It was announced on Econsultancy yesterday that, despite the current gloomy economic outlook,  the UK Paid Search market is expected to reach a value of £4.19bn by the end of 2012. This is up 14% from 2011 when the market was valued at £3.68bn. This year on year growth is likely due to the accountability [...]

Part of Google+’s recent changes we discussed last week, Google+ Business Pages have integrated Google Places. The change has meant that many pages that were Google Places (integrated with Google’s natural search) have been changed to Google+ Business pages. The 80 million Google Place pages worldwide have been automatically converted into 80 million Google+ Local pages, according to [...]

China’s social network ‘Weibo’, which is the equivalent of Twitter, has introduced a code of conduct explicitly restricting the messages it users can post and share. China has always come under scrutiny for its censoring of internet use and this latest update is said to be the result of “unfounded” rumours being posted by some [...]

Facebook appears to be planning a move into the competitive smartphone market next year in an effort to make money out if its growing mobile audience. The New York Times cited several anonymous sources including Facebook employees, claiming that the company (which recently launched its IPO) has recently hired several smart phone developers and engineers. In the past, [...]

Google took a big bit into the Search Competitor Monitoring market this week when it announced on the Google Blog the introduction of of the new ‘Auction Insights’ Report. The new report is a step up from the already existing and popular ‘impression share’ report that shows the percentage of impressions your client is missing [...]

More than 170 million people have joined Google+ since its launch in June last year, yet it is still in the early days of its development. To improve its offering and increase the engagement of its user base, Google have introduced a more functional and flexible version of Google+ by changing key aspects of its layout. According [...]

QR Codes have been around for almost 20 years… That’s something to think about the next time you see one in a ridiculous placement. Those mysterious black and white pixelated boxes were originally intended to track vehicles during the manufacture process at a Toyota factory in Japan. Nothing says ‘cutting edge technology’ like a novel [...]

Microsoft has announced the launch of So.cl, its search integrated social network was designed initially for students but is now available for public use. The website has been available to students since the beginning of this year in beta and only available to a selection of institutions that agreed to partner with Microsoft. This current version with [...]

The Tug PPC team were at SMX on Wednesday to hear Amit Singhal, senior vice-president of engineering at Google, reveal that part of the search engines immediate plans were make Google more “human”. By this, he explained that Google and other search engines have only ever been able to understand words rather than context. “For [...]

The Tug PPC team were at SMX on Wednesday to hear Amit Singhal, senior vice-president of engineering at Google, reveal that part of the search engines immediate plans were make Google more “human”. By this, he explained that Google and other search engines have only ever been able to understand words rather than context. “For [...]