Search Engine Updates News

Important Updates Search Transitions

2010-08-19T07:07:00.000-07:00

Important Updates on Search Transitions

Organic transition beginning this week; paid search transition testing happening now

As we continue to work toward implementing the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance, we’ve reached some very significant milestones and wanted to share this important news with you.

Yahoo! organic search transition to begin

Later this week, we will begin the work of transitioning the back-end technology for Yahoo! Search over to the Bing platform. This is an important step toward our goal of improving the overall relevance of Yahoo! organic search results and attracting a larger audience to Yahoo! Search, to ultimately put your ads in front of more potential customers.

You’ll want to make sure that you’re prepared for this change, so be sure to check out these tips and stay tuned to the Yahoo! Search blog for confirmation of when the organic search transition is complete.

Testing of paid search account transitions has begun

Soon, you’ll be able to access a transition portal from within your Yahoo! Search Marketing account. This portal will walk you through the simple step-by-step process of creating a Microsoft Advertising adCenter account and importing your campaigns, or linking an existing adCenter account that you may already have.
Before we make this transition portal broadly available to all advertisers in the weeks ahead, we are currently testing it with a limited number of accounts. You will be notified via email once the transition portal is available.

Commitment to a quality transition continues

As we’ve stated all along, our primary goal is to provide you with a quality transition experience in 2010, while protecting the holiday season. We continue to make great strides toward this goal, and we evaluate our progress every day. However, please remember that if we conclude that it would improve the overall experience, we may defer the transition to 2011.
We’re looking forward to bringing you the benefits of the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance!

— The Team

Yahoo Microsoft Search Webmasters

2010-08-19T07:05:00.001-07:00

Today we’ve shared our latest milestones in the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance. We want webmasters to know that the Yahoo! Site Explorer team is planning tighter integration between Site Explorer and Bing Webmaster Center to make the transition as smooth as possible. The information that you provide about your website and its structure using Yahoo! Site Explorer has been extremely useful in helping us maintain the freshness and relevancy of our search results, and as you know, it helps ensure that your website gets great search traffic.

Later this week, organic search listings on Yahoo! Search will start to be powered by Bing in the US and Canada (English) markets, and webmasters should begin familiarizing themselves with the Bing Webmaster Center tool.

However, you should continue to provide your site information to Yahoo! using Site Explorer, because in many parts of the world search results will continue to be powered by Yahoo!’s systems until the full transition is complete for all markets by early 2012. This will help to ensure that you continue to get high quality traffic from searches originating on Yahoo! and our partner sites, even in markets that are not yet transitioned to Microsoft’s systems. We will share site information that you provide on Site Explorer with Microsoft during this transition period, to ensure that you get high quality traffic from search results that are powered by Bing also.

Once all markets are being served by Microsoft, we plan to refine the focus of Yahoo! Site Explorer, and webmasters should use Bing’s Webmaster Center to provide information about their website and its structure. Of course, we will notify you well in advance of all markets being transitioned to Bing’s content systems.
Yahoo!’s Site Explorer team is continuing to innovate and provide new features for webmasters. We are planning features that provide richer analysis of the organic search traffic that you get from the Yahoo! network and our partner sites. Stay tuned for more details, and in the meantime we would love to hear from you as to how we can serve the webmaster community better.

Please review these FAQs for more details.

Hemant Minocha
Product Manager, Site Explorer, Yahoo! Search

Yahoo API Updates Changes

2010-08-19T07:04:00.001-07:00

Important API Updates and Changes

Today we’re making some important announcements on the transition of our Search back-end infrastructure to Microsoft, and how this transition impacts the Search APIs and web services we offer on the Yahoo! Developer Network. We are also sharing specific news about several of our other developer services.

Over recent years, Yahoo! has made a commitment to developers by opening products, services, and canvases for third-party innovation. This commitment remains unwavering. For example, we recently announced new canvases and APIs as part of our Zynga deal. At the same time, we have to align our developer offerings with our products and strategy.

Yahoo! Search BOSS

Search remains critical to Yahoo! and we’re happy to announce that we will continue to offer the BOSS program (Build your Own Search Service). In the not too distant future, BOSS will provide web and image search results from Microsoft along with other search-related services and content from Yahoo!, such as news. In the next 30 days, we will announce the specific details about how BOSS will evolve. We are exploring a potential fee-based structure as well as ad-revenue models that will enable BOSS developers to monetize their offerings. When we roll out these changes, BOSS will no longer be a free service to developers.

To all the current users of BOSS, we appreciate your patience as we continue to work through the details. We know BOSS is important to your business and we promise to give ample notice before we change any usage terms. In addition, Yahoo! plans to deliver new search-related offerings to publishers in the coming months, and we will share those details as soon as they are available.

YQL (Yahoo! Query Language)

As described back in April, we are moving to YQL-based services wherever possible. This has long-term benefits for developers: YQL is reliable, scalable, cloud-based, and easy-to-use. YQL eliminates the need to learn multiple APIs while providing the same functionality. We are also preparing to roll out a new commercial program for developers focused on our social platforms and YQL.

YQL is a key element of Yahoo!’s infrastructure – it’s the way that the Yahoo! Homepage, Search, and other high-traffic, global Yahoo! products get their data. We rely on this technology and we’re committed to making it scalable and continuously available for you.

Several search-related web services will continue to be supported, but strictly through YQL. These include the Yahoo! Term Extraction Web Service, Related Suggestion, and Spelling Suggestion. Other non-BOSS search APIs such as Web Search, Image Search, News Search and Site Explorer APIs will shut down with no further support in YQL. We plan to make these transitions and shutdowns effective by end of year.
SearchMonkey

On October 1, 2010, we will close the SearchMonkey developer tool, gallery, and app preferences. Yahoo! Search is continuing to shift from a model where developers build lightweight apps to install on Yahoo! to one where publishers enhance their own site markup to produce similar results. Yahoo! Search results pages will continue to show enhanced result templates from websites’ page markup and structured data feeds along with Microsoft’s organic listings.

Site Explorer

The Yahoo! Site Explorer team is planning tighter integration between Site Explorer and Bing Webmaster Center to make the transition as smooth as possible for webmasters. At this stage in the transition, it is important for webmasters to continue using Yahoo! Site Explorer to inform us about your website and its structure so you keep getting high quality traffic from searches originating on Yahoo! and our partner sites – even from markets outside the US and Canada that haven’t yet transitioned to Microsoft systems. To keep things simple, we will share site information you provide on Site Explorer with Microsoft during this transition period.

When Microsoft fully powers the Yahoo! Search back-end globally, expected in 2012, it will be important for webmasters to use Bing Webmaster Center as well. The Bing tool will manage site, webpage and feed submissions. Yahoo! Site Explorer will shift to focus on new features for webmasters that provide richer analysis of the organic search traffic you get from the Yahoo! network and our partner sites.

Maps, Geo, and Local

Location-based services are an essential element in web app development. We will be evaluating all our Geo, Maps, and Local APIs--updating or shutting down some of them, and working with our strategic partner, Nokia, on others. We will work with our developer community to ensure a smooth transition in all instances and we will share more details about these decisions in September.

MyBlogLog

The future of MyBlogLog has been uncertain for some time, as we discussed back in December. The day has come, however, to shut down the MyBlogLog APIs. By the end of the year, these APIs will no longer be available. We encourage you to turn to our well-supported Social APIs. The Yahoo! network now relies on this Social platform to power user profiles and social graph, relationships, activity streams, and more.

The Web has changed a lot since 2005 when YDN launched as the home for Yahoo!’s Search APIs, and so has our business. We know you’ve built amazing products atop our technology stack and we will do our best to provide the greatest transparency and smoothest possible transition.

We will use YQL as our core foundation for APIs moving forward, and stay focused on making good, valuable data open and accessible to developers. We will continue to share key technologies, such as front-end libraries like YUI and cloud services like Hadoop and Traffic Server.

SES in San Francisco

2010-08-19T07:03:00.001-07:00

Join Yahoo! Search at SES in San Francisco

Search Engine Strategies (SES) will be in San Francisco for the first time starting tomorrow. Join Yahoo! Search in the foggy city and hear about what we’ve been to up.

Highlights of Yahoo! speakers at SES:
Tuesday, August 17

Search: Where to Next?
11:30 a.m.–12:30 p.m.

Speaker: Shashi Seth, Senior Vice President, Search Products
Digital Asset Optimization

1:30 p.m.–2:30 p.m.
Speaker: Josh Cobb, Sr. Director, Americas/Business Development & Partnerships Group

Price-per-Click (PPC) Lab
3:00 p.m.–5:15 p.m.
Speaker: David Roth, Director of Search Marketing

Developing Great Content
4:15 p.m.–5:15 p.m.
Speaker: Wendi Sturgis, Vice President, North America, Business Development and Partnership Group

Wednesday, August 18
Crossing the Digital Divide: The Leap from Search to Display

11:00 a.m.–12:00 p.m.
Speaker: Dave Zinman, Vice President and General Manager, Display Advertising

Getting Mobilized Marketing Strategies
1:00 p.m.–2:00 p.m.
Speaker: Paul Cushman, Senior Director, Mobile Sales Strategy

Thursday, August 19

Social and the Marketing Mix

2:00 p.m.–3:00 p.m.
Speaker: Bobby Figueroa, Vice President, Product Development

Advanced Paid Search Tactics
4:45 p.m.–5:45 p.m.
Speaker: Jon Mette, Senior Strategist, Search Optimization and Strategy

See the complete SES San Francisco conference agenda.

The Yahoo! Search Marketing Blog will be tweeting (#sessf), posting to Facebook, and uploading snaps to Flickr page. So check back here for updates. We hope to see you there!

News Yahoo SearchMonkey Program

2010-08-19T07:02:00.001-07:00

We’ve been very pleased with the benefits that the SearchMonkey Program has provided to Yahoo! Search users over the last two years and want to share our plans for SearchMonkey with respect to the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance. Some of the amazing improvements that SearchMonkey has enabled over the past two years include:

Enhancing results on over 60% of all Yahoo! Search Result Pages, with relevant images, links or other useful information about listings.
Providing “object filters” for over 18% of Yahoo! Search results, including the ability to filter search results by your favorite Web sites.
Jumpstarting Yahoo! Search initiatives to provide richer search experiences, including automatic rich results and richer object displays on Yahoo! Search.

In keeping these previous efforts to bring structure to the Web, our enhanced results program will continue as we transition organic search listings to Microsoft. As part of the enhanced results program, we will be adding new entities (including people, Q&A, and real estate) to power both additional enhanced results and object filters within Yahoo! Search.

All of the existing enhanced result templates will continue to be generated from websites’ page markup and structured data feeds, and Yahoo! will continue to show this structured data on the Yahoo! Search results page, along with Microsoft’s organic listings. Over time, some of this structured data processing will be supported natively by the Microsoft platform. Webmasters will continue to have the ability to affect the presentation of a search result through page markup on their site (microformats and RDFa).

As we look to the future of Yahoo! Search, we are focusing on new search-related offerings we believe will provide additional value for publishers and partners. In order to align our resources on strategic priorities, we have decided to close the SearchMonkey developer tool, gallery, and app preferences on October 1, 2010. As a result, third party custom result apps, infobar apps, and data services will no longer appear on Yahoo!’s search results. For developers who wish to retain their code, please export it using your favorite copy/paste tool before then.

We know many people enjoyed being part of the SearchMonkey developer community, and we want to give a heartfelt “thank you” to all of the developers and webmasters who have participated over the last two years. We look forward to continuing to work with developers to explore new and interesting ways to incorporate useful applications into the search experience.

Natasha Fattedad
Principal Product Manager, Yahoo! Search

Yahoo Microsoft Search Alliance

2010-08-19T07:01:00.001-07:00

Last month we shared that we had begun limited testing of displaying organic search listings from Microsoft on Yahoo! Search result pages. As we continue to work toward implementing the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance, we’re reaching some additional significant milestones that we want to share with you today.
Later this week, we will begin transitioning the back-end technology for Yahoo! Search in the U.S. and Canada (English) over to the Microsoft platform, and will post an update when the organic search transition is complete for both Web and mobile searches. Keep an eye out for the “Powered by Bing” indicator at the bottom of our search results page, which will indicate that you are viewing listings from Microsoft. And of course, as we’ve stated before, you’ll continue to enjoy the same enhanced Yahoo! experience that surrounds the listings themselves – such as rich results, Search Assist suggestions, site filters, related topic suggestions, and more to come.

I know many in the developer and publisher community have had questions about whether this transition will impact tools we offer like SearchMonkey, Site Explorer, BOSS and our search APIs. We’ve been hard at work sorting through these details with Microsoft and are happy to share updates for you today on the Yahoo! Developer Network blog, and in the blog posts below from the Site Explorer and SearchMonkey teams. Yahoo! has learned a lot from working with the developer and publisher communities on these products, and we are committed to supporting and enhancing a strong ecosystem that you can count on. We look forward to the next generation of search-related publisher tools to come, so stay tuned for more on this front.

In addition, this week we’re beginning testing of paid search account transitions, and advertisers can read more about that on our Yahoo! Search Marketing blog.

Shashi Seth
Senior Vice President of Yahoo! Search Products

process for listing Open Directory

2009-01-05T21:55:00.000-08:00

The process for listing in the Open Directory:-

STEP 1. Find the categories that you "belong" in, you are allowed to list in more than two categories. I recommend a maximum of 2 submissions at a time, to avoid the appearance of spamming. So pick your two most important categories, submit them, and then wait until you are accepted before submitting another two.

Different services that use the "Open Directory" may list a different set of categories. So do a search for your most important keyword at each of them.

Don't spam them all! Pick the most important and relevant two categories. Leave the rest - if there are other "good fits," save them for later.

STEP 2. Get ready to submit by pulling out your answers, simply prepare answers for the following four points, so that you can copy-and-paste them when the time comes.

