Galide

light weight images for the web

2010-02-17T10:41:00.001Z

When posting images to your website, it is important to ensure that they are optimised for the web.

Yahoo has launched a very useful service: http://www.smushit.com

Which shrinks images nicely (even those which are optimised through photyoshop web optimiser!)

Worth bookmarking.

popularity of programming languages

2009-12-17T11:56:00.004Z

TIOBE, a company founded in 2000, collects statistics on the popularity of programming languages. They recently released a new ranking:

Interesting to see that PHP is doing very well, with progressive C on the rise (Iphone App programming language).

continuous integration

2009-11-23T20:15:00.003Z

Countinuous integration is the last buzz word... keep reading it everywehre.

What is continuous integration
Continuous integration is a software development process, which ensures that bugs which have been detected earlier are not coming back into the code un-noticed.

It relies on a few principles:

use of a version control: each time someone carries out a commit, a new build a done automatically in the background
automatic build: as seen above, a build can be automatically triggered.
automatic testing: the bug raised and fixed previously must have a matching unit test which will automatically test whether it is still fixed or not.

Continuous integration and PHP
A few tools can be useful to get started with "continuous integration".

http://www.simpletest.org: Easier to use that PHPUnit, you can this software to implement and test your unit tests.
http://phing.info/trac/: Tool to automate the build.

Test Driven Development (TDD)
The idea behind TDD is to write the test before starting coding. The objective of the code should be to get the test passing.

This can be nicely applied to continuous integration: whenever a bug is raised:
1) Write the unit test for it, which currently fails
2) Write the fix.

The idea is that the tester could actually build the unit test**, so that the developer can still focus on development.

Note **:It is worth considering integration testing also, using selenium RC for instance.

launch48

2009-10-18T15:10:00.003+01:00

Had a chat with Hugues last week and he mentioned an idea about a mobile app' -brought the idea to Launch48, pitched it, was voted in top 6, and without realising it find myself involved in quite a cool little project (has got potential though!), supported by a great team.

been captured on video by the lovely Hermione, presenting what the application is about... well I tried to anyway.

More about the actual team, and the project later.

contacts manager

2009-09-25T10:24:00.003+01:00

Digital age allows us to have many friends, much more than we can deal with really. You can meet them on forumsn, through online connections, facebook, etc... and it is becoming increasingly hard to keep up with all these connections.

CRM tools (Customer Relationship Managament) have been around for a while. We now start seing what we could call FRM tools (Friend Relationship Management).

LinkedIn, Facebook can be used to keep an eye on what your "friends" are doing. But these online applications are also networking platforms, so not real "RFM" tools in my opinion.

Gist and Xobni are the real thing. These tools allows you to collect automatically information about your contacts, the way they are interconnected, the conversations you have with them thr0ugh many social channels, information about them on the internet, etc...

These are vey valuable tool, which I now use on a daily basis. They save you time, let you focus on other aspects of your business, and automate relationship management.

W3C validation

2009-09-17T23:02:00.004+01:00

It is interesting to hear about W3C from Matt Cutts, a chap working at Google and answering questions about search engines optimisation.

Most of the websites, including Google, don't respect W3C standards. And there is no "direct" relation between W3C compliance and search optimisation or browsers compatibility.

I am sure that Google can aford the best front-end designers in the world... and I always find it amusing to see in front-end designers or in quotes**: produce 100% W3C compliant XHTML code.

This is a great objective to strive for 100% W3C compliant code, but can hardly be a requirement for complex dynamic sites.

** I must admit that I put this in proposals myself, when I know that:
1) it is achievable (semi-static sites)
2) it will re-assure the client who has been told that validation is mandatory for quality websites..

I just hope that the distribution of this video will help destroying this myth.

Team picture / Baden Place

2009-08-27T13:04:00.002+01:00

Thank you Matt for taking the picture!

Debating the role of innovation

2009-08-25T10:20:00.002+01:00

Providing innovative products and services is top priority for over 80% of marketing directors in the technology sector. Although a study from Forrester (Being Innovative Means Beyond The Hype) indicates that the way innovation is managed by these companies is usually not process driven, and do not support innovation efforts with proper management.

The definition of innovation according Chris andrew (author of the article) is:

Innovation is a combination of both invention and commercialisation.

This definition insists on the fact that to be innovative, an invention needs to have commercial value.

Companies such as Google or 3M take innovation very seriously. Members of engineering development teams at Google for instance are actively encouraged to allocate and spend 20% of their work time (one day per week) on projects that interest them.

