Google Expands Flight Search Outside US To 500 Cities

Google Flight Search is taking off to international destinations. Starting today users can search for flights to 500 airports outside the US. Google hasn’t provided a comprehensive list of destinations, but most European and Asian cities I searched for were available.

Will Pending Layoffs Put Final Nail In Yahoo Search?

Whatever is left of Yahoo Search — and, frankly, that’s unclear at this point — might be gone completely within the next couple of weeks.

At AllThingsD today, Kara Swisher is reporting that Yahoo is planning substantial layoffs as early as next week, with a company restructuring to be revealed the week after that. Swisher, who’s been correct on things like this in the past, mentions “a half-dozen sources” in reporting on Yahoo’s impending plans.

AdWords Gets ZIP Code Targeting, Location Insertion, Other Tweaks

Google this week introduced the ability to target more than 30,000 ZIP codes in AdWords, giving advertisers the ability to find potential customers in a familiar, granular way. Another new feature, Location Insertion, is aimed at letting advertisers with multiple locations create one ad, and have information dynamically inserted depending on the user’s query or location. Both features are part of location extensions. which are also getting some other tweaks in response to feedback.

For ZIP code targeting, advertisers will be able to add up to 1,000 postal codes at a time. They’ll also be able to view campaign performance stats by ZIP code.

AdWords To Automatically Match For Misspellings, Other Variants

Most experienced AdWords advertisers have developed keyword lists that include things like misspellings, plurals, and other variations on a keyword or phrase. Now, Google will do all this automatically — as it does with organic results — with exact and phrase matching, though advertisers will be able to opt out.

A new way to access quality content online

Whether we’re getting the latest election news, making sense of the day’s stock market activity or looking for an update on our favorite celebrities, we rely on publishers to inform and entertain us. Online publishers often fund the creation of this content through ads; sometimes they ask you to pay for content directly, by buying a subscription or purchasing a particular article.

Now, you may see a new option: the ability to access some of this content by responding to microsurveys, without having to pull out your wallet or sign in. When a site has implemented this option, you’ll see a prompt that offers you a choice between answering a market research question or completing another action specified by the publisher (such as signing up for an account or purchasing access). All responses are completely anonymous -- they aren’t tied to your identity or later used to target ads. The prompts look like this:

Google Webmaster Tools Expands Query Data to 90 Days

Today, Google has expanded the historical search query data to 90 days. The number of queries reported has increased as well: the report will now list the top 2,000 for each day of the selected date range (vs. the previous top 1,000).

This is great news, as this is data not available anywhere else and when looking at trends, the more information, the better. Google has made a few other minor adjustments to this data recently. So if you use Google webmaster tools query data, see below for all the details of how these reports work.

Google Webmaster Tools Cleans Up With Dashboards, New Navigation & More

Google announced on the Webmaster Central blog that they have cleaned up Google Webmaster Tools. The three changes include:

(1) Updated Dashboard (2) New Left Hand Navigation (3) Home Compact View

Here is a picture of the revised dashboard:

The new navigation was changed to be more representative of the content and tools within the portal. Google explained:

Configuration: Things you configure and generally don’t change very often.

Health: Where you look to make sure things are OK.

Traffic: Where you go to understand how your site is doing in Google search, who’s linking to you; where you can explore the data about your site.

Optimization: Where you can find ideas to enhance your site, which enables us to better understand and represent your site in Search and other services.

Source: Google blog