1) Site URL -- double-check in your browser! (Do it!)
2) Title of Site
3) Site Description -- important strategy point(Listed Below).
4) Your E-mail Address

See the Open Directory for special instructions if your site fits into one of the following...

o non-english sites
o sites that are purely regional (ex., local car dealer)
o adult sites
o online shopping sites

STEP 3. Go to the Open Directory...

http://www.dmoz.org/

Do a search for your keyword. Click on the most important category that fits. Once you're in the category, click on "Add URL."

You can also do this on Lycos, Netscape, etc. As a matter of fact, if one of your categories only appears on, say, Lycos, it's easier to just submit it from there. Then click on the "Submit a Site" link at the bottom of the page (once you have linked into the relevant category, of course).

No matter where you submit from, it all goes to the Open Directory central database. So don't resubmit to the same category from different services.

STEP 4. Submit the site. It's simpler for you to get preferential treatment! Just enter the info that you prepared above...

1) Site URL -- double-check in your browser!
2) Title of Site
3) Site Description -- important strategy point below.
4) Your E-mail Address

Now repeat for the second most important category that fits.

STEP 5. Expect to be listed in 2-4 weeks. Resubmit and contact the editor of the category (name at bottom of each category) if you have not been listed after 3 weeks. Tell the editor the date that you resubmitted and your original date of submission, the URL of your site and why you feel that your site deserves to be included.

SPECIAL STRATEGY NOTE:- One important tip... If you submit to several different categories, change the keyword in your TITLE so that your customer can find you. It must, of course, still be true to what your site, or at least that page, is all about.

Also... customize your Site DESCRIPTION to fit with the different category. Adjust the content of your DESCRIPTION so that the editor for this category understands why you belong there. And include a more appropriate keyword here too, again so you are more likely to be found.

If you submit to more than two categories, play it safe. Wait until your first two submissions have been accepted before submitting two more. Never submit more than two at a time.

Finally, and most importantly, Act in good faith and add value to their product. That way, everybody wins... Search Service, Customer... ...and YOU! :-)

Source:
Ken Evoy (author of MYSS! - the bible of internet selling).

Google Updates December 2008

2008-12-15T23:18:00.000-08:00

Google Updates December 2008

While searching something i noticed that Google showing results in differ way. Looking something updates on user’s feedback. So that if an irrelevant result shows them, they can remove that and even comment about it.

So now if webmaster tried to do some unethical SEO might be possible it will not going to help them.
So good news for White hat seo :) and fearing factor for the Black hat webmasters :( .

Waiting for your favorable response.

Sifymail WIYI powered Google

2008-11-11T03:57:00.000-08:00

Sify launches Sifymail WIYI powered by Google

Sify Technologies has launched a new mail service called Sifymail WIYI (World In Your Inbox), powered by Google. Sify had earlier signed a deal with Google under which Google Apps suite of communication and collaboration tools, including email, chat and online documents, would power Sify mail and chat, as well as other applications using the Google Apps platform.

According to Sify, Sifymail WIYI will offer its users a 7 GB mailbox, faster downloads and effective spam filters. It will also provide simultaneous chat, advanced search, Sify Documents, Sify Spread Sheets and Sify Calendar all accessible from the inbox. A wide range of widgets and customizable windows will let users to personalize their inbox to become virtually their home page.

Venkata Rao Mallineni, head of portals and consumer marketing, Sify Technologies, has said, “With internet applications and tools evolving rapidly, we felt the need to add value to Sify users by providing a one stop platform for all their Internet needs.”

“The new Sifymail WIYI is a perfect blend of email and applications that will not just enhance the user’s experience with us, but benefit them functionally. For the first time ever, all this functionality is enabled from their inbox, making it their home page on the Internet,” Venkata Rao Mallineni has added.

Source: http://www.alootechie.com/content/sify-launches-sifymail-wiyi-powered-google

Google Image Search October 2008 Update

2008-10-30T04:35:00.000-07:00

Google Image Search October 2008 Update

A WebmasterWorld thread has users noticing changes over at Google Image Search. The changes may be a filter or may be a full-blown image index update, hard to tell at the moment.

The last Google Image update seemed to be an image filter update in September. But now, the update seems a bit more outside of the scope of what we would classify as a filter.

WebmasterWorld administrator, tedster, observed:

I started seeing some really wrong captions on some images, where the algo is pulling the caption from on-page anchor text. How can on-page anchor text be a candidate for naming for an image that is also on the page?

Senior member, zeus, who reported the image update has seen tons of images drop out of Google Image search, plus he has seen a possible hotlink image bug. The hotlink image bug happens when a third-party site links to a specific image and Google classifies that image from a a third-party domain.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld .

Source: http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/018496.html

Microsoft pays to search

2008-10-10T08:07:00.000-07:00

Microsoft pays to search

OK, did you see this? Microsoft is going to pay you to use its search engine. Until the end of the year, you’ll get points every time you use Microsoft’s Live.com service. Pile up enough of them, and you can buy free music downloads, gadgets, even frequent-flier miles. (Limited to the first 1 million people who sign up. Works with Internet Explorer for Windows only.)

I’m sorry. I mean, I know Microsoft has deep pockets and all. But has it really come to this? If Microsoft doesn’t feel as though it can compete with Google on the merits of its product, maybe, instead of trying to bribe you, the company should pour that money into making Live.com better…

Souce:http://payperclickoffer.com/pay-per-click-advertising-microsoft-pays-you-to-search/

GEO TARGETING AND SEO searchengineoptimization

2008-09-18T22:36:00.000-07:00

GEO TARGETING AND SEO

Providing geographic metadata in Web sites and syndicated feeds can provide users with the ability to search easily for services and articles based on location and proximity.

Geolocation by IP address enables statcounter applications and Web sites to determine users' locations automatically in order to provide specific location-based services to users and members of an on-line community. Such data also helps in combating internet fraud and ip is one of many details recorded by our payment processors 2checkout and Paypal. Recording ip also helps Newswriter target expired domain traffic campaigns according to the clients customer audience. In this article, we present various methods by which Web sites can provide their geographic locations to static pages and syndicated feeds, in the form of meta information or geotags. Put another way, geolocation by IP address is the technique a Web site uses to determine where users are located; geotagging is the technique users employ to find out where a Web site is located. In addition we will look at the SEO value of such services including the results of our recent study into ICBM.

Geotags typically locate the Web site's principle location on the Earth. This information can contain a number of elements. Some geotagging contains latitude and longitude information enabling a webmaster to pinpoint an exact location. Additional tags can name cities, regions and country stats for general locations. Web services, applications and users then can query this information to obtain directions (how to get from here to there), locality (what's near there) or context (where was this article written). Geotags differ from a simple address in that they usually are encoded in metadata and are not visible as part of the Web page. In the case of Newswriter our geo targeting is hardcoded on the server and not visible. By following a standard, other services easily and reliably can find these geotags. Various semantic Web projects still are solidifying geospatial tagging standards, but several techniques already have become common and supported. This article presents these current techniques.

Why Geotag?

Providing a geographic location is beneficial particularly for retail and service businesses, tourist attractions and entertainment venues. If you want to locate a local veterinary center or a hotel near a particular landmark this can be achieved through geotagging. Geographic link directories, such as A2B and Multimap, can index these services by location and allow users to search geographically as well as by service type. Currently, many of these services limit users in their selection of available services. But, it would be possible to allow for more complex queries, such as searching for "Thai restaurants within 2 miles of Central London". Or, when using automatic geolocation, one could ask for "directions from my current location to the nearest theater".

Current location-based services rely on the Web site administrator registering with an on-line index and specifying its location. Some of these services charge a fee, and many are not used commonly, nor are they cross-referenced. Google runs Google Maps a free engine that allows users to search for location-based services using complex queries such as the examples above. Google Maps is an excellent example of how providing geographic information on a Web site greatly can enhance its visibility and usefulness to potential customers and users.

Geographic metadata also is useful for bloggers and photographers. Traveling writers, travel writers and reviewers can give context to their articles by supplying specific geographic information about where they are writing from or where the business they are reviewing is located. Are you travelling to Thailand?. A geo targeted Thailand article can put content infront of those that are looking for it.

By embedding a geographic location in the metadata of the Web site, applications and Web-based services quickly and reliably can determine the site's location relative to search criteria. Using metadata prevents the confusion of an automated search bot having to determine the location from the site's text. Geotagging has been around for some time. Yet only a minority of people know of its use and fewer still utilise the benefits of geourls. The rest of this article discusses the techniques used for embedding geographic information in your Web site or syndicated feed.

Geotagging a Web Site

For a Web site, several means of geotagging are available. In this article I will focus on meta tags for geo targeting. Below is a copy of the meta tags used on a domain of our parent company:

Blogger Not Allowed some HTML Tags So treat <@ as < :)

<@meta name="ICBM" content="40.746980, -73.980547">
<@meta name="DC.title" content="Watch Live Football">
<@META NAME="geo.position" content="40.746990, -73.980537">
<@META NAME="geo.placename" CONTENT="New York">
<@META NAME="geo.region" CONTENT="USA">

The problem with ICBM is its original acronym is Intercontinental Ballistic Missile. The meaning for ICBM in turns of Geo Targeting is:

The form used to register a site with the Usenet mapping project, back before the day of pervasive Internet, included a blank for longitude and latitude, preferably to seconds-of-arc accuracy. This was actually used for generating geographically-correct maps of Usenet links on a plotter; however, it became traditional to refer to this as one's 'ICBM address' or 'missile address', and some people include it in their sig block with that name. (A real missile address would include target elevation.)

ICBM tags are limited to latitude and longitude and do not include other regional information, such as city or country. The syntax is as follows:

<@meta name='ICBM' content="latitude, longitude" />

This tag would be included in your Web page's section.

Another means of embedding geographic metadata is through geo-structure tags. These geo-structure tags can include latitude and longitude information as well as regional information and an extra placename. The placename could contain the specific address of the person or business. Or, it could be useful for providing a location that may not have a specific point but covering a broader region, such as a city or district. The following example is for the Museo Nacional Del Prado, in Madrid, Spain

<@META NAME="geo.position" content="40.746990, -73.980537">
<@META NAME="geo.placename" CONTENT="New York">
<@META NAME="geo.region" CONTENT="USA">

Geotagging an RSS Feed

Besides geotagging a Web site, it is possible to geotag the source of an RSS feed as well as the individual articles. By geotagging each article, your feed can provide entries from various locations and reach a varied audience. Then, these entries can be displayed on a map where users can read about locations that interest them. Alternatively, by geotagging the source of the feed, a directory or opml file could provide feeds based on user-selected locations.

An example tag looks something like this. Notice the addition of altitude:

<@rdf:RDF>
<@geo:Point>
<@geo:lat>55.701<@/geo:lat>
<@geo:long>12.552<@/geo:long>
<@geo:alt>52.4<@/geo:alt>
<@/geo:Point>
<@/rdf:RDF>

The ICBM standard discussed above also can be used in tagging an RSS feed. An XML namespace is used to specify the keywords of the file, and the tags are included either in the header or within the item tags. Here is an example below:

<@rss version="2.0" >
<@item>
<@title>M 3.7, Southern Alaska<@/title>
<@description>October 02, 2006 03:55:52 GMT<@/description>
<@link>http://earthquake.usgs.gov/recenteqsww/Quakes/ak00043775.htm<@/link>
<@icbm:latitude>60.4780<@/icbm:latitude>
<@icbm:longitude>-152.4355<@/icbm:longitude>
<@dc:subject>3<@/dc:subject>
<@dc:subject>pasthour<@/dc:subject>
<@/item>

Finally, some Weblog services may prevent users from adding new tags to RSS feeds. In this case, it is acceptable for some sites and packages to embed the geographic information in tags, as shown below:

<@rss version="2.0" >
<@item>
<@title>M 3.7, Southern Alaska<@/title>
<@description>October 02, 2006 03:55:52 GMT<@/description>
<@link>http://earthquake.usgs.gov/recenteqsww/Quakes/ak00043775.htm<@/link>
<@icbm:latitude>60.4780<@/icbm:latitude>
<@icbm:longitude>-152.4355<@/icbm:longitude>
<@dc:subject>3<@/dc:subject>
<@dc:subject>pasthour<@/dc:subject>
<@/item>

Several Weblog packages already incorporate the ability to specify a geographic location within an entry as well as for the entire Weblog. This geographic information then can be included for users when reading the Weblog through their browsers or through their own aggregators. Each entry, when posted, is assigned either a default location or is given a new location.

What to Do with Geotags

Now that your Web site has been geotagged, what can you do to share this information with users and have new users find your site? A2B is the new incarnation of geourl.com. A2B allows Web site administrators to register their sites. From there, users can search for sites based on location or geographic locality to another Web site. It may be interesting to find out what other sites and places can be found in your area.

A2B also provides a free public API that allows application and Web site developers to query the A2B database of locations. The A2B query does not return the actual location of the Web sites, however, merely their distances and directions (compass headings) from the queried location.
To find out the latitude and longitude or city and region of a Web site, the user can view the Web site's meta information. To illustrate this, we have written an extension to the Firefox browser that alerts users that geotags are available for the Web site currently being viewed. The extension also retrieves that information without the user having to look at the Web site's markup source.

Geourl can be used in a similar way although it can be difficult to use its small map to pinpoint and generate meta tags for your site.

Other applications of geotags include creating a Web page of closely related Web sites, similar to a Web ring, and display their locations on a map of the Earth or a specific region. A restaurant review Web page, for example, could display a map of their reviewing regions, and users could click on locations to read reviews of the restaurants located there. Furthermore, travelers could pull up Weblogs and travel information for the area they will be visiting. Hopefully, larger services similar to Google Local or Multimap will be developed that automatically will collect and use this information to provide users with a large database of services.

Future of Geotags

Geotags currently are not employed widely, and only a small number of services support their use. Geotags have been around for some time and still very few people are aware of them. However, many could benefit from better geographic knowledge of Web sites and on-line data. Applications could provide a central location to assist users in finding out about their locations or intended travel locations

ECommerce is growing exponentially with every company worth its salt jumping on the bandwagon. Imagine if your online purchases were chosen by location rather than serps. In a previous article we discussed the importance search engines pay to content on domains and rank them accordingly. Due to the world of duplicate content this created we are looking at what could be next in the world of SEO. Could geotags be the next decider. Instead of ranking by age, importance, content or backlinks will the internet as we know it become more homely with surfers looking for sites in their immediate vicinity.

