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Google’s made an announcement regarding Unicode, and believe it or not, there’s something for everyone here.  Programmers should be interested to know that Unicode is becoming more popular at a rapid pace.  Normal Google users, meanwhile, will be happy to learn that searches should now turn up additional useful results.

Let’s start with the stuff that’s easier to understand.  On the Official Google Blog, Mark Davis explained today, "[T]he characters ‘fi’ can either be represented as two characters (‘f’ and ‘i’), or a special display form ‘?’.  A Google search for [financials] or [office] used to not see these as equivalent – to the software they would just look like *nancials and of*ce."

Davis then continued, "But no longer – after extensive testing, we just recently turned on support for these and thousands of other characters; your searches will now also find these documents."

As for the news that may only mean something to a smaller set of people, well, Google’s been tracking Unicode usage for a while based on its index, and the search giant believes Unicode has itself nearly earned the "giant" moniker.  The graph below shows that usage is almost at 50 percent.

According to Davis, Google’s ability to deal with different languages should improve as Unicode becomes more common.

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Some Google users have had a mysterious link appear in their accounts when they visit Google’s product page. The link is for "Google Guru", and is accompanied by the text, "Ask questions and get answers from online users." Its icon is a question mark.

If it is showing up for you, it is located between Groups and Knol on Google’s "More Google Products" page:

According to Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Land, Google Guru is a product that was launched in Russia back in 2007. While here in the U.S., the link pointing to Google Guru goes nowhere, the Russian link Schwartz provides goes to something that looks like this:

It’s basically a question and answers site. "What is interesting is that Google closed down their Google Answers site back in November 2006, yes over three years ago," says Schwartz. "Is Google Guru their way of getting back into the social Q&A space? Yahoo is dominate right now with Yahoo Answers, maybe Google feels they can make a run at that as well?"

Apparently not everyone is seeing the link to Google Guru at this point, and Google hasn’t at this time made any announcements about it that we are aware of. I expect that will change soon enough. Are you seeing the link?

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Google has extended its personalized search functionality to users who are not even signed in. This goes for Google users around the world, in over 40 languages. What this means is that when you search with Google, it will provide results that are aimed at higher relevancy to the individual user, as opposed to relevancy for the average person.

"For example, since I always search for [recipes] and often click on results from epicurious.com, Google might rank epicurious.com higher on the results page the next time I look for recipes," Google explains in a blog post on the subject. "Other times, when I’m looking for news about Cornell University’s sports teams, I search for [big red]. Because I frequently click on www.cornellbigred.com, Google might show me this result first, instead of the Big Red soda company or others."

Can you "rank" in Google if everyone has different results? Share your thoughts on this.

What Does This Mean for SEO? 

Naturally, when Google announces any significant changes to the way users get their search results, the search engine optimization community must take notice, and must consider what said changes mean for them. If people start getting more results that are specifically tailored to their own tastes, it could be harder for businsses to reach those people through traditional SEO tactics. That’s one way of looking at it. Another way is this: Google always makes changes, but there are always ways to adapt.

"Honestly, if this makes Google more relevant for their searchers – all power to them," says Barry Schwartz of RustyBrick, which offers SEO services. "I am not going to say I know what is better for the average searcher. They can quickly figure this out after days and decide to keep it, turn it down, or off completely. SEOs will adapt, like they always do – we are a strong and smart bunch – I am not worried."

My guess is that all of the same best practices for search engine optimization will apply. What you may have to pay greater focus to is your target audience.

Are you worried? Do you think this is a change that could have a negative impact on your search engine traffic? Tell us what you think.

On the other hand, personalized search could play to the strengths of the horizontal content approach. Rich Ord, CEO of iEntry Network and Publisher of WebProNews has an interesting take on the matter. "There is going to be the same number of searches and the same number of clicks to content," he says. "So basically, personalization in search will just be dividing up the traffic pie more."

"This could make people think more about the long tail instead of just focusing on their top key words that they would like to rank for," he adds. "It could also make people less reliant on organic search results for their traffic and in turn increase their use of Adwords."

Could personalized search directly contribute to an increase in revenue for Google itself? Interesting.

The feature has been available to Google users who have accounts, are signed in, and have their web history enabled (on Google) for a while. Now it appears to just be the standard way of delivering search results to everybody.

"This addition enables us to customize search results for you based upon 180 days of search activity linked to an anonymous cookie in your browser," Google says. "It’s completely separate from your Google Account and Web History (which are only available to signed-in users). You’ll know when we customize results because a ‘View customizations’ link will appear on the top right of the search results page. Clicking the link will let you see how we’ve customized your results and also let you turn off this type of customization."

