The history of the Google Doodle is an interesting one. Google’s initial logo was an exclamation point, during this early stage the founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin found themselves in a dilemma as both wished to attend the Burning Man Festival but they were worried the site would not remain active without their input and they would be unable to answer any calls from the desert.

Consequently the first Google Doodle was created, it simply depicted the Burning Man’s stick figure popping out of the traditional logo. The purpose was to display an ‘out of office’ message to all Google users. Since then there have been a wide range of themes and images used, eventually resulting in the Google Doodles that we see today, 271 of which were produced last year alone.

For more information on Where Google Doodles come from click here>>

For the full list of the Top 30 Google Doodles click here>>

Source: Mashable

YouTube trends manager Kevin Allocca has been reminiscing. “2011 was a year of amazing new channels and new stars being discovered, awesome creativity, and of course, Rebecca Black,”  “It was also a year of powerful news stories playing out on YouTube, as people witnessed and documented uprisings and natural disasters, touching personal moments and moments of protest.”

Wondering what people watched the most during the past 12 months? See below (click to play).

1. “Friday” by Rebecca Black

2. Ultimate Dog Tease

3. “Jack Sparrow” by The Lonely Island and Michael Bolton

4. Talking Twin Babies Part 2

5. Nyan Cat

6. “Loot At Me Now” Cover Karmin Music

7. “The Creep” by The Lonely Island, Nicki Minaj and John Walters

8. “Born This Way” Cover by Maria Aragon

9. “The Force” Volkswagen Commercial

10. Cat Mom Hugs Baby Kitten

With YouTube also being the second most used Search Engine in the world, now is the time to take advantage of it’s popularity. From YouTube Channel Design to YouTube Advertising, Clicky Media can help with all your YouTube needs! Call us on 08457 257 1225.

Source: Mashable

Leave it a few seconds and you’ll find your whole screen fills up with snow, to the point that you can even draw in it!

Merry Christmas everyone – enjoy!

Counting down from 10, the Google searches that rose fastest in 2011:

10. iPad 2
At 10 we have the iPad2 that sold an incredible 500,000 units during their debut weekend and sold out on almost all channels in it’s first week. The iPad 2 searches are up 939% from 2011.

9. Steve Jobs

The revolutionary visionary who inspired a generation with the help of some of Apples biggest gadgets, including the Mac computer, iPhone and iPad. Searches for Steve Jobs grew by 982% this year.

8. 東京 電力

The 東京 電力 (TEPCO) Fukushima Plants nuclear rector was damaged during the 2011 earthquake causing the Japanese government to order an evacuation of the thousands of residents. Searches rose by a huge 1,470% in 2011.

7. Adele

With the release of her album ’21′ Adele shot to the number one spot on the Uk Album Chart for an impressive 16 consecutive weeks, selling 208,000 copies in it’s first week alone. Adele’s searches rose by an impressive 1,588% this year.

6. iPhone 5

Before the release of Apple’s newest smartphone there was a host of rumours, from edge-to-edge glass to extensive voice controls. It was widely believed that the new device would be called the iPhone 5 leading to a 1,658% increase in searches for this term.

5. Battlefield 3

This impressive first-person shooter from EA sold 5 million copies in it’s first week leading to a 1,773% increase in searches for Battlefield 3.

4. Casey Anthony

Casey Anthony was found not guilty for the murder of her 2 year old daughter Caylee on 5th July 2011. She was charged with murder after her daughters remains were found near her home in Florida. Searches for Casey grew by 2,680% in 2011.

3. Ryan Dunn

A tragic car accident took the life of Ryan Dunn who was best known for daredevil stunts on the reality shows ‘Jackass’ and ‘Viva La Bam’. The searches grew by over 10,000% this year.

2. Google+

The launch of Google+ in June this year resulted in an impressive 10 million people joining the social network space, this caused an increase of over 10,000% in searches for Google+.

1. Rebecca Black

In the Number 1 spot is Rebecca Black who’s Youtube music video went viral and received over 167 million views. Her success drove her searches up over 10,000% giving her the top spot in the fastest growing search queries of 2011.

Source - Google Zeitgeist

Also a really nice timeline to show each development:

For more info see www.google.com/insidesearch/

Google announced “In life we connect with all kinds of people, places and things. There’s friends and family, of course, but there’s also the sports teams we root for, the coffee shops we’re loyal to, and the TV shows we can’t stop watching (to name a few). So far Google+ has focused on connecting people with other people. But we want to make sure you can build relationships with all the things you care about—from local businesses to global brands—so today we’re rolling out Google+ Pages worldwide.”