Whatever the future holds for geotagging; can you afford to ignore it as a webmaster?.

GeoTagging and SEO

We have been aware of the use of geotagging for quite some time. However, recently we heard claim from one of our business associates regarding its use as an SEO tool.

Our informer claimed that through using Geotagging and placing a site within the vicinity of a good cluster of established domains; that any new domain could be indexed and obtain a pr of 3 after one update. This pr update was based on no other link building work – only the use of geotagging. When I first heard of this idea I laughed it off. Geotagging has been around for a while and while it has its bonuses Grand Master Google isn’t going to pay that much attention. It wasn’t until the idea was explained to me properly that I sat up and paid attention.

Google bases part of its algorithm on backlinks to a site. Google also looks for sites similar or associated with a site. In the past this area would contain sites of the same category or authority sites in any given industry. With geotagging you are putting your site in the same area or association as a whole host of domains. In some geographic locations such as New York mentioned earlier there are around 200 geotagged domains per mile. By tagging a domain in the same region you are basically saying that your site is geographically associated with others in the area. Based on this argument it was put to us that using geotargeting in any significant cluster would increase the pr and serps for any new domain. Being 1 of the largest internet marketing companies in the world; we had to put this to the test.

Take 3 domains. All purchased this year for subsidiary sites but put on hold for the time being

http://www.adultbulktraffic.com/
http://www.bulkcasinotraffic.com/
http://www.buytrafficwholesale.com/

Add to each site a basic text page containing content related to the domain. If these sites are going to get anywhere they need some content. We added geotagging to 2 of the new sites; sticking them smack bang in the middle of a huge cluster of established good pr sites in London, England. The third domain was left – 0 backlinks no geotargeting. We allowed the test to run for one google pr update to see the results and claims of this technique.

3 months later and I actually forgot about the test sites. I only remembered them this week whilst editing another site and stumbling across geotagging. 3 months on and I wish I could say here is a secret SEO method which will get you a pr of 3 on any new domain with 5 minutes work. However, the truth lies with my original scepticism. None of the 3 test domains are indexed in the search engines and all remain pr0. For the geotagged domains some links have been found from geourl to their location but in the search engine world these have been deemed to carry no importance.

As regards, to SEO geotagging is not going to have any significant effect on your domain. Infact it is more than likely to have no effect at all. For internet marketing if your site bases its product, customer base or prestige on a location and you are registered with the correct directories to utilise geotagging then it can be a new weapon in your internet marketing arsenal. For me I guess I better start getting around to develop those 3 domains into new subsidiary sites of Newswriter. Then again; just by placing their url in this article on our pr6 site they will likely be indexed. You win some, you lose some. Still trying to find that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Source: http://www.newswriter.us/ShowAdminArticle-13.htm

Semantic Web Marketing

2008-09-03T04:46:00.000-07:00

Semantic Web Marketing

Semantic Web, Semantic Marketing, Effective Web Marketing – SEO Tips

The Semantic Web is an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which the semantics of information and services on the web is defined, making it possible for the web to understand and satisfy the requests of people and machines to use the web content.

The semantic web is a vision of information that is understandable by computers, so that they can perform more of the tedious work involved in finding, sharing and combining information on the web.

One promise of the Semantic Web is increasing the relevance of websites without visitor effort - visitors will get more of what they want and less of what they don't when they arrive at a website. Ultimately, the entire Web is going to get more relevant for each of us. Semantic Marketing enables your website to deliver more meaningful interactions with the majority of visitors. When you increase the relevance of your website, more visitors will stay longer and go deeper into your content. This results in more visitors becoming prospects, and ultimately, more customers.

Semantic marketing is very effective way of web marketing. Semantic marketing makes a determination about each visitor upon arrival and displays relevant content, simplified navigation and/ or supportive imagery. Today, we use pre-session, detectable attributes in the absence of a unified system for ontological matching.

Here are 7 possible missions for "semantic marketing":

Marketing becomes the champion of generating the underlying data.
Marketing views categorization, metadata, RDF graphs, relevant microformats, etc., as a new kind of market positioning and placement -- "semantic branding", if you will.
Marketing takes a much broader view of distribution and promotion of its semantic web data in search engines and vertical networks (SEO++), including the sponsorship or creation of new niche semantic networks.
Marketing comes up with new ways to incentivize the conversion of semantic web interactions in real business objectives.
Marketing will have a real challenge with tracking and attributing distributed data in the semantic web to measure its impact -- from multi-touch marketing to micro-touch marketing. Hard problem but entrepreneurial ingenuity will prevail.
Marketing will want to leverage other people's data in their own value-add mash-ups (interesting "joint venture" semantic data partnerships), as well as for internal-only apps focused on market research and competitive intelligence.
Marketing will need to be concerned with brand protection in the semantic web: quality control to watch for bad data, conflicting data, competitive misuse, etc.

Source: http://importantseotips.blogspot.com/2008/08/semantic-web-marketing-seo-tips_25.html

Media Optimization vs Media Marketing

2008-09-03T04:44:00.000-07:00

Social Media Optimization vs Social Media Marketing

Social Media Optimization (SMO) is the things you can do ‘on site’ to your website where as Social Media Marketing (SMM) is the things you do off-site. This is slightly different to SEO where it can be done on site and off site. Confused yet?

SMO is a subset of overall SMM just like SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a subject of SEM (Search Engine Marketing). Instead of repeating what has been perfectly said around the web

Social Media Optimization

SMO refers to the process of refining a website (optimizing it) so that it’s awareness and content are easily spread through social mediums and online communities by users and visitors of the website. This can include anything done “on-page” such as improving the design and usability of the website so that it becomes more compelling to users, in an effort to help them spread it through social media sites. The simplest example of SMO is represented by all the “digg this” and “add to delicious” icons and links that are all over the web today.

Social Media Marketing

SMM on the other hand plays more of an active role in relation to social media by referring to the creation and distribution of content and other messages through the social web by some form of viral marketing. This can be anything from creating compelling content that gets bookmarked and even hits digg’s homepage to spreading a viral video by putting it on YouTube and other social media websites. It’s about the things that are done off-site, for example, participating in online communities where your customers hang out would be an active role that falls under SMM.

Source: http://importantseotips.blogspot.com/2008/08/social-media-optimization-vs-social.html

Search Rankings for Keyword

2008-09-02T05:06:00.000-07:00

Lowering Your Search Rankings for a Keyword That is Getting You in Legal Trouble

A client of mine wanted to target high traffic terms in his industry. His industry was not very competitive, and some of the target terms were competing trademarks. We rank top 5 for them in Google, and now legal troubles are occurring. We removed all references to the competing trademark on our site, but still have some rogue inbound links that we can't get removed that have the anchor text which targets the competing mark. What should we do? Answer: There are four options which can help get you out of this situation.

Work With the Competition

If you have a nepotistic relationship with the competitor and recommend them then perhaps you can both be strengthened as category leaders.

Is the Lawsuit Cheap Marketing?

Anything involving Google and search is still a ripe field for media exposure. If you think your chances of winning are good enough, and the potential return is much larger than the risk of losing consider letting them sue you. It is probably not your fault that Google ranked you, but also seek legal advice outside of reading this post... I am not a lawyer.

Tank Your Rankings for that Keyword

If the links point at a page other than the homepage, consider removing the URL from your site, and then use the Google URL removal tool when the 404 error shows.

If you bought those links cash usually works to help remove them. Use their on site contact information and the email in their whois. Call the number in the whois data. Pay them to take down the links.

Improve the Rankings of Competing Pages

The tips offered in my search engine reputation management post work here as well. Follow the tips in that post to help make other competing pages rank better.

You can also work on improving the rankings of other competing pages while lowering your rankings. Feel free to push a couple strong pages if you are just trying to end the confrontation, but if you feel they are dirty you may also want to help surface some ugly news that was ranking on page 3. Do that and they may care less about your rankings, and shift their focus to those other sites.

Source: http://convonix.blogspot.com/2008/06/lowering-your-search-rankings-for.html

Google Rocky Search Engine Updates

2008-07-24T05:21:00.000-07:00

Google Rocky Search Engine Updates

If you've been promoting your site on the Google search engine, you've probably experienced ups and downs at times unless you are a strong authority site whereby these updates don't have practically any effect on your rankings such that the latter are rather stable. These ups and downs are what the seo marketers call the Google updates. These updates are important because Google is tweaking its algorithm to deliver better search engine results and hopefully to solve problems which are being faced by marketers ie url canonicalization, duplicate content and 302 redirects. In the past months and years, there have been several updates eg Florida, Allegra, Bourbon, Jagger and the latest one at the time of this writing(03/01/2006) is Bigdaddy which has already started about 2-3 months back. These updates are named at webmasterworld.com. You can read more about this latest update on Senior Google engineer Matt Cutts blog at http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/bigdaddyGoogle.

Google has several datacenters and when the updates are rolling in, the different datacenters are working on building new results and when everything is stabilised and settled, the final results are shown on the main Google.com. Google is no longer proned to chaotic updates whereby the search engine results are really shaken with rankings shifting quite a lot and creating confusion. With all the different datacenters, Google is proceeding with micro updates. Presently, Bigdaddy is only live at 66.249.93.104 and 64.233.179.104 right now. You might want to take a closer look at 66.249.93.104 as Matt Cutts says this is the preferred data center to hit.

If you have a website ranking in the search engines and according to the datacenters, you seem to be affected, don't panic. It's of no use constantly worrying about whether your site will finally come out "safe and sound" when the update is not over yet. And if you have a good site with several quality backlinks from different sources ie reciprocal links, one-way links, directory links, article links and press releases links, you should not really worry. Even you lose rankings, it might just be temporary and will get fixed sooner or later. In the meantime, continue to work in building your backlinks and content as well and not wasting too much time checking and monitoring the update. Let it do its job and you might be surprised by the final outcome.

This article can be freely published on a website as long as it's not modified in any way including the author bylines, plus all the hyperlinks must be made active just like below.

Jean Lam is a writer, author, publisher and owns several sites. Visit his Website Marketing

Search Engine Updates

2008-07-22T11:53:00.000-07:00

Webmasters always anxiously wait for a search engine update. Those who rank well want to see their sites get even better. Those who didn't do well expect a major boost. Those whose sites get de-indexed anticipate a major comeback. Those who just started new sites bet on their sites will make into the first page of search engine result pages (SERPs) for their targeting keywords. Of course, not everyone will be happy about the results of search engine updates. After all, search engine traffic is a zero-sum game - someone loses and someone gains. Then, the webmasters start preparing for next update.

The Types of Search Engine Updates

Search Engines are large software systems. There're three types of search engine updates.

Updates of index database - Search engine crawlers continuously scan the Web for new content and changes to feed their index databases. This drives the minor SERP shifts.
Minor search engine updates - Search engines need to fix software bugs and do some minor algorithm changes once in a while. Minor updates seem to happens monthly.
Major search engine updates - Every year, major search engines will shock the SEO community with major search engine updates. A major update involves both major algorithm changes and the re-organization of the index database. Major search engine updates are clearly driven more by business reasons than by technical reasons.

The Business Reasons Behind The Major Updates

All major search engines claim that they strive to present search results to users with the highest quality. But the business of search engine is business. What they won't tell us is that there're many business reasons for every major search engine updates. Search engine traffic is hot commodity - it's free and has higher conversion rate since the searchers are very close to make their buying decisions. The downside of the search traffic for webmasters is that they don't have control at all. Your sites may be ranked #1 today, but nowhere next day.

Search engine companies will, no doubt, use the search engine traffic to maximize the values for their stakeholders. Google's Feb. 2 update (allegra update or Superbowl update) once again shocked the webmaster community like last Florida update. The noticeable change in Superbowl update is that well-established sites rank well even for specific keywords that aren't even highly relevant to their pages. You may think the move is to fight spams and improve the quality of SERPs. That's only part of the story. The results of the update is that the websites of well-established corporations (with never ending press releases) will get a major traffic boost from Google. Google does this by algorithm changes, not manual manipulations.

If we think search engine traffic from Google is really an incentive to try it free before you buy. This time, Google decides to lure the major corporations to test the benefits of search traffic. Major corporations will likely increase their spending in online advertising and those news agencies may even drop their law sues against Google if they see the traffic from Google justifies that their sites benefit from including in Google index database.

Is this the real driving force behind last update? Only Google knows. If you own Google, however, you will do the exactly the same.

Will this negatively impact the user experience? - maybe and maybe not. What is the real difference between the #1 spot and the site that ranks #100? - the backlinks. Backlinks don't alter the quality of a page at all.

When they say technology, they mean business. Major technology changes are always driven by business needs. It has nothing to do with "good" or "bad".

Strategies to Cope with search Engine Updates

The Internet and the Web was once hailed as the new medium and the new opportunity for small business and site owners. They will be disappointed as big three peek into fortune 500 companies's deep packets. There're strategies they can use to cope with the search engine updates, however.

Create a portfolio of website using different SEO techniques. If some of your sites get hammered in a update the rest may benefit from the update.
Generate traffic from all major search engines.
Use the search traffic to build loyal user bases.
Build sites similar to the sites of well-established companies. The tags, on-page, off page optimization techniques will become less and less important as major corporations aren't interested in those types of things that geek webmasters are interested.

Speculation on Coming Updates

The next Google update is around the corner. I won't expect any noticeable change. If Google decides to let big apples try search traffic free. They will need a couple of months to realize the values of the search traffic. There will be major re-distribution of search traffic in 3 or 6 months. If the same group of major corporations always get huge amount of free traffic from Google. They won't bother to open their wallets. The major traffic distribution may be from one group of major corporations to another. The search traffic will unlikely sift back to small sites.

Yahoo Update July 2008

2008-07-08T00:34:00.001-07:00

Yahoo Update July 2008

Yahoo recently announced an update in their algorithm and warned people they may see fluctuations in rankings. Google also reportedly made over 45 tweaks to their algorithm last month. There is a lot of fluctuation going on in the search engine results right now.

