Google's official blog has announced a notable change in the ranking algorithms being used by the search engine, which are initially being introduced on Google.com but will eventually affect all versions of Google search.

Google says that the latest change will impact 11.8% of their search queries and it is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites. These are sites which Google considers are low-value for users, such as those that copy content from other websites or sites that are just 'not very useful'. At the same time, Google says it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites, namely sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, 'thoughtful analysis and so on'.

This change is in response to growing criticism in recent months about the quality of the search results being presented by Google and the growth of 'content spam' to try to manipulate ranking positions. It remains to be seen how noticeable these changes are for most searchers and websites that generate visitor traffic from Google. However, this change is a restatement of Google's core principles and an adjustment to reflect what they hope are the best results for users.

A lengthy article by the New York Times investigates the 'Dirty Little Secrets of Search', based on the recent experience of the JC Penney store in the US. It reports how the store's website came to dominate many searches for product items that they sell, even though they might not be the 'best fit' for the searcher.

An online marketing consultant was asked to investigate the issue and claimed that the 'black hat' techniques being used by JC Penney was 'the most ambitious attempt to game Google’s search results that he has ever seen'. 'Black hat' optimisation describes the range of techniques that could be described as 'spamming' or methods that contravene Google's standards when targeting search engine rankings.

In this case, the JC Penney site has benefitted from some extensive link development tactics whereby their agency paid to have thousands of links placed on hundreds of sites scattered around the web, all of which lead directly to JCPenney.com. A spokeswoman for J. C. Penney, is quoted as saying: “J. C. Penney did not authorize, and we were not involved with or aware of, the posting of the links that you sent to us, as it is against our natural search policies. We are working to have the links taken down.”

Matt Cutts at Google was shown the evidence and confirmed that the 'link farm' techniques being used violated Google's guidelines and that 'corrective action' was being taken. Apparently Cutts says that Google had detected previous guidelines violations related to JCPenney.com on 3 occasions, most recently last November. Each time, steps were taken that reduced Penney’s search results but Google did not later “circle back” to the company to see if it was still breaking the rules. He and his team had missed this recent campaign of paid links, which he said had been up and running for the last three to four months.

JC Penney have since reacted to their recent reversal of ranking fortune by, among other things, firing its search engine consulting firm, SearchDex.

The surprising news of this week is the claim by Google that Microsoft has been 'cheating' by taking search results from Google to use on their Bing search engine. The story was first broken on Search Engine Land and has quickly developed into a war of words between the two leading search engines.

The articles reports that Google has recently run a sting operation against Bing that, it says, proves the Microsoft search engine has been watching what people search for on Google and the sites they select from Google’s results. They have then used that information to improve Bing’s own search listings.

Bing doesn’t deny this and say that use 'multiple signals and approaches' which seems to include tracking search activity through the Internet Explorer browser and the Bing toolbar. They accuse Google of manipulating their search results to identify one element of Bing's search criteria, and to time the exposure of the news to coincide with a Microsoft event to discuss the future of search.

This story is already generating much news and blog comment and is likely to run for some time as the two search giants exchange claims and counter-claims.

At the end of last week, Google's head of search quality Matt Cutts announced in his blog that the search engine has just implemented an algorithm change that is intended to "help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content."

The issue of 'content spam' and the increasing amount of this content that is 'clogging up' the search results has been rumbling on for some time and Google has been responsive to this criticism. Cutts says that the impact of the changes won't be that widely noticed with slightly over 2% of queries changing in some way, but that the net effect is that searchers are more likely to see the sites that wrote the original content rather than a site that scraped or copied the original site’s content.

There has been some amount of discussion forum and blog comment over the past few days about these changes and the impact they are having, but for most sites it should be minimal, or if anything, a positive change that rewards original content.

As reported by the Sydney Morning Herald, Google has further developed its business relationship with Sensis in Australia by signing up the Telstra arm as a keyword "reseller". This means that Sensis will be selling the AdWords pay-per-click service to its Yellow Pages customers and take a commission from Google.

