Doing math through a search engine isn’t new. One of Google’s earliest parlor tricks was allowing people to enter math problems into its search box and get answers. Indeed, I use it for this more than my pocket calculator, these days.

Want to know 345,567 / 23? Enter that into Google, and you get back the answer: 15,024.6522:

You can do a wide range of functions using the Google Calculator. That “More about calculator” link in the screenshot above unfortunately takes you to this entirely unhelpful page. Instead, read this page buried in the Google help files to discover how the Google Calculator can do trigonometric functions, logarithms and factorials.

Fancy! But how about dealing with lowly fractions? Last night, I was dealing with problems like these:

56 2/3 * 3 1/2

I thought I was explaining how to do them right, as we worked through the homework exercises. But was there a quick way to double check? Well, I tried Google and got back:

For those who can’t see the screenshot above, that was:

(56 2/3) * (3 1/2) = 198.333333

That’s correct in decimal form, but the exercise required the product to be expressed as mixed fractions.  You know, a whole number followed by any fractional amount. C’mon, we all remember that.

I know that Bing also does math, so I tried things over there. I got back:

Again, for the screenshot-challenged, Bing processed my calculation like this:

56*2/3*3*1/2 = 56

Instead of doing fractions, Bing made some odd assumptions that I just wanted to multiple or divide the numbers that were next to each other. So, I tried it another way:

(56 2/3) * (3 1/2)

That just gave me a bigger mess:

And the text version:

(562/3)*(31/2) = 2,903.666667

This time, the space between the whole number and the start of the fraction was removed, completely changing what I entered.

NOTE: From a comment below, entering the calculation as (56 + (2/3)) * (3 + (1/2)) would have worked at Bing!

For those who want to read more about Bing’s calculator, see the Bing help page here. It can do a lot of functions even if it didn’t get mixed fractions multiplication right.

By the way, Bing does do fractions better than Google — that is, if you want a simple fraction expressed. Consider this:

300/35

On Google, that’s expressed as a decimal form only. But on Bing, you get both decimal and fractional forms:

As for the homework assignment, I gave search engines one more shot to help, this time using one that was built by a mathematician, Wolfram Alpha. How’d that go? For the example above, I got back this:

Awesome — multiple forms of the same answer. A decimal form. A fractional form. And what I wanted, the mixed faction answer:

198 1/3

I’m not sure if Stephen Wolfram’s grand ambition with Wolfram Alpha was for it to help me and my son figure out the multiplication of fractions. But it was sure useful!

“…our measurements show that synonyms affect 70 percent of user searches across the more than 100 languages Google supports. We took a set of these queries and analyzed how precise the synonyms were, and were happy with the results: For every 50 queries where synonyms significantly improved the search results, we had only one truly bad synonym.”

Google shares an example of a bad synonym: substituting “pc” as a synonym for “precision” in a search query like [dell system speaker driver precision 360].

Google also says it’s changing how synonyms are displayed in search results: Rather than only bolding direct variants of words (like “photos” for “pictures”), Google has “extended this to words that our algorithms very confidently think mean the same thing, even if they are spelled nothing like the original term.”

On his personal blog, Matt Cutts follows up the official post with some words of advice for webmasters:

“Think about the different words that searchers might use when looking for your content. Don’t just use technical terms–think about real-world terms and slang that users will type. For example, if you’re talking about a “usb drive,” some people might call it a flash drive or a thumb drive.”

The official post also mentions that users can turn off synonyms by putting a plug sign (+) before a word in your query, or by putting the query in quotation marks.

Not mentioned in either post is that you can use the tilde symbol (~) to force Google to show additional synonyms (and related words) for your query. For example, a search for [~murder statistics] leads Google to bold words like “crime,” “crime statistics,” “suicide statistics,” “criminal,” and more.

Mayer replied: “It would be a machine that could answer that question, really. It would be one that could understand speech, questions, phrases, what entities you’re talking about, concepts. It would be able to search all of the world’s information, [find] different ideas and concepts, and bring them back to you in a presentation that was really informative and coherent.”

What Mayer may have unknowingly described is Siri, a “virtual personal assistant” that uses artificial intelligence to determine user intent and then match data or applications that can fulfill that intent. The company will launch its iPhone application soon and already has a deal with a “tier one” US mobile carrier. The NY Times offers background on Siri and some of the technology behind the system:

SRI International’s software venture, called Siri, is more ambitious, in that it allows users to speak or write natural-language requests into the device (“Find me a place to eat dinner tonight with Karen, reserve a table and put it on our calendars.”), which will complete the task independently and inform you when it is done.

In terms of long-term predictions, Siri is actually an easy bet. Dag Kittlaus, the company’s chief executive, said one of the four major carriers would introduce the service early next year, and he said it would also be available as an iPhone app. But over the next two years the technology should be able to complete a wider range of tasks.

I’ve seen Siri in action and found it impressive. The system is not perfect but it brings users closer to transactions and fulfillment of their objectives — at least in a range of use cases — than can Google on mobile devices today. It uses a voice interface to receive queries. You can use the keyboard if necessary but that’s entirely secondary to the experience. 

