WebProNews

Google May Change Your Page Titles

In case you were not aware, Google "reserves the right" to change the titles of your pages in search results. Google's Matt Cutts has released a video discussing why and how they go about doing this. Cutts says Google wants to show the titles that it thinks are most useful. "For example, suppose the title of your page is 'Untitled' or if there is no title. If that's the case, we try to show a relevant, useful title."

Google Integrates World Bank Data

Students and statistics hounds now have even more reason to love Google.  Today, the search giant announced that it's made information related to 17 World Development Indicators available through standard search results pages.

IAB Releases New Guidelines for Email Monetization

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has released a list of "best practices" for marketers and publishers who want to monetize their email efforts. The best practices come in a document appropriately titled "Email Monetization Strategies."

Bing Managed Big Gain In October

According to new data from Experian Hitwise, October was the month of the underdog with respect to the search market.  The two search companies that usually dominate lost a bit of share, while Bing (and to a lesser degree, Ask) gained ground. Let's start with the success stories.  Bing's market share rose from 8.96 percent in September to 9.57 percent in October, which represents an increase of 6.8 percent.  That's nothing to sneer at, even if Bing remains solidly in third place.

Bing Gets a Bunch of New Search Features

Microsoft has announced the addition of a number of new features to its Bing search engine today. The company says it has been examining the trends in search and in feedback, and is working to accommodate these. Microsoft is referring to trends like the demand for faster access to knowledge, offering different user interfaces for different kinds of results, and an increased focus on "getting things done" with search.

Research Scientist Heads From Yahoo To Twitter

Today, as is often the case, one tech company's loss became another's gain.  Utkarsh Srivastava has left Yahoo after spending more than three years as a senior research scientist there, and Srivastava confirmed (in well under 140 characters) that he'll land at Twitter. Srivastava's background is quite impressive.  On the educational front, he earned degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology and Stanford, and happened to receive the Stanford Graduate Fellowship, too.

Holiday Shoppers Turning To Social Media And Internet

Digital technologies continue to drive a new approach to shopping, with social media and mobile phones becoming key influencers this holiday season, according to a new survey of holiday retail spending and trends by Deloitte. Social media is gaining traction with 17 percent of consumers planning to use social media during their holiday shopping, and 60 percent plan to use it to find discounts, coupons and sales information, More than half (53%) plans to use social media to research gift ideas, while 52 percent plan to check the gift wish lists of friends and family.

Google Gives Users a Way to Lock SafeSearch

Google has launched a new way to lock SafeSearch. What this accomplishes is, users will have to enter their password to change the setting, and Google Search results will be visibly different than when SafeSearch is not locked. Google demonstrates how to to lock SafeSearch with the following short clip:

More on Google's Caffeine Update

Update: Out at PubCon in Las Vegas, Mike McDonald of WebProNews discussed the rolling out of the Caffeine update further with popular search enthusiast Barry Schwartz:

Has YouTube Found the Right Ad Solution?

YouTube has begun testing a new kind of ad format on some of its videos - skippable pre-rolls. These ads let users choose whether or not they want to watch the ad as it appears at the beginning of a video. YouTube says that when it first began testing in-stream ads a couple years ago, abandonment rates on videos were as high as 70%. They found that users were much more likely to view and engage with overlay ads.