As New Google Blog writes, Google seems to have filed a patent for its search result pages. Here is a picture of the filing. To me it’s a good example of the insanity of software patents. I guess Philipp Lenssen is right when he points out companies just have to patent such technology today, just to counter similarly trivial patents by other companies. It’s a weird new world.
Yes, this is my first ever post with a chinese title. Google China got itself a new name, as announced by CEO Eric Schmidt on a conference in Bejing. The name 谷歌 is pronounced Guge, and said to mean ‘Valley’s Song’ literally.
According to Haaretz Google has just acquired a new search algorithm that has been developed by Israeli student Ori Alon. The algorithm, named Orion, seems to recognize the topic of a search query and generates a list of keywords relevant to that query. A webpage will only appear in the search results, if the page contains enough of the relevant keywords. The algorithm also considers the quality of the website for the ranking, although it is not yet clear how Orion determines quality. Alon reportedly works at Google’s offices now. I wonder if Google is actually going to implement this for their web search, or if they only acquired Orion to keep Yahoo and MSN from getting their hands onto it.
If you’ve been in the website game for a little time you know that the majority of traffic for most sites comes from search engines. But there are other means to drive serious traffic to your website, as everyone who has been Slashdotted or been on the Digg frontpage can confirm. These sites drive huge numbers of people to the websites they feature, often resulting in server overload of these sites. Other ways of getting visitors are the bookmark services like del.icio.us, Spurl, BlinkList and many similar services. Tagging seems to be the in vogue way of organizing information, so a good and appropriate tagged site on Technorati or Flickr can receive nice traffic from these too.
Allthough search engines still seem to rely on linkage to determine a sites placement, there are valid reasons to believe that they also measure real traffic to a site and take this into account when calculating rankings. Why do you think Google is giving away Analytics for free? So if you can increase your traffic by getting a lot of visitors from non search engine sites, this might in turn improve your search engine rankings, creating some kind of traffic perpetuum mobile. There is also a good probability that some of these visitors have websites or blogs of their own, and if they do enjoy your content, they might link to you, providing even more Google juice. So how do you tap into this traffic power? You have to make your site as findable as possible. Here are a few ideas:
<a href="http://del.icio.us/post?url=http://your_url&title=your__title">Add to del.icio.us</a>I suggest you try these tactics and see if they work for you. It is very likely you will see a good increase in traffic. Even if it doesn’t boost your search engine rankings (I would be surprised) it is allways good to have more happy visitors.
There has been some talk recently on a more esoteric feature of Google Adsense called Smart Pricing. Smart Pricing looks at tracking data gathered from Adwords, to determine how well a given sites Adsense clicks convert to actual sales and leads for the advertiser. The higher the conversion rate, the more the publisher gets paid per click (also taking into consideration the usual factors like keyword pricing or click through rate).
Now there is an interesting twist to this: As pointed out recently on JenSense, Smart Pricing does not effect a single site, but a publisher’s entire Adsense account. That means that if you have Adsense on a site with a poor conversion, this may actually hurt your Adsense earnings across all your site. Now everybody knows these »Made for Adsense« sites, that focus on high paying keywords and flood the search engines with mediocre content. I would guess that these are the exact sites with low conversion, albeit a high click through rate.
If this is the case, Google has a win/win situation with Smart Pricing: First, Adwords customers will have to pay less for visitors coming from such trashy sites, which may well improve Adwords reputation among advertisers. Second, running a poor website with Adsense might actually hurt a webmasters income if he also has well performing sites. So maybe there is an encouragement for publishers to build sites that not only generate lots of clicks, but also generate qualified clicks. In the long run, this may lead to less clutter on the search results. What are your thoughts? Might Smart Pricing actually improve the net, or is this just another confusion measure by Google, making it impossible to analyse your Adsense performance?
c’t, Germany’s most influential IT magazine, has launched a new SEO competition. The objective is to get a good position for the keyphrase Hommingberger Gepardenforelle on the major search engines. Top ranking sites will be listed on c’t publisher Heise’s website. Since Heise is a major authority for the German web, getting published there would be quite nice. I decided to enter the competition with the Hommingberger Gepardenforelle entry in my German Webmaster Blog. I often manage to get rather good search engine positions with my posts there, but they tend to drop in rankings after some time. Let’s see how far I can push that one.
Now there is a statement from Google CEO Eric Schmidt that Google will not go into a browser war against Microsoft. So Schmidt seconds what John Doerr said a few weeks ago. Schmidt goes on to explain that Google won’t move towards being a broader internet portal, avoiding to go into direct competition with Microsoft and Yahoo on that stage. Actually releasing the desktop search was a strong move into Microsofts territory allready, and they pushed into Yahoo’s earlier that year by launching Gmail. So I guess they try to avoid confronting these any more right now. The web search is still their home playground though, where Microsoft and Yahoo do have a lot to catch up.
So the Google desktop search tool finally indexed all of my hard disk, and I’m rather impressed with the speed and the great integration into the regular web search. Alas, some of the features are of no use for me: I read my mails with Thunderbird, and happen to browse the web with Firefox. My IM happens on ICQ, and if I will ever move away from that, I might switch to Jabber, not AIM. So the only thing that’s left for me of all the features is the regular file search. And even there, I am slightly disappointed that it’s not even able to index pdf documents. Looks like the developers were very focused on Microsoft apps here.
Will future versions of the desktop search offer support for other mail clients, web browsers or even non MS Office documents? What if Google offered an API for the tool, which allowed developers to publish their own extensions? How long would it take for the Mozilla community to build a plugin to search the Mozilla/Firefox cache, or Thunderbird mails? With the toolbar, Google never offered an official version that worked with anything else than Internet Explorer, although there surely was quite some demand among webmasters. Will they change this approach with the toolbar, or will they continue to push Microsoft’s products?
While Google board member and investor John Doerr recently said the Google Browser was not going to happen, the search giant surprised the net once again today by releasing the beta version of the Google Desktop Search. This handy tool keeps an index of local files that can then be searched via the normal Google front end in the web browser. As soon as it is installed, Google offers another tab, called ‘Desktop’, which will display results from local files. Also, these results will be integrated with regular web search results. With this application Google has proved how well they can integrate a local search with their existing services. This is very well done, and an aggressive push into Microsofts territory - the users desktop.
An extensive review can be found here
Yahoo has some interesting job openings for engineers and scientists, and they wrote about that in their blog. So anyone interested in a job in the search industry might consider checking these out.