If you have considered optimizing your site now would be a good time to do it.

You see when rankings fluctuate many of the same sites will end up returning to their past position after things settle - so while this fluctuation is going on it's actually the perfect time for a new site to swoop in with a newly optimized site and try to take over some of those rankings.

If you are handling your own site, make sure you stay aware of fluctuations in the algorithms! Staying current is really important in the SEO world.

Alternative Search Engines

2008-07-02T22:16:00.000-07:00

Alternative Search Engines

Search Engine name	URL	Category
Accoona	www.accoona.com	A.I. Search (HM)
AfterVote (SEM)	www.aftervote.com	Social Search
Agent 55	www.agent55.com	MetaSearch
AllTha.at	www.allth.at	Continuous Search
AnswerBus	www.answerbus.com	Semantic Search
Blabline	www.blabline.com	Podcast Search
Blinkx*	www.blinkx.com	Video Search
Blogdigger	www.blogdigger.com	Blog Search
Bookmach.com*	www.bookmach.com	Bookmark Search
ChaCha* (#1 2006)	www.chacha.com	Guided Search
ClipBlast!*	www.clipblast.com	Video Search
Clusty*	www.clusty.com	Clustering Search
CogHog	www.infactsolutions.com/projects/coghog/demo.htm	Semantic Search
Collarity*	www.collarity.com	Social Search (HM)
Congoo*	www.congoo.com	Premium Content Search
CrossEngine (Mr. Sapo)*	www.crossengine.com	MetaSearch
Cydral	http://en.cydral.com	Image Search (French)
Decipho*	www.decipho.com	Filtered Search
Deepy	www.deepy.com	RIA Search
Ditto*	www.ditto.com	Visual Search
Dogpile	www.dogpile.com	MetaSearch
Exalead*	www.exalead.com/search	Visual Search
Factbites*	www.factbites.com	Filtered Search
FeedMiner	www.feedminer.com	RSS Feeds Search
Feedster	www.feedster.com	RSS Feeds Search
Filangy	www.filangy.com	Social Search
Find Forward	www.findforward.com	Meta Feature Search
FindSounds*	www.findsounds.com	Audio Search
Fisssh!	www.fisssh.com	Filtered Search (HM)
FyberSearch	www.fybersearch.com	Meta Feature Search
Gigablast*	www.gigablast.com	Blog Search
Girafa*	www.girafa.com	Visual Display
Gnosh	www.gnosh.org	Meta Search
GoLexa	www.golexa.com	Meta Feature Search
GoshMe* (SEM)	www.goshme.com	Meta Meta Search
GoYams*	www.goyams.com	Meta Search
Grokker*	www.grokker.com	Meta Search
Gruuve	www.gruuve.com	Recommendation Search
Hakia	www.hakia.com	Meaning Based Search
Hyper Search	http://hypersearch.webhop.org.90.seekdotnet.com	Filtered Search
iBoogie	www.iboogie.com	Clustering Search
IceRocket*	www.icerocket.com	Blog Search
Info.com	www.info.com	MetaSearch
Ixquick*	www.ixquick.com	Meta Search
KartOO*	www.kartoo.com	Clustering Search
KoolTorch (SEM)	www.kooltorch.com	Clustering Search
Lexxe*	www.lexxe.com	Natural Language Processing (NLP)
Lijit	www.lijit.com	Search People
Like*	www.like.com	Visual Search
LivePlasma*	www.liveplasma.com	Recommendation Search (HM)
Local.com*	www.local.com	Local Search
Mamma	www.mamma.com	MetaSearch
Mnemomap	www.mnemo.org	Clustering Search
Mojeek*	www.mojeek.com	Custom Search Engines (CSE)
Mooter*	www.mooter.com	Clustering Search
Mp3Realm	http://mp3realm.org	MP3 Search
Mrquery	www.mrquery.com	Clustering Search
Ms. Dewey*	www.msdewey.com	Unique Interface (HM)
Nutshell	www.gonutshell.com	MetaSearch
Omgili	www.omgili.com	Social Search
Pagebull*	www.pagebull.com	Visual Display
PeekYou	www.peekyou.com	People Search
Pipl	http://pipl.com	People Search
PlanetSearch*	www.planetsearch.com	MetaSearch
PodZinger	www.podzinger.com	Podcast Search
PolyMeta	www.polymeta.com	MetaSearch
Prase	www.prase.us	MetaSearch
PureVideo	www.purevideo.com	Video Search (HM)
Qksearch	www.qksearch.com	Clustering Search
Querycat	http://querycat.com	F.A.Q. Search (HM)
Quintura*	www.quintura.com	Clustering Search
RedZee	www.redzee.com	Visual Display
Retrievr	http://labs.systemone.at/retrievr/	Visual Search
Searchbots	www.searchbots.net	Continuous Search
SearchKindly	www.searchkindly.org	Charity Search
Searchles* (DumbFind)	www.searchles.com	Social Search
SearchTheWeb2*	www.searchtheweb2.com	Long Tail Search
SeeIt	www.seeit.com	Image Search
Sidekiq*	www.sidekiq.com	MetaSearch
Slideshow*	http://slideshow.zmpgroup.com/	Visual Display
Slifter*	www.slifter.com	Mobile Shopping Search (HM)
Sphere	www.sphere.com	Blog Search
Sproose	www.sproose.com	Social Search
Srchr*	www.srchr.com	MetaSearch
SurfWax*	www.surfwax.com	Meaning Based Search
Swamii	www.swamii.com	Continuous Search (HM)
TheFind.com*	www.thefind.com	Shopping Search
Trexy*	www.trexy.com	Search Trails
Turboscout*	www.turboscout.com	MetaSearch
Twerq	www.twerq.com	Tabbed Results
Url.com*	www.url.com	Social Search
WasaLive!	http://en.wasalive.com	RSS Search
Web 2.0*	www.web20searchengine.com	Web 2.0 Search
Webbrain*	www.webbrain.com	Clustering Search
Whonu?*	www.whonu.com	MetaSearch
Wikio*	www.wikio.com	Web 2.0 Search
WiseNut*	www.wisenut.com	Clustering Search
Yoono*	www.yoono.com	Social Search
ZabaSearch*	www.zabasearch.com	People Search
Zuula*	www.zuula.com	Tabbed Search (HM)
Twing*	www.Twing.com	Community / Forum Search & Discovery Engine

Ask anyone which search engine they use to find information on the Internet and they will almost certainly reply: "Google." Look a little further, and market research shows that people actually use four main search engines for 99.99% of their searches: Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask.com (in that order). But in my travels as a Search Engine Optimizer (SEO), I have discovered that in that .01% lies a vast multitude of the most innovative and creative search engines you have never seen. So many, in fact, that I have had to limit my list of the very best ones to a mere 100.

But it's not just the sheer number of them that makes them worthy of attention; each one of these search engines has that standard "About Us" link at the bottom of the homepage. I call it the "why we're better than Google" page. And after reading dozens and dozens of these pages, I have come to the conclusion that, taken as a whole, they are right!

The Search Homepage

In order to address their claims systematically, it helps to group them into categories and then compare them to their Google counterparts. For example, let's look at the first thing that almost everyone sees when they go to search the Internet - the ubiquitous Google homepage. That famously sparse, clean sheet of paper with the colorful Google logo is the most popular Web page in the entire World Wide Web. For millions and millions of Internet users, that Spartan white page IS the Internet.

Google has successfully made their site the front door through which everyone passes in order to access the Internet. But staring at an almost blank sheet of paper has become, well, boring. Take Ms. Dewey for example. While some may object to her sultry demeanor, it's pretty hard to deny that interfacing with her is far more visually appealing than with an inert white screen.

A second example comes from Simply Google. Instead of squeezing through the keyhole in order to reach Google's 37 search options, Simply Google places all of those choices and many, many more all on the very first page; neatly arranged in columns.

Artificial Intelligence

A second arena is sometimes referred to as Natural Language Processing (NLP), or Artificial Intelligence (AI). It is the desire we all have of wanting to ask a search engine questions in everyday sentences, and receive a human-like answer (remember "Good Morning, HAL"?). Many of us remember Ask Jeeves, the famous butler, which was an early attempt in this direction - that unfortunately failed.

Google's approach, Google Answers, was to enlist a cadre of "experts." The concept was that you would pose a question to one of these experts, negotiate a price for an answer, and then pay up when it was found and delivered. It was such a failure, Google had to cancel the whole program. Enter ChaCha. With ChaCha, you can pose any question that you wish, click on the "Search With Guide" button, and a ChaCha Guide appears in a Chat box and dialogues with you until you find what you are looking for. There's no time limit, and no fee.

Clustering Engines

Perhaps Google's most glaring and egregious shortcoming is their insistence on displaying the outcome of a search in an impossibly long, one-dimensional list of results. We all intuitively know that the World Wide Web is just that, a three dimensional (or "3-D") web of interconnected Web pages. Several search engines, known as clustering engines, routinely present their search results on a two-dimensional map that one can navigate through in search of the best answer. Search engines like KartOO and Quintura are excellent examples.

Recommendation Search Engines

Another promising category is the recommendation search engines. While Google essentially helps you to find what you already know (you just can't find it), recommendation engines show you a whole world of things that you didn't even know existed. Check out What to Rent, Music Map, or the stunning Live Plasma display. When you input a favorite movie, book, or artist, they recommend to you a world of titles or similar artists that you may never have heard of, but would most likely enjoy.

Metasearch Engines

Next we come to the metasearch engines. When you perform a search on Google, the results that you get are all from, well, Google! But metasearch engines have been around for years. They allow you to search not only Google, but a variety of other search engines too - in one fell swoop. There are many search engines that can do this, Dogpile, for instance, searches all of the "big four" mentioned above (Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask) simultaneously. You could also try Zuula or PlanetSearch - which plows through 16 search engines at a time for you. A very interesting site to watch is GoshMe. Instead of searching an incredible number of Web pages, like conventional search engines, GoshMe searches for search engines (or databases) that each tap into an incredible number of Web pages. As I perceive it, GoshMe is a meta-metasearch engine (still in Beta)!

Other Alt Search Engines

And so it goes, feature after feature after feature. TheFind is a better shopping experience than Google's Froogle, IMHO. Like is a true visual search engine, unlike Google's Images, which just matches your keywords into images that have been tagged with those same keywords. Coming soon is Mobot (see the Demo at www.mobot.com). Google Mobile does let you perform a search on your mobile phone, but check out the Slifter Mobile Demo when you get a chance!

Finally, almost prophetically, Google is silent. Silent! At least Speeglebot talks to you, and Nayio listens! But of course, why should Google worry about these upstarts (all 100 of them)? Aren't they just like flies buzzing around an elephant? Can't Google just ignore them, as their share of the search market continues to creep upwards towards 100%, or perhaps just buy them? Perhaps.

The Last Question

Issac Asimov, the preeminent science fiction writer of our time, once said that his favorite story, by far, was The Last Question. The question, for those who have not read it, is "Can Entropy Be Reversed?" That is, can the ultimate running down of all things, the burning out of all stars (or their collapse) be stopped - or is it hopelessly inevitable?

The question for this age, I submit, is‚Ä¶ "Can Google Be Defeated"? Or is Google's mission "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" a fait accompli?

Perhaps the place to start is by reading (or re-reading) Asimov's "The Last Question." I won't give it away, but it does suggest The Answer‚Ä¶.

Charles Knight is the Principal of Charles Knight SEO, a Search Engine Optimization company in Charlottesville, VA.

The Top 100

For an Excel spreadsheet of the entire Top 100 Alternative Search Engines, go to: http://charlesknightseo.com/list.aspx or email the author at Charles@CharlesKnightSEO.com.

This list is in alphabetical order. Feel free to share this list, but please retain Charles' name and email.

Update, 5 February 2007: Charles Knight has left a detailed comment (#94) in response to all the great feedback in the comments to this post. He also notes:

"...while it looks like a very simple, almost crude list of 100 names, it has taken countless hours to try and do it properly and fairly. The list will be updated all year long, and the Top 100 can only get better and better until the Best of 2007 are announced on 12/31/07."

Google News Search Leaps Ahead

2008-06-19T22:28:00.000-07:00

Google News Search Leaps Ahead

Google has dramatically enhanced its news search service, serving up a portal of real-time news drawn from more than 4,000 sources worldwide.

Until recently, Google's news search has been competent, but less useful than other news-aggregating services such as AllTheWeb's News Search and Yahoo's Full coverage. The new enhancements establish Google as one of the premier news finding and filtering destinations on the web.

Like Yahoo's Full Coverage, Google News Search now looks like a portal, with links to the top headlines organized into categories such as Top Stories, World, Business, Sports and so on. Each category has its area on the News Search home page, with headlines, descriptions and links for the top two or three stories.

"The page looks very different than the average Google page," said Marissa Mayer, Google product manager. That's because it's packed with headlines, descriptions, thumbnail photos and dozens of links to the sources of the articles online.

Unlike Yahoo Full Coverage, however, Google News Search isn't assembled by human editors who select and format the news. Google's process is fully automated. News stories are chosen and the page is updated without human intervention. Google crawls news sources constantly, and uses real-time ranking algorithms to determine which stories are the most important at the moment -- in theory highlighting the sources with the "best" coverage of news events.

Each top story is presented with a headline linked directly to the source. Beneath the headline is a short description, name of the source, and the time when the article was last crawled, ranging from a few minutes to several hours ago.

Beneath the main headline and description are two full headlines from other sources, followed by four or five links to stories with only the name of the publication indicated. Finally, there are links to "related" stories from other sources.

This design makes it easy to quickly scan the headlines while having the option of reading multiple accounts of a story from different news sources -- from literally thousands of sources, for some stories.

Each major category has a link at the top of its respective section that allows you to scan news just within the category. Tabs on the upper left of each page also allow you focus in on Top Stories, World, U.S., Business, Sci/Tech, Sports, Entertainment and Health categories.

Unlike many news aggregators that simply "scrape" headlines and links from news sites, Google's news crawler indexes the full text of articles. This approach offers several unique benefits.

