Archive for the ‘Search’ Category
Darko on June 20th, 2008
Microsoft executives said the company does not plan to make a slew of Internet acquisitions since it ended its bid for Yahoo.
There has been speculation that Microsoft would possibly buy Facebook, which it has a small stake in or Time Warner’s AOL along with a number of other companies.
“People don’t understand what they’re talking about,” chief executive Steve Ballmer said in an interview with the Financial Times. “At the end of the day, this is about the ad platform. This is not about just any one of the applications.”
Kevin Johnson, head of Microsoft’s Windows and Internet businesses, said that the bid for Yahoo was part of Microsoft’s strategy to strengthen its advertising business, with the focus on the search advertising market.
After Microsoft dropped its bid for Yahoo last month it returned with an offer for the search business.
“The most important application for the foreseeable future . . . is search,” Ballmer said.
“I don’t think we can say, ‘OK, well, we’re going to be in the ad platform business and we’re going to do it just on the strength of non-search-based assets.’ We don’t have to dominate, but we’d better have a darn good chunk of the search market over time.”
Darko on June 18th, 2008
The search engine thinks the apocryphal talk about webmasters being able to wreck their competitors by creating bad links to them is just a bunch of talk.
One webmaster who believes he has suffered at the hands of such “Googlebowling” tactics isn’t convinced that Google looks closely enough at potential abuse coming from specially crafted inbound links.
At Search Engine Roundtable, the assertion exists that a little sneakiness by a webmaster will be the only item needed to build and target a rival, and drop it from Google’s rankings. A post at Google Groups detailed how the targeted webmaster would experience such a sudden loss:
Create a bunch of links pointing toward of all your enemies and competitors’ websites then use some really nasty porn Anchor text Keywords. Don’t link the porn keywords to the site’s main or index page, DO link the porn to a single specific page on the site and use that same page as the only page to link the porn too. Googlebowling works better if you embed the links into a video or flash (please note the example).
A Google staffer followed up on the post, claiming the site targeted by the Googlebowling ought to be looked at more closely, and in the context of Google’s quality guildelines.
“Looking at the site that you mentioned, I could imagine that studying our Google Webmaster Guidelines, in particular the quality guidelines, would be time well spent,” Google’s John Mueller said.
“Most of these guidelines involve the content on the site itself, something which generally can’t be changed through links pointing to the site.”
In a mildly direct way, Mueller suggested the site’s low quality, not the inbound links, needs work. As far as evil linking and site rankings go, Mueller said in a follow-up that in theory the linking cited could cause a problem in some “borderline situations,” but still suggested the webmaster in question needs to study Google’s quality guidelines.
Darko on June 17th, 2008
It failed to acquire Yahoo’s search business — or at least that’s what Yahoo has said. So now Microsoft has to rely on its own resources to come up with a plan for moving forward in search; and to do that, it’s setting up a second laboratory.
This morning, Microsoft publicly announced it will be opening what it’s calling a “Search Technology Center” somewhere in Europe at some point next year. It did not say exactly when or exactly where, though with the company’s slate of acquisitions in the search space already hailing from all over the continent, there are several intriguing candidates.
Although Microsoft’s announcement was made this morning in Cannes, Oslo, Norway may be high on the company’s list. That’s where one of its most important acquisitions in the search space is located: Fast Search & Transfer, the manufacturer of a groundbreaking behavior-monitoring search platform for enterprises. That platform already enables big businesses that produce and manage a lot of text to use tracking data gleaned from employees to enhance the relevancy of documents retrieved during queries.
But that’s a product sold to businesses, not a query line served up through a public Web page like Windows Live Search. In a statement sent to BetaNews this morning, Microsoft said that its new tech center — wherever it ends up being located — will be partnering directly with the Live Search team to develop “a highly relevant, localized, and interactive search experience” for online users. If FAST’s behavioral algorithms are to play a role there, perhaps Oslo will be the center; but if FAST remains a professional platform, the new European STC might be running on a different track.
For the last two and a half years, Microsoft has already been operating an STC in Beijing. There, one of its key projects has been improved relevancy and experience for Live Search and the public Web, though some academic projects are also involved.
Back in February 2006, Microsoft acquired Paris-based mobile search technology provider MotionBridge. Since that time, the company has made some headway in building location-oriented search services for mobile handset users — not just Windows Mobile — although it’s struggled with the problem of branding these services. Then in a deal completed last January, Microsoft acquired geographical search provider Multimap, based in London. That deal could also play into the company’s expansion of mobile search services as well.
But if Microsoft’s intentions with this new STC are to provide more transparency to European regulators, who may be questioning the efficacy of these acquisitions, the company may want to consider Brussels as a home base.
