Google News for Opera Mini

While the Google News team has been hard at work redesigning our service for smartphones, we’ve also been thinking about our milllions of users around the world who access the web not from a smartphone, but from a feature phone, using Opera Mini as their browser.

So we have rolled out a redesigned Google News for Opera Mini in all 29 languages and 70 editions of Google News. This includes an enhanced homepage featuring richer snippets, thumbnail images, links to videos and section content without explicit navigation, a convenient search bar, comfortably spaced links and the ability to access your desktop personalization on your phone.

We hope that this will improve the news browsing experience for Opera Mini users around the world, including millions of people using a feature phone as the primary point of access for the web. See it here in the Indian Hindi and Nigerian English versions.

So, pick up your feature phone and point your Opera Mini browser to http://news.google.comto catch up on news anytime and anywhere. For more information or to share your feedback with us, please visit our Help Center.

BrightLocal Survey- 59% of Consumers use Google Each Month to Find a Good Local Business

Brightlocal.com, a provider of local search tools for local marketers and SMBs, has released a new survey of Local SEO’s and US consumers title: Where do local business websites get their traffic & do consumers appreciate local search results? They surveyed 648 Local SEOs and 1,250 US consumers as to the value of Local search results.

Local SEOs reported that Google Places was the number one source of traffic and Google organic was number two, with Google in total providing 58% of all search traffic. (I have asked for clarification of the results but it strikes me as difficult to ascertain with any confidence where a result from Google is coming from with blended results.) All other sites provided a small percentage of the traffic; Yahoo providing 4% in from both local and organic, Bing providing 3% and Facebook 2%. These numbers reinforced the results that I reported in a much smaller sample of rural visitation in January.

The report found that consumers looked more closely at results that included images particularly in younger demographics. It is confirmation of the general perception in the SEO world of the benefits of the Google included visuals. Of particular interest to me, were the consumer usage and satisfaction results.

Question: How often do you use Google to locate and find a good local business? (e.g cafe, bar, plumber, taxi service…)
– 59% of consumers use Google each month to find a good local business
– 31% of consumers use Google each week to find a good local business

% of consumers using Google Local results

Question: In Google’s search results they often display local results*. Which of the following statements best applies to your attitude and use of these types of results?

Key Findings:
-71% of consumers value the information contained within local search results.
-This rises to 80% for those aged 16-34; Only 66% of consumers aged 55+ find these results useful

Related posts:

  1. How Often Does Google Show A Local Map? More than a 1 billion times per month!
  2. Google Maps User Survey
  3. Google Business Group Survey – Not from Google