Google plans to give its Web-search formula a bit of a face lift. In addition to displaying the traditional list of URLs, the search engine will begin to surface more facts and direct answers to queries at the top of top of the search results. 

The change will make Google search more closely aligned with “how humans understand the world,” Amit Singhal, a top Google search exec, told WSJ.

While this move will likely present Google with new real estate on which to serve search ads (which currently generates $37 billion in annual revenue for the company), it will be interesting to see how this shift will affect SEO strategy for indexed companies. It will also be interesting to examine those companies’ click-through-rates, as users will begin to see more answers on the search page, itself. 

Check out this exciting announcement from AddThis. A huge step towards truly measurable analytics.

Twitter will be rolling out some minor changes this summer regarding links. Twitter will automatically wrapping all links using an official t.co shorter.

The size of the shortened link ID (what matters to Twitter in regards to character size) will be a predicatble 19 characters, but the link might (and often will) be an slightly longer abbreviated version of the original. The distinction here is that you will be able to see a longer URL description - and effort to prevent link spams and malware - but only 19 characters will be counted against the sender’s total.

Twitter asserted that this would have no effect on third party applications like Bit.ly or Hootsuite, both of which offer full analytics for shortened links.

Anyone that has published a website knows how frustrating it can be optimize your sight for Search Engine relevance. This feat has been particularly tough, because until today many of the largest Search Engines and Indexes has used different criteria to rank pages.

At last, the major players - Google, Yahoo, and Bing - have announced a major move in the right direction. Today, the three companies collectively announced that they will be partnering to create schema.org, a resource for site owners to gain insight into how to improve their sites’ search results. The site will provide a standardized collection of schemas, or HTML tags, webmasters can add to their pages to make it easy for search providers to recognize and display their sites.

For more info, here is Schema’s description of the tool: “Many sites are generated from structured data, which is often stored in databases. When this data is formatted into HTML, it becomes very difficult to recover the original structured data. Many applications, especially search engines, can benefit greatly from direct access to this structured data. On-page markup enables search engines to understand the information on web pages and provide richer search results in order to make it easier for users to find relevant information on the web. Markup can also enable new tools and applications that make use of the structure.”

Twitter has launched a Follow button, allowing websites and publishers to invite users to subscribe to their Twitter feed without ever leaving the page. All it takes is a single click.

Previously a company needed to redirect the follower to the account on Twitter.com, before encouraging them to follow. The result will likely be more “Follow Us” prompts on websites, as publishers no longer need to worry about redirecting audiences off-site.

Expect to see one up on this blog, and on my website, shortly.

TechCrunch has just reported that Google’s +1 Button for websites will launch tomorrow. The news was prematurely leaked by the PR firm representing Clearsping, Google’s partner in the venture.

“The +1 button is designed to help publisher’s content stand out in search results by giving users the ability to +1 content. The more chances users get to +1 content, the more likely publishers’ URLs are to show up in search results with +1 annotations. This helps users highlight which results are most useful and helps publishers better engage with their audience”

The arrival of the button is potentially big news for publishers, as it can potentially alter the way Google search results will be served.