Find out more about Google Pages here >>

Check out Clicky Media’s new page here >>

Plus take a look at some other new pages*

*These pages are not our work! They are listed here also on Google’s official blog >>

Facebook’s business pages have of course been a huge success. Millions of brands are now connecting socially with their customers like never before through Facebook pages, and the commercial advantages are vast and varied; meaning Facebook has become an increasingly essential resource for online marketing in recent years.

But speculation of how Google+’s business pages could trump Facebook’s has been rife. So what might these pages contain? What functionality night they employ, and how might they look?

One suggestion has been that supposed “public circles” might be a main advantage of the Google plus business pages, Circles would allow users to pick and choose which brands’ circles they’re part of (in the same way they might choose to “like” different brands’ Facebook pages), with the advantage that users can choose what information they want to receive from each of their circles, so they only see messages & updates from those they want, thus granting greater user control than Facebook. Whether this would benefit the brands on the other hand is questionable, but of course this is all entirely speculative as Google’s official business pages plans remain a mystery.

None the less, it’s fun to speculate! And some have even taken it as far as designing what the pages might look like (see below). Either way, rest assured, as soon as we know anything for certain about Google plus’ business pages, we’ll let you know.

Source: Mashable

Previously, Google displayed a magnifying glass icon next to each result for any given search. To preview a result, the user was required to click the magnifying glass – the site preview would then display on the right hand side of the results page.

Now however, arrows are displayed next to whichever result the user is hovering on at the time. If the user then hovers over these arrows, a site preview is shown on top of the ads on the right side of the page (the same place as previously).

Eric Schmidt defended the site at a US Senate hearing in which accusations the company abuses its power were examined.

“Google is in a position to determine who will succeed and who will fail on the internet,” said Republican Senator Mike Lee.

“In the words of the head of the Google’s search ranking team, Google is the biggest kingmaker on Earth.”

Google stands accused of using its position as the world’s most popular search engine to hinder rivals as it moves into other business areas such as travel search.

But Mr Schmidt said: “We built searches for users, not websites, and no matter what we do there will always be some websites unhappy with where they rank.”

Mr Lee confronted Mr Schmidt with statistics he said showed that while competing products’ search rankings vary, Google’s remained remarkably consistent.

“I see you magically coming up third every time,” the senator said.

“I don’t know whether you call this a separate algorithm or whether you’ve reverse engineered one algorithm, but either way you’ve cooked it, so that you’re always third.”

Mr Schmidt replied: “Senator, may I simply say that I can assure you we’ve not cooked anything.”

He added that the company had learned from its predecessors – a nod to the long-running anti-trust legal battles faced by Microsoft.

However, Mr Schmidt was criticised by Democratic Senator Al Franken for giving “fuzzy” answers about the business practices of some of the company’s products.

Jeffrey Katz, CEO of Nextag, an internet comparison shopping company, said Google was a huge help in the early days of his company, but didn’t “play fair” once the sites were considered competitors.

“What Google engineering giveth, Google marketing taketh away,” Mr Katz said in written testimony.

“Google doesn’t play fair. Google rigs its results, biasing in favour of Google Shopping and against competitors like us.

“As a result, Nextag’s access is more and more discriminated against, because we compete with Google where it matters most, for very lucrative shopping users.”

Source: Sky News

It’s not only the number of additional results that has changed, it’s also their appearance. Previously, the sitelinks were limited to simply displaying the name of the page. Now, each sitelink displays the name of the page, along with the URL of the page and a short description (taken from the meta description tag). See below for the new layout…

These sitelinks are chosen via a Google algorithm and although you cant pick and choose which additional links you want to appear when somebody searches for your brand, you can specify URLs that you don’t want Google to show (an example may be that Google is returning an old blog post that you don’t want to appear as a result). To inform Google of this, you need to log in to Webmaster tools and ‘demote’ the URLs that you don’t want Google to show. Once Google has carried out this change, you can then repeat the process until you are happy with the sitelinks that are appearing.

We regularly carry out sitelink optimisation for clients as part of our SEO service. If you would like to find out how we can help you, visit our SEO section and request a call back or quote.