Today at SMX East, natural language search engine Hakia has launched a new search experience that enables searchers to view categorized results, as well as view “Trusted” Results” from “Credible Sites”. The Trusted Results program is an initiative Hakia has developed with information professionals and librarians. As they note on their site: A popular Web […]
Today, the Microsoft Live Search Webmaster Center is launching its first major update since its initial debut last fall. The Live Search Webmaster Center is Microsoft’s hub for their communication with site owners, and the tools portion of that center now has new crawl issues reports, backlinks data, and download functionality. The Webmaster Center was […]
Earlier this year, when I wrote about Yahoo! SearchMonkey, which enables developers to build search result enhancements based on semantic web data, I was skeptical that it would fulfill Yahoo!’s stated aims of encouraging wider use of semantic web standards. While I agreed with Yahoo! that site owners need a reason to adopt these standards, […]
Yahoo! has just unveiled the next phase in their plan to spur search innovation by providing search-related resources to developers. The Yahoo! Build Your Own Search Service (BOSS) enables developers to access Yahoo! search results, combine them with other sources, rerank them, and define their appearance. Yahoo! says they are making BOSS available in an […]
Historically, search engines have been unable to extract content, such as text and links, from Flash (SWF) files. Subsequently, much of the Flash-based content on the web has been unavailable in search results. This situation has been frustrating for web developers, who have tried to come up with workarounds to help get search engines to […]
As I reported last week, Yahoo SearchMonkey applications are now available to searchers. The Yahoo Search blog posted details last night, saying that searchers can now add SearchMonkey applications via either the gallery (which is in beta) or through promoted links from application developers or web sites. The gallery contains only 39 applications so far […]
Today, Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft have come together to post details of how each of them support robots.txt and the robots meta tag. While their posts use terms like “collaboration” and “working together,” they haven’t joined together to implement a new standard (as they did with sitemaps.org). Rather, they are simply making a joint stand […]
Last week, Microsoft Live Search expanded the description that appears below Wikipedia results and added navigational links to major headings within the Wikipedia article. Google has long been gently mocked by the search marketing community for ranking Wikipedia results highly for a large percentage of queries, but the general searching population tends to find these […]
Today, Yahoo! is making its SearchMonkey developer platform publicly available and is kicking things off with a launch party and a developer challenge. As we noted a few weeks ago when SearchMonkey launched in private beta, Yahoo! is encouraging the use of microformats and semantic web standards by providing an infrastructure that developers can use […]
Yahoo Search has begun a partnership with McAfee, Inc. to provide SearchScan, which uses McAfee’s SiteAdvisor technology to flag URLs it deems "risky" in the search results. Results are flagged with the type of danger below the title. This new feature is primarily aimed at preventing spyware and other malicious software from being downloaded on […]
Today, Yahoo! is providing a "limited preview" of a tool that enables developers to create SearchMonkey applications. Yahoo! CTO Ari Balogh will be unveiling the tool at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco today, and more details are available in the Yahoo! Search Blog. Yahoo! first announced SearchMonkey in February at SMX West, and followed […]
Two weeks ago at SMX West, Yahoo! announced a new project code named "Search Monkey" that would enable content owners (and in some cases, searchers) to add rich content to search results. Today, Yahoo has released additional details about the program, which has not yet launched. The announcement describes how developers can provide Yahoo with […]
Google’s Webmaster Central is giving you a new way to access the diagnostics and stats for your sites. Rather than log into your Webmaster Tools account, you can add the Webmaster Tools gadget to your iGoogle page and access information from there. You can choose what components to display on your iGoogle page. Below are […]
The major search engines have announced an update to the sitemaps.org protocol which enables site owners to store their XML Sitemap files in any location — even on a different domain than the one referenced in the Sitemap. This will be a welcome change for those who manage multiple domains and would like to keep […]
When monitoring what people are saying about you and your brand online, you have two main choices. You can use Google Alerts as well as search a variety of social media and social networking sites manually, or you can pay a reputation management firm to do expensive monitoring for you. Now you have a third […]
Newspond is a news aggregation site that boasts “No editors. No voting. Just an AI news engine.” Presumably, the lack of voting distinguishes it from sites like Digg and the lack of editing from the Mahalo-like and maybe Slashdot? Does this mean it’s like Ask’s recent news aggregation entry BigNews but with fewer categories? Or […]
Today, Microsoft announced changes to their Live Search crawler intended to reduce bandwidth resources during the crawl of a site. MSNbot (upgraded to version 1.1) now supports both HTTP compression and conditional get. The post on the Live Search Webmaster Center blog describes each feature in detail and includes links to tools you can use […]
Live Search has just added Instant Answers for snow conditions at ski resorts. Type a query for a resort name (such as “whistler”) or for a resort area (such as “CO snow report”) and you’ll see information such as lift status, amount of new snow, base depth, and conditions.
