SEO:Search

Blogs were a buzz on Friday after speculation surfaced that IAC/InterActiveCorp (Ask.com’s parent company) were planning on dumping Teoma, the Ask.com’s search engine, in favor of Google’s search results. The rumors first appeared via Peter Kafka’s post on Silicon Valley Insider, where he shared this comment from an apparent “insider”:

Is Ask.com Surrendering To Google?

There is indeed a big shakeup coming. A new Ask. Some think a reduction in workforce is likely. There are no sacred cows, Teoma may be sold or simply abandoned which is hundreds of engineers who work on the core search engine, in place of just using Google’s search with our special brand of user interface.

With the rumors believed to be the cause of a 7% decline in IAC’s share price on Friday, the search world waited with bated breath for confirmation from the IAC ranks on the speculation.

Alas, it was not forthcoming. In fact, the opposite happened, with a source close to the matter reporting to Reuters that the blog report was “incorrect”.

Silicon Valley Insider was quick with their “right of reply” suggesting that if the rumors were incorrect, that Ask.com should consider dumping Teoma nonetheless. And given that the all speculation thus far has been from undisclosed “sources”, SVI added the following quip to their update post:

Not clear whether IAC has finally reached a decision on Teoma or whether our source has fresher information (or is hallucinating).

Given the time and money Ask.com has invested in its search technology, it would be a surprising move to dump Teoma now. That said, all Ask’s re-engineering and marketing still hasn’t bridged the gap between the former Search Engine Butler and Google.

Perhaps it’s a case of cutting costs - and conceding “if you can’t beat em, join em”.

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Rumors are rife that Ask could be considering handing over its search operations to Google and consequently downsizing it’s engineering team, reports Silicon Alley Insider. Ask might be thinking about abandoning or selling its Teoma search engine in favor of Google, There is indeed a big shakeup coming.

Will Ask Switch To Google And Lay Off A 100?

A new Ask. Some think a reduction in workforce is likely, informs an unnamed inside source. There are no sacred cows, Teoma may be sold or simply abandoned which is hundreds of engineers who work on the core search engine, in place of just using Google’s search with our special brand of user interface.

There is projection of a big shakeup coming up. If the rumor does turn out to be true and Ask does go ahead with the changes, then a downsizing measure could make about a 100 layoffs inevitable. The layoffs are predicted for April and there aren’t any sacred cows as well.

This fallout could be a bad one for Ask’s engineers, but perhaps good news for IAC. One of the favorite public statements of Barry Diller, CEO, IAC, is, while Ask has a great technology, it has done a bad job of marketing it. Ask and others like Yahoo have spent quite a lot of money to catch up with Goliath Google, but in vain. Ask’s shareholders being a witness to these developments would have thought it to be best if Ask had taken this step much earlier.

Recently, Ask has seen some good growth in the number of people querying the engine, see: Ask.com Grows 20% In January.

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Yahoo! has guys like Jeremy Zawodny marketing their fresh new search platform, and yet they remain behind the competition. Microsoft jumped into the search field way later than Yahoo! did, so why is it that Microsoft rankings for well promoted sites often roughly track Google rankings, while Yahoo!..

Yahoo! Search Lag Google & Microsoft in Ranking Newer Websites

…still has yet to give many of these sites an opportunity to rank?

Here are some examples of what I am talking about (with URLs expunged to protect the guilty)…

A couple year old site that was lingering about with a few inbound links and was promoted last November. Notice how quickly both Google and Microsoft took to the marketing, whereas Yahoo is still nowhere to be found

Here is a site that was promoted from brand new. Notice how Google and Microsoft are trending toward trusting it more and more, while Yahoo! Search occasionally picks it up and then spits it back out again

Here is yet another newish site that Microsoft loves and Google is starting to like more and more. Yahoo! is still nowhere to be found

If you had to pick the 1,000 most competitive keywords on the web I think all 3 of the above would fall in that group. I could list numerous other example sites as well. All the above sites have been in the Yahoo! Directory for at least 4 months. Even with new sites and a moderate amount of targeted promotion it is not that hard to work your way up into Google and Microsoft’s rankings, but Yahoo usually ignores it.