I think that this model can work for for SMEs as well (interesting discussion here), and is worth considering. For a web development/design company, this can include: working on improving production processes, developing plug-ins for open source software or work on open source projects, developing new services, setting up micro websites or online social communities, etc...

There are many challenges to address...

- ensure that staff don't become too "passionate" about this side projects, and end up spending more than 20% of their time on them
- try to fit in these projects into short term strategies, whereas they should on the contrary contribute and be in line with comapny's long term strategy
- running the scheme for a couple of weeks and then forget about it as soon as new product/services deliveries are due.
- etc..

... However I would find it difficult to encourage big corporations improving the way they manage innovation if I could not demonstrate that it can have a very positive impact on my own company's bottom line.

Buy to standardise, build to compete

2009-08-17T18:23:00.003+01:00

There is an interesting article about the choice between building an IT application or buying one.

This can apply to websites, which are online IT applications. And I often comes across clients or prospects who ponder whether it is worth developing a website from ground up, or use existing software available on the market.

Here is a first pointer given by the article:

Everybody knows that the more standardised you are and the more you buy off-the-shelf, the more cost effective it will be for both implementation and ongoing maintenance

This is true, especially for trivial activities such as the ability to update your website. Updating a website should be as easy as giving a phone call. And it doesn't really make sense nowadays to build a content management system from ground up. The objective is to find the right product for your business.

And an other pointer:

On the other hand, executives such as Bob Laird, IT chief architect at MCI (now part of Verizon Business), sing the familiar refrain of in-house development: �Where we tend to invest is where we can get incremental revenue � or competitive advantage,� he says.

Well I tend to agree as well. It makes sense to choose a Content Management System already available in order to give the marketing team the ability to update the site without depending on the IT team (internal or external), at lowest cost possible. However it is also important to consider developing some features from ground up, specially the ones which can give you a competitive advantage.

We recently released a stock photos website. The website is a combination of:

1) open source content management system: allows administrators to update the actual content of the page (about page, disclaimers, etc...)

2) open source frameworks (Zend, Doctrine): allows programmers to use a familiar environment, and speed up the development process. It makes also any custom development more robust and reliable.

3) custom programming: makes the website unique, with features matching exactely the business model. As business model evolves to meet new challenges, the website can also evolve rapidly to meet new requirements.

In my view, custom development is only justified when the website is intended to provide a competitive edge to a business (especially for an online business for instance). In case a website act only as a support for an exisiting communication strategy, it is preferable to select existing products.

I believe this view is in line with the conclusion of the article:

When evaluating whether to buy or build, it�s critical to thoroughly understand total costs during the software lifecycle -- typically seven or eight years. This step is important, Lutchen says, because 70 percent of software costs occur after implementation. A rigorous lifecycle analysis that realistically estimates ongoing maintenance by in-house developers often tips the balance in favor of buying.

Bearing in mind that it can become very costly (if not sometimes impossible) to customise a commercial (or open source) software to match new business requirements in case these requirements are unique, and not covered by "common features".

The importance of testing your website backup

2009-08-04T10:53:00.002+01:00

You have probably come across http://ma.gnolia.com/ in the past, a popular social bookmarking web site which has been around for years.

In early 2009, the site went down, and is now only accessible through invitation (back to beta version!)

What hapened behind the scene?

Their database backup failed... and they lost all their data.

Hang on , you would think that they run daily backup, test it and ensure that they can deploy a back-up version of the site quickly.

Well, it turns out that they overlooked this elementary side of the business, and they actually lost everything.

Check out the video here, where the owner talks honestly and in a very transparant way about the whole exprience..

The art of twitter

2009-08-03T07:51:00.002+01:00

I have really tried Twitter as yet (except maybe a couple of lines written when the services launched a few years ago).

Recently came across an excellent article about how to "master" twitter from Tom Raftery (social media wonk), and will probably try to follow the recipe and give it a try very soon though.

HTML td cells not respecting the attribute width

2009-04-22T19:16:00.003+01:00

#results {
width: 24em;
table-layout: fixed;
}

table-layout: fixed will resolve the problem.

Sounds straighforward, but have been struggling with this for years until I found this article about 5 rarely used CSS properties on SitePoint.

Google Web Tool Kit

2009-04-19T20:15:00.003+01:00

I have been involved more in project management than development lately, but had the opportunity to look into GWT (Google web tool kit), and seriously considering using this framework much more systematically when we develop web applications, or simply administration panels.

