Search Engines, The Future….

"Search Engines, The Future…." proved to be an illuminating refresher from Helen Mitchell (of Ascendancy Internet Marketing)  on what's happening in the world as represented to us by Google. 

We've all begun to notice the gradual changes creeping into Google's organic results listings now that "univeral search" is beginning to expose the contribution of blogs, video, products and map locations. Helen took us through the fascinating challenge of keeping our websites ranked up there and in the Google-public's eye. Why all the focus on Google? Well, it does now seem to have the lion's share of the search engine market in the UK. 

We had a whistle-stop tour of the contribution of intelligence fed back from iGoogle and Google Gadgets; and a good opportunity for comparison of experiences with pay-per-click advertising. We've often described this group to ourselves as a sort of 'self-help' group - and the lively conversation that Helen's talk generated certainly flushed out lots of observations and experience to share and learn from.

An interesting observation: in the chit-chat over a pint beforehand (yes, this was our regular "Unplugged" session in the Corbett Arms, Upton Magna, this month)... I got into several "have you heard from [[whatsisname]]? conversations, most of which were elucidated by some gem that someone had read on Facebook. Now it seems only yesterday that this particular "F" word was perceived as belonging in the domain of our youthful progeny... and now it's gradually embedding itself into our everyday experience... 

Still, nice to know we still do have these regular meets... and do some proper 'social networking'... ;-)