Hummingbird – New Google Search Algorithm announced

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Hummingbird – Google announce their new search Algorithm

A day before their 15th Birthday, Google went back to their roots – literally.

In the garage where Larry Page and Sergey Brin created the world’s largest search engine, Google announced a handful of new changes including a major update to their search algorithm called “Hummingbird”.

The new Hummingbird algorithm, which has been in place for nearly a month, affects 90% of all searches said Amit Singhal, senior VP at Google.

So what is Google Hummingbird?

Despite many questions from the audience on just how does Hummingbird work, Google avoided getting too technical.

What they did say, and kept repeating, was that this was the biggest overhaul to their engine since their 2010 “Caffeine” update. Caffeine provided 50 percent fresher results for web searches than their last index (see Google Caffeine Blog post), and that the Hummingbird algorithm focuses on more advanced search queries rather than parsing searches word by word.

The new algorithm is designed to accommodate questions on par with what someone might ask a friend rather than the usual short keyword query we are used to.

For example, rather than “web design innerleithen” users may now search for “are there any web design companies in innerleithen?”

Google summise that internet users are becoming more comfortable with searching and move beyond the one or two word searches or short directed terms eg: “web +design +innerleithen”, and users will begin to type real questions into search engines. Google aim to be the first to accommodate this and provide good quality results.

How will Google Hummingbird affect me?

Well, Google silently pushed Hummingbird out a few weeks back so if you haven’t noticed any large spikes or drops in traffic already then the answer is it won’t!

And finally, if you’d like to remind yourself how Google looked back in 1998 then search Google for “Google in 1998” or click here to go directly back in time. It’s amazing how little it’s changed since then but then why change something that works.

Google 1998 Easter Egg and Hummingbird Algorithm

Vote for our local Innerleithen School in the Bank of Scotland Community Fund

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St. Ronan’s Primary School – Innerleithen

We know how important local communities can be and support ours as much as possible. Innerleithen is an amazing place to live and we love it and we are lucky to have such an amazing school.

That’s why when we saw that the local school has been entered to win £3000 in the Bank of Scotland Community Fund we knew we had to try and help them win.

Our local school, St Ronan’s Primary School in Innerleithen, has the chance of winning a £3,000 grant from the Bank of Scotland Community Fund.

help Innerleithen win £3000

To be in with a chance of winning we are asking everyone to quickly vote on the Bank Of Scotland website or via text by texting VOTE MPNA to 82332 or both ;-) And remember, it’s not often banks give back to the community!

Or, if you are lucky enough to have a local branch that hasn’t be turned into a coffee shop then you can pop in and vote there…

Local Bank Of Scotland Branches:

  • Galashiels
  • Innerleithen
  • Peebles
  • Selkirk
  • West Linton

If they win, St Ronan’s are planning on using the funds to improve outdoor facilities for both the children and the local Innerleithen community who use the grounds.

St. Ronan’s Primary School and Nursery Grounds project will improve facilities and safety for the hundreds of children, young people and members of the community who use our outdoor space for play, leisure and learning.

It would be lovely to see our Innerleithen school win and your vote could be the one that wins it for us!

So, if you wouldn’t mind, please visit the Bank Of Scotland website at https://communityfund.bankofscotland.co.uk/voting/cf_org_vote_profile.asp?cfr=98AD76 and enter your name & email address.

Please remember to click the link in the validation email you receive otherwise your vote won’t count.

If you want to read more about our local school please visit the St. Ronan’s primary School website

Compfight – Flickr search for Creative Commons license Images

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Creative Commons license search tool – Compfight

Blogging involves not just writing good copy but also using good imagery.

Photos are a great way to engage people on your blog. They also catch attention when people share your post on Facebook or other social media platforms. This is all very well but good photography doesn’t come cheap and if you are paying for images from Royalty free sites like fotolia.com then it can quickly add up.

Enter Compfight

Images are a great Social Media Tool - Compfight searches Flickr

Photos are a great way to engage people on your blog and draw them into your post. They also grab attention when someone shares your blog post on Facebook or another social media channel. Unfortunately, good photography can cost a lot of money, and with regular blogging, the investment can add up fast.

Enter Compfight. Compfight searches Flickr’s photos that have the appropriate Creative Commons license for Commercial Use and even provides you with the HTML code for proper attribution.

There’s a good FAQ guide and link to the Flickr Creative Commons licence page so you can fully understand how the licences work and what your rights are and how to use the images.