Darko on June 17th, 2008
Google’s dominance in desktop search is transferring nicely to cell phones, according to new statistics from Nielsen Mobile. In fact, an almost complete sameness has been achieved.
The mobile market looked wide open for a while; Google, Yahoo, and even AOL appeared to have more or less equal changes of success. Unfortunately for those last two companies, Google cornered a market share of 61 percent during the first three months of this year.
Yahoo trailed behind with 18 percent, and MSN snagged five percent. Compare this Nielsen Mobile data to the most recent report from Nielsen Online - the same entities scored 62, 17.5, and 9.7 percent, respectively - and it’s almost enough to make you think some corporate email addresses got crossed.
Whereas Google’s place on large computers seems pretty much cemented, though, it remains possible that it’ll be fall behind with mobile users. Nielsen Mobile reports, “44% of Google users rate their satisfaction with mobile Internet search between 8 to 10 on a 10-point scale, compared to 40% of Yahoo! searchers.”
So a whole lot of people are still waiting for a mobile search engine that scores an eight or better in terms of satisfaction
Darko on June 13th, 2008
When it comes to file extensions, not all are created equal. If your URL ends a certain way, there’s a good chance that page won’t be crawled, says Google’s head webspam fighter Matt Cutts.
Cutts posts on his blog that Google will crawl/index any common file extension so long as it doesn’t have a history of being generally useless. These include .html, .htm, .php, .asp, etc.
But .exe? Not a chance. .dll? Nope. .bin? Fahgeddaboudit.
Matt gives his standard explanation: “[T]here are some file extensions that are mostly binary data, such as .exe, where the vast majority of the time the data would be meaningless blobs, so there are a few extensions to avoid. If your files are named example.dll or example.bin and you don’t see Google crawling pages with that file extension, I’d recommend changing your file extension to something else.”
He recommends also that if a webmaster is unsure about a file extension, they should run a search on Google [filetype .exe] to see if Google has actually indexed any of those files. If not, your page isn’t going to be indexed either.
That doesn’t mean Google won’t have a change of heart about it. After reviewing feedback about HTML pages ending .0, for example if the page ended with Web2.0, they decided to index pages with .0 as a file extension.
Darko on April 16th, 2008
For the month of February Google Sites were again the top U.S. video property with nearly 3.6 billion videos viewed (35.4% share of all videos), gaining 1.1 share points over January according to comScore Video Metrix.
U.S. Internet users viewed more than 10 billion videos online during the month, a three percent increase over January and a 66 percent gain over February 2007.
Not surprisingly YouTube accounted for 96 percent of all video viewed at Google Sites. Fox Interactive Media was second with 586 million videos (5.8%), followed by Yahoo Sites with 293 million (2.9%) and Microsoft sites also with 293 million (2.9%); if the two companies were merged they would be tied for second with Fox Interactive Media.
Close to 135 million U.S. Internet users spent an average of 204 minutes per person watching online video in February. Google Sites had the most viewers (81.8 million), where they spent an average of 109 minutes per person viewing video in February.
Fox Interactive attracted the second most viewers (55.7 million), followed by Yahoo Sites (37.1 million) and Microsoft Sites (27.1 million). ABC.com had the tenth largest viewing audience (7 million) where they spent an average of 51 minutes per person watching online video, second in time spent only to Google Sites.
A majority (72.8%) of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video in February. Eighty million viewers watched 3.42 billion videos on YouTube (42.6 videos per viewer), and 50 million viewers watched 539 million videos on MySpace (10.7 videos per viewer).
The average online video duration was 2.7 minutes and the average online video viewer watched 75 videos.
Darko on April 15th, 2008
Searching the web could help save the planet from global warming according to a new ‘green’ search engine initiative being launched today in New Zealand and 13 other countries.
Sydney-based ecocho says it will sponsor the growth of up to two trees for every 1000 searches users conduct on Yahoo and Google at no cost to the user.
To achieve this, the company has struck a deal with the search giants to direct advertising revenue to ecocho according to searches made through the ecocho search engine that uses Google and Yahoo! The search results are the same as on Google and Yahoo!, except the Ecocho logo is displayed above the results.
To join the scheme, users download an ecocho toolbar, selecting either Yahoo! or Google, and make ecocho their search engine.
Founder of ecocho, Tim Macdonald says that in New Zealand alone, web users conduct close to 120 million internet searches each month. “If we could capture just 1 per cent of that traffic, we would make a significant contribution towards lowering the impact of harmful greenhouse gas emissions.”
“ecocho.co.nz is a free service that doesn’t alter or slow your search results, plus users can choose between technology they know and trust, Yahoo and Google,” Macdonald says.