I have highlighted that Yahoo! Search has their domain authority score overemphasized in their relevancy algorithms, which causes a lot of parasitic SEO to dominate their search results, but do they even care?

Can you rank a new site in Yahoo! for terms like insurance without getting it nuked in Google? What makes Yahoo! so much slower at ranking new sites than the other major search engines?

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Google released Google Sites, allowing you or a whole team to build websites with documents, photos, presentations and more. This new service, which was spawned from the Google-acquired JotSpot suite, just works with a Google Apps account, though. If you dont have a Google Apps account, try signing up for one.

Google Sites Launched

If you have one, log-in to your domain management dashboard and click the Add more services link, where you can then add Sites.

Creating a site

When you create a site, youll first configure site title, topics, theme and more. Im creating a dummy site for Samplonia Incs software downloads. Once saved, the page is (optionally) public on an address like
sites.google.com/a/outer-court.com/samplonia….

Editing pages on the site

If youre logged in to Google as administrator, then you will see an Edit button above pages (among other buttons, none of which appear for normal visitors). Hitting the wiki-style Edit button transforms the page youre looking at into a what-you-see-is-sort-of-what-you-get editor. Nothing so far is revolutionary as similar content management systems have been around for many years (the press release, in true press release style, makes you think Google just invented the wheel), but the implementation is quite usable.

Admin view

Admin view while editing

What the visitor sees

When you create a new page, you can select from different page types (web page, dashboard, announcements, file cabinet, and list), and each type may have more sub-types (e.g. a list can consist of action items, issues, a unit status, or a custom list). Using a list -> issues page, Ive created a todo list for the sample site.

Creating a todo list using the list page type

Many more options are available from Google Sites. Theres:

• the ability for editors in the team to add comments to a page
• the ability to add attachments to a page
• an automated site map, showing the hierarchy of your sites pages
• an alert feature you can subscribe to, sending you an email when the page changed
• a revision history for pages so you can see what was changed on a page in the past
• the ability to customize the sidebar, e.g. by adding a countdown widget
• a built-in site search which doesnt include the usual lags of having Googlebot index the site first
• sharing options for the site, with an interface similar to the sharing tab of Google Docs
• customization options for fonts and colors, as well as the ability to change the theme later on
• and more…

Google also presents a couple of use-cases so you can see what can be done with Google Sites.

The feedback so far

Some of the early comments Google Sites received in the forum were mixed. Ben says, Im so disappointed that its just for creating intranets, and is not after all a replacement for the very basic Google Pages. He adds: I also wish it was a public wiki rather than a private wiki ” i.e. I wish people could sign-up themselves, without having to be invited, and could view edit history without having to login.

Beussery notes that Google still seems to be fixing bugs right now. Pau Toms comments that Google Sites needs more integration with the other Google Apps. For example offering a list of the available Docs when inserting into the document instead of having to paste the URL of the doc. David Mulder wonders why people call Google Sites a wiki, as he considers it more of an advanced intranet tool.

Elsewhere at the Google Operating System blog, Simon comments (line breaks removed): Ive given Sites a try and it looks as easy as using Blogger. As usual, Google is starting simple but therell be more to come Im sure. Weve used Blogger for a community organisation which doesnt have a lot of web expertise but Sites may be the way to go for collaborative content generation. Meanwhile, Im wondering if theres potential for a family intranet. And Ephilei wonders: So will this be a total replacement for the Google Page Creator which hasnt seen an update in about a year?

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch argues Google Sites is a relaunch of JotSpot which took 16 month. He says it may not be a SharePoint killer yet, but that Google Apps constitutes 2-3% of Googles total revenues. Some point soon, its going to start hurting Microsoft.

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The Santa Clara Convention Center has come to life as the Search Marketing Expo was declared open. All the attendees have their eyes set on covering fundamental and basic issues, the latest happenings and forward-looking keynotes from leading authorities in search marketing and technologies.

