Bill Slawski is the Director of Search Marketing for Go Fish Digital and the editor of SEO by the Sea. He has been doing SEO and web promotion since the mid-90s, and was a legal and technical administrator in the highest level trial court in Delaware.
Groucho is not my real name. I’m breaking it in for a friend. – Groucho Marx One of the most important and one of the most difficult decisions that a business can make is what to call themselves. A friend managed to put together a business model in few days. The same friend struggled for […]
One of the difficulties of talking about local search is the lack of a shared vocabulary. I’ve been working on putting together a Google Local Search Glossary, focusing upon some of the terminology from patent applications published by Google. The Glossary is a work in progress, and will likely evolve some over the next few […]
If you bid on keywords for a term or phrase that you rank well for in a search engine, might your organic result be filtered in some instances, when your ad appears on the same page? A newly granted Microsoft patent is the first I recall seeing which discusses such a possible interaction based upon […]
Back in October, 2006, Google announced on the Official Google Blog that they were enabling people to create their own custom search engines. If you asked yourself why they were doing this, and how it might provide benefits to individual site owners, searchers as a whole, and Google itself, there are some answers that came […]
Google returns results based upon content appearing upon individual pages, or at specific URLs. But that content could come from different authors, who have different levels of control over it. For example, a blog page may have posts written by more than one author, comments penned by others, and advertisements showing ads that even the […]
One of my favorite search related articles is one that Danny wrote a few years back titled Searching With Invisible Tabs. It stands out because it describes one of the major difficulties involving how search engines work – making a user interface as simple as possible, while still somehow providing information that can meet a […]
Clickz columnist Ryan Naraine wrote up some of his thoughts about a Google patent application (Allocating advertising space in a network of displays) that would enable advertising upon electronic displays and billboards in shopping centers and other places, in his article Google Patent Filing Hints at Digital Billboard Ad Network. While New Scientist wrote about […]
A wide range of newly published patent applications and granted patents, covering such ground as subscribed content in search results from Google; tag searching, detecting similar audio files, and simpler support vector machines from Yahoo; geographic based searching from MetaCarta; and data center architecture and smarter results to queries from Microsoft, amongst others…
A newly published patent application from Yahoo, Using community annotations as anchortext, provides a hint at some of the research and work that Yahoo is doing to incorporate user created tags, annotations, bookmarks, and social profiles into the way that they index and organize information, and rank that information. Danny asked me if I would […]
Desktop and file search can be very different than web search, and the user’s context plays an important role in what is valuable when creating a search algorithm. But understanding context may be helpful to web search, too. Microsoft’s Susan Dumais has done an extensive amount of research on how users interact with search applications […]
Have you ever tagged an image in Flickr, a link in Del.icio.us, a video in YouTube? Have you used tags in these systems to find similar pictures or pages or videos? Is tagging is taking indexing away from professional indexers, and putting it into the hands of amateurs. Have you used a tag to indicate […]
Google was granted new patents this week on a methods for estimating similarity between web pages and documents which may help to filter duplicate content, and upon a digital mapping system which appears to be the foundation for Google Maps, and has a number of related map-based patent applications in its wake.
Can indexing phrases from pages be an effective approach in identifying and filtering keyword stuffed pages, and honeypot pages aimed at attracting visitors solely to have them click upon ads? A new patent application published yesterday and assigned to Google, Detecting spam documents in a phrase based information retrieval system, presents a reasonable argument in […]
Mobile search has its own rules, and if you want your pages indexed for people searching with handhelds, it may help to take a look at some of the patent applications that have come out lately from Microsoft and Google on the topic. Microsoft provided some details about what they are looking for in a […]
Back in September, Vanessa Fox at the Official Google Blog shared with us a little information about sitelinks, the groups of links to internal pages that sometimes appear under the top result on a search results page. She also pointed to a page on Google’s Webmaster Help Center that provides some more details. A patent […]
Some processes covered in patents granted last week by the US Patent and Trademark Office: Microsoft reranking results based upon redundancy of information, Ask reranking pages based upon affinities between searchers, Hewlett-Packard creating queries for searchers to investigate from scanned documents, and; Exalead forming dynamic query refinements from words found in documents located within search […]
What are people looking for when they type “Google” into Google? What do they want to see when they use “eBay” as a query? How does a Google or Yahoo learn from their log files, and other user information? What does it tell them about user intent? In an interview posted earlier today with Luke […]
The final day of the conference saw blog posts about the conference’s last three sets of sessions; some video interviews conducted by Lee Odden with Neil Patel and Cameron Olthius, Joshua Stylman and Peter Hershberg, Stephan Spencer, Gord Hotchkiss; and a retrospective of Day three, from the comforts of home, by Kim Krause Berg. The […]
The social side of search came out in some of the blog posts about Chicago SES today. Search Pulse 11, broadcast live last night during cocktail hour was filled with major search issues and special on air guests. Loren at Search Engine journal writes of Jim Hedger’s press conference last night, which uncovered a connection […]
Three new search related patents were granted yesterday at the US Patent and Trademark Office to Yahoo, Google, and IBM. The Yahoo Patent looks at how to measure the buzz around categories, topics, and terms from their use at the Yahoo Portal. Google’s filing focuses upon matching anchor text to find related documents in different […]