Google Wave has been in beta for several months now and it’s still a trending topic.  In this post, I want to link you to some Wave examples collected by Mashable.  For a basic review, re-visit my earlier post on Google Wave.

There has been so much buzzzzz around Google Wave.  It’s like the launch of the iPhone except I can’t get one!  I’m not on the list!  Can some one help, please?

Luckily, there’s a lot of publishers online who DO have beta accounts, so you can get a look at Google Wave in advance even if you are among the unwashed. Of all the short treatments I’ve seen so far, the one I’ve liked best is from Mashable. This was first published in May and updated several times since — it’s still a hot topic on Mashable for good reason.

Now, if you want the long treatment, take a look at this free ‘Complete Guide to Google Wave‘ by Gina Trapani and Adam Pash.  Edited by Trapani with an assist from Pash, you can browse through chapters online at the site in the link.  You will also be able to purchase a PDF download any day now.  Maybe right now.  Thanks to these guys for putting this together.

My biggest problem in this post is that I don’t know how to categorize it.  The Wave is something new.

Lots of search engine deals with Twitter this past week, first Bing, then Google.  I like Adam Ostrow’s comment at Mashable about how these deals validate Twitter’s model:  With a fresh $100 million in the bank and both Google and Microsoft implementing tweets in search, it looks like Twitter is in it for the long haul.

First, there’s Bing.  Bing Twitter is Microsoft’s take on the up to the second data stream of tweets.  It would simply be another Twitter search, except Bing has analyzed the data stream to eliminate a lot of redundant tweets, and you can select a ‘best match’ option rather than the default ‘latest’ post option to try to boost relevancy. Bing also gives you two sets of results, first the most recent tweets themselves in chrono order, and then the most popular links within tweets.

Bing says they evaluate the authority of tweets by looking at the number of followers of the post plus the retweet pattern.  This is a beta release, so it isn’t always right on target, but it’s an interesting addition to the ever-growing world of search.

I think it helps a lot with some of the kinds of searches I might do, like reputation management for a customer.  For a really thorough and typically good treatment of this, see Danny Sullivan’s post at Search Engine Land.

Then Google makes a splashy announcement almost within a day that it has reached an agreement with Twitter to use its data in real time search results.  Google hasn’t yet rolled out how it will integrate that data into search results — might be a separate index, like Microsoft — but I think it will  have some kind of user option built into it, probably in the ‘show options’ like you have for blogs, video and so forth.  Then again, that’s probably way too easy for Google.  What will they think of next?

On that note, there’s Danny Sullivan again, this time gushing about Google Social Search:  I don’t see a lot of things that make me go “wow,” that’s useful. This did.

Google has yet another beta product here (and I do not know where in the world they get the ideas for all the stuff they roll out, but they are busy!).  The basic idea of Google Social Search is to extend the personalization of your search results by linking them to your networks of friends.

To make it work, you need a Profile set up on your Google account.  On that profile, if you list your social network accounts (especially Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn — aka the big 3), Google will recognize them and — to the extent they are visible — filter your search results through your friends.  Somehow.  I haven’t seen it done yet, but I’m looking forward to it!

I know a lot of businesses, including my own, that purchase keyword-driven ads on Google’s pay per click networks.  But not too many that also use Yahoo and/or Bing.  If this fits you, you might want to consider adding that extra outlet.

In a flurry of recent back and forths over the Microsoft-Yahoo search deal, there’s been a lot of talk about the importance of scale.  The MSN and Yahoo folks think it’s ‘good’; Google tries to downplay it because of decreasing returns to scale (Google should know, shouldn’t it?).

But here’s one little piece of info that cuts through the clutter.  Advertising Age reports that Ben Edelman, who teaches at Harvard Business School, found that click prices at Yahoo were 30% cheaper than Google, and at Bing (Microsoft) 27% cheaper.

Prescription:  mercilessly cut the poorer performers at your Google account and use the money to purchase keywords that convert on Yahoo and Bing.

