Research & Studies

The debate on the activity level on Google+ has raged for years. How many users are really active on it? Is the place a ghost town? Why hasn’t Google shut it down already? Well, I decided to put it to the test, so I did a hardcore analysis of 516,246 randomly selected Google+ profiles, and […]

So here is the question: Does Google scan Gmails to see URLs shared within them, and then does it use these to discover new content? There are many who adamantly maintain that they do. So the IMEC Labs Test Group decided to put that to the test. In this post, we will report our results […]

UPDATE: For the latest on how Rich Answers such as Featured Snippets have grown in Google search over the years, see Featured Snippets: New Insights, New Opportunities In a test of over 850,000 search queries, we found that Google offered some form of rich answer (AKA a knowledge box) 19+% of the time. If you […]

UPDATE: For the latest on how Rich Answers such as Featured Snippets have grown in Google search over the years, see Featured Snippets: New Insights, New Opportunities In a test of over 850,000 search queries, we found that Google offered some form of rich answer (AKA a knowledge box) 19+% of the time. If you […]

Get caught up! We have updated this study two more times since this was published. See the latest version: Google Indexing to Tweets Appears to Decline. Late on Wednesday evening (February 4th, 2015), Bloomberg broke the news of a new deal between Google and Twitter. The following day Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan put together an […]

As a part of the IMEC Labs Test Group, we have been running some tests to see whether or not tweeting a link to a page that is otherwise invisible to Google can cause it to be crawled and indexed. The short story is this is: Yes, it might. [Tweet This!] In our two test samples, one […]

Here it is in a nutshell: Engagement with Japanese tweets is more affected by Social Authority levels than are Western language tweets. [Tweet This!] Use of Hashtags, links, and longer tweet length have an even greater positive impact than they do in Western language tweets. [Tweet This!] In December we published our study on Twitter Engagement, with a […]

What you see before you is the result of analyzing more than 2 million Western language tweets out of over 4 million Tweets we collected. In this paper we will outline the results of analyzing that data to learn and understand what drives behavior on Twitter. One of the main goals: to see what really drives […]

Which voice search app – Google, Siri, or Windows Cortana – is best at directly answering questions? We wanted to find out, so we prepared a set of over 3000 questions that could potentially generate a simple answer and asked them to all three apps. For complete test methodology and results, see our article The […]

Google’s Knowledge Graph has been the center of much attention lately. We have been hearing a lot about another concept called the Knowledge Vault as well. But just how extensive is Google’s capability? And what about Siri and Bing/Cortana? How do they stack up? To find out, we loaded the Google App onto an iPhone […]

Google’s Knowledge Graph has been the center of much attention lately. We have been hearing a lot about another concept called the Knowledge Vault as well. But just how extensive is Google’s capability? And what about Siri and Bing/Cortana? How do they stack up? To find out, we loaded the Google App onto an iPhone […]

In December of 2013, we conducted a survey of 325 users to learn about the ways they were using Facebook. We wanted to see if we would get the same results, so we repeated the survey to see what kind of changes in awareness of various aspects world’s largest social network have occurred. We conducted […]