Google is always into expanding its search territories and this time they have conquered two major areas:

1. Improved flash indexing: Flash was always consider non-SE friendly. All search engines were trying to reduce the gap between flash content and search engine algorithms. Google has improved their flash indexing.
   

   Q: Which Flash files can Google better index now?
   We’ve improved our ability to index textual content in SWF files of all kinds. This includes Flash “gadgets” such as buttons or menus, self-contained Flash websites, and everything in between.Q: What content can Google better index from these Flash files?
   All of the text that users can see as they interact with your Flash file. If your website contains Flash, the textual content in your Flash files can be used when Google generates a snippet for your website. Also, the words that appear in your Flash files can be used to match query terms in Google searches.

   For more information visit Google webmaster blog.

2. There were important sections behind the web forms, now Google is trying to fill in the forms with crawler programs to reach out to additional content.
   

   Google is constantly trying new ideas to improve our coverage of the web. We already do some pretty smart things like scanning JavaScript and Flash to discover links to new web pages, and today, we would like to talk about another new technology we’ve started experimenting with recently.

   In the past few months we have been exploring some HTML forms to try to discover new web pages and URLs that we otherwise couldn’t find and index for users who search on Google. Specifically, when we encounter a element on a high-quality site, we might choose to do a small number of queries using the form. For text boxes, our computers automatically choose words from the site that has the form; for select menus, check boxes, and radio buttons on the form, we choose from among the values of the HTML. Having chosen the values for each input, we generate and then try to crawl URLs that correspond to a possible query a user may have made. If we ascertain that the web page resulting from our query is valid, interesting, and includes content not in our index, we may include it in our index much as we would include any other web page.

   More more information read “Crawling through HTML forms“

Google is always improving various algorithms to reach out to the farthest content on web.

Trust has always been a major factor in decision making for customers. 84% OF AMERICANS are concerned that they could become victims of IDENTITY THEFT. An offline customer can touch and feel the product to gain an instant trust. There were many other factors for trust but let me put in some major reasons why people don’t trust online presence as much as that of an offline (or physical) presence:

• Online building are cheaper: One can easily make a replica of amazon or ebay by copying (scraping) various things whereas it is practically impossible to replicate a Walmart. The physical presence in itself has contributed a lot to the trust factor. On web anyone can seem big.
• More frauds online than offline because of anonymity: I don’t have the stats to support this but I can easily say that it is easy to run an online scam that offline scams. I had seen many of the scams being run online with complete anonymity. The anonymity has enabled the offline cowards to try various online frauds.
• Stumble upon and buy: In offline world, we generally don’t stumble upon any shop and buy stuffs. We hear about the business and then visit the shop (most of the times). In online world we search and buy, we buy from unheard businesses too.
• more .. Limited options, localization: There are limited option for offline shopping and consumers are generally aware of the shops but online shops are plenty to count and most of us are unaware of the shops. There are various other reasons that why people trust offline businesses over online business.

The question remains that how a trustworthy business can show its trustworthiness? I have worked in finance industry for last 5 years and building trust was one of the biggest challenges we faced. I enlist 5 ways to improve your online trust:

1. Various certification: According to a survey conducted by Verisign, 86% of online shoppers say it is important for an e-commerce site to include a trust mark of some kind on its site. Get relevant certification to help your users trust you. BBB certification and verisign Certification works really well for some of the business. I was even surprise to see “Hacker safe” logo improving the sales.
2. Testimonials: “Having more testimonials helps any business”. People are not unaware of the fake testimonials, after all according to Seth Godin “All marketers are liars“. Attach pictures and videos along with testimonials to make it look more credible. Attach the designation, location of the users too.
3. Photos: Add photos of founder, co-founder and other team members to make it look more credible.
4. Company tour video: Add a video with proper location giving a complete company tour.
5. Toll free numbers: Allow people to talk to you. Taking to someone improves sales.

Related articles:

1. 7 Essential Web Design Principles to Earn Trust. And 4 Things to Avoid!
2. How to Design for Persuasion, Emotion, and Trust