Social and Search News Round Up
Posted: Friday 22 June, 2012
Jessica Ward
It’s Friday, so in our true integrated search and social media agency tradition, it’s only right to bring you up to speed on all the latest search and social news, courtesy of our weekly SEI and SMI reports.
To begin with, Yahoo has teamed up with Getty Images to redesign its image and video search results. The new partnership will see Getty’s photos and videos included in Yahoo’s SERPs, as well the introduction of a new Quality Badge to help users identify top quality images and videos. Hot on its heels, Bing has also revamped its image search results this week, adopting the use of the tile-based layout of images that is also used by Pinterest and Yahoo.
In other news, Google is testing out a new search interface, including options such as images, maps, videos and news in a horizontal menu. Some believe that the update might be an attempt to create more space for ads, but Google is yet to officially comment. Google has also released a new security report to keep web users updated and reassured, featuring interesting statistics about spam websites.
On the social front, Google+ introduced an update earlier this week, making the management of cover photos much easier and Twitter users experienced a misfortune yesterday when the social network went down worldwide for more than an hour, which is the first time this has happened since October 2011. After previously only being available in beta mode, social app Flipboard has launched on Android, and with this, will also be integrating Google+ streams. Facebook has also introduced several new features, including allowing users to opt out of notifications, as well as showing the number of friends who have logged in on a user’s profile.
For more news from the social and search sectors, take a look at our two weekly intelligence documents: Social Media Intelligence & Search Engine Intelligence.