As a result of the deal, Google gains access to this additional network and customer base, while Sensis maintains its reach by ensuring its customers' ads can be found when people are searching the web. The Yellow Pages service has been suffering in recent years and the most recent annual results have shown that revenue for Yellow and White Pages fell by 2.9% with revenue from the print edition down 6.9%. However, revenue from digital and mobile versions grew by 10 per cent, although this is a much smaller proportion of the overall revenues.

This new deal between Sensis and Google follows the agreement in 2008 for Yellow Pages business listings to appear in Google maps (Google Places). Google also powers Sensis's search engine as a search partner.

In a surprise announcement at Google's 4th quarter earnings review, Larry Page is to take over as CEO at Google in place of Eric Schmidt. The BBC reports that co-founder Page will take over the role in April and Schmidt - who has been in the job for a decade - will become executive chairman with a focus on "deals, partnerships, customers and broader business relationships".

The news upstaged the earnings report, which showed that Google had a strong rise in net profits in the last three months of 2010, at US$2.54bn on revenues of US$8.44bn. The profit figure also compares well to the $1.97bn made in the same quarter the year before. Although there will be much speculation about the change, it appears that Google timed the potentially unstabling news to come out at the same time as the positive financial figures.

The BBC report says that, in corporate terms, co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have been 'grown-ups' for quite a while and now they are taking charge at the company that is rightfully theirs. Mr Schmidt said the management changes were part of a plan to "streamline" decision making and create clearer lines of responsibility and accountability.

Google has launched a new service called Hotpot, which is described as a local recommendation engine powered by users. This social recommendation tool will contribute information to local search results for places on Google, making the information more personal, relevant and trustworthy within a social group.

By using Google Places as the base information, logged in users will be able to rate places and see information about other similar rated locations. This rating information can then be shared with friends and, in return, users can also see the places their friends have recommended. To accompany this service, Google has created a Hotpot rating app that allows users to quickly rate all the places they’ve been to and choose exactly which friends they want to invite to Hotpot.

As a logged in Google account user, people can see recommendations in search results, or recommended places by using the new Place Search and clicking on the “Places” filter. Users can also see recommendations when searching on Google Maps, Google Maps for Android or when checking the Place pages for a specific business.

Google has made a significant change to its local search results with the introduction of Place Search announced yesterday. Whereas previously, a localised search term (such as 'plumbers in sydney') would display a map at the top of Google's search result, with up to 10 companies listed alongside. The layout and presentation of these type of results have no changed, with more emphasis being placed on companies listed in Google Places (Maps).

Google has clustered search results around specific locations to enable searchers to make comparisons and decide which businesses to contact or visit. The new results have moved the map to the top right of the results and listing are marked with red pins. The main search results include more information for each of these local business listings, as well as links from across the web, including reviews.

Place Search results will begin appearing automatically on Google when the search engine predicts that the user is searching for local information. In addition, there is also a new link for 'Places' in the left-hand panel of the search results page where users will also now see their location listed and have the option to change this to another location if required.

Google says that they have made these new Places results possible by developing technology to better understand places ad user locations. With Place Search, Google is dynamically connecting hundreds of millions of websites with more than 50 million real-world locations. They automatically identify when sites are talking about physical places and cluster links even when they don’t provide addresses and use different names.

Google's new local search results layout includes more relevant links on a single results page, with sometimes up to 30 or 40. So, they say that instead of doing 8-10 searches, users should find the results they want much quicker - in testing, they say that Place Search saves people an average of two seconds on searches for local information.

This change places more emphasis on the need for companies to get control of their Places business listing and to optimise this content as much as possible to achieve high rankings for relevant searches. It's another way to achieve visibility in the search listings and coincides with Google's attempt to clamp down on the content and format of listings that some companies have added.

The Google Webmaster blog has announced the introduction of new information within the "Links to your site" feature. The updated content now shows a summary of which domains link the most to the website, the pages on the website with the most links, and a sample of the anchor text that external sites are using when they link to the website.