If you’re worried about privacy, settle down, because Google lets you turn personalized search off altogether. For signed-in users, all you have to do is remove web history from your Google account. For signed out users, click "web history" in the top right corner of a search results page, then click "disable customizations." You can also just clear your browser’s cookies.

As a user, do you like the idea of Google personalizing your search results? Discuss here.

On a related note, Google is also rolling out the inclusion of real-time search results on regular search results pages for some queries. These results draw from Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and numerous other sources. This means you have yet another opportunity for visibility, but it also presents a new challenge, as with any other universal search element, it may push organic listings down on the page.  Are you glad to finally see some real-time search make its way to Google?
 
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Google’s Matt Cutts, as you may know, frequently appears in videos for Google’s Webmaster Central YouTube channel. In these videos he answers questions submitted by Google users. One of the latest ones features a different kind of (and perhaps more fun) question:

If you could improve one thing or add a feature to Google Search right now, what would it be? (Tell us what your answer would be.)

Every Google user probably has an answer for this question, and the differences among those answers are limitless. It is interesting to hear what Cutts himself has to say on the subject though, considering he has kind of become the unofficial posterboy for giving webmasters information about the inner-workings of the world’s most popular search engine.

Matt says there are actually a lot of things he would like to see added to Google Search, but one thing comes immediately to mind for him. When you do a search on Google (for example for "flowers"), the URL you get for the results is not just www.google.com/search?q=flowers. There are always other parameters such as "hl=en" and others.

Cutts finds this annoying because he emails search results a lot, and English is the only language he speaks. He says he has even considered writing a Greasemonkey script that would eliminate the extra parameters. He also says he’s tried to get some people at Google to consider changing it, but nobody is very exited about the idea because not that many people email search result URLs around.

"But who knows? Maybe some day I will prevail," Cutts proclaims with a smile on his face.

It’s interesting to look at the comments for Matt’s video. Other people have made suggestions for what they would change about Google search. Suggestions include more control over regular expressions, a date limiting factor on search results beside the search box, and Google Alerts recognizing hyphens in searches.

What would you change about Google Search? Is there a feature you would add? Is there one you would like to see removed? Comment here.

Google’s Matt Cutts, as you may know, frequently appears in videos for Google’s Webmaster Central YouTube channel. In these videos he answers questions submitted by Google users. One of the latest ones features a different kind of (and perhaps more fun) question:

If you could improve one thing or add a feature to Google Search right now, what would it be? (Tell us what your answer would be.)

Every Google user probably has an answer for this question, and the differences among those answers are limitless. It is interesting to hear what Cutts himself has to say on the subject though, considering he has kind of become the unofficial posterboy for giving webmasters information about the inner-workings of the world’s most popular search engine.

Matt says there are actually a lot of things he would like to see added to Google Search, but one thing comes immediately to mind for him. When you do a search on Google (for example for "flowers"), the URL you get for the results is not just www.google.com/search?q=flowers. There are always other parameters such as "hl=en" and others.

Cutts finds this annoying because he emails search results a lot, and English is the only language he speaks. He says he has even considered writing a Greasemonkey script that would eliminate the extra parameters. He also says he’s tried to get some people at Google to consider changing it, but nobody is very exited about the idea because not that many people email search result URLs around.

"But who knows? Maybe some day I will prevail," Cutts proclaims with a smile on his face.

It’s interesting to look at the comments for Matt’s video. Other people have made suggestions for what they would change about Google search. Suggestions include more control over regular expressions, a date limiting factor on search results beside the search box, and Google Alerts recognizing hyphens in searches.

What would you change about Google Search? Is there a feature you would add? Is there one you would like to see removed? Comment here.

Back in February Google launched the beta version of Google Sync. This allowed Google users to sync their Gmail contacts and Google Calendar events to their iPhones or Windows Mobile devices (Android already synced data). The feature did not come with the ability to sync actual mail, however. That has now changed.

The addition of "push Gmail" support has been a heavily requested feature ever since Google Sync was launched.

"Having an over-the-air, always-on connection means that your inbox is up to date, no matter where you are or what you’re doing," says Google Mobile Software Engineer Douglas Gresham. "Sync works with your phone’s native email application so there’s no additional software needed."

"Once you’re set up, new messages are normally pushed to your phone within seconds," notes Google Mobile Product Manager Marcus Foster. "While this type of speed is pretty awesome, push connections tend to use more power than fetching at intervals, so don’t be surprised if your battery life isn’t quite what it used to be. We’ve done a lot of work to optimize power usage, but if you prefer to save battery life, you can always turn off push in your phone’s settings and fetch mail every 30 or 60 minutes instead."

To set up push Gmail on an iPhone, you have to be using iPhone OS version 3.0 or greater. To use Google Sync, just go to m.google.com/sync from your computer. More information about using Google Sync on various devices can be found here.