For example, full text indexing allows true searching, rather than just browsing of headlines. Creating a full text index of news also allows Google to cluster related news stories, around what Mayer calls a "centroid" of keywords. "A cluster is defined by a centroid of keywords, and all the articles have some of those key words in them," she said.

The process uses artificial intelligence in addition to traditional information retrieval techniques to match keywords with stories. Mayer says this approach to identifying related articles means that the relative importance of each article is "baked in," which is how the top sources for each story are selected.

Other factors used in calculating the relevance of top and related stories include how recently articles were published, and the reputation of the source. When you actually do a search, these factors are also applied in addition to keyword analysis to determine how closely particular stories match your query.

On search results pages, a link allows you to override the default ranking by relevance and order results by date -- a feature that's particularly helpful for monitoring breaking news.

Google's decision to index the full text of news sources rather than simply scraping headlines posed a major challenge for implementing the new service. The vast diversity and typically cluttered design of most online news formats is more difficult to crawl and index than many other types of web sites. "Article extraction has proven to be one of the most difficult aspects of the project," said Mayer.

Google crawls its 4,000 sources of news continuously and in real time. According to Mayer, the crawler continuously computes what's likely to change on each news source, and when the change is likely to occur. To expedite the discovery of new stories, the crawler tends to hit hub or major section pages frequently, to see what new links are there.

While the news sources are crawled constantly and individual news stories are updated continuously, the entire set of displayed stories is "auto generated" every 15 minutes. A message in the upper right corner of the main news page indicates when it was last generated.

Google's updated news search is an exceptionally powerful tool for web users. It's still in beta, so there are still a few rough edges, but all told it's one of the best news browse and search portals currently operating on the web.

Google News Search
http://news.google.com

News Search Engines
http://searchenginewatch.com/links/news.html

Hitwise Data Google Rules

2008-06-18T23:35:00.000-07:00

Hitwise Data: Google Rules

Google Receives 68 Percent of U.S. Searches in May 2008

Search leader continues record growth - up 5 percent year-over-year;

Google accounted for 87 percent of searches in UK

NEW YORK, NY – June 10, 2008 – Google accounted for 68.29 percent of all U.S. searches in the four weeks ending May 31, 2008, Hitwise announced today. Yahoo! Search, MSN Search and Ask.com each received 19.95, 5.89 and 4.23 percent respectively. The remaining 41 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1.63 percent of U.S. searches.

Percentage of U.S. Searches Among Leading Search Engine Providers

Domain	May-08	Apr-08	May-07
www.google.com	68.29%	67.90%	65.13%
search.yahoo.com	19.95%	20.28%	20.89%
search.msn.com	5.89% *	6.26% *	7.61% *
www.ask.com	4.23%	4.17%	3.92%

Note: Data is based on four week rolling periods (ending 5/31/ 2007, 4/26/08, 5/26/2007 from the Hitwise sample of 10 million U.S. Internet users. * - includes executed searches on Live.com and MSN Search but does not include searches on Club.Live.com.

Source Hitwise

In the U.K. market, Google search properties (Google.co.uk and Google.com) accounted for 87 percent of all UK searches in May 2008 representing a 12 percent increase compared to May 2007. Yahoo! search properties accounted for 4.09 percent of UK searches in May 2008, a 2 percent increase compared to April 2008. MSN search properties accounted for 3.72 percent and Ask search properties accounted for 3.07 percent of searches. MSN increased two percent compared to April 2008 and Ask increased 6 percent.

Percentage of U.K. Searches Among Leading Search Engine Providers

Domain	May-08	Apr.-08	May-07
Google Properties	87.30%	87.69%	78.28%
Yahoo! Properties	4.09%	4.01%	8.58%
Microsoft Properties	3.72%	3.65%	5.46%
Ask Properties	3.07%	2.89%	4.96%

Note: Data is based on UK Internet usage over the four week rolling periods (ending 5/31/ 2007, 4/26/08, 5/26/2007) from the Hitwise sample of 8.4 million UK Internet users. Note that the percentages for the search properties include the .uk and .com domains.

Source: Hitwise UK

Google an Increasing Source of Traffic to Key U.S. Industries
Search engines continue to be the primary way Internet users navigate to key industry categories. Comparing May 2008 to May 2007, the Travel, News and Media, Entertainment, Business and Finance, Sports, Online Video and Social Networking categories showed double digit increases in their share of traffic coming directly from search engines.

U.S. Category Upstream Traffic from Search Engines and Google - May 2008

Category	Percent of Category Traffic from Search Engines, May-08	Percentage Change in Share of Traffic From, Search Engines, May-08 - May-07	Percent of Category Traffic from Google, May-08	Percent Change in Share of Traffic From Google, May-08 - May-07
Health and Medical	45.76%	3%	30.86%	5%
Travel	34.81%	11%	24.26%	21%
Shopping and Classifieds	25.48%	2%	16.84%	8%
News and Media	21.70%	7%	14.53%	10%
Entertainment	24.33%	17%	15.76%	22%
Business and Finance	18.15%	14%	11.73%	22%
Sports	13.09%	17%	8.81%	24%
Online Video*	29.94%	37%	20.78%	52%
Social Networking*	16.50%	18%	9.98%	21%

All figures are based on U.S. data from the Hitwise sample of 10 million Internet users.
* denotes custom category

Source: Hitwise

About Hitwise
Hitwise is the leading online competitive intelligence service. Only Hitwise provides its 1,400 clients around the world with daily insights on how their customers interact with a broad range of competitive websites, and how their competitors use different tactics to attract online customers.

Since 1997, Hitwise has pioneered a unique, network-based approach to Internet measurement. Through relationships with ISPs around the world, Hitwise’s patented methodology anonymously captures the online usage, search and conversion behavior of 25 million Internet users. This unprecedented volume of Internet usage data is seamlessly integrated into an easy to use, web-based service, designed to help marketers better plan, implement and report on a range of online marketing programs.

SEO activities on your website

2008-06-16T21:46:00.000-07:00

SEO activities on your website

1. Analysis & Research

* Keyword/Phrase analysis
* Keyword research using word tracker, Overture and Googlesets
* Competitive analysis
* Extensive Competitive Analysis for better search engine ranking performance
* Initial position analysis report
* Website Usability Analysis by Usability and copyediting expert
* Extensive Log file analysis
* Personalized Report Analysis and Monitoring

2. On site ( On Page) optimization

* Homepage Optimization
* Meta tags placement
* Content fixing
* Monthly Manual Update to Optimized Content
* Fixing the text links
* Optimized Navigational Structure
* Site map for better crawling of your site
* Descriptive site map creation
* Link resource page creation
* Link exchange page creation
* Image Optimization
* SEO Copywriting
* Spell Checking
* HTML Validation Checking
* Browser Compatibility checking
* Website Load time checking
* Creation of robots file
* MOD_Rewrite / URL rewrite for Dynamic sites for better search engine crawling

3. Off site (Off Page) optimization

* Manual submission to all major search engines
* Semi-automatic submission to more than 200 Search Engines
* Resubmission of sites to certain search engines if necessary
* Submission to important paid inclusion directories
* Yahoo Directory Inclusion
* Submission to Dmoz directory
* Submission to more than 5000 free inclusion quality directories
* Re-optimization of site
* Reciprocal link building - 2way and 3way links
* Link Popularity through one way links
* Buying text link advertisements from relevant sites to increase the link popularity
* Article Submission
* Newsletter Submission
* Forum Posting
* Blog submission

4. Reports

* Monthly management plan
* Detailed Ranking Report
* Weekly updates & comprehensive Monthly Ranking Reports
* Submission Management with Reports
* Site Visibility Statistics Report
* Server Check and Link Check

5. Support

* Search Engine Algorithm Updates
* 100% Guaranteed Uptime during site Modifications
* Multiple CD Burned backups of Optimized pages and site
* Technical Support
* 24/7 Phone support and online support

Change Definition for Doorway Pages

2008-06-13T02:04:00.000-07:00

Google Change Definition for Doorway Pages

According to Search Engine Watch, Google has changed the way it defines 'Doorway Pages'.

The new definition at Google Webmaster Help Center for 'Doorway Pages':

Doorway pages are typically large sets of poor-quality pages where each page is optimized for a specific keyword or phrase. In many cases, doorway pages are written to rank for a particular phrase and then funnel users to a single destination.

Whether deployed across many domains or established within one domain, doorway pages tend to frustrate users, and are in violation of our Webmaster guidelines.

However, the cached version of the same still shows the old version:

Doorway pages are pages specifically made for search engines. Doorway pages contain many links - often several hundred - that are of little to no use to the visitor, and do not contain valuable content. HTML sitemaps are a valuable resource for your visitors, but ensure that these pages of links are easy for your visitors to navigate. If you have a number of links to include, consider organizing them into categories or into multiple pages. But in doing so, ensure that they are intended for visitors to navigate the sections of your site, and not simply for search engines.

In the new version of the definition, key sentences, words and adjectives have been changed and replaced by more generic terms. Discussions are on at the Search Engine Watch Forum. It seems that Google has tweaked the definition in order to make the look of the page more subtle than technical.

Google IP Delievery Geo Location

2008-06-13T02:01:00.000-07:00

Google IP Delievery Geo Location cloaking

At the Google Webmaster Central Blog, Google has released some valuable information about webserving techniques, especially related to Googlebot. This post has been written keeping in mind the numerous information requests that Google had received for IP Delivery, Geo Location and Cloaking techniques.

Geolocation: It is the process of serving targeted or different content to users on the basis of their locations. Webmasters have the tools to determine a user's location from preferences stored in their cookies. This information is related to the user's login or their IP address. Such as, if your website is about theater, then you can always use geolocation techniques to highlight Broadway for a user in New York.

IP Delivery: It is the process of serving targeted or different content to users on the basis of their IP address. IP addresses are meant to provide geographic information. IP delivery is quite similar to geolocation, therefore, the techniques are almost the same.

Cloaking: It is the method (unethical though) of serving different content to users than to Googlebot. However, this step is considered to be unethical and Google Webmaster Guidelines prohibit Webmasters from using it. If the file that Googlebot crawls is different from the file served to the user then a Webmaster is coined as being in a high-risk category. A program such as md5sum or diff can compute a hash to verify that two different files are identical.

First Click Free: If the Webmasters follow Google First Click Free Policy. Then they would be able to include their premium or subscription-based content in Google's websearch index without violating Google's quality guidelines. Webmasters can allow all users who find their page using Google search to see the full text of the document, even if they have not registered or subscribed. The user's first click to the content area is free. But, if the user jumps to another section of the website, then a Webmaster can block the user's access to the premium or subscribed content with a login or a payment request.

There is also a thread at the Webmaster Help Group, that would be quite interesting for all the Webmasters out there.

Robot Exclusion Protocol

2008-06-13T01:54:00.000-07:00

Google, Yahoo! & Microsoft Talk About 'Robot Exclusion Protocol'!

Google Webmaster Central Blog, Yahoo Search Blog and the Microsoft Live Search Webmaster Center Blog have come out with quite informative documentation about Robot Exclusion Protocol, Last year in February, I had put up a post informing our readers about Google's thoughts on the Robots Exclusion Protocol. All three have come out with REP features documentation at the same time. This makes it mighty easier for users to know about the techniques employed by all three Search Engines for the Robot Exclusion Protocol.

Here is what all three Blogs are saying in Unison:

Google Webmaster Blog:

For the last couple of years Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft have been collaborating to bring essential Webmaster Tools. The REP features employed by all three search engines are applicable for all crawlers or for specific crawlers by targeting them to specific user-agents, which is how any crawler identifies itself. The following are the major REP features currently in use by all three search engines.

For Robots.txt Directives

Disallow.

Allow.

Wildcard Support.

Sitemaps Location.

For Sitemaps Directives.

NOINDEX META Tag.

NOFOLLOW META Tag.

NOSNIPPET META Tag.

NOARCHIVE META Tag.

NOODP META Tag.

Yahoo! Search Blog:

Yahoo! Follows the same REP feature as used by Google and mentioned above. However, there are some Yahoo! Specific REP directives that are neither supported by Google, nor by Microsoft. These features are:

Crawl-Delay: Allows a site to delay the frequency with which a crawler checks for new content.

NOYDIR META Tag: This is similar to the NOODP META Tag above but applies to the Yahoo! Directory, instead of the Open Directory Project.

Robots-nocontent Tag: Allows you to identify the main content of your page so that the Yahoo! crawler targets the right pages on your site for specific search queries by marking out non content parts of your page.

Microsoft Live Search Webmaster Center Blog:

Even Microsoft follows the same REP Directive as Yahoo! And Google. However, as with Yahoo, Microsoft too has a dedicated REP feature that works with Microsoft and Yahoo, but not with Google.

Crawl-Delay: Allows a site to delay the frequency with which a crawler checks for new content.

Over at Matt Cutts Blog, he also mentions the similar REP directives used by Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!. However, he has also written about some other informative online documents that Google has published over the past few weeks. Some of the really interesting posts by Google so far have been.

IP delivery/geolocation/cloaking: In this post, Google explains with the help of a video, their webserving techniques related to Googlebot. This post is all about IP Delivery, Geo-location and Cloaking techniques.

Doorway Pages: Google has recently changed the definition for Doorway Pages at the Google Webmaster Help Center. This post provides the old and the new definition for the user to compare and understand the difference between the two.

This collaborative revelation is all about providing a clear picture to the Webmasters about the actual REP functionalities. Keeping track of techniques for different Search Engines is very arduous task and hence, Yahoo!, Microsoft and Google have provided a consolidated overview of the actual similarities and differences between the implementation of REP features by these three major search engines.

Google SERP Dancing Possible June 2008

2008-06-13T01:51:00.000-07:00

Google SERP Dancing Possible June 2008

According to Webmasters World Google SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) are returning fewer results for specific queries, pointing to possible Google SERPs update. The speculations for such changes are that, it may be due to the quality control practices employed by Google, or it can also be a human-error.

