Recently in Search

Just a thought: Google is lame. I mean, Google is great - search for the most part, Gmail, Google maps, and tons of other useful, nearly indispensable stuff... but at the same time, I think that the mantra of Larry and Sergey of "Don't be evil" doesn't hold up anymore, and that in the sprawl of what they are doing (web browsers, high speed Internet access, applications, social networking, etc.) they have really dropped the ball on SEARCH. When they started, yes, we needed to know where the website of a thing we were looking for was, and let's face it, Google worked at that better than anyone at the time. A few years later, a lot has changed on the web, but Google's main search really hasn't. I am really tired of finding 3 or 5 or 7 year old websites for topics where new things are much more relevant. And tired of not finding stuff that sometimes appears (like Twitter results) and sometimes doesn't - based on what? We never know, because too much of what Google does is still secret. Which is sort of a crock anyway - what they did, follow text links to their relevant sites and then rank those sites as most probable to be about what the text link says, is really no big deal (not to diminish the technology and the fact that yes, they made it work). Webmasters and SEOs have been pulling their hair out over this secret formula/algorithm for years - it is a whole industry unto itself now - but for what, really? If your site is relevant, live, legitimate, and people link to it and come to it, unless you have screwed something else up royally, you should be just fine in all matter of search engines after a period of time. In the end, 99% of the other crap webmasters worry about (how many h2 tags does this page have?) is crap.

So what is my point? Google search needs to change - they need to change their results more often, refreshen the index more, give new and news site more credence, and at some point and for some topics they need to admit that the "algorithm" does not know all and do some human, qualitative analysis of their search results. And stuff like Twitter results and in the future perhaps Facebook, etc. (anywhere that is as important as those sites are to millions of web users) should be at the top of the page as an option for a user to search or not - not show up when Google feels like it.

Keep developing, keep striving, but don't forget what brought you to the dance.

There is a good article up on the increasingly relevant WebProNews site about using press releases: How Press Releases Can Be Great For Search

It includes this handy list, which should be indispensable for all web marketers:

- Business Wire
- PR Newswire
- PRWeb
- 24-7 Press Release
- PR Zoom
- PR Leap
- I-Newswire
- Webwire
- ClickPress
- PR.com
- PR Log
- eReleases
- MarketWire

WebProNews asks: "Can You "Rank" in Google if Everyone Has Different Search Results?"

Answer - I don't want to. I don't want everyone's searched customized - I don't want my searches customized! I want to know what the best, most relevant site is - but I don't want it influenced by each and every person in the world! This has always been an issue for me with Google. I would love to see Google results more qualitative (from a human editorial standpoint) and fresher (I hate searching for an event or something newsworthy and constantly getting things from 3, 4 or 5 years ago - that is ridiculous) - but I want Google to do that. With all the money they make, why can't they let some real people make some editorial decisions? I think they need to stay relevant.

But - what I don't want, is every person in the world getting a different, customized result based on their own past behavior. I can't see how in the long term this doesn't end up making individual searches less relevant, as all you are doing with your searches (by what you eventually click on) will be preaching to the converted (you!). How will you then break out of your own habits and find things that are new?

Anyway - I think this is a can of worms for Google and that letting people opt out of it is disingenuous - they know that 90% of users have no idea how to do anything other than point and click - configuring their Google settings isn't going to happen...

Yeah - RIGHT! Good luck with that....

There's a chance that the content produced by the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and a number of other important organizations will soon become impossible to find using Google. Rupert Murdoch indicated in a recent interview that News Corp. may block search engines...

Finally, in response to a question regarding why News Corp. doesn't just block search engines, Murdoch said, "Well, I think we will..."

Full article and video here. Notice how this is quoted by SkyNews... which Murdoch conveniently, you know - what's the word I'm looking for... OWNS.

Look - this is pure crap. And if he really believes he can live without Google, Bing, Yahoo!, etc. he is really out of touch. No one is going to pony up for this stuff. What value does any of his properties add? If anything, his news ops are marginalized now by their political alignments. I for one would be happy to have his crap publications deleted from my search results as it is.

This is really too funny - some Microsoft employee ran a test last weekend to see what search engine was more relevant... that soon devolved into a mess. But this quote from the pollster is priceless:

Indeed, Kordahi eventually yanked all the poll results altogether, complaining about "some douche gaming the system."

It really is pretty amazing that these captains of industry and masters of the universe will stoop to, on all sides.

