According to a Google Plus post today, Freebase is shutting down, and will no longer be available after March 2015. The current Freebase data will be ported over into WikiData. [Read more…]

Google has removed the Google Carousel from the search results. A search for keyword phrases such as Dallas Hotels, Chicago Hotels, and New York Hotels, popular searches that previously showed the Google Carousel, now shows a different type of search result, which is similar to the traditional map pack. This has been phased out, and there is no Google Carousel anymore for any of the local searches. Google removed carousel. For good. Does this mean that the Google Carousel failed?

So, instead of showing photos of the hotels at the top of the search results that, when clicked, caused a branded search to occur and another set of search results to appear, more “traditional” type of search results are now showing. The search results for cityname + hotels shows specific hotels, but the PPC ads are prominent along with the organic, natural search results. [Read more…]

Google has decided to shut down its operations in Spain, and will no longer include any Spanish publishers in Google News. Google’s reasoning behind this is the new Spanish law that requires every Spanish publication to charge services like Google News for showing even the smallest snippet from their publications, whether they want to or not. [Read more…]

While searching Google today for a random search query, I noticed that the first search result was kind of odd. The Instragram post was a travel photo and it had nothing to do with the query that I just searched for. But that’s actually what didn’t surprise me. I’m not surprised by Google showing off-topic results for certain search queries. What shocked me was that apparently Google says that the post was made on Jan 17, 1970.

Yep, you got that right. Take a look at the screen capture:

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Google has started displaying new mobile friendly tag in the search results to show which sites are mobile-friendly and which sites are not. So, if your site is mobile-friendly, and someone is searching on a mobile device, and your site shows up in the search results, it will get a special tag in the search results.

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Google just updated or “refreshed” the knowledge graph data within the past 24 hours. I have knowledge graph data showing up for a search for my name, Bill Hartzer, and I’ve been constantly watching the data, as it was previously incorrect: and it appears that they just updated the information within the past few hours.

Here is what the previous knowledge graph data/sidebar in the Google search results looked like for my name:

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