Not long ago we talked about Microsoft the monopoly using its vast power to squash would-be competitors. Now it seems almost like poor Gulliver being tied down and lashed by the tiny knives of its Lilliputian enemies.  It just can’t get no respect.

Until Bing?  The NY Times has written that Bing delivers credibility to Microsoft’s search efforts, finally, pointing to its gains in query volume since its launch in May.  Yet most of those gains seem to be coming from weaker challengers like AOL and Ask (another perennial search pretender), and the industry’s talking heads don’t think people will switch to Bing for good.  Why bother, when Google delivers the goods?

To rub salt in the wounds, Google recently announced its own frontal assault on Microsoft with its plan to develop the Chrome OS for netbooks.  Google’s language in the announcement almost seems like it’s taunting Microsoft: So today, we’re announcing a new project that’s a natural extension of Google Chrome — the Google Chrome Operating System. It’s our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be…Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system…

Google describes this as the operating system for people who spend most of their time online and invites developers to begin making applications for it.  I am betting that they will.

Sometimes I wonder at Google’s need to take it to Microsoft, but I think I get why they do.  From the user’s point of view, you want to have a framework of programs and applications that work together – interoperability is essential.  Once you begin to use a set of products that are integrated like this, you tend to keep using all of them.  There is a price to pay to use applications outside the network because it can’t have access to all your information and preferences.  Once you are inside one of these families of software, you will see the ads running there, and not somewhere else.  So both Google and Microsoft are extending their offerings and necessarily moving into the other’s space.

There’s almost no one alive who hasn’t got the message that cloud computing is the future, which seems to give a natural advantage to Google in the long run.  But no one knows for sure.  And sure enough, Microsoft continues to try to reinvent itself by moving into the web services with its Azure platform.

Then, just yesterday, Microsoft announced it would be offering light versions of its flagship applications Word and Excel as Internet-based programs to compete with Google’s successful Apps.  Here’s the leader from Marketwatch on Microsoft’s announcement:

Microsoft Corp. on Monday made the latest edition of its Office software suite available for testing and plans to make key applications such as Word and Excel available over the Web – acknowledging burgeoning competition from Internet giant Google Inc. and others.

I’m glad to see this. Letting Google define our total existence online is not a good idea, even if it were true the G didn’t “do evil.”  We need this competition — they will make each other better.

On May 12, Google introduced a new feature called ‘Rich Snippets‘ that will become a standard part of their indexing algorithm. This feature could be important for any business, but I think local businesses should be especially alert to it — it is one more tactic to use in the local search SEO campaign.  Pay attention to this one, folks – it could have a big impact on search over time.

The Rich Snippets feature is an evolving effort to use structured data in search results. Ordinarily, Google picks up a piece of text, usually the meta description, to insert a brief descriptive ‘snippet’ about a website along with the URL in search results. Beginning now, it will sometimes include structured data in the search result snippet in place of the text description.  Google is currently supporting structured data about ratings and people, but plans to begin using other kinds of data soon.

Here’s one example from Google how a rich snippet might look.  In this one, a local business with a rating on Yelp is shown in search results with rating information.

Google has tested this concept and offers an important clue to the importance they give it: It’s a simple change to the display of search results, yet our experiments have shown that users find the new data valuable — if they see useful and relevant information from the page, they are more likely to click through. That’s the important thing for your business — attracting the click.

It’s not yet clear, to me at least, how individual local businesses will use this feature, but I am sure the issue will be all over the blogosphere for the next few weeks, and we’ll know a lot more soon.  The structured data does have to be tagged by someone who knows what they are doing (your webmaster, unless you build websites yourself), but as always Google is providing examples like the ones you see in the link above.

One last thing:  You might be asking, what is structured data?  Roughly, it is information that is defined by a variable that can take a range of values.  “First name” = “Glenn” in my case.  Ratings information is classic, since there is a structure that includes the name of the business, a ratings system (e.g., 1 to 4 stars), a price range, and might include a testimonial in text.  If you run a business that can be rated, in Yelp or TripAdvisor for example, it is described by structured data.

One more part of your SEO package.  Do use it.