The way one interacts with it is “conversational” and “transactional” rather than providing a verbal version of a conventional search query. 

I moderated a panel at the recent Open Mobile Summit in San Francisco called “new directions in navigation and search.” The panel, among others, featured Siri CEO Dag Kittlaus. What became clear during the panel is that we’re going to see lots of innovation and change in mobile search and that the present version of the experience could well be regarded as Jurassic in only a few years as the unique attributes of the device (e.g., the camera) become input mechanisms and search tools. Augmented reality is also a part of this, although in its present form it’s fairly undeveloped and limited.

And, as another example of how far things could develop away from the current “query box and blue links” search paradigm,  look at the video demo below of “SixthSense” a “wearable gestural interface”:

Click here to view the embedded video.

By the way, this is a long article. If you want a digest of what’s new today, then see the much shorter companion piece, Google Adds Visited Pages, Past Hour & Fewer Shopping Sites Filtering.

Using Search Options

The Search Options panel is available after you do a search. Look near the top left-hand side of the search page, just below the search box, and you’ll see a “+ Show Options” link:

After you do this, a series of options will appear to the left of your search results:

Selecting any of these will cause the results to change, based on the filter you choose. Not shown in the illustration above are the Viewed / Not Viewed choices, but those will be explained (and illustrated) below. This article will run from the top of the Search Options panel to the bottom.

Filter By Result Type

The first set of choices allows you to filter the results to show specific type of content:

1. Videos
2. Reviews
3. Forums
4. Books (New)
5. News (New)
6. Blogs (New)

Video Searching

Video filtering was one of the first three filters available when Search Options launched. Select this, and the standard search results are filtered so that only video clips show:

Note that when you do this, as the arrow shows above, you get new “Any duration” filter options that let you further refine the video results to show clips that are short (0-4 minutes), medium (4-20 minutes) and long (more than 20 minutes) in length.

Video Searching Confusion

Like getting video results? Confusingly, the Search Options feature means you now have two different ways to get them on Google, which in turn produce different experiences.

Look at the very top of the search results page, and you’ll see a Videos link in the navigation bar (the top arrow in the screenshot below shows this). This was rolled out in May 2007 with great fanfare (see Google’s New Navigational Links: An Illustrated Guide). Click on that Videos link, and you get results back from Google Videos:

You’d think that for consistency, getting video results by using the top-of-the-page navigational link should bring back exactly the same thing you’d get by filtering for videos using the search options panel. But not so, as I’ve highlighted in the screenshot above.

For one, the ranking of results is different. Using the navigational video link, I got a result on replacing an iPod battery that did not rank in the top results when getting video using Search Options. Also, using the navigational link puts the first video results within a blue border, making it seem like an ad, even though it’s not.

More confusion. If you search for videos using the navigational link, you can still open up the Search Options panel — whereupon you find options that are NOT available if you do a regular search and then filter by video. In particular, the navigational link enables different display options (TV view, list view & grid view), along with options to see only high quality video, to filter by video source site (such as YouTube or Vimeo), to see videos with closed-captioning and more.

There are even more filtering options available for video searching, such as to filter by language or file type. However, to get these, you have to use the advanced search page at Google Videos.

Review Searching

Another filter available at launch is the ability to get back what are supposed to be product reviews. I used the word “supposed” because despite the promise, you’ll still get occasional “review” that can be puzzling. For example, here are “review” results for ipod:

Many of the results lead to good review sites (I’ve marked these “Good!” in the screenshot above). But down there at the bottom of the page? Yes, the web site that will not die — Wikipedia. I always joke that it’s required by law for Wikipedia to be on every Google search results page. Perhaps it really is a law.

I can already hear Google spam czar and all around debunker Matt Cutts winding up a defense. “If you look at the Wikipedia page listed, you’ll see there’s a criticism area and a useful history of the models.” True, but it’s still not what I’d expect when I’m thinking product review.

Neither am I thinking that the manufacturer of a product — in this case Apple — should be listed (twice). I went to both of those pages, by the way. Neither had product reviews.

In the middle of the page, you get a big huge shopping results OneBox unit. Hey, I thought I was getting review listings, not shopping listings!

As it turns out, those shopping results do have a nice collection of reviews, like you’ll see here, gathered from across the web. In fact, those listings seem better than some of the “review” listings that search options was giving me. So why aren’t these pages listed like “normal” pages rather than being confusingly tucked in a shopping OneBox? Why isn’t Google perhaps showing a better display of these (mostly user reviews) somehow mixed or set alongside editorial reviews?

Forum Searching

Forum searching was the third filter available at launch. It works well. You do indeed get back matches from online forums and other places where discussions are happening. Still, I’ve got gripes:

Note that the VMware Communities are both the second and the third major listings. Sandwiched between them are three more VMware Communities threads using the new forum sitelinks display. That’s five listings from the same site in all, showing up in three different places. Surely there could be more consistency here.