SMX West, February 2008, Day 1

Session: Opening Keynote by Danny Sullivan: Search 3.0, Search 4.0 & Beyond

Danny begins by emphasizing how the times have changed since the first generation of search or the Search 1.0. The period was a cakewalk as it was dependent on the location and frequency of search terms. As of now the age of Search 2.0, in which the links do enhance the democratic nature of search, though the system is still fraught with manipulation. Google leads in Search 4.0 aka personalized search. While attempts to include the social search haven’t been a hit, but social media simply can’t be ignored and assures everyone that there’s no need to be scared of it. Social media helps in building links, increases visibility and influences reputation. SEO is on a growth path and there’s a need for PR efforts, SEO case studies and to resolve complaints.

Session: The Blended Search Revolution

The Blended Search track at SMX West, has on the panel David Bailey from Google, Cris Pierry from Yahoo! and Raju Malhotra from MSN Live Search.

Hosting the panel is Vanessa fox, the ask.com representative has not arrived as yet so she begins by showing off the Ask User Interface. David Bailey speaks of Google fulfilling its primary mission of Universal search. Says that it was simply web results earlier but now we have the blogs, images, news, code and the best part is that all of it is available from one search box, rather than using many vertical engines.

She now shows the latest releases on the Universal search from Google

• There are now the local business review snippets within search results
• There’s a list of ten local businesses for if you run a broad query in the serps
• A increased number of videos from external sites are displayed in the serps
• There are more number of pictures with triggering on the long tail
• Books too are grouped for the topical queries, mostly at the bottom
• There’s a comprehensive blending of which is more than just being at the bottom of serps
• There are also universal blends for the international audience, other than Google USA
• A growing diversity on the page is the overall theme

How does it all work?

There’s an increase in the diversity amongst the search results, gives the example of Ella Fitzgerald, users are searching for a whole array of results. The universal search works by searching all Google indexes and only then collect the data, use it for better ranking. The query is sent to several vertical engines and the results returned are then compiled with the help of a ranking algorithm to show the results and in which places.

There are a couple of challenges like the capacity to expand, optimize the big infrastructure. Rank compares to apples and oranges. Like in the (Green Bay Packers ) & (Kentucky Fried Chicken), where should it go to the local results or the web results. Apparently, looks like the web results, but need to notice the whole text as ‘green bay’ and ‘Packers.’ So Google has the task of handling the situation to make the results relevant.

Google makes use of the PageRank, phrase matches, anchors etc, other indicators as the freshness, users’ ratings, TOC matches etc, the universal search is all about technology.

So whats next with universal search

• Enhancing the relevance
• Ramping up the new categories blogs, Images
• Enabling users exploration the the universal search

Where would search engine optimization land up?

• The web results are indeed the main results at Google, but the universal search is to complement this listing, but the normal webmaster guidelines still apply.
• SEO for Images requires publishing high quality images on the high rank tagged images.
• Videos search engine optimization, use sitemaps at the Webmaster Console and tell Google about the contents of the video.
• Product search requires you to submit your feeds to Google Base/Product.
• For blogs, the quality needs to be high

Sean Suchter from Yahoo’s search

He explains that Yahoo! focuses more at the placements of shortcuts at the same time finding out what information the users need to answer their search query. At Yahoo! there’s a great deal of content in music, movie, pictures from Flickr etc, videos, local business results, maps. There’s also the capacity to fine tune the restaurant search by location city visitor guides, hotels by chains location. Lots of info about one of a kind hotels. A category for consumer electronics, health etc.

A quick presentation by Cris about Yahoos SearchMonkey (yahoos open search platform ) is shown.

Next up is Raju Malhotra the director, product management for Live Search, Microsoft

He feels that the blended search this the first step to the internet and information that being hunted for. At Microsoft, the favorite means of researching is to simply camp out with the users and monitor their search behavior, and the info being hunted for. They’ve found that users search in three primary ways.

• They want an answer to a specific question, eg. weather, directions, traffic, etc.
• The users searching in the discovery mode, eg. research and shopping
• Users exploring, surfing through the search, eg. entertainment, music, hobbies, videos, etc.