Rumors have been flying around that Google is hot to buy Twitter.  Makes sense to me, since I see Twitter as a real-time search tool with a billion points of light (users) who can get the most up-to-the-minute answers to almost any question.  This has cooled off in the last week or so — but it still makes more sense to me than some of Google’s other acquisitions.  Why not own your most threatening competitor (much as I would not like to see that happen)?

In the past couple days, though, other stories have emerged that suggest that Twitter and Google might be dancing to a different kind of tune.

First up, in a Google to Acquire Twitter post from a couple weeks ago, Techcrunch‘s influential Michael Arrington said that Twitter and Google were in “late stage” negotiations on a purchase in the neighborhood of $250 million.  Arrington also believes Twitter is a search engine, like I do, and thinks it makes good strategic sense for Google.  But:  Twitter insiders apparently think the company’s value is closer to $1 billion — plus it’s beginning to dawn on people that Google acquiring Twitter might raise anti-competitive warnings among regulators.  On April 3, Twitter’s co-founder Biz Stone posted a brief reply that of course they were talking with other companies, but that they had every intention of building their own firm.

Then, on April 9th, Kara Swisher published a long article called Who Will Be Twitter’s Best Search Friend? with the remark that the hot property of the moment in Silicon Valley has been pursued before (notably by Google and Microsoft – who obviously have some of the deepest pockets) – she mentions Microsoft’s purchase of a tiny part of Facebook for $240 million after a lengthy battle with Google (who won that battle is an open question).  Finding a way to get ad distribution on Twitter would be a coup for either of the biggies — if there is a model that works.  The attraction of Twitter is that huge and growing audience, and the fact that it has a model whose applications are continuing to grow.  Lots of big companies are buzzing around it, attracted to all that mindshare.

Updating all this, Claire Cain Miller published an interview with Fred Wilson, one of the investors in Twitter, in the April 16th  NYTimes, with the summary that:   Yes, Twitter is talking to big Internet companies about forming partnerships with them. No, it is not looking to sell itself. Wilson says that Twitter has reached the scale (#3 social site in the US now, after Facebook and MySpace) that other people take seriously, but it is working to find out how to leverage its scale and model in distribution deals with other large properties like Google and Microsoft.

Then, finally, today sees an NZ site called The National Business Review reporting on Google’s recent healthy profits and Eric Schmidt’s (Google CEO) praise for Twitter. They note that this could be part of the competition with Microsoft, trying to butter up Twitter to favor a Google deal for ad distribution.  On the other hand, they also report that rumors persist that Google and Twitter are still in purchase talks, stalled over price.

I hope Twitter stays independent, much as I like Google.  I don’t see how Twitter could replace Google’s archive search, or vice versa, but melding the two would still reduce competition in this market.

In case you have been missing it, Google publishes the Zeitgeist to highlight the trends in search for that year. This year, the Zeitgeist includes search trends for a bunch of foreign countries.  In case you were wondering, ‘sarah palin’ is the number 1 fastest rising search term worldwide; ‘obama’ is #6.  John McCain got shut out of that elite list, but he’s high on the U.S. only list as a consolation.  Of course, these lists are formed from Google search network data, so they are not comprehensive — but in the U.S. at least it’s still pretty good:  Google was where 72% of search queries began in November in the U.S.  Dominance.

Everyone likes a tidy little factoid to make a bigger point.  The folks at ITBusiness share this one:  for the average website, 61% of traffic originates in natural (organic) search.  41% of traffic is from Google alone.  So:  SEO is the place to start.  ’Nuff said.

Ad position is important — higher on the first search result page translates into more clicks (not always more sales!). Google’s Quality Score for your ad is one factor that determines position. It is based on the keyword match between query and ad, your maximum CPC bid, and the quality of your landing page.

Now Google is updating how the Quality Score is calculated. The Score will be calculated dynamically. Instead of a minimum CPC, you will be shown the estimated bid price for a first page ad position. And, the system will no longer mark some keywords as unavailable to an advertiser based on a past Quality Score. See the details in Google’s blog post on Quality Score Improvements.