This is an excellent new addition to the array of data provided for website owners, and in particular the knowledge about inbound links can be a key factor in the marketing and traffic volumes coming to the site.

Following the launch of Google Instant earlier this week, the Google, blog has published more information from the search engineering perspective as to how and why the updated search engine was developed. It outlines how Google have changed the search process from a static HTML page into an AJAX application and the challenges that were faced in doing so.

The post says that the key design challenge was to make sure users would notice relevant results without being distracted, and the constantly changing results appearing as you type can take some getting used to. Google tested a series of prototypes and ran usability studies and search experiments to try different interfaces and search results as the user typed their search.

For the launch, Google decided on a single search model which includes the query prediction in the search box in gray text as well as results for the top prediction that update continuously while the user types. In user studies, people quickly found that they would type until the gray text matches their search intention and then moved their eyes to the results. The speed of the results changing wasn't seen to be a distraction but this can depend on the user's connection speed and browser.

The mechanics of Google Instant mean that the search engine is serving five to seven times as many results pages for each query performed, compared to the original version of Google. This required some increases to Google's servers and back-end capacity, but they also developed other techniques such as new caches that can handle high request rates, user-state data to keep track of the results pages already shown to a given user, and optimized page-rendering JavaScript code to help ensure web browsers could keep up with the rest of the system.

This is undoubtedly a major step-forward in search engine technology and throws down a challenge for Bing to match their search experience to this. The search process will continue to develop and potentially change the way that people will search and possibly rely on the predictions made by Google.

A big announcement from Google this week has been widely covered in the press (such as the BBC) and 'blogosphere'. Google Instant has been tagged by the company as "search at the speed of thought" and represents a change in the way the search engine displays results, so that now the listings are displayed as soon as a user types in a query, rather than waiting until the Search or Enter button is clicked.

The other main change with Google's search results is that the engine now tries to predict the likely query and need of the searcher, so that the search suggestion bar and results will modify as the displayed results as more letters are typed into the search box. Google estimates that the typical user spends 9 seconds entering a query and 15 seconds looking for answers, so that the new Google Instant tool could shave between 2-5 seconds off a typical web search.

It's another move by Google to improve their search performance over Microsoft's Bing engine, as well as deflecting the coverage away from Bing now powering the search results for Yahoo in the US. The new search results are now available in the US, using a larger search home page and a centred layout for the search results. Instant will then be rolled out to other regional versions of Google in the coming weeks.

The launch of instant has also created a lot of comment in the search engine optimisation (SEO) community, with some saying this changes the whole landscape. However, this seems an over-reaction as the underlying search results are still being generated with the same basic principles, and although this may start to change search behaviour over time, the ultimate aim of SEO to present a business in front of relevant searchers and so drive traffic to a website remains unchanged.

Google has recently launched a new blog for small business, to add to the long list of specialist blogs that are published by the company. Google says that this new blog will be "a central hub that brings together all the information about our products, features and projects of specific interest to the small business community".

This will combine tips and advice from all the Google services that can have an impact on small and medium-sized businesses, such as how to use templates for creating video ads on YouTube, tips for using Gmail or how to respond to the business reviews on Place Pages.

Google has announced some significant changes to its Image Search tool. First launched in 2001 the image database has grown from 250 million images to over 10 billion images now. Over this time the search tool has been enhanced to improve the search results and to include different search filters, such as images of clip art, line drawings, faces and even different colour themes.

In addition, Google's sophisticated computer vision technology powers the “Similar images” tool to recognise similar patterns and images or “Similar colors” refinement which returns images with the core image area containing the similar colour content. However, with the developments going on at Microsoft's Bing search engine, Google also has to keep up with, or ahead of, the game, and is now making further enhancements to the image search results.

The most obvious change is a new tiled layout which removes the content around each image and makes it easier to view lots of images at once. There's also instant scrolling between pages, with up to 1,000 images, all in one scrolling page. The thumbnail previews on the results page are also larger and a hover pane now appears when users mouse over an image, providing a larger preview and more information about the image.