Book Searching

Last week, Google quietly added a book filter to Search Options. Select this, and you get back matching results for your search from Google Book Search:

Note that after filtering to matching books, you also get new options to see “Full View” books (that you can read fully online) or to show either books or magazines. The arrows in the screenshot above point to these.

The ranking of results seems to match that as if you went to Google Book Search itself. What’s missing are the many more filtering options that Google provides through Google Book Search’s advanced book search page (such as by author or by ISBN).

News Searching

The news search filter was added yesterday. Select it, and you get back matching news results from Google News Search. The ranking and display is identical, as best I can tell, to what you’d get at Google News Search itself. The main difference is that if you search at the dedicated news site, the Search Options panel changes to provide additional date filtering options and the ability to filter to just news images:

See the year blocks, like 2008-2009 or 1980-1989? You only see these when using search options via Google News.

In either case, there are even more filtering options such as news source or author which only appear if you use Google News Search’s advanced search page.

Blog Searching

Blog filtering is supposed to be added sometime today. As it wasn’t live when I wrote this article, I couldn’t test it. I’d expect it to bring back results from Google Blog Search and for the Search Options panel to reflect some, but not all, of the filtering options at Google Blog Search’s advanced search page.

Date Filtering

Filtering search results by date is hardly a Google innovation. Many search engines offered this in the past. However, it never really seemed to catch on. My personal theory was that most of the time when people are wanting to filter by date, they want to have “recent” results — which means news results. In turn, that means they should be using a news search engine.

Another complication is that knowing the “date” of a page has long been a messy business. Is the date:

• When the page was first published as reported by the web server (sometimes these give out incorrect dates)
• When the page was updated with new material? (such as an article that was written, then perhaps revised months or years later)
• When the page was first found by Google? (which might not mean the page was actually published on or near that date)
• The “date” that might be listed somewhere on a page, such as near the author’s name?
• The “offline” date (such as if an old public domain article from the 1700s is put online)

In most cases, Google tells me the date will be when it first visited the page, though it will try to combine various signals to come up with the best one to determine a valid date.

Date Inconsistency

That sounds good, but it’s pretty easy to demonstrate how messed up the date identification can really be. For example:

The first listing says “Sept. 15, 2009″ but in reality, that page has been on our Search Engine Land site at that exact URL for nearly a year. So, the date isn’t the “first visited” date. If you go to the page, you’ll also see that it has content as of Sept 25, 2009 — so that isn’t a “last updated” date being shown. As for the web server, it spits out a date of October 1, presumably because the page comes from a database. Each time it’s requested, that’s the “date” of the page as far as the server is concerned.

This all means the date Google shows is the date of the last time its spider visited the page. If you view the cached copy of the page, you’ll see the date there is also Sept. 15. However, that’s misleading. The dates on Google’s cached pages can be days, weeks or even months out of sync with when Google last spidered a page to update its searchable index.

The second listing seems to use the date as published on the web page, the date displayed to readers, in order to inform them of when the page was written. But then the third listing ignores that and like the fourth listing, seems to use the last visited date. Then the authored date gets used again, then for no apparent reason, the authored date gets ignored and the last visited date appears.

Date Options

My Finding Search Engine Freshness & Crawl Dates is an older article that goes into depth about issues with dates, if you really want to know more. But despite the fact that dates might not always be accurate, I’ve personally used the filter by date option many times to successfully narrow down results in a useful way. Nor am I alone. The date and time options, Google tells me, are among the most used from those offered in the Search Options panel.

The date options are mostly self-explanatory. When Search Options was launched, these were offered:

• Past 24 hours (results with a date in the past 24 hours)
• Past week (results dated in the past week)
• Past year (results dated in the past year)
• Recent Results (undefined — in one test I did, results stretches back to the “recent” year of 2002. I’m checking on this)

At the end of July, a custom date range option was added, allowing for pages to be narrowed down between a specific period of time.

Today, a past hour option was added, allowing you to find pages dated within the past hour. That not good enough for real time search junkies? Last month, the Omgili Blog discovered a way to narrow results down to the last minute or even the last second, if you’re willing to play around with the URL that shows up after a search. It’s easy and safe. Our Hidden Google Feature: Find What’s New In The Last Minute Or Second covers it in more depth. For the record, Google confirms they work and simply calls them unsupported.

I joked about real time search junkies, but in seriousness, I have a severe allergic reaction to anyone who believes that Google finding a page in the last minute or second means it provides real time search. For me, real time search means finding a particular type of “real time” content. My What Is Real Time Search? Definitions & Players article goes into depth about this.

Finally, let’s have a look at all the date options in context:

The top arrow points to the narrowing options you have. But once you’ve selected these, the bottom arrow points to a sorting option. By default, results are sorted by relevancy. However, you can sort by date within the range you’ve filtered. Do that, and the most recent comes first. There’s no oldest to newest option, which would be useful, on occasion.

