Search Engine Land’s Most Popular Stories Of 2007
Below are Search Engine Land’s 25 most popular stories, in terms of pageviews, during the 2007 calendar year.
Topic: Algorithm
Google & Human Quality Reviews: Old News Returns
A quote from Google’s director of research Peter Norvig in an article at Technology Review about how human reviewers assess Google’s search quality is starting to pick up play on the web and will no doubt grow. Problem is, it’s not news. Still, I suppose it’s interesting to those who are new to the space […]
High-Tech Christmas Cookies? Nah, Just A Google News Glitch
A reader spotted a pretty strange story in the Google News Sci/Tech area. Mixed alongside stories about AskEraser, the Space Shuttle launch, and “w00t” being crowned as word of the year was a recipe for Grasshopper Chocolate Chunk Cookies, the lead item for a cluster of Christmas cookie stories.
Google Tweaks “Host Crowding” Algorithm To Reduce Results From Same Domain For Search
Friday I reported that Google would be treating sub domains like sub directories. That turned out not to be 100% true. Matt Cutts clarified at his blog that Google tweaked their “host crowding” algorithm to reduce the amount of search results shown from the same domain. The examples I gave in Friday’s post reflect the […]
Google News Updates Algorithm: Sourcing Story Updates & Local Context To News
The Google News Blog announced they have updated their algorithms to become more relevant and fresh with news.
Sub Domains To Be Treated As Folders By Google
Matt Cutts of Google said at PubCon that Google will be treating sub domains similar to how they treat folders on a site. I reported this at the Search Engine Roundtable on a post by Tedster at WebmasterWorld, where Tedster said: News flash from Las Vegas PubCon. Matt Cutts informed us that Google will very […]
October 2007: Search Engine Land’s Most Popular Stories
Below are Search Engine Land’s 10 most popular stories from October 2007:
Secrets Of Google Quality Score Revealed!!! (Not.)
The nice folks from Google were in for a visit a week or so ago. One of the topics on the day’s agenda was Ad Quality. If you read extremely closely, much of what they presented in their briefing is also described at the AdWords help center (see What is a ‘Quality Score’ and how […]
Gmail To Increase Email Capacity With New Counter Algorithm
The Gmail Blog announced that in an effort to continue to gradually increase the storage space for their Gmail users, they have updated their counter algorithm. The new formula will speed up the rate at which they increase the capacity for email storage in Gmail. Googlified documents how this new algorithm will impact your storage […]
Google Book Search Improved(?)
According to the Google blog “Inside Google Book Search“, some changes have been made recently to Google Book Search, so I took this as my cue to go and visit to check these out. To say that I was disappointed is to put it mildly, and if you don’t have time to read my entire […]
SearchCap: The Day In Search, October 3, 2007
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
Billboard Showdown: Google 411 Takes On Ask’s Algorithm
I’m in the Bay Area this week, and driving down Lombard Street, I brought the car to a halt when I saw the two billboards above. Yes, that’s one of the Goog411 billboards for Google Voice Search sitting on top of an Ask.com "The Algorithm" one. Sadly, there’s doesn’t seem to be room to squeeze […]
Google: Got A “Bad” Site? Then All Your Landing Pages Might Be Poor Quality
The Inside AdWords blog has provided more detail into what makes for a low landing page quality score. Google also said they will now not pre-announce all quality score algorithm changes prior to implementation. In fact, Google details which types of sites can cause all your landing pages to be penalized. The new FAQ describes […]
Organizing The World’s Push Content: The iGoogle Ecosystem
Today, we welcome another guest author to Just Behave. This week, we’re pleased to welcome Sep Kamvar, the lead software engineer of personalization at Google. In the first of two parts, Sep looks at how the introduction of iGoogle and gadgets have created a new ecosystem of push content and how Google tackles the problem […]
New Local Search Destination Grayboxx Officially Launches
New local search engine Grayboxx has spent over a year developing a methodology and collecting information that offers “implicit” recommendations or endorsements of local businesses. These are represented as scores, called “neighbor recommendations,” and offer an alternative to more familiar review sites such as Citysearch, Yahoo Local and Yelp. Grayboxx founder Bob Chandra says this […]
Google AdWords Top Ad Promotion Formula Now Live
The Inside AdWords blog just announced that the new top promotion algorithm is now live. Advertisers who want to take advantage of this can now begin to do so. Yes, there is a lot of debate and reaction towards this new formula. I suspect now that it is live, we will see some real life […]
Reaction Towards Google’s New AdWords Promotion Formula Change
A week ago today, I wrote about new changes coming to Google AdWords under the title of Want That Top Ad Position On Google? The Rules Are About To Change. As I explained, Google is changing some of the criteria on how an ad gets promoted from the normal sponsored results listed on the right […]
Want That Top Ad Position On Google? The Rules Are About To Change
In the upcoming weeks, Google will be releasing an updated algorithm to determine the ads that are displayed in the top ad spot, above the organic search results. The updated algorithm will continue to use the quality and cost-per-click (CPC) figure but will be slightly tweaked for that top ad position. Instead of using the […]
Building Ask’s Traffic: It’s The Toolbar, Stupid!
Can Zwinky Save Ask? from the New York Times reports that the real winner in growing Ask.com’s search volume growth is their FunWebProducts division. The division launched a product named Zwinky.com that enables people to create avatars of themselves online. They then place these avatars throughout their social network pages. The thing is, the only […]
Answers.com Loses Significant Google Traffic Despite Google Definition Links
Pretty amazing — Answers.com has issued a press release to warn that its search traffic is down 28 percent due to "a search engine algorithmic adjustment by Google." It raises lots of issues — how dependent should you be on search traffic; how the "definitions" links that Answers.com has from Google don’t seem to generate […]
London Car Bombs: The Big Fat Search Failure
I was in London last night right smack in the area where a large bomb was defused this morning. Naturally, I was curious about what exactly had happened. I hit the news sites, but then I wondered what would happen for those searching generally for information using search engines. Both Google and Ask.com in particular […]
Google’s Human Touch
The Human Touch That May Loosen Google’s Grip from the New York Times questions whether Google’s use of algorithms and computers to compile search results might lead to its demise in the future.