Another concern is cache related, where the cache date is current but the cache pages are about one to three months old. In some cases, cache pages aren't being displayed at all. Such as in case of google.co.uk, users are experiencing ranking changes (increased ranks), that is being attributed to the quantity of links rather than quality of links. Some reports suggest that a lot of irrelevant information is being displayed in the first page of Google SERP, information that is in no way related to search query.

Let us see what the Webmasters at the 'Webmaster World' have to say about this possible update:

“I've wondered too as to why some search terms are affected more than others and some result pages are changing around while other barely move.

Has anyone seen any relationship between how popular a search the term is and how much movement is going on?

As to when it will end I don't think we can predict as nothing quite like this has gone on before”

“I don’t know if anybody has reported this or they could be doing some major testing in my areas.

I’m seeing some dramatic across the board cuts for returned results for many keywords in my areas. Many keywords that once returned 850-950 results are now showing only 600-725 returned results. First page though is showing about the same amount of returned results as before which is somewhat deceptive. I had a feeling this was right around the corner. They’re applying more and more of the quality control features of Adwords to the natural results.”

“I see this pattern too. It might be the result of the "human editorial army" as well as the automated quality measures.“

“Has anybody seen where cache dates may be 1-3 months old but the page showing in the cache is current? This is taking into account that the new cache date could show up shortly but doesn't.”

“ I'm noticing the rapid rise of a few sites in the google.co.uk serps. On investigation using Yahoo site-explorer it looks like shear volume of backlinks of any quality trumps a lower number of quality links. Whoever has been playing with the UK geo filter recently seems to have turned off the "high quality" bit of the algorithm. Thus creating a field day for webmasters who exploit the low pay rates of 3rd World SEOs.

Since it is generally agreed that being linked to (except in certain extreme situations) cannot harm your site should we all be paying someone $200 to get 400 links from dodgy directories?”

Well, these unexpected changes definitely have unmistakable similarities with SERP updates. However, as of now, it would be wise to just wait for Google's response.

Google SERP Updates June 2008

2008-06-13T01:48:00.000-07:00

Google SERP Updates June 2008

This month, WebmasterWorld are reporting that there are fewer results being returned for specific queries. The suspicion lies in quality control practices that are now being implemented, but others believe that the "human editorial army" may be the reason behind this.

Other issues reported include cache problems. The cache date is current, but the cached page is 1-3 months old. Additionally, some say that pages that are cached are not even showing up in search results (even with the site: operator).

In Google.co.uk, it looks like there are some increased rankings and it's a result of the quantity of links (rather than quality). They also say that a lot of junk is showing up on the first page that are not even related to the queries being made. There are a number of UK members chiming in that the SERPs there are "crazy" and irrelevant. One #1 ranking even returns a 404. Obviously, something seems fishy over there.

Google Updates Sitemaps

2008-06-02T21:36:00.000-07:00

Google Updates Sitemaps

The webmaster-friendly project started by Google over the summer has its own blog and some new features available for its users.
Google Sitemaps makes a tool available that lets site publishers create a map Google's spiders can use to more effectively index its content. On the official Google Blog, Grace Kwak posted about some new features in the Sitemaps service.

In our latest release, we provide even more interesting statistics that webmasters can use to improve the way their pages work with web crawlers, which will ultimately benefit their visitors.
I think the most fun are the new "query stats" -- they show top Google search queries that return pages from a site, as well as the top search queries that led users to click on a site. We've also enhanced the crawl errors we show, like specific HTTP errors Google runs into when crawling a page.

Google posted some more details about the new stats available on the Sitemaps blog:

With query stats, we show you the top Google search queries that return pages to your site as well as the top queries that caused users to click on your site in the search results.

With crawl stats, you can see how we view crawled pages. You can see a distribution of the pages successfully crawled and the pages with errors as well as a distribution of PageRank for the pages in your site.

Page analysis shows you what we detect about the content and encoding of your pages.

Index stats provide an easy way for you to use our advanced search operators to return results about how we see the indexed pages of your site.

Mobile stats
You can now verify your mobile sites and see stats for them.

More detailed errors
Now you'll have more details about problems we had crawling your site. We report on 40 different types of errors in 5 categories.

Search Engines Can Looking Queries

2008-05-27T00:12:00.000-07:00

Search Engines Can Learn From Looking at Sequences of Search Queries

Whenever someone searches at a search engine, they not only get information in response to their search, but they also provide information to the search engine about the things they are searching for - information which the search engine might find useful in helping other searchers.

If that searcher performs another search related to their first search, then the search engine might create an association between the two search phrases that the searcher used, if the two phrases appear to be related. If they perform a series, or sequence, of searches on a concept, then the search engine might take advantage of that information.

If a lot of people perform that first search, and then the same second search, or that same search within a search session, then the search engine might decide that the phrases are semantically related to each other. Knowing that relationship exists between search queries might help the search engine help people find things on the web, and it might help provide better advertisements from the search engine.

A patent application from Yahoo explores how the search engine might find semantically related terms by looking at queries searched for by people in search sessions, and describes some of the processes behind how the search engine might determine that phrases may be related to each other. It also describes how a search engine might identify whether a query comes from a person, or from a program.

How Can Looking at Queries Help Search Engines?

Search engines may be able to learn a lot from searchers, by looking at the words that people search with and related searches performed by those searchers in the same search session. Search engines can also learn from the words chosen by advertisers who may choose to advertise on a search engine.

If a search engine can determine that two words or phrases are related in meaning in a language or in logic, knowing that “semantic” relationship could allow advertisers “to broaden or focus their online advertisements to relevant potential customers and allows searchers to broaden or focus their Internet searches in order to obtain more relevant search results.”

Imagine a search engine setting up a system that can determine semantically meaningful relationships between certain terms when those terms are searched with, and people click on particular pages when receiving those pages in response to those related terms.

The same system might also determine that terms that advertisers choose to relate to each other when setting up an online advertisement campaign are semantically related.

This system could be used to:

1) Discover semantically related words for purposes of bidding on online advertisements

Advertisers could optimize their advertising campaigns by finding terms to advertise with that are semantically related to terms they planned on using in their advertisments. Those semantically related terms may also appear on webpages that their advertisements could appear upon in an content advertising program.

Providing an advertiser the ability to serve an advertisement based on semantically related terms can increase the relevance and efficiency of those ads to an advertiser, so that the advertiser does not have to determine every possible word combination where the advertiser would like their advertisement served to a potential customer.

2) Assist a searcher performing research at an Internet search engine

When someone performs research at a search engine, the queries that they use could be treated as seed terms, with a search engine suggesting semantically related words related to the terms either within the search results generated in response to the original query, or as search suggestions.

This can help a searcher to broaden or focus their future searches, and receive more relevant search results.

3) Automatically discover terms related to evolving products of a given product brand or related to new events happening at a given place of interest

If a search engine is looking at semantically related terms, and someone searches for a term such as “Sony DVD player,” the search engine might return a term such as “Sony DVD player” which the search engine found from sequences of search queries containing both the term “Sony DVD player” and “Sony DVD player.”

Someone searching for an event might search for the word “Burbank” and might get a suggestion to look at “Yahoo! Burbank” as an event that they might want to find out more about. This way of automatically discovering terms related to new events happening at a given place of interest could be based upon sequences of search queries containing both the term Burbank and Yahoo! Burbank.

People recently searching for “Burbank” may have discovered an event happening at Yahoo known as “Yahoo! Burbank” and decided to search for that term. The sequence of searches let the search engine know that the terms are semantically related.

The Yahoo patent application is:

System and method for determining semantically related terms based on sequences of search queries

Invented by Kevin Bartz, Vijay Murthi, Benjamin Rey, and Shaji Sebastian
Assigned to Yahoo
US Patent Application 20080120072
Published May 22, 2008
Filed: November 16, 2006

Abstract

The present disclosure is directed to systems and methods for determining semantically related terms based on sequences of search queries.

Generally, a semantically related term tool examines search logs to associate search queries with a user submitting the search query. The semantically related term tool establishes a plurality of sequences of search queries, each sequence of search queries comprising one or more search queries associated with a common user and relating to a common concept.

The semantically related term tool receives one or more seed terms and determines one or more terms related to the received seed terms based on the established plurality of sequences of search queries.

Information from Queries

When a searcher submits a query to a search engine, the search engine usually records information about the search in a search engine log file. At the very least, the information collected includes the terms used to search with and the search results that were shown to the searcher in response to those search terms. But the search engine log could include additional information, such as:

The positioning of URLs in the search results,
A URL the searcher clicked on after viewing the search results,
The number of times the searcher clicked on the URL,
The time the search query was received,
The search query received before the present query, or;
Any other type of information relating to the search query or search results desired by the search engine.

It’s possible that the search engine logs could contain a lot more information about how a searcher interacts with the search engine and search results. This information might be used to draw conclusions about whether or not phrases used in searches are related to each other in some manner.

Related Searches and Patterns

A program that attempts to see how semantically related terms might be to each other examines search engine logs to determine sequences of search queries by an individual user that are related to a common concept.

Someone searching for a particular concept may try many many related search queries, hoping that one of the variations of the search query is better at returning pages that are more relevant to the particular concept being searched.

This pattern of sequences of queries around the same concept could help the search engine try to examine how related those terms might be.

Switching Topics and Multi-tasking

The search engine might not look at every query during a session as being related to each other. Sometimes, when a searcher is done researching one concept, they might move on to a new concept. Or they may be multi-tasking, and looking for information on multiple concepts at the same time.

So, the search engine might examine all of the search queries from a searcher for a particular period of time to determine if one or more search queries should be grouped into a sequence.

The search engine starts sorting queries found in the search engine log (or during real time searches) from a user into sequences, and may decide that a query is similar to one or more previously entered queries, and may place that query into an “established sequence.” If the query term appears unrelated, the search engine may start a new sequence.

A search session from an individual searcher may contain multiple sequences. How does a search engine identify whether or not queries are similar to each other?

Determining Similarity of Queries

The search engine might decide that search queries from a session are semantically related by looking at one or more properties of changes in search queries used in that session.

These properties of queries in a session can include things such as edit distances, prefix overlaps, and suffix overlaps.

Edit distance — also known as Levenshtein distance, is the smallest number of inserts, deletions, and substitutions of characters needed to change one search query into another search query.

Word edit distance — the smallest number of insertions, deletions, and substitutions of words needed to change one search query into another search query.

Prefix overlap — occurs between two search queries when one or more words occur at the beginning of both search queries. For example, the search queries “Chicago Bears” and “Chicago Cubs” have a prefix overlap due to the fact the word “Chicago” occurs at the beginning of the search queries.

Suffix overlap — occurs between two search queries when one or more words occur at the end of both search queries. For example, the search queries “San Francisco Giants” and “New York Giants” have a suffix overlap due to the fact the word “Giants” occurs at the end of the search queries.

The search engine might look at how related terms are by using those features and looking at:

A minimum, average, or maximum edit distance between a search query and the search queries of a sequence;
A minimum, average, or maximum difference between a time a search query was received at the search engine and a time the search queries in the sequence were received at the search engine;
The minimum, average, or maximum prefix overlap between a search query and the search queries of a sequence;
The minimum, average, or maximum suffix overlap between a search query and the search queries of a sequence;
Whether a search query and the search queries of a sequence relate to the same geographic location; or,
Whether a search query and the search queries of a sequence relate to a common product brand.

Assigning Weights to Search Sequences

The search engine might look at a number of search sequences, and then apply different weights to the search sequences based on the number of users who have submitted similar search sequences.

For example, if many searchers submit the terms “basketball and “Lakers basketball” in a search sequence, the search engine may have more confidence in that search sequence than when only one searcher has submitted the terms “basketball” and “Lakers basketball” in a search sequence.

Did a Human or a Program Submit the Queries?

After looking at a number of query sequences, the search engine might examine them to determine whether a program instead of a person submitted any portion of the search queries to the search engine. Search queries submitted by programs, such as rank checkers and others, are often not helpful in establishing relationships between search queries, so the search engine might remove any sequences of search queries created by a program.

How might a search engine determine if a program submitted a query?

It could look at the number of search queries submitted for a given period of time from a certain IP address or from a cookie associated with the query.

For example, if 100 search queries were submitted to a search engine in less than five minutes with the same cookie, or from an IP address that is not known for providing a high volume of traffic, it could be assumed that a program is submitting the search queries and all of the sequences associated with the program should be removed.

The search engine might also determine whether a program has submitted the search queries based on lexical patterns of the search queries. For example, if the search engine sees sequences of search queries with the words “link,” “suggest,” and “add” in conjunction with a domain name, those could be considered indicative of lexical patterns that suggest a program submitted the search queries to the search engine.

Seed Terms and Semantically Related Terms

After looking at a number of sequences of search queries, and removing any potential sequences of search queries created by a program, the search engine might receive search queries from searchers or advertising terms to be used in an ad campaign (together referred to as seed terms) and determine a set of terms semantically related to those seed terms based on the sequences of search queries.

Each of the received seed terms may be a single word or a phrase.

Further, each of the seed terms may be a positive seed term or a negative seed term.

Positive Seed Terms — A term that an advertiser would like to bid on to have the advertisement ad provider serve an advertisement or the type of terms a searcher interacting with a search engine would like to receive search results relating to.

Negative Seed Terms — A term that an advertiser would not like to bid on to have the ad provider serve an advertisement or the type of term a search interacting with a search engine would not like to receive search results relating to.

In other words, an advertiser, searcher, or system within the ad provider such as the ad campaign management system submits seed terms to receive more terms like a positive seed terms, while avoiding keywords like a negative seed term.

The search engine might send semantically related terms to an advertising campaign management system to be used in a keyword suggestion tool. Semantically related terms might also be used by the search engine to broaden or focus searches.

Conclusion

One of the most important takeaways from this patent application is that search engines don’t just look at information on the Web to help them with searches, but are also paying attention to how people search, and what they search for, as well as the terms that advertisers might relate together when they advertise on a search engine.

The patent filing provides some useful terms about queries, and how searchers may change their queries when they are searching, such as edit distances, prefix overlap, and suffix overlap.

We also learn a little about how a search engine might identify whether a query comes from an actual human searcher, or from a program that is performing searches on the Web.