Visited / Not Visited Pages

To me, the new Visited / Not Visited Pages filter introduced today seems like a really useful feature. Assuming you use Google’s Web History feature, you can have Google filter out pages you’ve already clicked on from its results or feature those pages and hide those you’ve not seen.

For example, I was looking for information on how to add Twitter to Google Wave earlier today. I’d heard about a program called Twave, so started searching for it. By using the “Visited Pages” option (in the screenshot below, look in the middle of the left column), it was easy to get a list of what I’d been to:

Notice the two arrows to the top right of the screenshot. They point out how Google tells me when I last visited the page listed (me visiting the page, not Google’s spider) and the term I searched for when I clicked from Google’s results through to the page.

All’s not perfect, however. Notice the three arrows further down. Technically, I told Google to do a search for “twave” and then filter out only pages that I’d visited when doing that particular search in the past. So why’s Daggle, my personal blog, showing up? Look at the bottom two arrows. They show I last visited the page on September 12 for a search on “daggle email,” not on “twave.”

The answer is shown in the description. See how I’ve boxed and pointed at the word “Twave.” I wrote a post about Twave on my blog. Google visited my blog, saw that word and so considers it a page I’ve visited before for a search on “twave” simply because that word is on the page — NOT because I actually searched for “twave” in Google and found my blog that way.

I especially liked the Not Visited option:

I can think of so many times I’ve done a search, then realized I was “done” with some of the pages I’d already seen but kept getting them back when I searched again. That was the case this evening, when the pages I viewed didn’t really have the answer I wanted. I need to look at some more.

Unfortunately, most of the other ones I hadn’t visited because I could already tell they were junk by looking at them. Yet the only way to remove them from the Not Visited list is to actually visit them? Ugh.

An easier solution would be if Google enabled its SearchWiki feature when you’re using Search Options. Then you could easily delete pages you weren’t interested in. For some reason, SearchWiki isn’t active when Search Options are used (for more about the service, see my Google SearchWiki 101: An Illustrated Guide article).

Finally, you’ll only see the Visited / Not Visited pages option if you’re logged into Google and making use of its Web History feature. That will have an ick factor for some people, the idea that Google’s watching what you search for and click on. If you’re among them, well, don’t sign in and don’t use Web History. All the other search options will work just fine for you. My Google Search History Expands, Becomes Web History story goes into more depth about the Web History feature. Like really, really in depth. It makes this article seem short.

View Options

Further down in the Search Options panel are four ways to view your search results, all of which were present when Search Options launched:

• Standard view
• Related searches
• Wonder wheel
• Timeline

I’m not going to drop a ton of screenshots and explanations about how these work, because I’ve already done that in my Google Wonder Wheel & Other Search Refinement Features article. Check that out. The only difference is in that article, the “Related searches” option was called “Search suggestions.”

Results Options

Just below the view options area are results options, like this:

It’s confusing, I know. Didn’t we have a filter by results area at the top of the Search Options section? Yes, we did. And isn’t “More Text” a view option. Yes, it is.

The “More text” and “Images from the page” options were present when Search Options was launched. They show longer description for results and thumbnail images alongside results, respectively. That Google Wonder Wheel & Other Search Refinement Features article I mentioned earlier explains more about the options, complete with illustrations.

If it were me, I’d move both of these options into the View Options section. As for the other two related to shopping, I’d put them into that other results options area — the one where you can get news, video, blog results and so on.

Let’s talk about those shopping optons. They’re brand new: “Fewer shopping sites” and “More shopping sites.” I’m sure they’ll also freak out some site owners who’ve long suspected that Google’s wanted to decommercialize (if that’s even a word) its results in order to push businesses into buying ads. And in fact, to some degree Google admitted that type of shift back during the major “Florida Update” of 2003. Not to boost ad sales, of course, but because sometimes people may want less commercial results. Well, now you can overtly drop shopping-oriented sites from your results or conversely, pump them up.

Here are standard results for rollerblade speedmachine, which as you can see are loaded with shopping results:

When I apply the “fewer shopping sites” option, however:

Away go some of the sites, with the boxes showing where new forum threads or blog posts have come in. Shopping results are still there, though kind of sad, I noticed a good dependable store I use personally disappeared. I’d like the feature better if it removed shopping sites with less reputation, if it’s going to leave some in. But I’ve also not done more than a few tests, so perhaps this isn’t the case with other searches.

Wondering what makes a site shopping-like? Google says prices are one of the key signals. You have a lot of prices, you may seem like a shopping store. Google also said things that just look and feel like shopping sites will get flagged. If your using certain words frequently associated with shopping sites, or a format that is commonly seen, that can also be an influence.

Conclusion

Don’t see some or all of the new options mentioned? Remember that for the Visited / Not Visited options, you need to be logged in. As for others, typically with these types of releases, it might take a few days for everyone on Google to see them.

Overall, I like that the new options are more visible, and it may perhaps be reversing the long standing conventional wisdom that searchers simply ignore options when offered through “advanced search” or other links. However, it feels like Google’s been so busy growing the Search Options panel that it’s failing to maintain consistency with the existing advanced search pages for some of its vertical search properties. I’d like to see them consolidate and be more consistent.