The Wolfram|Alpha search engine launches on May 9th...Here is a nice article from h+ that breaks down how it all works:

Despite his disclaimer, Wolfram|Alpha looks like a search engine, in that there's a one-line box where you type in a question. The output appears a second or two later, as a page of text and graphics below the box. What's happening behind the scenes? Rather than looking up the answer to your question, Wolfram|Alpha figures out what your question means, looks up the necessary data to answer your question, computes an answer, designs a page to present the answer in a pleasing way, and sends the page back to your computer.

Let me give three random examples. If you enter the query, "3/26/2009 + 90 days" you'll get a page that gives a date ninety days later than the first date. If you enter "mt. everest height length of golden gate" you'll get a page expressing the height of Mount Everest as a multiple of the length of the Golden Gate Bridge. If you enter "temperature in los gatos," you'll get something like the current temperature, a graph of the temperatures over the last week with projections for the next few days, and a graph of the temperatures over the last year.

There is also a podcast with Stephen Wolfram that gets a bit deeper into the science behind the new service.

Many moons ago, I led the creation of a faceted search system across IBM's PC catalog. Along the way, we experimented with different user experiences. I ran across an article this morning on Designing for faceted search. The salient points are contained below:

• DON'T go crazy with facets. Information overload is bad enough in general--don't add to it by presenting users with 15 different facets. That is hardly "narrowing," and users will generally not scroll too far down beyond the initial screen to locate your more obscure facets. But how do you make sure your facets are focused and helpful?
• DO base facets on key use cases and known user access patterns. A little bit of research goes a long way in identifying key ways users navigate and search your site. Analyzing search logs, evaluating competitor sites, and user research and testing are great ways to figure out what key access points users are looking for. Interviewing as few as 10 users will often give you great insight into what the facet structure should be. Don't skimp on that upfront research; you'll thank yourself later as you continuously refer back to that data while you configure your taxonomy and search engine.
• DO order facets and values based on importance. That might sound obvious, but a lot of sites get it wrong. Not all facets are created equal: Some access points are more important than others depending on what users are doing and where they are in the site. Give them top billing because only the first few will be visible on page load. Same goes for values: Most faceted search engines will allow you to order values based on number of items in that category. This is almost always a better bet than alphabetical ordering, because it dynamically presents the most popular items at the top. When determining order for navigation, again think about your users and why they are coming to your site: Don't obscure the big-play items in an alpha scheme.
• DO leverage the tool to show and hide facets and values. While the free or low-cost faceted search tools don't all offer those configuration options, more sophisticated faceted search solutions allow you to create rules to progressively disclose facets. Think of a site offering online greeting cards. While the visual theme of the card--teddy bears, a sunset, golf--might eventually be important to a user, it probably isn't the first place they will start their search. They will likely begin with occasion (birthday, Christmas), or recipient (father, friend), and then become interested in themes further down the line. Accordingly, we might hide the "themes" facet until a user has selected an occasion or recipient. You can selectively present facets based on your understanding of your users and their typical search patterns (as mentioned in the previous "do").

If you are wondering how the Digg algorithm works, a good place to start is right here.

Specifically I think these are the most salient facts to consider:

• Voting is the dominant component.


• Timing of the votes matter.


• Who submitted the content by domain and submitter.

Amazon sent out an email today and announced inside their affiliate program pages the following:

Change to Amazon Associates program

After careful review of how we are investing our advertising resources, we have made the decision to no longer pay referral fees to Associates who send users to www.amazon.com, www.amazon.ca, or www.endless.com through keyword bidding and other paid search on Google, Yahoo, MSN, and other search engines, and their extended search networks. If you're not sure if this change affects you, please visit this page for FAQs.

There is more to it but I am sure you can find the rest in the news. It may not seem like a big deal, but I am sure that it could put a certain number of people virtually out of business. Key word bidding on certain retail items is both science and art - and Amazon's decision, at this stage of the recession, is pretty curious. Do they feel the Google has their merchandise covered well enough that they are throwing money away paying these affiliates? Or do they plan on advertising themselves more? Either way I am sure it came as a shock to some SE marketers who may have seen a big chunk of their business disappear in an instant. I am sure lawsuits will follow.

If you ever wanted to know what your online competition is paying for keywords and adwords, check out SpyFu.com.

Here is a quick snapshot of what ebay is paying:

You can also search by keyword to see how much certain words will cost you... pretty cool.

Here are a few interesting viewpoints on why Alpha wont be a google killer, but a new kind of service that can function side by side.