He moves ahead with an example snow reports and searching for info on ski shops. He figures out ‘one click’ directions in examples of blended searches at Microsoft.

What are the implications for the SEO perspective. the local searches have a big share of 33%. If a person searches for a ski shop in San Jose, you’d want to be #1. one way to better your rank is to feature in the business listing in built in the Microsoft webmaster dashboard. A huge proportion (80%) of online shoppers start off with product search queries. Microsoft allows users to upload the whole of the product catalog so as to help users find the whole range of products available.

Session: Search Marketing & Persona Models

Gord Hotchkiss begins by asking how many people are using personas at present? Only a handful do. Why do people use personas at all? Before 1992 the emotions were removed from neurology and psychology, there’s a whole lot of emotions that affect decisions, and personas help you to cash in on those factors lying beneath. The factors which offer something more than the rationally considered ones. People manage reward, risk, emotion, knowledge in decision making. But way humans interact with search engines in very similar ways. The decisions move through from being broad and narrow down to specifics. So the intent of wording coupled with size, placement of images determines how the actions are taken.

Persona is akin to a character of the brand that’s constructed to target the audience that could use a site or a product. If you have a marketing persona it will create empathy and integrate the emotional part of people, which is so much used in decision-making.

To create a marketing persona you’d need to research the demographics followed by brainstorming and documenting it. Things that would prevent you from doing well in creating the persona are the stereotypes, perfectionist attitude and uncommon words. Once you’re through with building the persona you need to measure, review and alter it accordingly. The personas act a stand-ins for your users, you’d need to draft your message to communicate with users and make a write a text for their needs and wants. There’s a caveat that you shouldn’t trust the data gathered from research too much, because you need to act on what actually people do rather than what they tell you they’d do.

Session: Defending Your Paid Search Budget Against New Ad Fads

First up is Brian Combs, he begins by emphasizing that while defending things, budget isn’t the only thing, and more of it is about time. Time for price comparison among second-tier search engines as also for testing new keywords, ad copy variants, new landing pages, etc. Understanding of your numbers is important, this includes some precise metrics and analytics, cost per lead, cost per acquisition, cost of different kinds of paid search and ROI.

This helps to showcase a clearly spelled out definition of success, you need to educate the site’s stakeholders. The focus should be on the biggest ROI drivers so as to maximize ROI across different. When you evaluate the programs you need to present stats. The advancement in paid search such as the geotargetted ads, mobile ads, video ads, local ads, etc simply can’t be ignored. Stats reveal that the global paid search revenue would be hitting a $30.5 billion mark. And it had gone up by 48 percent last year. The paid search advertisers have experienced an ROI in the range of 15 to 20 times of the investments made.

Session: The Economics of Search

Chris Sherman begins by briefing about why the session is taking place at all. He asserts while, many SEMs know about marketing side but aren’t aware of the other part and that is what the engines think about, and make money?

First to surface is Michael Schwarz, he talks about the future of sponsored search. And that the primary competitors of Google and Yahoo! in the sponsored search are the organic listings. In short people click on the sponsored search listings because organic search isn’t good. The interests of both the advertisers and search engines are for the most part same. All are important, maximizing the value delivered to users and advertisers and maximizing the search engine’s profits. Sponsored search is faced with some major challenges, such as that of making it more relevant, including better measures of the user experience, better targeting and lacking tools for advertisers.

When you bid on AdWords, it you need to bid on real search behavior, should use long-tail keywords, consider the cost per conversion compared to the value per acquisition. Also the bid should continue until the value per click is equals the incremental cost per click.

Moreover, you would want to consider cross subsidization as well. Try making deals with low profits or margins now, to be able to grow in the future ahead. Google will not be left untouched by recession, this is so because as people would purchase less they’d also search less.

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Yahoo announced the launch of Yahoo! Search Experience, a 3rd party development platform to enable websites to include more information in Yahoo! search results.This new scheme looks pretty cool and seems to be somewhat of a competing service to Googles Universal Search / Local Search / etc.