Google’s “site:” is an advanced search operator that allows you to see the URLs they have indexed for your website. To access it, you simply type into Google’s search box the following:

site:www.example.com

Substituting your own domain for example.com, of course.

This is one of the first things we do when researching and reviewing a new client’s website, because there’s a lot you can learn from the results that are displayed.

You can learn:

• Approximately how many URLs (not pages) from your site are indexed

• If you have duplicate content issues
• What your title tags look like

When you run a query using the “site:” operator, in the top-right of the search results page (SERP) you’ll see something like: “Results 1 – 10 of about 162,000 from www.example.com.” Which means that they have approximately 162,000 URLs of your website indexed. You won’t be able to see all 162,000 in the results, however, as you can generally only drill down to the first 1000.

Knowing how many URLs Google has indexed is important because it can help determine if there are any indexing problems. For instance, if Google says you have 162,000 URLs indexed, but you know your website doesn’t have even close to that many, you probably have duplicate content issues. This doesn’t mean that you actually have pages of duplicate content, but that you may have the same content being indexed under multiple URLs.

As an example, your home page could be indexed as www.example.com as well as www.example.com/index.php. Or if you have tracking URLs in place, you may find that you’re seeing both the “real” URL being indexed, as well as the tracking URL. That’s not a good thing, and you’ll want to use your robots.txt exclusion file to make sure those don’t get indexed.

Other forms of content being indexed under multiple URLs can happen when your content management system spits out a variety of query strings for pages of essentially the same content. You may be able to fix this via your robots.txt, or you may need your developer to tweak your CMS to only allow one form of the URL to ever be output.

Another thing you might notice in the SERP when you run the “site:” operator is your home page (or any page of your website) is being indexed under a variety of URLs that you wouldn’t expect. If you see this happening, it might mean that your 404-error page is not set up correctly to send out a 404 http header response, and is instead redirecting people to your home page (probably via a 301-redirect). This shouldn’t in and of itself be a problem, but it is when it comes to the search engines and indexing. You definitely don’t want your home page indexed under multiple URLs, as Google’s duplicate content filter might stop your “real” home page from showing up when it’s supposed to.

If your home page being indexed under multiple URLs is not because of a 404-error page being set up incorrectly, it might be due to your website providing unique session IDs for any browser that visits the website. If you must use session IDs to track the visitors to your website, you’ll need to make sure that these will not be shown to search engine spiders and that they only get the “clean” version of each URL. Your website developers should be able to implement this if brought to their attention.

Though the “site:” operator can teach you a lot about how Google indexes your website, there are some things that it doesn’t show you. For example, the “site:” operator doesn’t show you:

• What your SERP description will look like

• Which pages of your website are most important

Often people see their search results from a “site:” operator and panic because the snippet or description that shows up underneath their URL is part of their navigation or something else that looks icky and not click-worthy. Don’t despair! The snippet that shows up when you use a “site:” operator query is rarely the same as the description that shows up for an actual keyword query. Perform some keyword searches yourself and you’ll see the difference.

The other mistake people make is thinking that the order of the pages listed when you use the “site:” operator in the SERP shows the order of importance of those pages. While Google does tend to show the home page of a site before the other pages, the rest of the list isn’t sorted in any particular order of importance. So be careful about drawing any conclusions based on that.

I find new discoveries all the time when using Google’s “site:” operator for the websites I review. If this isn’t something you currently check for your websites or for those of your clients, you may be missing some important information that could improve your website’s search engine performance.

If you’d like to learn more, last year Vanessa Fox posted some info about the site: command on Google’s Webmaster Central blog.

Jill Whalen, CEO and founder of High Rankings, a search marketing firm outside of Boston, and co-founder of SEMNE, a New England search marketing networking organization, has been performing SEO since 1995. Jill is the host of the High Rankings Advisor search engine marketing newsletter. The 100% Organic column appears Thursdays at Search Engine Land.

A few weeks back I did a post on my blog about creating Firefox quick search bookmarks. I was surprised at how well received it was, though I think people were most pleased with the fact that I had created a download of a very small selection of the large list of SEO related Firefox quick searches that I use.

If you’ve ever seen me do a site review, you’d know I appear lost without my laptop, which contains all of my quick searches. Since the small list of general SEO ones I previously published was well received, I figured I would create a download of some of the ones I find to be great tools in my link development efforts. I can’t give them all away, but anyone who spends a lot of time doing link development should find these pretty useful. So, grab the original shortlist of general SEO Firefox quick search bookmarks (some of which are used in link dev) and then grab this expanded list of link development Firefox quick search bookmarks (to download either file, right click and save as).

