Firefox's Default Search Engine Is Now Yahoo

You read that right. Firefox's default search engine is Yahoo - and aims to have a a full roll out starting December 2014. They also agreed for a five-year strategic partnership including future integration. Google will still be available along with Bing, eBay, Amazon, Twitter and Wikipedia as alternative search options.

For more details, read the Firefox Blog post here. Marissa Meyer also announced this on Yahoo!'s Tumblr blog.

HTTPS Is A Ranking Factor

Is your site secure? HTTPS is now a ranking factor. Visit Google Webmaster blog for more information.

Cheers! 

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/08/https-as-ranking-signal.html

Gmail Supports Latin and Special Characters

Whoa I was really busy! Here's a new update for you.

Yup! More than A-Z, Gmail now supports names that include these characters.

More details on Google Blog:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2014/08/a-first-step-toward-more-global-email.html

Enjoy!

Google Made With Code

Made with Code is Google's initiative to inspire girls to code. Google worked with Chelsea Clinton, Girls Inc., Girl Scouts of the USA, Mindy Kaling, MIT Media Lab, National Center for Women & Information Technology, SevenTeen, TechCrunch and more to make this happen. The program includes:

• Cool introductory Blockly-based coding projects, like designing a bracelet 3D-printed byShapeways, learning to create animated GIFs and building beats for a music track.
• Collaborations with organizations like Girl Scouts of the USA and Girls, Inc. to introduce Made with Code to girls in their networks, encouraging them to complete their first coding experience.
• A commitment of $50 million to support programs that can help get more females into computer science, like rewarding teachers who support girls who take CS courses on Codecademy or Khan Academy.

Visit MadewithCode for more info.

Google Celebrates Rubik’s Cube 40th Anniversary

This morning, as I open up my browser came yet another interesting Google Doodle, the Rubik's Cube. Not only that it moves, you can actually do the actual movement of the cube in this doodle. The instructions to move this is pretty simple:

To go Google now and enjoy!

Google Classroom Preview Announced

As part of yesterday's Teacher's Appreciation Day, Google announced a preview of the new, free tool - Google Classroom as a product in Google Apps for Education. This tool can help teachers create and organize assignments quickly, provide feedback efficiently, and communicate with their classes with ease.

According to Google, teachers can:

Create and collect assignments: Classroom weaves together Google Docs, Drive and Gmail to help teachers create and collect assignments paperlessly. They can quickly see who has or hasn't completed the work, and provide direct, real-time feedback to individual students.

Improve class communications: Teachers can make announcements, ask questions and comment with students in real time—improving communication inside and outside of class.

Stay organized: Classroom automatically creates Drive folders for each assignment and for each student. Students can easily see what’s due on their Assignments page.

New Google Apps for Docs, Sheets and Slides with Offline Feature

Today, Google announced that standalone apps for Docs, Sheets (and coming soon for Slides) are available for download – enhancing productivity with offline editing feature.

Fore more information and download links for Google Play and App Store: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2014/04/new-mobile-apps-for-docs-sheets-and.html

Google's Self Driving Car Is Smarter Than Ever

Intersections, bikers, railroads, pedestrians even simultaneously? - no problem with Google's Self Driving Car. See video below.

New Twitter Design Rolls Out

As announced last April 8 by Twitter, they will be rolling out a design with larger profile photos, ability to customize headers, show off our best Tweets and more. Indeed and just today I got a notification to do so.

Before:

After:

Here are the key features:

• Best Tweets: Tweets that have received more engagement will appear slightly larger, so your best content is easy to find.
• Pinned Tweet: Pin one of your Tweets to the top of your page, so it’s easy for your followers to see what you’re all about.
• Filtered Tweets: Now you can choose which timeline to view when checking out other profiles. Select from these options: Tweets, Tweets with photos/videos, or Tweets and replies.

So you want to showcase or brag your smartest 140 characters or less tweet? Pin it to top!

Facebook: Streamlined Look for Pages

You're a social media specialist or a community manager who represent your business or companies? Facebook will bring more improvement to your accounts as they will roll out a new streamlined look for pages.

Key features include:

• An updated Page timeline design - a one column display at the right side that will show all posts of your page.
• Easier access to admin tools - you will have the ability to navigate to your ads, messages and notifications anywhere from the page. Of course creating a noticeable button for Build Audience (it's all about $$$)
• Pages to watch - a new addition for admins to create a list that is similar to your business. Clear enough, those may be your other pages and your competition.

Photo by Facebook:

Google Scraper Report Tool

Before, scraper pages report was before based on a spreadsheet, beta, when Google was testing algorithmic changes for scraper sites: http://goo.gl/IecHpo ... Today, Matt Cutts tweeted a new scraper report form. Feel free to use!

How Not Be Boring: Food Blog Guide, Infographic

LinkedIn Marketing Solutions otherwise known to be responsible of "sponsored updates", has made an infographic to guide food bloggers for a week's daily posts. It includes vegetables, meats, whole wheat and grains, condiments and desserts. Their study shows that 82% who blog everyday see improvement in ROI as opposed who just blog monthly. Blogging with a schedule and with themed content everyday enables you to have fresh and diverse updates for your readers. So if you think about blogging like food using this schedule, you are less likely to publish the same peanut butter and banana sandwich day after day.

YouTube is down today February 10, 2014

Feb 10, 2014 8:30 am ET, YouTube is down.

Google Sold Motorola to Lenovo

After Google used Motorola to supercharge the Android ecosystem by creating a strong patent portfolio, they are now selling it to Lenovo as  to cope up with the demand and competition for hardware innovation. Read more on Larry Page's announcement in Google Blog.

New Twitter UI Design Rolled Out Today!

January 13, 2014, 4:20pm ET, Twitter announces new UI design. Twitter now has a refreshed design as seen on the top, left hand side and has clear big buttons.

Users can also edit more design options in Twitter's settings page.

How do you find the new design?

Source: Twitter

SEO Prediction in 2014

Happy New Year! It was a crazy Q3 and Q4 for me but gladly we hit our company target, thanks to the efforts of all! While new targets are rounding up for different companies, we digital marketing professionals should have some insights to guide us as we move forward with our craft.

I say:

• More Knowledge Graph data
• Some redesigns for Adwords ads
• More mobile results appearing in the results page including (in app content)
• Better overall UX and UI in Google results
• More personalized results and targeted results to seamless UX with Google's acquisition of Behavio
• Guest blogging will have lesser impact or correlation to ranking
• Mobile sites will be a default

With all the changes (versions of both Penguin and Panda and Hummingbird) and these predictions, "Search Engine Optimization" will seem to veer towards to be more of "Search Experience Optimization" in 2014.

How about you? What's your prediction? :)