Google to Increase Caffeine Level After Holidays

Back in August, I wrote about the launch of Google Caffeine – the search leader’s next generation architecture aimed at improving their indexing infrastructure.The less fancy version: to keep up with the growth of content, Google’s trying to improve the speed-of-delivery, depth, and relevance of what you see when you do a search with them.

It turns out that Google has decided to move forward with this. They are going to take Caffeine from the sandbox and roll it out to one of their data centers. Then they will continue to watch results and feedback while they consider wider implementation.

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Google-Powered Search for Your Retail Site

If you run a retail website with lots (at least a few hundred) items in your catalog, Google just launched a new product that’s worth investigating. It’s called Google Commerce Search (GCS). I am not endorsing this product or being compensated for this blog post. I’m simply trying to inform you about this option.

According to Google, the concept behind GCS is simple – visitors take about 8 seconds to decide whether or not to stay on your website. And in that 8 seconds, a lot of people (over 40% according to this PDF from MarketingSherpa) perform a search to find the brand or product that they want. So if that many people rely on search to make their decision on whether to stay or go, then why not have that search powered by Google?

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How Much Traffic Does My Competition Receive?

Ever wonder how much monthly traffic a website gets? C’mon, you’ve got to be curious about what kind of visits your competitors get. If you’re not, you should be!

Well, there’s a FREE and easy way to check, just use Compete. It’s really simple. I should note that I am not being paid to make this recommendation.

Here’s a graph of Compete.com’s traffic for the last year:

compete-graph

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