1) Ability to program in Java
The beauty of this "framework" is that you use Java to generate your Javascript. You don't have to worry about the browser, or the actual HTML, the framework will generate everything for you.

This allows you to develop UIs very fast, and include this into a SCRUM process easily - and you don't need to invlove "front-end" designers at this stage, unless you define "front-end designers" as "programmers" responsible for the front-end.

2) Compatible with other Javascript frameworks
Javascript frameworks such as JQuery are great to achieve nice rendering effects, or get access to the DOM quickly, to achieve things that sometimes you wish CSS would allow you to do (such as selectors, which is unfortunately not supported by lazy browsers).

These libraries are typically used by front-end designers.

Conclusion
GWT makes the prototyping process much easier to manage.
- build your prototype using GWT, which will generate the general JS scripts responsible for the rendering / ajax interaction

- refine then your design / UI with JQuery

Testing :: in phases

2009-02-24T16:23:00.003Z

Was reading Matt's blog at Aroxo, and found an interesting little summary of how testing should be conducted before releasing a site live:

Test type	Description	How many people
Over-the-shoulder	The main sticking points in the system. Where the system confuses users. Start when functional testing at 80% readiness. Earlier with mock-ups also possible.	10-15
Task-driven testing	How well the system stands up on its own. Start when the major usability holes uncovered in OTS testing have been fixed.	Start with 20-30 keep growing invites to 100 or so
Goal-driven testing	End-to-end flaws across the system. Start when functional testing at 95% system readiness with a slick UI.	150-200
Beta testing	The marketing points for the site, highlights future developments. If there are enough users it may also reveal performance issues Start when the system is 99% ready.	250+ including members of the public

More information there >>

Google adwords :: new tips and techniques

2009-01-06T12:35:00.005Z

It has been a long time since I last wrote about CPC, specially Google adwords.

Here are a few tips/tools I have recently started using a lot, with very positive impact.

1) Quality score

Quality Score is a dynamic variable calculated for each of your keywords. It combines a variety of factors and measures how relevant your keyword is to your ad text and to a user's search query.

This is a very important parameter, which can be used to troubleshoot the performance of each keywords, specially related to the content of the ads and of the landing pages.

I am usually targetting at 7.

run a report showing quality score for each keyword
identify each keyword which can potentially bring traffic to the site (significant volume of impressions) and highlight all keywords with a Quality Score <>
Verify that the ad copy contains these keywords. If not, create a new ad group for this type of keywords, and create a relevant ad containing the keywords in the copy
Verify that your landing page is optimised for this keywords (meta tags, h1 title, image alt tag, copy contain these keywords). If not, create a new landing page targetting these specific keywords

Note: this process can be very time consuming if you try to apply this to ALL keywords (specially if you have got 1000s listed...). This is why it is important to focus only on keywords bringing potentially significant traffic to the site.

Benefits: A poor quality score usually means that the ad will not be clicked as much as it could be (poor CTR), that conversion rate will not be as good as it could be. By improving your quality score, you ensure that the ad copy and the landing pages are optimised to some extents. Also, a good Quality Score will ensure that you pay less than competitors for a same position.

2) Watch out position 1-2-3 format for your ads.
If your ad is in position 1-2-3, it may be formatted differently by Google (see picture below)

You need to ensure that your ad still makes sense (right punctuation) in both formats.

3) Use the editor
The adwords editor is nice piece of software allowing you to manage your ads more effectively that for the google.com/adwords interface

4) Use the media planner
This is a tool I have very recently started using, and turn your CPC content campaigns into a real media buying tool. Use this tool to build a map of all the sites you want to advertise on.

5) Use Google Insight Search
It is a combination of Google Trend, and Google keywords suggestion tool, providing you with a good way to create your different adgroups. This tool would deserve a post itself, which I will probably add to this blog later on this month.

Web design process

2008-10-16T16:49:00.003+01:00

production tools/applications

2008-10-15T07:38:00.004+01:00

Had an interesting meeting with Mike Karliner yesterday. We went through some of the tools he is extensively using in his production process. Some were very familiar (such as subversion which we use as version control internally), some not. The list below gives a pretty good toolset for anyone looking into rolling a production process - and everything is open source:

1) Version control
Subversion: The Subversion project arose out of frustration with the limitations of CVS (Concurrent Versions System). Subversion is designed to be like CVS, but to fix its flaws. A key improvement in Subversion is atomic commits. This means that when you commit a changed project, either all the changes succeed or none, like a database transaction.