The following is a listing of the searches contained within the link development specific download:

• Google Link Search: I don’t think this one needs explaining, except to remind newer SEOs that this listing is far from complete, as admitted by Google, and only shows a small sampling of your inbound links. Also don’t assume that because you see a specific backlink when doing a link: command that it means it carries any weight.
• MSN Link from Domain Search: Shows you a listing of sites that a specific URL is linking to. For example, you can see what sites Search Engine Land is linking to with this command.
• Google News Search: Allows you to search Google news specifically, which I’ve found handy when trying to identify and organize the Linkerati in a specific niche.
• Google News Site Search: Allows you to quickly identify if a publication is listed within Google News as a source of news content. To me, this is one potential signal of the quality of and value in obtaining a link from a specific site.
• Digg Popularity of a Website: Does a Digg search for any stories that have been submitted from a specific URL, buried or not buried, front page or non-front page, to show you the success or non-success of a site’s social media attempts. This can also help you identify which competitors truly are competitors in the social media space and which competitors seem to be ignoring it so that you can fill the voids they leave by not paying attention. A much better way to see the Digg popularity of your website than fad widget sites like Diggularity.
• PRWeb Search: Searches all press releases at PRWeb.com. I use this search to identify the companies and websites that are seeking publicity within a site’s niche and to get ideas for the content that will allow us to develop some killer links based upon new discoveries within an industry.
• YouTube Search Ordered by View Count: Self explanatory as far as what it does in regards to finding YouTube videos. This helps us identify competitors that are developing views well surrounding our topic area, allowing us to not only learn from their success, but to also take a look at the sites that have linked to their videos on YouTube. This gives us a more specific listing of “Video Linkerati” to contact when we have a big push on a video.
• Yahoo Answers Open Questions: This will search Yahoo Answers for open questions containing your search terms. Regardless of nofollow links, Yahoo Answers is a traffic driver in a lot of categories and we find being active in those categories helps us develop branding and visibility that leads to traffic and outside links.
• Yahoo Search to See if a Site Is Linking to You: Does a quick search to see if a specific domain is linking to your website. It’s useful in helping you not repeatedly contact the same sites, especially if you bought a website and don’t have records of previous link development efforts.
• Ye Old Digg Mining: Does a Digg search to find stories that reached front page without being buried on a specific topic, listing the oldest first. This can often help you come up with some great topics for killer content (I will not use the overused but often misunderstood word “linkbait”). If you think Cosmo hasn’t been repeating the same stories for decades upon decades, you’re very wrong. They simply take the same topics and attack them from fresh angles.

Lastly, one I couldn’t include the code for because you first need to create a custom search engine with Google (you can see an example of an SEO related one in action here): Searching Your Custom Search. I like to set up custom search engines for my niche– only putting in the high quality sites I’ve developed relationships with and/or hope to develop relationships with so that when we’re searching for something to link to on a specific topic (and thus, creating a quality outbound link), we can simply search the sites we know to be the best of the niche to do so (don’t forget to include your own). This has worked best for us the bigger our industry or niche is.

Joost de Valk created a Google Web search parameters cheat sheet (PDF file) that contains a comprehensive list of many of the different parameters you can add to the Google search URL.

What’s the big deal? The search engines never had to give us this data in the first place. The actual operator, link: is a creation of the engines, and it was a bonus freebie that many of us have used and abused for years. I’m thankful that we still have Google and Yahoo to use for link searches, but frankly I’m more thankful that Microsoft is considering a more robust “functionality for real queries.” I hope Google and Yahoo do the same with their respective Site Explorer and Webmaster Tools services. We marketers were never entitled to free link data, so let’s be happy we have any at all, and at the same time look for ways to stop being so dependent on it.

In the interim, for you Live Search link: addicts, don’t forget you still have a workaround: “domain.com” -site:domain.com. It’s not perfect. HotBot can still be link colon’ed, as well.

A larger question worth asking is what exactly are we doing with all that linking data we’ve been freely mining all this time? What is the reason to look for links pointing at sites other than our own? You know the answer. We look for links pointing at competitor’s sites so that we can identify linking targets for our own site. We analyze links across our industry niche in order to spot the holes and opportunities. In some ways this data has been so freely available for so long it’s made us lazy. Slap a Google Alert on link:competitor.com and new link opportunities are sent right to our inboxes.

Maybe it’s worth pointing out the obvious, and because I haven’t seen it pointed out yet, maybe it isn’t so obvious. You can do competitive link analysis til the cows come home, but it wont help your site unless you have linkworthy content that will also attract higher trust links than can’t be found automatically. Put more simply, if everybody uses the same link analysis tools and everybody chases the same links, then over time everyone ends up with the a nearly identical inbound link profile.

And for the engines, that kind of profile is useless. When twenty camping equipment sites each have 20,000 links, from nearly the same 20,000 targets, you end up in the Truman Show. Everything is the same, every site is the same, every link is the same. Nothing differentiates one site from another. I do heavy duty link analysis for a living, so let me be clear. I’m not saying doing regular link research is bad. I do it every day. But I find that some of the best target sites for link building don’t appear just by doing advanced link operator searches or by using automated programs.

This week I’m doing some online publicity and link building for PBSkids.org’s new Curious George content. I’ll do some link analysis, sure. But I really don’t need any of Live.com’s advanced link operator searches for my core target site identification. All I need is this search, or this one or this one.