Once users click on an image, they're taken to a new landing page that displays a large image in context, with the website it’s hosted on visible right behind it. By clicking anywhere outside the image users are taken right onto the original page where the image was located.

Google has also announced a new ad format for PPC advertisers, called Image Search Ads. These ads appear only on Google Images and let advertisers include a thumbnail image alongside the standard lines of text - a good option for companies selling products that benefit from a visual approach.

Google has announced that it has acquired Metaweb, a company that maintains "an open database of things in the world". Central to Metaweb's products is Freebase, a free and open database of over 12 million items, including movies, books, TV shows, celebrities, locations, companies and more. Google plans to use this content to improve search beyond words by an understanding of the relationships between real-world entities that can help to deliver relevant information more quickly.

With features like rich snippets and the search answers feature, Google says that they are still just beginning to apply an understanding of the web to make search better. By using the technology developed by Metaweb, Google wants to make search more effective by developing semantic search which will be able to provide better answers.

Google says that they want to maintain Freebase as a free and open database, as well as further develop this tool with the Metaweb team to make it a richer online resource that will also benefit from third-party developers using the open source platform to improve the service.

As widely reported in the media - including by the UK's Independent - YouTube has successfully won a legal battle with Viacom over copyright on the video sharing website. After a long-running case, the US judge threw out the copyright lawsuit filed against YouTube by the US entertainment giant, which marks a significant legal victory for the Google-owned business.

The ruling was made that YouTube was protected against Viacom's claims of copyright infringement by the provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The judge decided that YouTube qualified for the protection of the act against all of Viacom's claims for direct and secondary copyright infringement.

The article quotes Google's general counsel Kent Walker, who said in a blog post: "This is an important victory not just for us, but also for the billions of people around the world who use the Web to communicate and share experiences with each other".

US movie and television giant Viacom had sued Google and YouTube in March 2007, arguing that they condoned pirated video clips at the website to boost its popularity. They claimed that YouTube was a willing accomplice to "massive copyright infringement" and sought more than one billion dollars in damages.

Viacom said it planned to appeal.

MediaPost reports that Google and Facebook are gaining a strong share of the display advertising market. Taking the latest data from market research firm IDC, the article says that Google's rise in display advertising has been so swift that the company now poses a serious threat to the biggest players in the segment - Yahoo and Microsoft.

Much of this growth in display advertising is attributed to YouTube, which is owned by Google, and the acquisition of DoubleClick in 2007. In fact Google has now overtaken the No. 3 company in the category, AOL - which had 6% share in the first quarter -and is now likely to push Microsoft, with a 9.5%, share, out of the No. 2 slot by the end of the year if current trends continue.

That would leave Yahoo as the remaining target for Google. The research indicates that Yahoo's share was 16.5% in the first quarter of 2010, but has been stuck at about 16% for the last five quarters. Facebook is also coming on strong too, although not quite as fast as Google. The world's largest social network has already surpassed News Corp. and CBS, the former No. 4- and 5-ranked companies in display, is poised to catch up to AOL within the next three to four quarters, based on the IDC figures.

The Forbes website reports on the latest survey of the world's most reputable companies, as surveyed by the Reputation Institute, a global private consulting firm based in New York. They assessed the strength of the world's 600 largest companies (by revenue) in their home countries and then consumers in 24 countries judged the 54 highest-rated companies, giving them ratings on their products and services, innovation, workplace, governance, citizenship, financial performance and leadership.

Google topped the list and demonstrated a strong source of innovation, as did second place Sony - both of which received consumer admiration for new technologies that touch consumers' lives. As the article reports, Google not only generated $6.7 billion in advertising revenue for the first quarter of 2010 (up 23% from the same time period last year), but they also offer free services, such as e-mail and maps, for anyone to use.