2) Version Control UI for windows
Tortoise: TortoiseSVN is a cool/efficient/friendly SCM / source control software for Microsoft Windows.

3) Project management / Bugs tracking:
Trac: Trac is a web-based software project management and bug/issue tracking system. It provides an interface to Subversion and an integrated wiki.

4) Data storage
FreeNas: FreeNAS will allow you to turn just about any computer in to a full-featured NAS, complete with a easy to use web-based configuration utility.

5) Server's/applications monitoring
Hobbit monitor: Hobbit is a monitoring solution for servers and network devices and allows you to write or use extensions to monitor just about anything that responds over a network connection. A central server controls and collects the monitoring and displays the results via a fairly easy to use web interface. It will track history and trends (via rrd) and provides a built-in reporting tool. If there is an issue (that you've defined), such as a down host, the interface will turn red and will performs any alerting actions that you've defined, such as sending an email or sms message.

6) Traffic analysis
Cacti: Cacti provides a fast poller, advanced graph templating, multiple data acquisition methods, and user management features out of the box. This allows you to build up your own analytics tool, combining data at will, and building very custom reports.

7) External bugs tracker
Mantis: if you are deaing with clients, or have an external team of testers, this tool will let you track and report on bugs fixes and software updates.

"I am rich" iphone application

2008-08-10T19:53:00.003+01:00

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,399461,00.html

Buy something you don't need, at a cost you cannot afford, to impress people you don't like...

Someone published an application which basically does nothing - it just let people know that you are rich enough to afford buying it...

Which is a good pricing strategy after all, used by many companies. When I started writing my business plan, "experienced" people told me that I should not focus too much about the actual product: you don't care about the actual product, focus on your market, and how much you can sell your product/services for.

And if you get the right exposure, you can sell something which is worth nothing, at the highest cost! a shame the application was taken off the apple's website...

floating window working with resize event

2008-05-05T10:08:00.004+01:00

I spent a little while trying to figure out today how to get a little window sticking in the right hand-side corner of my browser, while resizing the screen.

Many examples are available out there, but found difficult to pick up a simple way to achieve this.

the best way I have found was this (suing JQUery code for DOM selection):


<script>
function findwidth(){
  ns4 = (document.layers)? true:false
  ie4 = (document.all)? true:false
  winW = (ns4)? window.innerWidth-16 : document.body.offsetWidth-20
  return winW;
}

function positionmydiv(){
  var myposition = findwidth()-$("div.mydiv").width();
  $("div.mydiv").css({position: "absolute", left:myposition});
}

$(document).ready(function() {
  $(window).resize(function() {
    positionmydiv();
  });
});

positionmydiv();
</script>

You then can use


</div class="mydiv" id="mydiv">My text here..... </div>

Anywhere in your code, the div will float nicely and adjust with resize.

forums: embedded link or links in signature?

2008-04-29T16:57:00.004+01:00

I recently participated to a thread on a SEO forum (http://www.webproworld.com/google-discussion-forum/68650-can-inbound-links-really-hurt-you-2.html), which spreads over 5 pages. I initially picked up the thread because it was featured on the newsletter sent by the site - a good bet that this thread would be read by a fair amount of visitors.

It is certainly not what people say in there which would justify spending more than a few minutes on there. So, is it useful to stick on there for links?

I targeted my blog, and checked the stats after a few days.

1) One page is outperforming the others: page 2 has been bringing 50% of the traffic so far. Why?
2) The only difference in page 2 is the actual links to the blog I have embedded in the post. the other pages have got a link to this blog, but only in signatures.

=> traffic wise, it is therefore more important to get an opportunity to stick a link to a site in the post itself, rather than relying on the actual link in the signature to bring traffic.

Note: we are talking about ~5/10 visits/day for 1 thread, not a wide scale experiment. But figures are relevant enough though and I think that a larger scale experiment would lead to the same results.

List of sophism. Do you mean syllogisms?

2008-04-26T17:40:00.006+01:00

When I started writing my post about SEO sophisms I realised that it was a bit challenging to find actual examples of sophisms.

I searched for "sophism list", "examples of sophism", etc .. but could not find a proper list of examples.

I switched to "my favourites sophisms", and found a page about paradoxes:
http://brainden.com/paradoxes.htm

On this page were listed 3 sophisms, good start..

"A slim crocodile living in the Nile took a child. His mother begged to have him back. The crocodile could not only talk, but was also a great sophist and stated, "If you guess correctly what I will do with him, I will return him. However, if you don't guess his fate, I'll eat him." What statement should the mother make to save her child?"