Internet Search Engine Update

2008-04-30T20:52:00.000-07:00

AlltheWeb has been busy, adding full Boolean searching, redesigning its site, and looking towards a new owner. It added full Boolean searching capability on the advanced search page using AND, OR, and ANDNOT. These operators, and nesting with parentheses, should only be used in the Boolean box on the advanced search page or on the simple search page if the search type menu box has been added via the customization option and the Boolean search type has been selected. It also has a RANK operator that is supposed to boost the rank of results containing that term, but it does not behave dependably.

AlltheWeb tries to automatically identify appropriate language limits for users, but it still retains an "Any Language" option, and the default language limit can be changed on the preferences pages. It has also introduced a variety of quick links, bookmark shortcuts, and search options for various Web browsers that make it easy to search AlltheWeb directly from the address box, by highlighting a term on a Web page and then clicking a bookmark, and other shortcuts. These are available under Help and Search Tools.

The AlltheWeb redesign banished banner ads, provides more readable results, uses new colors, and has added a URL Investigator. Enter a URL as a search term, and the results page can include page language, size, last update date, number of pages that link to the URL, number of pages that contain the term, number of pages at the site, subdomains at the site, Open Directory categories containing the site, and links to Easywhois and the Wayback Machine for the URL. With the redesign, a few features such as the document directory depth limit, the home page limit, and FAST topics were added. Also, the related searches and multimedia results have been moved from the right margin to the bottom.

Lastly, AlltheWeb and the rest of the FAST Web Search Unit (but not FAST's enterprise search) are being acquired by Overture with expected completion in April 2003.

AltaVista joins AlltheWeb in getting bought out, and by the same company, Overture. The deal is also expected to close in April 2003. Overture is buying the whole AltaVista company, including its search-related patents and its enterprise search engine. In terms of search features, one recent change at AltaVista is that the wild card or truncation symbol (the asterisk [*]) is now simpler to use. It used to only represent 0-5 extra characters and a double asterisk (**) had to be used for unlimited truncation, but now a single * represents an unlimited number of characters. AltaVista is the only major search engine that now offers truncation. It can be used at the end of terms and internally if after at least three characters.

Go, the former Infoseek, had long since given up having its own database and search engine. Instead, it just provided Overture search results with the ranked advertisements above Inktomi results. Recently it switched from Overture to Google, still with Google-provided ranked advertisements above regular Google search results. In addition, Disney, Go's owner, seems to be looking into the possibility of selling the Infoseek patents and technology that used to power Go.com.

Google has been active the past few months, but not with its usual search activities. Instead, it purchased a Web log company, Pyra Labs, the maker of the popular blog tool Blogger and the Blog*Spot blog hosting site. The other major initiative at Google is the introduction of yet another advertising program. Google Content-Targeted Advertising expands the reach of the advertising beyond search engine results (what It has offered for a while now—the text ads at the top and in the right-hand margin that are labeled as "sponsored links") to placing those ads on non-search related pages on other Web sites. These text ads are starting to appear on content sites such as HowStuffWorks, Knight Ridder Digital, Weather Underground, and Google Groups.

HotBot made a few changes to its new interface. It has added more advanced search features to its Teoma advanced search page: language, region, and date limits. However, the Inktomi and AlltheWeb advanced search pages have lost their directory depth limits.

MSN Search relaunched with less clutter and no banner ads. It now includes indexed PDF and Microsoft Office files, and the advanced search now has limits for HTML, PDF, Word, PowerPoint, and Excel documents. The Basic Search continues to display LookSmart directory results first followed by Inktomi results, while the Advanced Search goes straight to the Inktomi database.

Northern Light is almost completely dead, but it has still been sputtering along. The news search stops updating with new content and then starts again. The Web database at NLResearch.com has been up and down as well. The Special Collection is usually no longer searchable, and it looks likely that the whole system will be nonfunctional soon.

Yahoo! completed its acquisition of Inktomi. Yahoo! search results are still from Google at the time of this column, but many expect to see Inktomi results showing up soon on Yahoo! searches.

2008-04-22T21:34:00.000-07:00

While Google is experimenting on crawling hidden web pages through HTML forms indexing, Yahoo on the other hand has updated its search crawler with Slurp 3.0. Although the implementation of Slurp 3.0 would not really pose a big implication on webmaster’s part, just the same here are the changes that Slurp 3.0 will bring in the way it will crawl websites.

First, Slurp 3.0 will start crawling from smaller set of IP addresses, although still within crawl.yahoo.net.domain. Reverse DNS checks will still continue working. For webmasters who use IP-based recognition for identifying Yahoo crawlers, Yahoo advises to move to reverse DNS-based identification of Yahoo! Slurp to avoid getting dropped by the Yahoo Slurp 3.0 crawlers.

Second, Yahoo! Slurp 3.0 will now publish a new user-agent – “Yahoo!Slurp 3.0”. Although existing robots.txt directives for “Slurp” or “Yahoo! Slurp” will continue working, directives for “Slurp 2.0” would not work anymore. So, Yahoo suggests that webmasters use the shorter version of the User-agent which is simply – Slurp.

Update Yahoo Search Marketing

2008-03-31T04:22:00.000-07:00

An Update on Yahoo Search Marketing

Over at WebmasterWorld, moderator werty asks about the quality of YSM traffic. Has it changed, improved, or worsened?

Within the past few months, people have been seeing an increase of quality with Yahoo! Search Marketing. You can now exclude partners who send low-quality traffic as per our update in January. The low quality domains need to be entered by hand and there is a 250-domain limit at this time.

UK members aren't seeing any changes, though, especially because domain blocking is not yet available.

What are your opinions of the state of Yahoo Search Marketing? Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Yahoo Update Search March2008

2008-03-31T04:20:00.000-07:00

Yahoo Search March 2008 Update

Yahoo Search announced an update will be taking place today. They wrote the typical line:

We're in the process of rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms. While we expect the update will be completed soon, as you know, throughout this process you may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index.
Update: With this weather update, you might also experience spikes or drops in crawl traffic for the next week or two.

But no one has seen any changes, no where - not at WebmasterWorld, not at any of the forums - like we typically do. In fact a WebmasterWorld thread said Yahoo announced an update, but everyone is asking if anyone else is noticing any changes. When people start noticing any changes, I will post a summary of those changes.

For now, the only interesting thing I see is a comment at the Yahoo Search Blog that says he is seeing lowercase titles in Yahoo search. I wrote about this a while back at Search Engine Land, Are Lower Case Titles In Yahoo Coming From Anchor Text, but it was fixed soon after. I currently don't see any examples of new lowercase titles in Yahoo Search.

The last Yahoo update started about January 18th, 2008 and completed around January 29th.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

spam to search engines google

2008-03-25T04:16:00.000-07:00

Is your website nowhere to be seen in Google? It might be that Google doesn't like your website because it looks like spam.

Check the following list to find out whether your website might look like spam or not.

1. Domain name factors that can indicate a spammy website:

The domain names of spammy websites are often very long and contain many hyphens. Those domain names often contain commercial high value keywords (the keywords for which you receive lots of spam messages that we don't want to mention here).

Spammy domains are often registered by people who own a very large number of domains. The more domains a person owns, the more likely it is that the quality of a single domain isn't high. Spammy domains are often very young and have a short registration period. Low quality domains also often use .info, .cc, .us and other cheap top level domains.

Spammy websites often have many keyword-stuffed sub domains.

2. Content factors that can indicate a spammy website:

Spammy websites often show very many ads. They also often contain high-commercial keywords. The keyword density and the keyword frequency on low quality websites is often very high.

Spammy websites often have duplicate content and content scraped from other websites. Low quality websites usually don't have unique content.

Low quality websites usually don't contain a privacy policy, a copyright notice page and "Contact us" page with a full address.

3. Link factors that can indicate a spammy website:

Spammy websites often have many links to other spam and low quality websites. Low quality websites aren't likely to have links from trusted sites.

4. Technical factors that can indicate a spammy website:

Spammy website often use redirects (JavaScript, MetaRefresh, etc.) from landing pages. Spammy websites also often use cloaking. Of course, other spam elements such as hidden text also cause problems with search engines.

If your website uses many of the elements mentioned above then it could be classified as spam. In that case, you should consider a redesign of your website.

Search engines will regard your website as a high quality website if it has high quality links and useful content that can easily be parsed by search engines. Avoid everything that could look like spam and make sure that your web pages contain the right keywords in the right elements in the right density.

How To Write SEO Content

2008-03-25T00:37:00.000-07:00

Well writing SEO articles is one of those facts. The Internet has given many people the desire to become rich overnight. We join blogs we submit articles and then we wait. Well let me tell you folks nothing is that easy.

I can assure you I have been doing this for years, however I have been writing and submitting articles for clients and realized they knew something I didn't.

To think when I started doing this I was paid to write articles for $5 on a 350-450 word content while they made $ and slowly crept up the Google ranks. Well this is when I said "Basta" that's Italian for enough. I had given away many hours and days of good copy, good editorial content only to wonder what did they know that I didn't? Here is the trick. You have to hire a bunch of little writers to write 5-6 articles a day. It would behoove you if you could get them to upload the articles or blogs for you. Think about this for a minute. If you could get 5 people a day to write 5 articles each that would result in 25 articles in one day.

Please people keep in mind they have to be rich in content and keywords. They cannot just have keywords in the meta tags and not in the body of the article.

Okay I know I sound like I am harping but this didn't seem to go in my head for a few days. Then I was walking my dog Lucy and I realized if I had all the writers my clients had and I was able to upload all 25 articles a day to 25 different article submission places then Taraaaaa you would have uploaded to 100 sites a day.

Look I have never been very good at math so why don't you do the math After 1 week alone you are slowly creeping up the ladder of Google searches. A lot of people are probably going to hate me for giving away this information. But as I have said before Pffttt I don't care information should be for free. This is not a doggy dog world nor should the rich get richer.

The last thing I want to mention is I have some links where you can get writers cheap. Sure I am promoting outsourcing but isn't that what "capitalism" is all about. There are writers sweat shops in India, Pakistan, Poland, and yes in the USA where you can find writers who will write articles for you for less than you can buy a pack of cigarettes. You hand them the SEO keywords and they will write. Make sure you know what your keywords are, since that is your saving grace. As smoke bellows into my office I think of all the mistakes I have made... The only think we can be sure of is death and taxes.

As a freelance writer I find security and serenity in what I do. With that said the simpler we make our lives, the more abundant they become. I hope this information helped. Keep in mind that the outside world whether the Internet or the unknown darkness closes in. Inside is where you can find your own light. Be true to yourself and write excellent copy. Use each day as a canvass with 24 hours available to put brush to paint.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Gabriella_Sannino

Lycos updates search engine

2008-03-04T20:51:00.000-08:00

Lycos updates search engine

Online media firm Lycos is working with media search platform Pixsy Corporation to incorporate video and image search features.

The new feature will enable website owners to run a branded multimedia search engine with content customized to that specific audience, thereby creating new search activity and targeted advertising inventory.

“We chose Pixsy for their robust multimedia search offering and deep index of the most popular consumer content on the web,” said Edward Noel, General Manager of Search Products for Lycos, Inc. “This effort reflects our company-wide focus on providing Lycos users with a more visual-oriented, multi-media experience across all of our products and services."

Pixsy CEO, Chase Norlin added, “We’re excited to be working with such a world class search company and this is a great example of our ability to offer unique new products, such as Pixsy News, built off the powerful Pixsy media search platform.”

Crawler Improvements Live Search

2008-03-04T20:50:00.000-08:00

Announcing Crawler Improvements for Live Search

Today we're pleased to announce several improvements in the crawler for Live Search that should significantly improve the efficiency with which we crawl and index your web sites. We are always looking for ways to help webmasters, and we hope these features take us a few more steps in the right direction.

HTTP Compression: HTTP compression allows faster transmission time by compressing static files and application responses, reducing network load between your servers and our crawler. We support the most common compression methods: gzip and deflate as defined by RFC 2616 (see sections 14.11 and 14.39). Compression is currently supported by all major browsers and search engines. Use this online tool to check your server for HTTP compression support.

The following links provide configuration information for IIS, and Apache.
- Configure Compression in IIS
- Configure Apache using GZIP or using deflate

Conditional Get: We support conditional get as defined by RFC 2616 (Section 14.25), generally we will not download the page unless it has changed since the last time we crawled it. As per the standard, our crawler will include the "If-Modified-Since" header & time of last download in the GET request and when available, our crawler will include the "If-None-Match" header and the ETag value in the GET request. If the content hasn't changed the web server will respond with a 304 HTTP response.

To check if your site already supports the "If-Modified-Since" HTTP header, you can use this online tool to check your server for HTTP Conditional Get support. Alternatively, you can check using Fiddler for Internet Explorer, or Live Headers for Firefox. Each of these tools allows you to create a custom GET request and send it to your server. You'll want to make sure that your request includes the "If-Modified-Since" header like the following simplified sample:
```
GET /sa/3_12_0_163076/webmaster/webmaster_layout.css HTTP/1.1
Host: webmaster.live.com
If-Modified-Since: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 01:28:49 GMT
```
You should receive a server response similar to the following simplified sample:
```
HTTP/1.x 304 Not Modified
```
Check out MSDN for more information on using Fiddler for performance tuning.

If you have not yet configured conditional get on your site, we would strongly encourage you to do so, as it can significantly help reduce server load as most browsers and crawlers already support this feature (e.g. IIS, Apache).

In addition to these two features there are many more improvements in performance that should help further optimize our crawling. As a result, we've also upgraded our user agent to reflect the changes, it is now "msnbot/1.1". If you think you are experiencing any issues with MSNbot, or have any questions about the updates, please use our Crawler Feedback & Discussion form.

-- Fabrice Canel, Live Search Crawling Team

Yahoo Search Index Update

2008-03-04T20:48:00.000-08:00

Yahoo! Search Index Update

We're in the process of rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms. While we expect the update will be completed soon, as you know, throughout this process you may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index. To share your thoughts on this with other Yahoo! Search users, please visit the Site Explorer Suggestion Board.

