Google is unveiling its new flight search feature today, which makes it easier to search for flight information within Google. Notably, Google says this does not include any of the services it acquired with its controversial acquisition of ITA, the flight data search company Google bought last year and went through nine months of regulatory oversight before being approved in April.

The new flight schedule search feature is relatively minor by itself. It allows users to see all the flight schedules on a route as well as to explore all the outbound destinations from an airport. Yet, this is just a step in Google’s plans to take over flight scheduling data and search. What can users expect when Google finally does integrate ITA software into its travel features?

TA’s best travel search feature is called Matrix. It provides airport geo-search, event search to find things to do at your destination, an interactive calendar to explore date ranges for lowest fares, real-time filters to find the best flight for your needs and color-coded time bars. Google’s newest offering does none of this and is little more than flight data on a search page. Neither has Google integrated any of ITA’s mobile offerings, namely its “OnTheFly” app that is available for iOS and Android.

The theory is that Google will be able to take the ITA offerings and QPX software – with the data it harvests and the interface it provides – and display it in a Google search page. Google wants to know what users are doing so as to better push advertising and offerings such as the announcement of Google Wallet, and this revamp of its travel search offers significant insight into the online and real-world behavior of people. Google’s ITA purchase was as much about the rich data the company provides (and can manipulate through Needlebase) as the richer, real-time travel search options it can provide.

Will this set it apart from Bing, which partnered with travel search engine Kayak earlier this month? Bing had been using ITA data to power its search options and joined the coalition against Google’s purchase of ITA. Kayak by itself is an impressive travel search engine and the other market players – Expedia, Travelocity, Priceline, Orbitz, Optifly – all have heavy marketing campaigns and a wide base of users.

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With more than 10 billion images indexed, Google Image Search has become the visual reference source to beat. Google’s VP Marissa Mayer took the stage at a press conference today to announce the company’s latest image search redesign. the company released a significantly new iteration of its current interface alongside the launch of Google Image Search Ads.

The new ad product allows marketers to place the image of their choice next to their text advertisement. This feature lets product-based vendors offer images of their offerings based on the relevancy of the ad to image search results. So if the user is searching for a specific phone image and specs, it makes sense that commercial offerings for accessories and cases would co-exist in the commercial header.

Apart from the AdWords release, Google’s Image Search redesign offers speed and a higher quantity of images to the user. The new design features a tiled look with the ability to show more than 1,000 photos on a single page. As users hover over the results of their search, the image thumbnail increases and details of that result are displayed. Below are a few photos of the new interface.

The company has rolled out the redesign to 10% of users and will continue to make it available in waves over the next month. To inquire about the image advertisement program, marketers can sign in to their regular AdWords account.

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From all the forms of traffic to a website, the traffic driven by the search engine has been the most profitable, along the time. This is why, since the middle of the nineties, many tried to analyze the way they work and to adapt their websites, for a higher and higher rank, in search engines. Search engine optimization became, thus, a profitable business, itself.

For many, though, getting traffic by no means led to less orthodox practices, known today as Black Hat SEO practices. These tactics involve abusing the search engines and driving traffic to them, even from irrelevant searches. To defend themselves from these tactics, the search engines evolved and their demands are continuously, changing. Google and Yahoo do not even disclose, any more, most of their algorithm calculations and other criteria they require for delivering targeted, quality traffic, to a website.

Anyway, the times of reciprocal links, three-way links, article spinning, link farming and whatever means automation is over. The serious directories check all the submissions, by hand. Recently, many had their pages un-indexed just for using huge data feeds, to post massive content to their blogs or web-stores.

Today the search engine submission services are obsolete. Each search engine will offer different tools to include websites, for indexing but they do not guarantee a better rank from using them. Google offers the Webmaster Tools and asks for a sitemap to be included in the root of a website, in order to access its content and crawl it, periodically. The webmasters also have the option to exclude certain content, like the password protected one, from being indexed and revealed, to the public. The sitemap will not be able to do its job, unless proper linking or cross-linking between the pages of the same website is done.

The keywords probably, will always be the most important factor for rank improvement in SEO. This is why, without falling into the obsession to please the search engines and to compromise the content, one has to check out the trends in searching. Not only the search engines offer this information but also big online stores, like Amazon. Keyword stuffing and hidden content, typical Black Hat SEO tactics, should be avoided, of course. Though, using frequently searched keywords along with one’s legitimate content, in a natural and well balanced manner, is one thing to keep in mind.

These days, the content syndication and spreading the word on major networking sites helps a lot when it comes to getting quality driven content from search engine. Search engine marketing is becoming, more and more a matter of honesty and accurate information. As in real life, one cannot rely only on one method of advertising and search engine marketing should not be the only one to take into consideration, for any website owner. Placing ads on websites with high traffic, permanent visibility and continuously, providing quality content on your own are pretty much the only things that make the search engines tick and work in one’s favor, these days.

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Were seeing a number of reports on Twitter from people who are now seeing the new Google Search results design.

Google has been testing a new search interface on random people for some time, today it appears a significant batch of users have been given access to the new design.

Search Engine Land were given preview access late last year and have a detailed review, its worth a read if youre interested. Briefly though, its definitely cleaner, bolder and more colorful than the current version but clearly the biggest change is the design of the side column filtering, the sharper logo and larger search field.

If you havent got access and are keen to try it now, there is a hack, details after the jump.

To try it the new Google Search design now:

1. Go to Google.com

2. Once it loads, enter this code into your web browsers URL address field:

javascript:void(document.cookie=PREF=ID=20b6e4c2f44943bb:U=4bf292d46faad806:TM=1249677602:LM=1257919388:S=odm0Ys-53ZueXfZG;path=/; domain=.google.com);

3. Hit Enter.

4. Refresh Google.com page and now you should have the new Google Search.

Thanks to Lauren and Karoli for the screenshots.

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It’s been nearly a year since China first shutdown access to Twitter in preparation for the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, but today Google has opened up the doors again, in a way.

According to an article this morning in the Los Angeles Times, Google has added Twitter search results to its search engine there, “in effect, lifting a nine-month blackout of the microblogging service in China.”

Earlier this week, Google announced that it would stop censoring search results and would redirect visitors from mainland China to Google.com.hk from Google.cn. Already, China has worked to censor search results provided on Google.com.hk.

This latest move by Google is sure to further aggravate an already tense situation, but we have to wonder, as we have before, if it really matters or if we’re looking at it from an ethnocentric point of view. Twitter may have been blocked, but China has several of its own Chinese Twitter clones. So now China can see tweets, which are predominantly not in Mandarin, in Google search results.

Then again, the Los Angeles Times points out that the search results are already bringing sensitive topics into view of Chinese citizens:

“The tweets do not show up for all searches, but only for terms that appear to be popular on Twitter. On Thursday morning, that included discussions on such taboo subjects as how to circumvent China’s Internet firewall, why Google decided to exit China and a vaccine scandal unfolding in central China.”

The move seems more like a principled slap in the face than anything else. But then again, so does much of this situation.

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