This is from Doug Lenat - I was positively impressed with Wolfram Alpha:

At one extreme is, say, Google, which responds to almost anything like a faithful puppy bringing in the morning newspaper without understanding much of anything it's fetching (recognizing words in what it returns, often leading to amusing or hair-raising inappropriate "ads" being displayed, and leading to tons of false positives and false negatives). At the other extreme is, say, Cyc, which only can answer a small fraction of user queries, but can answer ones that require common sense (not just common sense queries like "Do surgeons often operate on themselves?", but ones where the logical application of such knowledge is required to correctly disambiguate and parse the user's query containing pronouns, elisions, ambiguous words, ellipsis, and so on) and where every piece of the query and every piece of the answer is as deeply understood as, say, arithmetic. Wolfram Alpha is somewhere around the geometric mean of those two extremes.

And this is from Physorg.com:

"Wolfram Alpha, at its heart, is quite different from a brute force statistical search engine like Google," Spivack said. "And it is not going to replace Google - it is not a general search engine," he said, adding that content sites like Wikipedia are more similar to Alpha than Google is.

"You would probably not use Wolfram Alpha to shop for a new car, find blog posts about a topic, or to choose a resort for your honeymoon," he said. "It is not a system that will understand the nuances of what you consider to be the perfect romantic getaway, for example - there is still no substitute for manual human-guided search for that. Where it appears to excel is when you want facts about something, or when you need to compute a factual answer to some set of questions about factual data."

Wolframalpha.com goes live May 9th... make sure to check it out. My first query will be "who am I?" - second query - "how did I get here?"

Google Chrome has a new beta. I have been using Chrome and have come to like many of the features..One of my favorites is the landing page with my most visited sites..Im lazy so it makes it easy for me to see my bookmarks. I plan on giving it a spin. This is what the official Chrome blog claims

The best thing about this new beta is speed -- it's 25% faster on our V8 benchmark and 35% faster on the Sunspider benchmark than the current stable channel version and almost twice as fast when compared to our original beta version.

This week we will be discussing wolframalpha.com.The next big thing in search... or so it seems.

Wolframalpha.com is a "computational knowledge engine", basically its an answer engine and not a search engine. What that means is instead of searching the way we do today by entering a query into google like "what is pi", this technology will allow you to ask "what is the 10,000th digit of pi", so the query is a computation as opposed to a lookup.

Whats behind wolframalpha.com is "trillions of pieces of curated data and millions of lines of algorithms."

This is from twine.com:

Wolfram Alpha is a system for computing the answers to questions. To accomplish this it uses built-in models of fields of knowledge, complete with data and algorithms, that represent real-world knowledge.

For example, it contains formal models of much of what we know about science -- massive amounts of data about various physical laws and properties, as well as data about the physical world.

Based on this you can ask it scientific questions and it can compute the answers for you. Even if it has not been programmed explicity to answer each question you might ask it.

But science is just one of the domains it knows about -- it also knows about technology, geography, weather, cooking, business, travel, people, music, and more.

It also has a natural language interface for asking it questions. This interface allows you to ask questions in plain language, or even in various forms of abbreviated notation, and then provides detailed answers.

The vision seems to be to create a system wich can do for formal knowledge (all the formally definable systems, heuristics, algorithms, rules, methods, theorems, and facts in the world) what search engines have done for informal knowledge (all the text and documents in various forms of media).

Isn't this askjeeves.com on HGH? I'm skeptical that this is in anyway a google killer, but I can see its relevance... let's see how the week progresses as we dive into this one.

Google is leaving no stone unturned in the monetization of the web. They are soon rolling out "interest" based advertising (more here) and this morning AdSense publishers got an email from the big G with some details outlining privacy policy changes.

The text of the email is below the fold.

A few weeks ago, Fast held its annual user conference in Las Vegas with the big announcement that they where going to have a specific version of their ESP product for Sharepoint. A good overview has been written up by Jim Atkins at Personal Computing World. What I found interesting what this last bit:

"Potentially there are quiet smiles in Autonomy right now, because Microsoft appears to be emphasising Fast for SharePoint rather than Fast as an enterprise tool," Byrne said. "From a marketing perspective it's almost as if they're taking it downmarket."

Koenigsbauer was at pains to reassure existing Fast customers that Microsoft would continue to support Fast products. However, if Microsoft is intent on widening Fast ESP's appeal, and even making Fast ESP the de facto search tool for SharePoint as many commentators suggest, then some traditional Fast customers may be beginning to feel nervous.

"Fast users of old have made big investments in the technology and use it on an enterprise scale. Many of them aren't going to be SharePoint houses, so where does this move leave them?" argued Richmond.

I just don't get this bit. Fast also announced that they where going to have a product called Fast ESP for Internet Business. So why would people think they are moving downmarket? And why would traditional Fast customers feel nervous about it?