Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Google isn't the only game in town and isn't even the best alternative for many specific search tasks and needs. Here's how to escape Google's grip with Bing, Blekko, BuzzSumo, DuckDuckGo, SocialMention, Quantcast, Topsy, Wolfram|Alpha, and more.

As concerns over the de facto monopoly status of Google continue to grow, I'm reminded of the great philosopher Herman Cain and his infamous line  "blame yourself". As long as "Google" is a generic phrase for Internet search, their dominant position is assured. That said, you can do something about it.There are plenty of Google alternatives and many of these players offer a bettersearch experience, depending on your needs. Here are 12 alternatives to escape your reliance on Google for all things search...

Last week Google made a number of major announcements. There’s nothing unusual about that, of course, except this time the announcements have big implications for SEO, which will make thousands of businesses around the world wary about their efforts to scale SERPs.

This time around, Google has publicly discussed two new updates which offer a major shake-up to the standard Penguin or Panda upgrade. One is a new algorithm called RankBrain, which boasts machine learning capabilities, and the other is a slightly disconcerting real-time Penguin update. For the latter, it essentially means it’s time for businesses to be at the peak of their game with their SEO practices.

When not frightening businesses with a continuous SEO ranking update, Google is nearing completion of an extraordinary project which would bring the Internet to over 100 million people around Indonesia. For businesses, however, the big news is Google’s latest updates–here’s what’s known so far....

If you are a Google Chrome user, there is good news for you. Your web browser is about to get faster and better than ever, all thanks to a new data compression algorithm that Google is planning to roll out soon.

Google employee Ilya Grigorik took to Google+ to describe the advent of Brotli compression algorithm. This new algorithm will replace the existing one, which is called Zopfli. Brotli was announced last year in September, and according to Google's internal benchmarks, it works faster than all existing data compression algorithms, and can compress data by 17-25% extra, as compared to Zopfli. Furthermore, its compression ratio is almost 25% better than all other data compression algorithms....

It's now been one week since Google Penguin 2.0 went live. Google's Distinguished Engineer Matt Cutts promised the new generation of Penguin would go deeper, and it seems to have lived up to that promise. Here are some early findings from sites hit by Penguin....