Yahoo announced a search update to their index. The update includes possible updates to Yahoo’s crawling, indexing, and ranking algorithms. Dan Rampton, Yahoo’s Product Manager said: The Yahoo! Search engineering teams are rolling out updates to crawling, indexing, and ranking algorithms. Similar to previous updates, you may notice some ranking changes and page shuffling during […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Short Vs. Long Tail: Which Search Queries Perform Best? The focus on the utility (or lack thereof) of long tail keywords in paid search campaigns seems to ebb and flow, but […]
Exclusive: How Google’s Algorithm Rules the Web from Wired has an excellent and detailed look at the evolution Google’s search algorithm over the years. It is a pretty long write up, so I wanted to highlight those key points in bullet format for you all.
The Yahoo Search Blog dusts itself off to announce a search update happening right now. The last “weather report” Yahoo announced was in September 2009 – typically, Yahoo would announce these updates monthly. We actually expected this to be announced. I was tracking a WebmasterWorld thread where SEOs were noticing ranking changes at Yahoo Search. […]
In a post on the Official Google Blog, Google opens up the curtains a bit on how it handles synonyms in search queries and results. It’s a fairly detailed peek inside one aspect of Google’s search algorithms — an aspect that Google says affects a lot of searches: “…our measurements show that synonyms affect 70 […]
The Technology Review magazine has an article named How Google Ranks Tweets. They interviewed Amit Singhal, a Google Fellow, who led development of Google’s real-time search, on the topic. Amit explained that in the social context, the number of people following someone is similar to the number of links pointing to a page. We know […]
Forget PageRank, at least if you’re a news publisher looking to do well in Google News. Google’s news service doesn’t rely on the same algorithm used by “regular” Google, of which PageRank is a part of. Instead, Google News taps into its own unique ranking signals, which include user clicks, the estimated authority of a […]
Google is buying ads to explain why an offensive image of the First Lady is back in its index and ranking so highly on searches for Michelle Obama in Google Image Search. As we reported last week, Google had originally removed the Michelle Obama image on the grounds that the site hosting the image violated […]
Data driven anticipatory bidding can turn an ordinary holiday bump into something extraordinary. Here are some tips for how to take apart and act on the data.
In social news and social bookmarking sites, many users tend to get caught up in how many votes or bookmarks it will take for their submitted content to be promoted to the frontpage or “popular” sections of the site. What is often overlooked by users is the quality and naturalism of those votes that trigger […]
In a series of interviews and articles recently published online, BusinessWeek magazine tries to open up the curtains on Google’s search quality team — the ways team members evaluate Google’s search rankings and their decision-making process when changes are being made. Perhaps the place to start is with BusinessWeek’s interview of Google CEO Eric Schmidt, […]
Google Sidewiki is a new feature being added today to the Google Toolbar that allows anyone to leave comments about pages as they surf the web. Love something you’re reading? Hate it? You can share your views with others who visit the page and who also have Sidewiki enabled. Share, that is, if Google thinks […]
If Google News is analogous to the print daily newspapers then the new “spotlight” feature is more like a weekly news magazine. Spotlight is an outgrowth of a test of “interesting reads” that a select group of users were exposed to. Here’s what Google says about Spotlight’s function and role: The Spotlight section of Google […]
A Google AdSense post announces that Google will be making changes to their contextual targeting algorithms in the near future. Woojin Kim, Google AdSense Product Manager said, “this week, we’ll be rolling out a series of enhancements to AdSense’s contextual targeting capabilities, which will more accurately match relevant ads to webpages.” Publishers do not need […]
In some ways, it’s the Who’s Who of Twitter — the Twitter Suggested Users list. These are the 241 people Twitter currently suggests that new people should follow. Below, a look at who makes it by categories, such as media or sports. Who’s getting Twitter’s love (such as the New York Times) and who’s not […]
Google’s “experiment” in using Wikipedia as a news source on Google News is over, at least in the U.S. and Canada. The experiment was obviously a success, because Google has confirmed for us that the idea has been expanded. Says Google spokesperson Gabriel Stricker: “As with many features on Google News, these links were initially […]
Earlier this month, Google’s Matt Cutts sent a shockwave through the advanced SEO community by saying that site owners could no longer perform “PageRank sculpting” using the nofollow tag in the way they’d previously thought. Now Matt’s posted more explanation about the change. But rather than stop PageRank sculpting, I expect his explanation will simply […]
Imagine that you fired up your computer and found that a bunch of your programs no longer worked, because behind the scenes, the operating system had been upgraded without any backwards compatibility. That’s what happened this week with Google. Some things that were working just fine now are broken, because Google isn’t being backwards compatible. […]
According to the Wall Street Journal Google is trying to apply its own search techniques to the problem of employee retention: Concerned a brain drain could hurt its long-term ability to compete, Google Inc. is tackling the problem with its typical tool: an algorithm. The Internet search giant recently began crunching data from employee reviews […]
There’s no official announcement (yet), but Google tells Search Engine Land that it’s made several improvements under the hood of Google Blog Search. In an email conversation, Google’s Jeremy Hylton — head of the search quality group in Google’s New York office — explained how the changes impact the “clusters” of stories that appear on […]