According to its website FAQ page, Ecocho generates funds through advertising, which is used to buy carbon offset credits, which in turn contributes cash to carbon dioxide emission offset initiatives.
Initially, Ecocho will plant trees in New South Wales, Australia, because it is close to the Ecocho headquarters and the NSW GGAS scheme was the first local government mandatory emissions scheme in the world.
Purchases through the New South Wales Government Greenhouse Gas Abatement Scheme (GGAS) will be monitored by KPMG, which will check the acquisition, registration and retirement of the carbon credits.
A similar scheme in New Zealand is currently being investigated with one option being a tie up with Landcare.
Each of the 14 nations involved will have its own national ecocho country domain, such .ca for Canada, com/de for Germany and so on, and local representatives will strike deals with carbon offset and/or forestry schemes. In New Zealand, the local representative is Creo Sustain.
“ecocho.co.nz aims to reinvest 70 per cent of the site’s revenue in forestry schemes, and as the site progresses, we’ll begin to support similar carbon-offsetting schemes in other states and countries,” Macdonald says.
To find out more or download the ecocho toolbar, visit www.ecocho.co.nz
Darko on April 15th, 2008
Companies that create fake blogs in order to hawk products violate what most people would consider basic truthfulness. Starting May 28th, they may also be violating UK law.
An 88-page document gets into the specifics, but it appears anyone or anything misrepresenting itself to consumers could get in trouble thanks to new regulations. The potential penalties are serious: “a fine or imprisonment not exceeding two years or both.”
That’s the sort of stuff that’ll make a lot of marketers play it safe. Judith Lewis, who seems to have been the first person to notice the fresh policy, wrote, “Be aware black hats in the UK - if you get caught the stakes just got criminally high.”
Still, what remains to be seen is how frequently the regulations will be enforced. Big UK-based corporations are probably at risk of prosecution, yet there’s simply too much going on for every fake blog to be stopped. All sorts of businesses may continue acting as their own best customers.
We’ll see how this goes. For the record, there doesn’t seem to be any equivalent legislation, either on the books or in the works, that would apply in America.
Darko on April 15th, 2008
It’s hard to believe data about 2007 is still being released, but a new Hitwise report is interesting, nonetheless. It seems that social networks and YouTube were quite popular last year, with related terms dominating a list of the top ten UK searches.
YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, and a two-word version of YouTube (”you tube”) placed third, fourth, fifth, and eighth, respectively, even though none of them showed up at all on the previous year’s list. Such accomplishments are impressive, to say the least. Bebo, meanwhile, held on to its number two spot.
Yet it’s also important to note what happened to less successful properties. Robin Goad writes, “‘ebay’ remains at the top, but other retail-related terms have fallen down the rankings: ‘argos’ and ‘amazon’ remain in the top 10, albeit placed lower, while ‘easyjet’, ‘autotrader’ and ‘ebay uk’ have all dropped out. ‘Old’ media has also suffered, with ‘bbc’ falling three places and ‘cbbc’ departing the top 10.”
Search trends aren’t surefire indicators of profitability, of course, and even traffic may not follow these numbers - people unfamiliar with the spelling of YouTube probably don’t watch many videos online. Still, this is the sort of news that can (and will) be taken straight to advertisers as recession problems continue.
It’s also likely to make AOL happier about its much-questioned acquisition of Bebo.
Darko on April 15th, 2008
Site publishers will see a new Yahoo bot crawling through their pages, and webmasters should be aware of a couple of little issues that may affect them.
Yahoo’s search team needed the past few weeks to prep their latest crawlers for its sojourns onto the World Wide Web. This new mutli-legged beast began its official rollout, as noted on the Yahoo Search blog.
“The new Yahoo! Slurp 3.0 recognizes the same user-agent and all robots.txt directives for ‘Yahoo! Slurp,’ though it’ll identify itself as Slurp 3.0 in your web logs,” the blog said. A handful of webmasters may notice a couple of changes.
“Please note that if you’re using IP-based recognition of our crawlers, you might see a drop in crawl/coverage from Yahoo! We strongly recommend that you move to reverse DNS-based identification of Yahoo! Slurp if you’re using any other method to avoid this problem,” they said. The IP ranges for Yahoo’s crawlers will change to a smaller set, too.
The other concept applies to robots.txt files and directives. Yahoo Slurp 3.0 will recognize existing entries for ‘Slurp’ or ‘Yahoo Slurp’, but not a reference to ‘Slurp/2.0.’ Yahoo thinks those entries are rare enough anyway, but just in case, it was prudent for them to reference it.