"Sophist: "Yes, greedy man gives his cash with sorrow. However, he doesn't have the cash with sorrow, so he gives what he doesn't have.""

"What is better than eternal bliss? Nothing. But a slice of bread is better than nothing. So a slice of bread is better than eternal bliss."

I then looked up in google for "A slim crocodile living in the Nile took a child", "Yes, greedy man gives his cash with sorrow.", "What is better than eternal bliss? Nothing", hoping to find other sites listing one of these sophisms alongside others... but not much success, these sophisms were hardly listed anywhere else.

Back to square one. On one hand Google could not find famous sophisms for me, but on the other hand I was convinced that I had been taught at school that the syllogism "Socrates is a man, all men are mortal, hence Socrates is mortal" was a famous one. How come didn't I come across this one in my previous research. I then searched for "hence Socrates is mortal" and found out that it was classified as a "syllogism".

I search then for syllogism to refresh a little bit my memories, and find out that syllogisms was a kind of logical argument used extensively by sophists.

I then searched for "syllogisms quotes", and finally found what I was looking for on http://www.thinkexist.com!

Since I have written the first post (which was more about SEO than sophists really), I started getting about 10 visits a day from people looking for a list of sophisms. These people are probably like me, looking for actual syllogisms, but simply don't use the right search queries.

So instead of directing them to a SEO forum, I thought I could write an other post directing them to the resources they are actually looking for instead. In short, doing a bit of SEO for good :-), and hoping that this post will rank better than the other one.

SEO: top 5 list of sophisms

2008-04-24T17:19:00.005+01:00

I recently participated to a thread in an SEO forum, and it struck me how many people in this fields are using sophism to try deceive people in thinking that they are search engines optimisation specialists.

What is sophism?
Sophism can mean two very different things: In the modern definition, a sophism is a confusing or illogical argument used for deceiving someone.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophism

Examples of sophism
"Whatever exists or does not exist exists"
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/richard-sophister/

Have a look at this text from plato: http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/sophist.html
.. very similar to some SEO forums...

Sophism is used to prove something which is either not provable, or which you cannot prove yourself, or in the worst case scenario something which is actually false.

Here is a list of sophisms I came across:
1) Proving that inbound links can hurt you
'"Tries very hard to prevent site A from hurting site B" is a pretty clear indication that it certainly can happen otherwise there would be nothing to "try hard to prevent" now would there.'
Quoted from http://www.webproworld.com/google-discussion-forum/68650-can-inbound-links-really-hurt-you-2.html about whether inbound links can really hurt you or not

2) proving that you should care about keywords density
"There is much talk about the ideal keyword density of a web page. The bottomline here is that there is no thumb rule regarding the ideal keyword density in a website, mainly because the search engines change their algorithms frequently"
http://ezinearticles.com/?Keyword-Density---How-Much-Is-Too-Much?&id=401316

3) proving that you should care about duplicate content
"The solution? Don�t rely on duplicate content as your main method of driving traffic to your site. Should you avoid all duplicate content? Of course not. What kind of duplicate content is acceptable? Answering this question is easily another article in itself."
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/duplicate-content-penalty-how-to-lose-google-ranking-fast/1886/

4) proving that you should not use a dynamic site
"Dynamic Sites are Spidered Slower than Static Sites
Google in particular has made it clear dynamic sites are spidered slower than static sites. The reason for Google to do this are webmaster friendly (as I�ve recently discovered), dynamically generated sites can potentially have unlimited pages and so Google assumes a dynamic looking site (a site with URLs like dynamic-page.php?page=1) is big and slows the crawl speed. It does this to limit server load because if a dynamic site (any site) has millions of pages, Googlebot and the other spiders could cause the server to crash if they spidered too many pages at one time."
http://www.seo-consultant-services.co.uk/static-html-vs-dynamic-urls.html

5) proving that inbound links can damage your site (an other one!)
"While there are links TO your site, the majority of them are nothing more than a list of links to similar vehicle tracking sites - which are not considered to be the ultimate type of links, and in some casesis even considered a scheme or link farm, which Google specificallywarns against in Google's "Quality Guidelines - Basic principles", "Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank ..." - ://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.htmland from Google's explanation of why your site might not be listed, "... certain actions such as ... setting up pages/ links with the sole purpose of fooling search engines may result in permanent removal from our index." - ://www.google.com/webmasters/2.html"

there are many more, but running out of time really.
http://searchengineland.com/070830-074852.php: this is a good list of SEO myths. Pick any of them, go on a SEO forum and check out what so-called specialists have to say about it - doesn't take long before digging out sophism examples -

Useful TIP: forums moderators are usually the most prolific users of sophism. That why SEO myths spread so easily.