The survey indicated that another important factor in building global reputation is the appearance of transparency, a category won by Google. When the company pulled out of China to avoid showing censored search results to users there in late March, Google sent a message to the rest of the world that its values would be placed ahead of its profits. The decision resonated strongly in Central and Northern Europe, Central and South America and in North America, where consumers rated the company within the top five most-reputable businesses.

In a significant posting on the Google blog, the company has announced the launch of Google TV, which is positioned as a new experience for television that combines TV with the freedom and power of the Internet.

These new TVs will have the Google Chrome web browser built in, so that users can access websites as well as easily move between television and the web. This was an inevitable next month for Google and starts to open up the TV experience from a few hundred channels to millions of channels of entertainment across TV and the web. This will make the entire Internet available from the TV, so that it will also become a web browser, a photo slideshow viewer, a gaming console, a music player and much more.

Google TV will use search to give users an easy and fast way to navigate to television channels, websites, apps, shows and movies, making it a powerful tool to access a wide range of media. During the announcement at the Google I/O developers conference, the company challenged web developers to start coming up with new web and Android applications designed specifically for the TV experience. Developers can start optimizing their websites for Google TV now and can start to build even richer applications and distribute them through Android Market.

Google says that they have already started building strategic alliances with a number of companies at the leading edge of innovation in TV technology, such as Jinni.com, who produce a next-generation TV application working to provide semantic search, personalized recommendation and social features for Google TV. The company is also working with Sony and Logitech to put Google TV inside of televisions, Blu-ray players and companion boxes. These devices are expected to go on sale after September this year in the US.

Google has created a website and video with more information about this announcement.

Google's search results are taking on a new look. As reported by the Google blog, the layout and design of the search results page have been given an overhaul and users will now see search results presented in a slightly different way.

The most noticeable change is the addition of the 'contextually relevant', left-hand navigation to the search results page. These options used to be more hidden and available through a small link at the top of the search page, but Google has now decided to make these more evident and also match the layout of the search page that Bing presents. On regional search versions of Google, the 'pages from' search option has now disappeared from the main search page and can only be accessed from this side panel once an initial search has been made.

The new side panel also highlights the most relevant search tools and refinements for a search query, so it takes in the 'Universal Search' options, such as images, videos, news, books and more, as well as recency filters and other search refinement tools.

In addition to the addition of the left-hand side search options, Google has also updated the look and feel of the search results in terms of the colour palette and logo. As Google says in the blog post, "these changes are slight, keeping our page minimalist and whimsical, but make our overall look more modern".

The CNN website includes an article about the new "Like" button which has recently been introduced by Facebook. If this new feature takes off, then the article suggests that this form of "social links" will create a potential problem for Google in the way that it measures links between sites, and how these could have a significant impact on the 'link value' used by its algorithm to help determine the order of search results.

By using the new "Like" button, websites can drive visitor traffic from Facebook by including Like buttons on their pages - every Like posts an update to a user's Facebook page. In addition, a website can customize its experience for users so that if you're logged into Facebook the 'liked' content can be ranked by the source as well as by friends on the social networking site.

Since these "social links" are related to a specific user they can potentially work better than the standard links that exist between websites. Facebook wants to replace this open system of links between pages with the "social links" (or Likes) that it controls. As the article explains, Google and other search engines won't have full access to all these Likes, so the company best positioned to rank on the web will be Facebook.

Some experts are therefore concerned that Facebook will begin to 'stockpile' all of the personal information and preferences of users. This can help place Facebook in a much more dominant position to control the search results on the main search engines and so companies will rush to implement the new "social plug-ins" from this networking site. Consequently Facebook may build a stronger base to 'organize the web' so that optimisation of Facebook's 'Like' buttons and user base will become a new focus for SEO.

The article concludes that advocates of the 'Open Web' have reason to be concerned and privacy experts are also raising red flags. Google is expected to be concerned and will fight any structures that will affect their search algorithms, although ignoring the role of these "Like" buttons may be one option. Because without access to the 'stitches that bind web pages together', the article suggests that the search engine could falter.