Big news last week: Twitter Search to dive deeper, rank results. Twitter’s @Santosh Jayaram has indicated Twitter Search, which currently searches only Twitter post text, will begin crawling links and indexing the content of pages posted in tweets. To help with search result ranking, Twitter is creating a “reputation” ranking system that among other things […]
A couple weeks ago, we reported that Google fixed the blogroll indexing algorithm in Google Blog Search, but has not yet fixed the link operator, which returned links found in blogrolls. Google has recently updated the link operator for Blog Search to not count links in the blogroll for the link operator command in blog […]
A new video by Google’s Matt Cutts may give us some insights into how Google may treat links from different segments of sites, differently. In the video, Matt explains that Google doesn’t necessarily look to valuing a link from a blog more than a link from a forum. However, Matt does seem to imply that […]
It seems like almost everyone in Big Business is looking for a bailout these days. That’s certainly true of several big brand media companies who, according to an AdAge article today, have told Google they deserve higher rankings in Google’s search results. Not only that, but one executive has also labeled the rest of the […]
Better Search Doesn’t Mean Beating Google from Saul Hansell at the New York Times does an excellent job breaking down the latest Google threat, or lack there of. A secret search engine named Wolfram Alpha is being designed now by Stephen Wolfram, a British mathematician. Wolfram Alpha differs from Google in that it hopes to […]
About a week ago, SEOs and Webmasters began noticing a significant change in how Google returned results for a certain set of keywords. Many webmasters felt Google was giving “big brands” a push in the search results. However, Matt Cutts of Google created a video that answered many questions about this “brand push.” Let me […]
It has been almost three months since Google Blog Search began indexing full text of the page and, since then, there have been numerous complaints from searchers and webmasters. The majority of the complaints are that Google Alerts are coming up for irrelevant or outdated blog results. In addition, many blogs are no longer indexed […]
Last week, the Rimm-Kaufman Group disclosed what is apparently an inadvertent bug in Google’s Broad Match algorithm. Last summer’s switch from minimum bid to first-page minimum bid wasn’t supposed to impact broad match logic at all, but it did in a big way. The result? Agencies and advertisers who pay attention to the numbers saw […]
This morning I reported that the “fairer” AdWords quality score changes went live. In that post, I asked you to submit your questions, because I had scheduled a call with Google’s Nick Fox to answer some questions I had over this quality score change. The call is now over and I have some pretty transparent […]
The new, improved and billed as “fairer” quality score changes made to the AdWords algorithm are now live. In short, Google made two changes: (1) Improved how they normalize the formula for taking into account ad position when calculating an ad’s click-through rate. (2) Enabled more ads to reach the top ad spot, through a […]
Blink, and you might have missed it. Google’s now doing synonym searching. It’s something they quietly noted in a past Google blog post and one that comes up again today in a post that covers how Google uses experiments to improve the search interface.
After being in testing for literally years, Google Suggest is finally coming to Google.com. This is the feature where as you start to type in the search box, related searches automatically appear below where you are typing.
Can any start-up search engine “be the next Google?” Many have wondered this, and today’s launch of Cuil (pronounced “cool”) may provide the best test case since Google itself overtook more established search engines. Cuil provides what appears to be a comprehensive index of the web, offers a unique display presentation, and emerges at a […]
It’s fairly safe to say: 1) patent law is a mess, 2) patent law is in transition, and 3) newer court rulings are reducing the rights of patent holders. But in a very provocative argument, based on recent cases, the PatentlyO law blog argues that new rules and tests imposed by courts (though not yet […]
Over a year ago, Microsoft adCenter launched a quality ranking component to their search ads. That rollout was available to US advertisers…that is, until now. The adCenter blog announced that the UK and Canadian ads will now be based off this quality-based ranking system. So now, for your ads to show in the “mainline” section […]
Back in March, after Ask.com seemed to be pulling away from search to some people, I wrote that Ask "killed the search engine," was no longer an innovator in search, and couldn’t expect to compete against Google. Recently, I spoke with Ask.com CEO Jim Safka, who hoped to change my mind. He failed to do […]
Udi Manber, VP Engineering, Search Quality at Google, wrote a fairly long post at the Google Blog on introducing search quality to the public. In short, Udi explains the various teams within the search quality group and explains what each team does. I will highlight below the parts I personally found most interesting:
There are two new interviews available, one from Google’s VP of search quality, Udi Manber, and one from Googler Matt Cutts. Popular Mechanics interviewed Udi Manber and posted the interview transcript online. Matt Cutts did an audio/podcast interview with Duct Tape Marketing. Here is a summary of my notes from each interview:
Google recently made some quite significant changes to the OneBox / Universal Search result that appears at the top of the result page when you do a query that Google determines has local intent. Previously, Google would display three local search results in the OneBox area, with a star rating and a review snippet. Now […]
Just days after the one-year anniversary of Google’s Google bomb fix, a new Google bomb may have gotten through — dangerous cult, bringing up the Scientology web site, as shown above. But is it really getting past the fix? Considering one of the targeted words is being used on the page itself, it’s hard to […]