 

 

Feedly and Buffer – Essential News and Social Media Scheduling Tools

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News Feed Readers & Social Media Scheduling Apps

Do you use them? We do and we find them essential for not only keeping up to date with our industry but also provifing quality content for our Social Media fans & followers. News Feeds (Aggregators) basically allow you to add websites, Blogs & RSS feeds to your account so that any new content published shows up in your feed. You can quickly scan through the summary and if you find it interesting, click on it and read more. Social Media schedulers like Buffer allow you add photos, posts and links to a queue and then schedule them to Social Media platforms like Facebook, Google, LinkedIn & Twitter.

What do we use?

We use Feedly & Buffer. Since the demise of Google Reader, the most popular news feed aggregator out there, we’ve been looking for a suitable alternative and we think we’ve found it.

Feedly

Feedly allows you to easily search for and add news feeds from Blogs, Websites & RSS feeds. So what’s so great about it? Well, firstly it’s free and secondly, it’s so simple to sign up for and use it shouldn’t take you more than 10 minutes to be up and running and thirdly it’s brilliant. You can easily search for keywords, #hashtags, @usernames or specific website or Blog names so it won’t take you long to build a stack of good quality, relevant feeds of interest to both you and your users.

You can group the feeds under topics to organise them according to the subject type, for example we have Design, Social Media & Tech and then browse all of the feeds, by group or individually. Feedley news aggregator used in conjunction with Buffer Clicking on a feed will bring up the full article including images and if you then want to read it on the original page, click the title again and it will take you that site.

It’s all pretty self explanatory so we won’t go into great detail on how and what to do. Suffice to say that if you want a good quality browser based app that automatically feeds you stories and articles from your favourite sites then Feedly is the one for you.

Buffer

Now, we are totally in love with Buffer, even more so since they added Google+ pages to their list of feeds yesterday. It is so easy to use, does what it says on the tin and the support is just superb and all this from an app that is free (you can pay to “go awesome” if you want extra features and queue storage and we are tempted).

Buffer works best if you install the browser extension. We use Chrome so this was an easy process and it gives you a Buffer icon in the top right of your browser. If you’re not using Chrome as your Web browser we highly recommend you do You can download Chrome here.

Once you find a news item, post, image or tweet you want to share, either via Feedly or while browsing the web, Twitter, Facebook or pretty much anywhere. Click the Buffer icon and up pops a screen allowing you to edit the post and then either post now to your chosen feeds or Buffer it which adds it to your buffer queue.

The app for scheduling posts to yourSocial Media

Click image to see a larger annotated version.

Your Buffer queue can have multiple posting schedules for each feed. So for instance you have Twitter posting 3 times a day and Facebook just the once. Choosing the time to post is easy using a drop down menu and halting the queue is as simple as clicking on each of the days so they go green.

It really is very simple to use.

There are loads of tips and tricks to help you get the most out of Buffer and rather than repeating them here we are going to link you to an excellent post by  from Buffer which lists the
The Top 10 Secret Buffer Hacks and Features: Supercharge your Social Sharing in 2013

Facebook Algorithm Updated – No more begging for likes or crappy memes

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Facebook Algorithm updated to reduce Like begging and crappy memes

Facebook announced last week (23rd August) that they are making changes to the News Feed Algorithm (EdgeRank) which should reduce the number of “Click Like if you love cats” or crappy memes you see in your News Feed.

Facebook’s aim is to make sure that the best quality content is being produced, surfaced and shared. Their latest update to the News Feed ranking algorithm helps ensure that the organic content people see from Pages they are connected to is the most interesting to them.

Facebook Algorithm changes: An example of an image "Like Begging"

So how did they go about changing the Facebook Algorithm?

“While the goal of News Feed is to show high quality posts to people, we wanted to better understand what high quality means. To do this we decided to develop a new algorithm to factor into News Feed.

To develop it, we first surveyed thousands of people to understand what factors make posts from Pages high quality.

Some of the questions we asked included:”

  • Is this timely and relevant content?
  • Is this content from a source you would trust?
  • Would you share it with friends or recommend it to others?
  • Is the content genuinely interesting to you or is it trying to game News Feed distribution? (e.g., asking for people to like the content)
  • Would you call this a low quality post or meme?
  • Would you complain about seeing this content in your News Feed?

Once they had the results in they developed a new Facebook algorithm, and then tested it with a small segment of their users and found:

  • By showing these high quality posts higher up in News Feed, we saw a significant increase in interactions (likes, comments, shares) with this content
  • People in the test group also hid fewer stories overall

These results suggest that this change shows more people higher quality content, and more interesting stories from the Pages they are connected to and Facebook will be rolling out this update to everyone over the next few weeks.

Will this affect my Facebook page?

If your Facebook posts consist mainly of begging for likes or memes then yes, the changes to the Facebook Algorithm will affect you. You will probably see a reduction in your reach, but if you continue to provide good quality content that people want to read and engage with then no, it will be business as usual.