Ask Advertising Campaign Slammed
As pointed out on Bruceclay.com — Ask.com thinks you’re an idiot — Ask can sometimes be an irritating company. I like the new Ask3D interface, and they’re doing a lot of good things in the search arena. However, when it comes to how Ask is marketing itself, I’m completely baffled.
Yahoo Search June 2007 Update
The Yahoo Search Blog announced that they are doing an index and ranking algorithm update. The update started last night and should be “complete very soon,” said Priyank Garg of Yahoo Search. Yahoo’s last update was just a few weeks ago on May 22nd. That update was a minor update.
Insight Into Google’s Search Quality Efforts
Google Keeps Tweaking Its Search Engine from the New York Times has some deep insight into the workings of Google’s search quality team. Google Blogoscoped has an excellent summary of some of the highlights from the article. In short, Amit Singhal, the head of the search quality team, let the New York Times in, to […]
Revealing The Sources Of Google News
American journalists and news reporters never reveal their sources. Google News follows suit, nowhere providing a list of the more than 4,500 English language news sources it claims to track. However, Henk van Ess, an investigative journalist from the Netherlands, offers a service that reveals the names of 1,256 news sources used by Google News […]
When Google Goes Temporarily Insane
The recent Google update, known to some of us as the “Google shuffle”, had a number of people freaked out. Seeing your site’s ranking suddenly change is a reality we all face. Sometimes the changes are legitimate, reflecting a shift in the algorithm, or in the inbound link profile of your site or your competitor’s […]
Google Says Stephen Colbert Is No Longer The Greatest Living American
Sadness, Colbert fans! Last month, I reported in Google Declares Stephen Colbert As Greatest Living American how Stephen Colbert had defied Google’s link bombing defenses and rose to be the greatest living American, according to a search for those words at Google. Today, it is no longer so. Google has dissed Colbert. Google Drops The […]
Now Starring: The Algorithm – Ask.com To Focus On Ranking System In New TV Ads
Ask.com Hopes Ads Compute to Buzz from the Wall Street Journal reports that Ask.com is launching a new TV and web ad campaign today, to try to generate buzz about the Ask.com search engine. The article says this ad campaign is “gearing up to a relaunch of the site and the debut of its new […]
What Is Google PageRank? A Guide For Searchers & Webmasters
PageRank. If you do SEO or are involved with Google or search, you’ll come across this topic at some point. You’ll also likely be confused by what exactly PageRank means. To solve that, here’s a guide to PageRank, designed for searchers and site owners alike. Google’s Definition: PageRank As Votes Let’s start with what Google says. […]
SearchCap: The Day In Search, April 18, 2007
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web:
adCenter Improves Ad Quality Ranking Algorithm
The adCenter blog announced that they have made improvements to the ranking algorithm to take into account several quality factors. The factors include:
Goodbye Teoma Algorithm, Hello Edison, Says Ask.com
Jim Lanzone, CEO of Ask.com, has confirmed with me that Ask.com is working on Edison. Edison is the code name behind merging of Ask.com’s two different search technologies they own, Teoma and Direct Hit. The name comes from inventor Thomas Edison, who worked out of New Jersey where’s Ask’s Teoma technology came from and where […]
Google AdWords Quality Score Algorithm Live
Google AdWords has begun to roll out the quality score column in advertiser accounts in AdWords last week. Now, Google has announced that the new quality score algorithm has been pushed to the Google servers. In the next few days, these changes will be complete and sponsored ads in the Google results will change – […]
Google Local Search Algorithm Explored
Matt McGee’s 10 Likely Elements of Google’s Local Search Algorithm explores what makes Google Local different from Google.com algorithmically. Here they are in summary:
Google AdWords Adds Quality Score Column & To Improved Quality Algorithm
Google will be adding a quality score column within your AdWords accounts by weeks end. In addition, within the next couple of weeks, Google will be rolling out a significant change to the AdWords quality score algorithm. I had a conversation with Nick Fox, the head of Google’s ad quality team, to review some of […]
Roundup Of Feedback On Yahoo’s Panama Release
Yahoo launched their new ad-ranking algorithm “Panama” this past Monday. Since then, I have collected feedback from the search community on the release. Here is a collection of blog posts, forum posts and opinion on Yahoo’s new quality score factor:
What Yahoo’s Panama Update Means For Searchers
Yesterday’s rollout of Yahoo’s new Panama search advertising ranking system has been both praised and criticized by advertisers (see Panama is LIVE! – for some and Yahoo’s Panama: The Switch Is Flipped on The New Ad System). Praised, because the new system is streamlined, easier to use and offers more campaign management tools. Criticized, because […]
Google’s Debated Penalties & Filters Roundup
Over the years, there have been dozens if not hundreds, of theories on possible Google penalties and filters being used in the Google ranking algorithms. Joe Whyte provides an excellent roundup of many of those filters and penalties that the search forums have debated over the years. I am not getting into the debate on […]
Google Kills Bush’s Miserable Failure Search & Other Google Bombs
Google has finally defused the “Google Bomb” that has returned US President George W. Bush at the top of its results in a search on miserable failure. The move wasn’t a post-State Of The Union Address gift for Bush. Instead, it’s part of an overall algorithm change designed to stop such mass link pranks from […]