Squidbyte Blog

It’s kind of late but Happy New Year to everyone….  Been very busy and, as a result, my life as a blogger has taken a back seat to everything else.  Not to worry, I do have something to crow about.

I’ve been working hard on a new price comparison website for the electronics market.  I already have a site running in Australia since the middle of last year and it’s going quite well.  Traffic is increasing and more and more online retailers are sending in data to be included.

The new year and 2008 has meant spreading my wings and….drum roll please….I’m pleased to announce the new addition of www.saveapound.co.uk – computers, notebooks, washing machines, digital cameras, it has it all.

Why do this? I hear you as.  Well, it’s all about helping consumers really.  Consumers want to find the best deal possible and don’t want to troll through all the different online stores to find the best price on the same item – SaveAPound does all of that for you.  Currently funded by Google AdSense there is no charge for users.  Nor is there is also no charge for retailers to submit their content either.  Everyone wins!

Not only is there a site for the UK, launched 25th February, on New Years Day itself we launched www.saveagreenback.com as a free service in the USA.

Both SaveAPound.co.uk and SaveAGreenback.com are currently in their early stages of development and we are adding data every day.   Hopefully both consumers of electronics goods and services and retailers will find this service to be a useful resource both now and in the future.

In May Google unveiled it’s famed Universal Search. Much fanfare was made of this at the SES San Jose event and it was even commented on by several speakers as being the ‘biggest change in the search landscape’ in years.

This may well be the case but it’s yet to be rolled out globally in full.

An example of this can be seen when searching for ‘APEC’ (the biggest thing in the news around Sydney at the moment – here). This is how the results look on Google.com.

And, this is how it looks if you perform the same search on Google.com.au:

Google maps have been incorporated into the SERPs for a short while now in Australia but soon there is bound to be several new additions that will follow what is seen in the US version of Google. This not only has implications as to the way that people will be finding information online but will also have major implications with the search industry and the way people optimise their sites everywhere. No longer is it only the text on the page that you will need to SEO, but images, news feeds, videos (BTW, these must be uploaded to YouTube and other ‘trusted’ sites to be included in the SERPs) and other content as well.

How will this affect people trying to scratch together an income from publishing material on the web? Time to change your ways and adapt – either that or get left behind.