It’s been covered a lot for quite some time, but site speed has now officially become one of the factors of Google’s algorithm. The idea is that google wants to provide users with the best experience possible, and the speed at which a website loads is one of the things that influences this. In order to keep users happy, Google will use the speed at which a website loads to determine it’s position in the search engine results.

This doesn’t mean that site speed will be a major factor in where a website ranks. It’s well known that Google’s algorithm contains over 200 different factors, with differing importance on each. What this means is that if two pages were to match up exactly on all the other factors, the quicker one would generally rank higher. The importance of site speed in the algorithm has not been revealed but it is certainly something to consider if you want your website to be as optimised as possible.

Thankfully there are a lot of tools out there that can make diagnosing any issues with site speed that much easier. If you want to learn a bit more about how to improve your site speed you can check out this post on site speed at Weboptimist.

Google has also been a bit fan of keeping the homepage minimalist, which is why it came as such a shock to users to find that last week it started to automatically apply a background picture to the homepage.

Having raised numerous complaints about the feature Google has since stopped these images from automatically appearing and instead offers users the option to manually set a background image. The move is seen by many as a way of keeping users that may otherwise start using Bing due to the visual impact it has.

WHatever the reason, Google’s hompage is becoming more and more cluttered with the additional feautures, and although it may still look quite bare it’s moving away from the minimalist feel it’s kept for so long.

You may have noticed a change to the Google search results over the past few weeks as they have recently rolled out a new layout.

With the major changes being the addition of a new left hand column on the side of the page providing quick access to the most relevant search tools depending on the query. The sidebar can help suggest related queries and gives users more control over Googles universal search feature which helps to integrate news, products, images, and videos into the search results.

The changes, which have come under a lot of scrutiny over the past few weeks, are comparable to Bing’s sidebar. With Bing being the only other real competitor to Google with the announcement of Yahoo no longer being a search provider the competition between these two companies is becoming stronger.

Below is a screenshot of Google’s new sidebar followed by an example of Bing’s sidebar

Google

Bing

Google have just announced their acquisition of Picnik, a browser based photo editor that can be used to edit photos directly without having to leave your browser. At the moment the majority of people will be using software on their computers to edit photos.

Picnik allows uploads of photos from the majority of social media/photo websites including Picasa, Flikr, and Facebook and being cloud based allows you to edit your photos from any computer with internet access.

At the moment all the search engines are announcing numerous deals with social media sites to integrate results into real time search. Google’s deal with Facebook now means that Facebook content is included in Google’s search results when deemed relevant.

The latest move means that news pages, photos and blog posts that fan pages publish can now potentially show up in search results, helping to drive traffic provide another reason for businesses to consider using social media as part of their online efforts.

While inclusion of facebook content will most likely be integrated slowly, we should see it more and more of it as it gets rolled out.

Google has announced a new feature to be applied to it search results in an attempt to make them more personalised – Stars. Stars are replacing the search wiki feature that was previously available in the search results and allow you to click on the start marker next to any result or map and when relevant these results will show up at the top of the results page in future.

Stars are useful for selecting websites that will be of interest for future reference when looking for relevant topics. You can use them to select your favourite football team or your favourite online community to help bring these up in future search results.

The stars feature will be available for all signed in users, so you will need a Google account to benefit.

It has just been announced that Google is facing a preliminary antitrust investigation by the European Commission.

On their blog post they mention that they have received complaints from three different companies, which it lists as Ciao! from Microsoft, ejustice.fr and UK price comparison site Foundem.

In essence the complaints claim that these websites rankings are demoted intentionally by Google’s algorithm due to the fact they are direct competitors. In the post Google claims this is not the case and that other vertical search engines such as Moneysupermarket typically rank well in the search results.

With pretty much all of Google’s revenue coming from paid search advertising services this is a situation they could do without, but this isn’t the first time Google has been confronted with similar allegations and by now they’re probably getting used to it.