Yahoo! Search to offer an open search platform

Check out the screenshot on the Y! blog - basically it means your Yahoo! search results could include more features and deep links to your site, including reviews, photos, contact details and price information.

From the Yahoo! blog:

Because the platform is open it gives all Web site owners ” big or small ” an opportunity to present more useful information on the Yahoo! Search page as compared to what is presented on other search engines. Site owners will be able to provide all types of additional information about their site directly to Yahoo! Search. So instead of a simple title, abstract and URL, for the first time users will see rich results that incorporate the massive amount of data buried in websites ” ratings and reviews, images, deep links, and all kinds of other useful data ” directly on the Yahoo! Search results page.

Not only is this an interesting (and pretty clever) move from Yahoo!, it also indicates a shift for the future of search and search engine optimisation.  I love the revised look for the Y! search results - I think this rolled out to the live SERPs would be a great change for Yahoo! and will most likely force the hand of MSN and Google who will need to keep up (although in fairness, Google has led the way in the past with new features like this).

It will take a bold step from any search engine to make the move from old school SERPs to new SERPs - Google have gone some of the way over the past year or two, but having been playing it relatively safe by keeping everything under the beta banner.

More doors opened though, means more ways for people to spam!  I know Google Local do keep a tight control of data that powers local results in listings - but thats just a few big sites providing most of the information, with loads of small sites providing a small proportion of the listings.  By allowing webmasters to dictate so much data that will be reflected in live SERPs, Yahoo! could be setting themselves up for a lot of work to keep a solid level of quality control over the process. 

A lot of work?  Yes, but I do think it is entirely within the realms of any of the big search engines to manage this well - and I also really do think they should do it.  

For SEOs it could make for an interesting future.  More data to play with + more control over SERPs = great for us.  But think about it:  more data on page 1 = less people browsing to page 2 (or even to below the fold on page 1).  Where title tags influence click through rates now, user reviews, contact details and other supplementary information might influence CTR in the future.

Not a bad thing, but certainly may offer a larger challenge for the Internet marketing community.  What do you reckon?

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Yahoo originally helped the Chinese government to jail dissidents, but after receiving public blame they now show regrets and push for release of dissidents. In their blog they write: Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will travel to Beijing next week to discuss a wide range of political issues with senior Chinese officials.

Yahoo Pushes for Dissident Release

With deep appreciation for the power of diplomacy and government-to-government engagement on human rights issues, we believe we have a window of opportunity for freedom. Yesterday, -Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang- sent a letter to Secretary Rice urging the State Departments continued assistance in securing the release of Shi Tao, Wang Xiaoning, and other political dissidents imprisoned for expressing their views online.

-Jerry Yang- pressed for continued government assistance in advocating for the release of dissidents. Over the past two years, legal and policy executives at Yahoo! have met with -non-government organizations- to discuss strategies for securing the release of political dissidents. Weve also met with senior Chinese officials and asked directly for the release of Mr. Shi and Mr. Wang. We understand our responsibilities, and we take them with the utmost seriousness. We also recognize the practical limits of corporate diplomacy, especially next to the powerful advocacy tools available to governments. We believe governments have the most leverage to influence the decision-making of other governments.

The stakes ” personal freedom ” are high for those unfairly imprisoned and for their families. This is one reason weve established a Human Rights Fund to provide humanitarian and legal support for these dissidents, as well as for their families. The Fund will be administered by noted dissident Harry Wu ” who spent nineteen years in a Chinese labor camp ” through his Laogai Research Foundation.

Wikipedia has more on the Shi Tao case, writing:

On April 20, 2004, the Chinese government released the Number 11 document A notice concerning the work for maintaining stability (”). In the document, it warned journalists that overseas pro-democracy Chinese dissidents may come back to mainland China during the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Protests of 1989 on June 4th, which would affect the politico-social orders stability. It asked all news media to not report anything regarding the so-called June 4th event, Falun Gong or people calling for politico-social change. Shi used his private Yahoo! email account and sent a brief of the document to an overseas web site called Asia Democracy Foundation.

