Latest Update to Google Products

Rocktime's Flashlight Search Marketing team are tasked with keeping their clients up to date with latest changes to the three main search engines, Google, Bing and Yahoo.  This week we are reporting on the latest updates to Google Products. Reported over at the Google Blog, titled 'More spring cleaning' dated: 28/9/12.

In summary Google are closing down some of the less popular products, so that they don’t spread themselves too thin.  They have also reported on several product updates to benefit their customers.

Google write: 

"Technology offers so many opportunities to help improve users’ lives. This means it is really important to focus or we end up doing too much with too little impact. So today we’re winding down a bunch more features—bringing the total to nearly 60 since we started our “spring” clean last fall" .

The latest products to be put on the chopping block include the below:

AdSense for Feeds: which allowed publishers to place adverts on their RSS feeds (closing December 3rd for more information visit the AdSense Help Centre)

Classic Plus: which enabled people to upload of select images to use as their background on Google.com (Closing November 2012)

Spread sheet Gadgets: which enabled you to add customised features into Google spread sheets is being turned off. (Early 2013)

There are also several updates for the benefit of their customers:

Update to Google Storage: the storage available in Picasa and Google Drive will be consolidated.  Users will have 5GB of free storage across both services. (Being actioned November 2012)

Google Insights for Search: which we love, is being merged with Google Trends. Also they no longer will allow you to compare traffic to and audience of different websites. (in effect now)

Our favourite change is that they have introduced +1 reports in Google Webmaster Tools, to help publishers measure +1 activity on their pages.  They have also stated that measuring social media remains a priority for Google Analytics and will post another improvement update soon.

If you would like to find out if you are benefiting from having an awareness of Google Products, why not talk to the Flashlight Search Marketing team today.

Author: Sarah Griffiths