SEO should get in bed with PR

2008-04-22T18:42:00.003+01:00

As a SEO consultant, I am often asked whether we can help companies increasing the exposure of their sites on blogs, online social networks or online news websites. I usually answer that increasing the exposure of a website is online PR, not SEO, and that it is not something I specialise in.

I came to realise this morning that the difference between online PR and SEO is very blur at the moment, and people feel that they need to depend on a SEO company to manage their online exposure.

This should not be the case.

SEO requires technical skills, in order to optimise the HTML of a site, format the content in order to make it semantically relevant for chosen keywords, and submit the site to online resources.

Online PR requires a good understanding of the business and a good network of relevant journalists/bloggers/media owners who will take on a press release and push it forward a large volume of viewers.

SEO and online PR don't share the same objectives

SEO's objective is to drive long term traffic, whereas online PR's objective is to drive short term traffic.

Now, if you are interested in increasing your traffic overall, the solution is simple: Get the 2 of them in bed together!

The picture below illustrates the concept. Instead of running SEO and online PR as two separate marketing strategies, SEO and PR should be combined in order to maximise return on investment.

The situation is a bit similar to the situation a few years ago when website owners depended on web design agencies to update the content of their website. Then came in content management systems, which now reconciles web design and web content management.

Companies should not rely on SEO agencies to run their online PR campaigns.

It is now time to consolidate SEO and online PR agencies, and release tools allowing PR agencies to combine their activities effectively with search engines optimisation. There is no such tools on the market at the moment.

I believe that someone coming up with such a tool would revolutionise the online marketing industry, the same way CMS revolutionised the web design market a few years ago.

creating a palette for your website

2008-04-08T18:06:00.006+01:00

I find it one of the most tricky part of the actual design process: defining your palette (or sets of palettes) for a web project.

A lot of theory is available about how to build your own palette, but unless you have done some serious studies in graphic design, pretty hard to get a good hand on the process.

Whoever you are using for the design of your sites (in house or external agency), try to ask how they came up with the palette next time you get some mock-ups... usually the answers are pretty vague.

I have tested many tools over the years trying to "automate" the process and always came across the same issue: too many choice! These palette tools give you 1000s of combinations to choose from, and you end up picking one at random (you have also websites offering selections of palettes posted by users, such as http://sa.pantone.co.uk/pages/MYP_myPantone).

Until I found this tool - the kind of tool which make you think "why did nobody else think about it before!".
http://www.degraeve.com/color-palette/

Upload a picture conveying the "look and feel" you have got in mind, and the tool will extract the palette for you.

The process of defining a palette for your clients becomes then so much simpler:
1) Ask them to provide with a few photos they would like to use on the site
2) Extract the palette for each of them
3) Ask them to select between the different palettes suggested

Google: Vertical search - secret weapon?

2008-04-06T13:33:00.008+01:00

Targeting profiles
I think one of the reason Google is providing a better search experience than other rivals is its ability to deliver very relevant results to specific profiles of searchers.
E.g. 1: businesses or individuals looking for local suppliers

If you search for "printers london" for instance, Google will combine results with google map, and display directly a list of local printers in the results page.

E.g. 2: definitions

If you are looking for a definition of a word or expression, Google will return a series of definitions in search results.

Always adding new "vertical" results.
And Google keeps adding new "vertical add-ons":

E.g. 1: people looking for information on a specific site (large portals)

If you are looking for a book on amazon, you can use their search box directly for Google search results.

E.g.2: Programmers looking for code snippets
This one was added only very recently. Just type in some random code, and you'll find files containing this code

Some articles pointed out that Google was upsetting large websites such as amazon with their embedded search bar:
"[Google] has absolutely crossed the line because it's so blatantly about commercialisation and not user experience."
Richard Gregory, COO of Latitude

I personally don't think that these features are driven from the marketing department. By improving its vertical results, Google improves the user's experience, and keep them on its results page.

This is of course a matter of concern to all publishers (Amazon complained about the search box, and got it removed for instance), who get their number of page views reduced, and consequently their advertising revenue. But Google's mission statement is to offer the best results to its users, allowing them to find the right product/service/content directly from the search results, and the addition of these "vertical features" are going in the right direction, keeping Google ahead of the game, and definitely improving the overall user experience.