Eric Ward has been in the link building and content publicity game since 1994, providing services ranking from linking strategy to a monthly private newsletters on linking for subscribers. The Link Week column appears on Mondays at Search Engine Land.

Getting The Anchor Text Data

To access the data, you have to be verified Google Webmaster Central user. That’s explained more here, and it’s easy to do. Note that if you’re verifying for the first time, it may take up to a day for the anchor text and other data to start showing up for you.

Once logged in, select the site you want to view from the "My Sites" screen. When that site loads, choose the "Statistics" tab, then select the "Page analysis" link you’ll see in the left-hand navigation, like this:

Look further down on the page under the "Common Words" section. There are two tables. The one on the right is called "In external links to your site." That’s the table you want. Here’s what it shows for Search Engine Land:

That table shows you the top 100 phrases people are using to link to your site. So for Search Engine Land, using the top of that table, here are our top 10 phrases most used when people link to us:

1. search engine land
2. more
3. 25 tips to optimize your blog for readers
4. google releases new link reporting tools
5. wikipedia enters top ten most visited sites
6. will google remain the start page for the
7. george bush is no longer a miserable failure
8. why the seo folks were mad at you
9. google kills bush’s miserable failure search & other
10. click to continue reading

What Is Anchor Text? How People Link To You

Let’s look at the most popular phrase on the list — "search engine land" – to explain more about how all this anchor text phrase stuff works. If you’re a pro, you might want to skip this section. For others, I thought a little anchor text basics might be helpful.

Lots of people link to Search Engine Land from across the web. Anyone can see some of these links to us by doing this search on Google:

link:searchengineland.com

(As a reminder, site owners can see even more links than the search above shows through Google Webmaster Central. My Google Releases New Link Reporting Tools article from last month explains more about this. But the public link reporting tool is fine for the explanation I’m doing.)

One of the top sites listed linking to us is Graywolf’s SEO Blog, from this page. If I go to the page, I can see him linking to us like this:

See the part I’ve highlighted in blue? That’s the link to Search Engine Land – and the text of the link (that’s what "anchor text" is, the text in a link), says "Search Engine Land" like this:

Search Engine Land

It’s not surprising that Search Engine Land is the top phrase used to link to us. It’s our name, so lots of people link to us that way. But now let’s look at something else. "More" is the second most popular phrase used to link to us. Weird, right? Well, chances are there are lots of people linking to our stories and using the words "more" in the link.

Now I’ve tried and tried to find an example of this with no luck. Further below, I’ll cover some frustration about this. But let me show you a similar example. Look here at a link in a post from Matt Cutts’ blog:

See the link in orange — the "more details?" one. That shows Matt linking to someone with that exact phrase. And if lots of people did that to your own site, then you might see "more details" show up as a top anchor text phrase.

The number three link in our list is pretty easy to understand happening. 25 Tips To Optimize Your Blog For Readers & Search Engines is a popular article we had back in January. Lots of people linked to the article using the exact title as the anchor text, like I did from the Daily SearchCast site:

How They Link, Not How Many Links, Influences Ranking

As you can see, the data is great information. The text people use to link to you is one of the most important factors — often the most important factor – for how you will rank in Google.

Let me repeat that. The anchor text used to link to your pages often is the most important reason you’ll rank well for particular words.

People still continue to mistakenly think that doing well at Google is about getting as many links as you can. It’s not. It’s about getting quality links from important sites and ideally, very descriptive links — links using the terms you want to rank for in the anchor text.

If you’re trying to show up for some key phrase, the new data will show you if people are linking to you that way, as seen by Google. If not, then you understand that a lot more targeted link building work may need to be done.

Down at the bottom of the table, you’ll see a "Download this table" option. That will let you download the data, if you want to play with it more.

The Old Keyword Table

I started off saying that anchor phrases are better than anchor keywords, which Google started reporting in February 2006. Before today’s change, this is what Google reported about our anchor text:

Look at the top ten words:

1. search
2. engine
3. land
4. google
5. the
6. 2007
7. for
8. searchengineland
9. searchcap
10. day

See the first three? On the new report, you can understand that Google was seeing lots of links that said "search engine land" and breaking the link text into the individual words. That was terrible, because it meant you had no idea of the exact order used in your most popular links.

To explain this even more, see the number four term, "google." Actually, that’s kind of useful to know — that out of all the links out there to our site, Google occurs as the fourth most popular term in them. Potentially, that might help us rank for that particular word. But breaking it apart meant I was unable to see that the word was really part of longer phrases people use to link to us, like this:

• google releases new link reporting tools
• will google remain the start page for the
• google kills bush’s miserable failure search & other
• google ramps up personalized search
• google’s agent rank patent application
• google news top of mind even if not
• q&a with marissa mayer google vp search products

If I have to choose, phrases are more useful. But ideally, I’d love both.

Wish List

Now that I’ve gotten one wish — anchor phrases rather than anchor keywords – I want more. My wish list:

• Anchor Keywords: I know, I abused them when starting out this story. But they can be useful to see in addition anchor phrases. So let’s have them both!
   