When the Chinese government found out, it demanded the senders personal information from Yahoo!s Hong Kong office. Yahoo! turned the information over without asking what it was for. Shortly thereafter, Shi Tao was detained on November 24, 2004. The Chinese authorities confiscated his computer and documents without showing any proper permit or document, and warned his family members not to talk about it with others. He was formally arrested on December 14.

His lawyer, Guo Guoting (), famous for taking human rights cases, stated that the search and seizure and subsequent arrest were illegal. As a result, his license to practice law was suspended for one year by Shanghais Department of Law. He was later put under house arrest, and one of his co-workers had to take over the case.

In 2005, Shi Tao was sentenced to 10 years.

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According to comScore data released today, Ask.com had the biggest jump in search queries. By that measurement, Ask had more growth than Google, MSN, or Yahoo last month (January 2008) compared to the prior months volume. Ask has a small piece of search market share but they have been a leader in universal search.

Underdog Ask.com Grows 20% in January

That is, they integrate search results for more than web sites - but for images, video, local information, news, blogs, and other media. Ask got further into social media integration with their recently launched social news aggregation site BigNews.

Of course, Ask occupies a tiny sliver of the overall search volume. Heres the breakdown on the top 4 search engines:

• Google Sites - 7.7 billion searches (comScore says Google got 58.4% of searches in January)
• Yahoo! - almost 2.5 billion searches
• Microsoft - 1.1 billion searches
• AOL - 903 million searches
• Ask.com - under 500 million searches and about 4% of the market

Ask.com Facts from Ross Dunn at StepForth:

• They dont have a nofollow on any of their links
• Local businesses can submit their business manually to Asks local portal AskCity. If youre not included and want to be, you have to send an email request.
• Ask owns blog reader Bloglines and they rank blogs partly based on their popularity on Bloglines.

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Following-up a story we first discussed in October, Google has announced the first patients to start testing Google Health. The pilot project to be announced Thursday will involve 1,500 to 10,000 patients at the Cleveland Clinic who volunteered to an electronic transfer of their personal health records…

Worried About Google Healths Privacy?

…so they can be retrieved through Googles new service, which wont be open to the general public.Each health profile, including information about prescriptions, allergies and medical histories, will be protected by a password thats also required to use other Google services such as e-mail and personalized search tools.

And with the announcement, we have all kinds of scary stories about lack of privacy and security that comes with Google taking hold of your health records.

Heres just a selection of the concerns CNN reports:

the health venture also will provide more fodder for privacy watchdogs who believe Google already knows too much about the interests and habits of its users as its computers log their search requests and store their e-mail discussions.

-Google Health isnt- covered by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA

-Google Health makes- it easier for the government or some other legal adversary to obtain the information

Normally Marketing Pilgrim would be the first to point out the downsides to any online service like this. But, heres the thing that doomsday predictors seem to forget. This is an opt-in service. If you dont want Google to have access to your medical records, dont give it to them!

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Remember when we told you about Googles plans to pledge profits and stock to its philanthropic arm Google.org? Remember when we told you that Eric Schmidt saw huge opportunity in India? Remember when Google told us that Google.org was really a screen so that it could find talented workers in growing countries?

Google.org + India = Master Plan

OK, we dont remember that part either, but that seems to be part of Googles master plan for Google.org.

As both Reuters and AP report, Google is teaming-up with George Soros to pump $17 million into a venture that will fund small and medium (SME) businesses in India.

The Soros Economic Development Fund, the Omidyar Network and Google.org said the venture would make investments of between $500,000 and $3.5 million in small and medium businesses in India that lacked access to formal funding options.

Long ignored by commercial capital markets, small and medium businesses are an attractive investment opportunity as well as an engine for economic growth, Neal DeLaurentis, vice president of Soros Economic Development Fund, was cited as saying.

While you thought Google.org would focus only on health, energy and environment, its busy tapping into the talented, under-paid workers of developing countries.

Woohooohaha!

P.S. We dont really think this is evil in any way, but we needed to make this kind of dull news sound interesting.

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