Eytan Seidman, Program Management Director over core relevance for Microsoft Live Search, is leaving Microsoft (and Seattle) after six and a half years and heading to New York to work on a start up with his brother. I talked to him about life at Microsoft, the birth of Live Search, and singing karaoke in New […]
Ask has just launched a new search service called BigNews, similar to Google News with a side of Digg. It uses something called “BigFactor” to rank stories (using signals like freshness, impact, quantity of multimedia, and amount of related discussion), provides category clusters, and lets you browse by top Diggs and no Diggs (as Mashable […]
Today is Super Tuesday, which means that voters in 24 states are carefully reviewing their candidate research and doing last minute thoughtful analysis in preparation for voting in the primaries. Well, maybe that’s hopeful optimism, but in any case, the place these voters are turning to for information is increasingly the internet. Makes sense, as […]
With all the furor about Microsoft’s potential acquisition of Yahoo!, how do the Yahoo! employees feel about the possibility? Top Yahoo! execs addressed employees on Friday and followed it up with a company-wide email. The email emphasizes that the bid was unsolicited, that no decisions have been made, and that Microsoft’s proposal is one of […]
Once upon a time, there was a company called Urchin that made web analytics software. As tends to happen, that company was acquired by Google (in early 2005), the software became Google Analytics, and the price became free. Google Analytics grew in popularity, and many people forgot that the original Urchin product was still around […]
Rae Hoffman has released her second annual set of interviews with link building experts. This year, she talked to 11 people in the search industry who are well-versed in the art of link development. Link building is a fundamental pillar of search engine optimization. Links from authoritative sources are strong reputation signals for factors such […]
Don’t like the backgrounds available on Ask.com? No problem. Now you can upload any image you want. For instance, maybe you’d like this one! The new background feature is part of the skinning ability launched as part of Ask3D last year. The other engines offer some customization features as well.
Philipp Lenssen and Tony Ruscoe at Google Blogoscoped have noted that the login page for Google Health is now live, although the service itself is not (and www.google.com/health currently redirects to the Google Coop page about health). Gabriel Stricker, Google spokesperson, told us: “We’re very interested in working on products in the area of health, […]
Mahalo has just launched several new features that entwine the human-powered search engine even further into social networking and online community building. The Mahalo Follow toolbar now enables you to post links to Delicious, Ma.gnolia, Mahalo Social, and Twitter with the click of one button. The sidebar now displays quick tips when you’re on sites […]
The Google Docs blog has announced new features for the Google Docs suite of tools. You can now create subfolders to more easily organize your documents and can rename documents and folders from the toolbar (previously, you could only do this from the File menu). The toolbar has also been spiffed up. In addition, Google […]
The paid links debate is back, this time about whether Google wants all links in a paid post to have a nofollow attribute. Below, a look at the latest round, plus a recap of this year’s "War On Paid Links" by Google and where the other search engines stand on the subject.
A PEW/Internet and American Life study out today finds that the place Americans turn to most for answers is the internet. The study, which surveyed 2,796 Americans, found that 76% have internet access and that 58% turn to the internet when they have questions about things like health, school, careers, and government issues. The project […]
Last year on Christmas Day, Barry reported over at Search Engine Roundtable how Adam Lasnik and I spent a bit of time answering questions on the Google Webmaster Central forums. This year, Google Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller keeps up the tradition. In the spirit of the season, I thought it might be fun to […]
Earlier today, we reported that over 4 million Google AdSense ads were being indexed by Microsoft Live Search. Tonight, the Microsoft Live Search Webmaster Center blog has posted that they’ve identified and fixed the issue and that search results should return to normal within the next few days.
According to a new post on the Google Webmaster Central blog, the supplemental index is no longer, well, supplemental. Google has long had a two-tiered index and webmasters have generally feared the second, supplemental tier. A Forbes article earlier this year called it “Google Hell“, as historically, those pages weren’t crawled as often as those […]
Marge Simpson Googling Herself "All this time I thought ‘googling’ yourself meant the other thing." A PEW/Internet Survey out this week found that 47% of internet users have done ego searches, up from 22% five years ago. That nearly half of internet users are searching for themselves seems excessive, but only 3% say they check […]
Today, Google’s Webmaster Tools have been updated with new diagnostic features that alert site owners to problems Google may have extracting content from pages. In addition, they’ve added Video Sitemaps. They’ve also added Hungarian and Czech to the 20 languages already supported. Below more about these features and how best to use them.
Everyone’s been talking about how the social graph is the next evolution of search. Search 4.0. The next step forward after Search 3.0’s blended and personalized search. Today, Mahalo is taking that next step and adding a social layer to their search results. Jason Calacanis, Mahalo founder, says that the problem of search will be […]
At Pubcon last week, Matt Cutts mentioned a change in the way Google handles subdomains. To better understand this change and what this means for search marketers, let’s revisit common site structure choices, how they’re handled by Google, and how that impacts SEO.
Today, Microsoft has posted to the Live Search Webmaster Center blog that the cloaking detection system they have been running for the past few months has, for some sites, skewed site statistics and ads reporting, as well as caused a high traffic load, and they have made some adjustments to the process to correct these […]
As Barry noted earlier, Matt Cutts, keeper of all things webspam and webmaster for Google, is reviving his video series. This new set is on the official Google Webmaster Central blog, rather than his personal site, and so far, don’t seem to feature either of his cats. But even cat-free, they are a welcome addition […]
A new partnership between Go Daddy web hosting and Google Webmaster Tools gives Go Daddy customers easy access to the features available within Google Webmaster Tools. According to the release, Go Daddy customers can opt-in to the integration for their hosted sites directly from their control centers. This jump starts account creation, site submission, and […]