• Number Of Links: It’s great that I can see the exact way people are linking to me, but how about the number of those links? Just how many more people link to me using the number one phrase versus the number two phrase? Enquiring minds want to know!
   
• Who Links? Let me drill down into any particular phrase and see the exact pages that are linking to me in that way. This I want more than anything else, especially because, as I’ll explain, it’s something you can’t get easily from any of the major search engines.

Will we get it? Perhaps, plus maybe some things I didn’t think of.

"There a lot that we can do with linking data that could help webmasters, and we’re looking at how we can provide more information. We aggregate phrases right now, but perhaps we can break those out. We might also show more than 100 phrases in the future," said Google Webmaster Central product manager Vanessa Fox.

Aggregate Data

By "aggregating" phrases, Fox is talking about how Google will remove punctuation and capitalization, so that all "variations" of a phrase get consolidated into one. Consider people linking to a Star Trek: The Next Generation site in all these ways:

• Star Trek: The Next Generation
• Star Trek – The Next Generation
• star trek, the next generation
• Star Trek, The Next Generation
• Star Trek The Next Generation
• Star Trek | The Next Generation

The same five words are used in the exact same order, so currently, Google considers all the variations to be the same phrase. To do this, it strips out most punctuation (apostrophes and ampersands seem to still stay in) and reports all variations like this:

• star trek the next generation

In the future, potentially those who care could get an breakdown showing exact spellings, punctuation usage and so on.

Internal Links & Subdomains

A few more details about the anchor text data. First, it comes only from external links to your site. Anchor text you use on your own site isn’t counted.

Second, links to any subdomains you have are NOT included in the data. So if you had several sites like this:

• mysite.com
• products.mysite.com
• blog.mysite.com
• videos.mysite.com

Then links to all of them would NOT show up for the mysite.com report. Want to see link data for a particular subdomain? Then you need to make a separate account for that subdomain.

What about this popular situation?

• mysite.com
• www.mysite.com

If these are separate domains (IE, when you enter them into your browser, the domain doesn’t change), then the links are reported separately. The exception is if you redirect. If entering www.mysite.com makes the domain change to mysite.com (similar to what we do here at Search Engine land), then the mysite.com account will cover any www.mysite.com links. FYI, that’s true for any domain or URL you redirect to another domain.

Hunting Down The Links

Remember how I said I couldn’t find an example of the people linking to me and using the word "more" in the links? What a pain! I couldn’t do it. Nor could I figure out why the 30th most popular anchor text link to our site was:

askmeaboutmybra.com

I’ve got nothing to say about my bra. I don’t wear one. Who and why people are linking to us that way is a mystery. Maybe it’s a glitch, but it underscores something I’ve wanted for ages. That’s better search commands allowing me to see exactly what anchor text is used to link to a site.

I’ve especially wanted this as we’ve had various link bombs or Google bombs erupt. Sure, Google’s fixed the Google bomb problem (see Google Kills Bush’s Miserable Failure Search & Other Google Bombs for more on that). But it’s still interesting to research the ways people are linking to sites, the words they are using.

Two major search engines offer anchor text searching. Not Google. Not Yahoo. Instead, it’s Ask and Microsoft that do. However, I don’t think the Ask "inlink" command works properly (Ask is getting back to me on this). Nor is it helpful without a related "link" command. So I’ll focus on Microsoft.

Microsoft added an anchor search command back in June 2005. It looks like this:

inanchor:

If you want to find pages that have particular words embedded in anchor text, then you use that command with the word, like this:

inanchor:miserable

That search should bring up all the pages that have a link containing the word "miserable" in the link. If I wanted to find more than one word in links, I have to do this way:

inanchor:miserable inanchor:failure

That should bring back pages that use both words in links on them — which would be pretty much a way to find all the people who have been playing in the "miserable failure" link bomb game over the past two years.

Unfortunately, the command — like Ask’s — doesn’t seem to work. In both cases, I get back the official President George W. Bush web page. I can assure you, there are no hyperlinks containing the words "miserable" and/or "failure" on that page. In fact, neither of those words even appear in ordinary text.

Let’s pretend it DID work. Remember how I wanted to find the pages linking to Search Engine Land and using the word "more" in the hyperlinks? To do this, I’d need to combine two commands. I’ll bold the two different ones:

inanchor:more linkdomain:searchengineland.com

That would bring back only pages linking to Search Engine Land and which had links using the word "more" in the link text. However, even if inanchor was working properly, this search STILL wouldn’t be enough. That’s because you could have a page that links to Search Engine Land in one place — with ANY text in the hyperlink — and has a hyperlink to some other page that uses the word "more" in it.

I struggle to think of what type of new command could be added to do exactly what I want. That’s what makes the new Google reporting so especially cool. It is the only way you can easily get the most popular anchor text from across the web pointing at your site. If Google adds some of the wish list items, especially the ability to see exactly what pages link using particular phrases, it only gets better.