Update: With this weather update, you might also experience spikes or drops in crawl traffic for the next week or two.

Google updates Android software development kit

2008-02-19T20:23:00.000-08:00

Google updates Android software development kit

Google released an update to the SDK for Android, its mobile-phone operating system.

It's the first update since the SDK was released in November and includes changes requested by developers.

Google highlighted a couple of changes in the updated SDK, which was released Wednesday. It has a new user interface that the search giant said is still a work in progress.

In addition, developers can now support additional file formats in the Android media player. Also, applications can translate an address into a coordinate and the reverse, in location-based programs.

Developers haven't had much time to review the updates; few have posted reactions on the Android developers' blog.

Even though developers said that the first version of the SDK was thin, Android has managed to gain momentum. Four chipmakers, including Qualcomm and Texas Instruments, showed off prototypes that support Android this week in Barcelona at the annual Mobile World Congress.

Still, Android faces competition from the established mobile operating systems as well as companies that have rallied behind LiMo, the consortium that is developing an open Linux mobile operating system. At the conference in Barcelona, LiMo announced 18 phones that comply with the operating-system specification that are either on the market already or will be.

Google PR Adwords Advertising Branding

2008-02-18T00:53:00.000-08:00

Google Hires New Israel PR Agency For Adwords, Advertising, Branding


                 Ra'anana ----- February 16, 2008 ....... Google Israel has retained
                 a new PR agency in Tel Aviv. Stern Ariely Public Relations was
                 choosen by Google Israel replacing Euro Tel Aviv.

Stern Ariely will be responsible for advancing Google's branding, coordinating special events in Israel and promoting Google Adwords as a means for helping surfers to find any product or service they desire in either Hebrew or English.

Google is the world's most popular Internet search engine, having replaced Yahoo, Lycos, Alta Vista and several others search engines through aggressive, creative development and marketing.

Google, which has been active in Israel since 2002, opened their Tel Aviv office as part of its global physical expansion program. Google Israel focuses on its improving directed advertisements in its search engine, and on selling services to the Israel advertising market. Google Israel has and will continue to hire people with connections to Israel advertisers. Only a handful of people in Israel and SEO professionals will be hired at this stage.

"This important addition to Google's growing number of offices will further enable us to provide our search experience and advertising services to users, advertisers and partners in Israel," the company said. Google Israel is led by Meir Brand who serves as country manager.

Who is Google? Google's founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed a new approach to online search that took root in a Stanford University dorm room and quickly spread to information seekers around the globe. Google is now widely recognized as the world's largest search engine - an easy-to-use free service that usually returns relevant results in a fraction of a second.

When you visit www.google.com or one of the dozens of other Google domains, you'll be able to find information in many different languages; check stock quotes, maps, and news headlines; lookup phonebook listings for every city in the United States; search more than two billion images and peruse the world's largest archive of Usenet messages -- more than 1 billion posts dating back to 1981.

Google is a public and profitable company focused on search services. Named for the mathematical term "googol", Google operates web sites at many international domains, with the most trafficked being www.google.com. Google is widely recognized as the "World's Best Search Engine" and is fast, accurate and easy to use. The company also serves corporate clients, including global and Israel SEO advertisers, content publishers and site managers with cost-effective advertising and a wide range of revenue generating search services. Google's breakthrough technology and continued innovation serve the company's mission of "organizing the world's information and making it universally accessible and useful."

SEO is short for search engine optimization, the process of increasing the amount of visitors to a Web site by ranking high in the search results of a search engine. The higher a Web site ranks in the results of a search, the greater the chance that that site will be visited by a user. It is common practice for Internet users to not click through pages and pages of search results, so where a site ranks in a search is essential for directing more traffic toward the site. SEO helps to ensure that a site is accessible to a search engine and improves the chances that the site will be found by the search engine.

Google also provides ways to access all this information without making a special trip to the Google homepage. The Google Toolbar enables you to conduct a Google search from anywhere on the web, while the Google Deskbar (beta) puts a Google search box in the Windows taskbar so you can search from any application you're using, without opening a browser. And for those times when you're away from your PC altogether, Google can be used from a number of wireless platforms including WAP and i-mode phones.

As Google enters the Israel market beyond it's basic service in Hebrew, SEO or Internet search engine optimization has gone into overdrive. The leading SEO in Israel, Leyden Communications Israel, which has been creating and optimizing Web sites in Israel for 10 years is now focusing on the PR market.

This new and highly potent public relations, public affairs Internet marketing news service for commercial, non-profit and governmental organizations in Israel was launched several months ago.

Israel Internet marketing and SEO - search engine optimization - is now in greater demand in Israel as Israelis try to find themselves on the search engines. Joel Leyden, president of Leyden Communications Israel and the publisher of the Israel News Agency announced the new PR SEO news Internet placement service.

Stern Ariely PR was most likely chosen by Google Israel given its association with the GCI Group. GCI is a global leader in the public relations industry. Its success extends across four practices areas, including healthcare, corporate, consumer and digital media. The PR firm is committed to supporting the business objectives of its clients through superior industry knowledge and measurable solutions. GCI serves a broad base of multinational clients including Dell, Lowe's, Nike, RadioShack, Schick, Boehringer Ingelheim and Starbucks. It was winner of PR Week's 2004 Campaign of the Year Award for its work on behalf of Medtronic.

Pupi Ariely and Ronit Stern will manage the Google Israel account.

Google Israel holds many seminars in Israel and cooperates with the Israel Export Institute.
The Israel Export Institute and Google Israel recently joined forces in promoting and hosting a one day conference on Internet marketing, SEO, Google Adwords and Google Adsense. Over 500 people attended the Internet marketing conference in Tel Aviv. But transcending digital advertising was a tone of peace which was expressed by Israel Export Institute Director General Yechiel Assia.

"I'm the world's number one believer in that good business makes for good stability and regional peace," Assia told the Israel News Agency in an exclusive interview. "The Internet transcends borders, cultures, religion, gender and age. It has become the most valuable tool for the business person to utilize in creating new trade partners, for gathering business intelligence and increasing market share. I am very proud of the successful joint effort that the Israel Export Institute and Google Israel created in hosting the first international Internet marketing conference."

The Israel Export Institute is a non-profit organization which was established in 1958. The Israel Export Institute has over 2,600 member companies, which together produces over ninety percent of Israel's industrial exports (excluding defense exports and diamonds).

Assia said that only a year ago only 50 to 60 thousand people visited the Israel Export Institute Website, whereas today the Website now has over a million visitors a month.

Google has been on the leading edge of Internet technology for many years. A recent service that Google has launched is Google Talk, a downloadable Windows application from Google that enables Gmail users to quickly and easily talk or IM with their friends for free. Google is focused on developing innovative technologies that enhance people's lives, and Google Talk encourages and simplifies instant communication across the web. "At Google, we're continually investing in areas where we can make technological change, and we recognize the importance of efficient instant communications and information exchange," said Georges Harik, director, Product Management, Google Inc. "Google Talk further enriches our users' communications experience, whether they choose to communicate via email, IM, or a call."

Source: http://www.israelnewsagency.com/googleisraelsternarielyprpublicrelationsadwordsseomarketing88021608.html

Yahoo Launches oneConnect For Mobile

2008-02-12T23:12:00.000-08:00

Yahoo Launches 'oneConnect' For Mobile

Yahoo ; Tuesday introduced a new service called oneConnect, which will combine e-mail, instant messaging, text messaging, and social networking in one mobile platform.

The company plans to roll out oneConnect as part of Yahoo Go 3.0 -- an all-in-one mobile offering -- and Yahoo's new mobile home page in the second quarter of this year. In the meantime, Yahoo is showcasing oneConnect at the Mobile World Congress conference in Barcelona this week.

One of the more impressive features of oneConnect is a socially-connected address book, which will allow users to transfer activities from social networks, professional networks, and communities to their address book. For example, users will be able to stay on top of when a contact updates their status or uploads a photo to their profile.

Yahoo will also offer integrated mobile messaging. That means any messaging service provider will be able to use Yahoo's application program interfaces to integrate with oneConnect's messaging feature, according to the company. Yahoo said it will use an open communications platform to give users the freedom to send e-mail, instant messages, text messages, and access social networks through a single application.

Users may potentially be able to access both their personal and work messaging services. Yahoo also said it's in discussions with DataViz, which specializes in mobile access to Microsoft Exchange e-mail accounts and Microsoft Office documents. The two would team up to develop widget versions of DataViz's RoadSynch and Documents To Go applications.

Other features in oneConnect include the ability to set up messaging shortcuts to get in touch with people more quickly; a social contact card for collecting relevant information about contacts; and a location-sensing capability for locating, chatting, and exchanging information with nearby oneConnect users.

Yahoo expects oneConnect to support hundreds of mobile devices and mobile browsers worldwide.

Source: http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=206502032

Mobile Nokia add Google search UPDATE

2008-02-12T21:12:00.000-08:00

Mobile Fair-UPDATE 2-Nokia to add Google search on handsets

BARCELONA, Feb 12 (Reuters) - Nokia will add Google to the list of search engines consumers can access from its handsets, the companies said on Tuesday.

Nokia has similar deals in place with Yahoo and Microsoft around the world, and with Baidu in China and Yandex in Russia.

"Providing choices for our consumers is an important driver in Nokia's Internet service strategy," Ilkka Raiskinen, Nokia's vice-president of software and services, said in a statement issued at the Mobile World Congress wireless fair in Barcelona.

As networks grow faster and most mobile phone handsets now come with Web browsers, Internet companies are moving aggressively to bring search, e-mail, mapping and other familiar online services to phones.

Google search would at first be added to selected phones and markets and later to some mass-market models in more than 100 countries, the companies said.

"This also might be a bit of a defensive move in light of Android-based devices supposedly coming in the second half of 2008," said Gartner analyst Carolina Milanesi.

"Although Nokia might not adopt the (Android) platform it is making sure they are working with Google and offering consumers what they want."

Google is scheduled to roll out its Android software -- a direct rival to Nokia's S60 platform -- for cellphones later this year.

Google search will be accessed through Nokia's own search application, and will first be available to users of four new multimedia phones Nokia announced on Monday.

Nokia has search applications on 40 handset models.

Nokia and Google already collaborate in a limited way, with Google search available on Nokia's Internet tablets. Some of Nokia's top models also support the popular, Google-owned video-sharing site YouTube.

By 0930 GMT, Nokia shares were up 1.4 percent in Helsinki, against a rise of 0.6 percent in the European technology index. (Reporting by Georgina Prodhan and Tarmo Virki; Editing by Erica Billingham and Quentin Bryar)

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/feedarticle?id=7302712

Complex Search Engine Different Hats

2008-02-08T01:22:00.000-08:00

How Complex Search Engine Came To Be With The Different Hats It Wears

According to Mr. Danny Sullivan, an industry analyst, the initiatory use of the term Search Engine Optimization was on July 26, 1997, contained in a spam message posted on Usenet.

SEO is composed of many integrated processes aiming to improve the quality and volume of traffic directed to a website. SEO is arguably the way to site Page Rank. Having ranked higher, if not highest in the search result would create a steady stream of traffic and leads to your business.

When working on SEO, relevance and popularity of keywords or keyword phrases and search algorithms are taken into consideration. SEO implementation starts at the first stage of site development. Having SE friendly pages are a must. The codings, presentation, and structure of the web page should not pose any problems to web spiders so as to get your site indexed. Effort should also be directed on regular updating of unique content for your site to be frequented by these automated indexing programs.

Meta tags were what the pioneering search algorithms calculated to determine positioning. These are distinct html codes provided by webmasters to set a page apart from another. By having relied on given data, this method was exposed to manipulation and abuse, leading to a lot of misled, inaccurate, irrelevant and inconsistent searches.

The incidents that happened urged Search Engines to develop more intricate ranking algorithms, considering additional elements that would be hard, if not impossible for webmasters to maneuver. Up until now, the search algorithms have become more and more complex and are being modified regularly, keeping webmasters busy in finding greater ways to boost their respective businesses through SEO.

The business of Search Engine Optimization is not an easy one. Like all other communities, it has grown in time and has acquired different types of characters. The members share that common goal which is to have their mark, if not totally dominate the Search Engine results. In the past years, the people behind SEO have formulated something to distinguish one from the other. They have labeled themselves by the hat color that they wear.

White Hats, also referred to as the good guys, are those that practice what they call "ethical" Search Engine Optimization. In this technique, the links and page content are designed for both search engines and humans to see, making it both visitor and SE friendly. For the links and pages to convert well, pages should be nice to the eyes and the content, good. The practitioners reduce the risk of having the site erased from the SE index by working with the primary domain. These techniques by white hats lead to long term results.

Black Hats, in contrary to the white hats, are referred to as the sneaky delinquents. The kind email found in your inboxes or bulk folders that are unsolicited are most likely the work of the black hats. There's no doubt that the Search Engines are spammed as well too. The links and pages aren't visible to humans and though detectable by SEs, the techniques are used to mislead them. Black hat strategies always place the site in risk of getting removed from the index list. Thus, making the results, last only on a short term.

Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Aweng_Moral-Basco

Update Google selloff $72 billion

2008-02-08T01:04:00.000-08:00

Update: Google selloff tab hits $72 billion

Google’s (GOOG) 8% drop Friday wipes $15 billion off the search giant’s market capitalization and puts the stock back at levels last seen back in September. But that’s not the worst of it. Fortune’s Philip Elmer-DeWitt notes that Google stock has now dropped more than 230 points from its November high of $747 a share - wiping out more than $72 billion in market value. That’s more than half again as much as Microsoft (MSFT) is offering for Yahoo (YHOO), for instance.

On the other hand, even at Friday’s reduced levels Google stock has risen 506% since its initial public offering in August 2004. That, along with the company’s hammerlock on the fast-growing Internet ad market, is why even at a rich price-to-earnings ratio Google stock continues to be a favorite of tech investors - regardless of the unanswered question of how the company will perform in a sharp downturn. Unfortunately, judging by recent trends, investors may find out the answer soon enough.

SOURCE: http://dailybriefing.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2008/02/01/google-selloff-damage-72-billion/