The push layer returns: Why ‘publish and wait’ is half a strategy
See how AI systems process content through five entry modes — and why relying on crawling alone limits visibility, speed, and revenue
Topic: HotBot
Historic recurrence in search: Why AI feels familiar and what’s next
AI is changing how people search – again. Learn what decades of search history can teach us about adapting to the next big shift.
The modern SEO: Researcher, strategist and project manager
The SEO of 2025 wears many hats: strategist, researcher, collaborator. This is the new SEO mandate – and how to stay relevant.
On Google’s 21st birthday, a look back in time
Revisit a 1999 interview with Google co-founder Larry Page by Search Engine Land's Chris Sherman.
SearchCap: The Day In Search, May 4, 2012
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Google Street View Shows ‘Secret Base’ In Israel, But Military Says It’s Not Secret At All Some in Israel are calling foul after images of what’s described as a “secret base” […]
Former Lead Inktomi Engineer On Why Google Beat Them
Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Inktomi was the search engine that many SEOs focused on when optimizing their sites – they powered Yahoo, HotBot and many other portals and search engines. But soon later, Google began to dominate and Inktomi was bought out by Yahoo for just $250 million. Diego Basch, a […]
SearchCap: The Day In Search, September 14, 2009
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Bing 2.0 “Visual Search” Launches, Allows Search By Pictures Microsoft has unveiled Bing 2.0 at TechCrunch50 today, also known as Bing Visual Search, which allows people to “search by picture.” After […]
A Look Back At The Old Search Engines
The Six Revisions blog complied an excellent list of the classic search engines, some dating back to the 1990s. His list includes screen shots of both the old and current (if available) versions of HotBot, Excite, WebCrawler, Ask Jeeves, Ask.com, Yahoo, Google, Dogpile, AltaVista, Lycos, MSN Search, Bing, AOL Search, Infoseek, Go.com, Netscape, MetaCrawler, and […]
Schmidt: Bing Can’t Buy Search Love With Ads; Gotta Earn It
CEO Eric Schmidt has weighed in on the Bing launch — and he’s not sounding panicked, not that I would expect him to be. But he certainly puts out a conflicted message that Bing isn’t a serious competitor and yet argues that it’s serious enough that talk of a Google monopoly seems “unwarranted.” Plus, a […]
Tough Love For Microsoft Search
Back in June, I spoke at Microsoft as part of a regular series for those involved with its webmaster tools group and anyone generally interested in search. My talk was called “Tough Love For Microsoft Search,” and I covered various reasons why I felt the company has generally failed to make headway in the space. […]
SearchBiz: Mehdi Moves Up At Microsoft; Should MSFT learn from Ask?; Top 25 People On The Web; Google & The NSA
With Microsoft’s current advertising campaign still leaving many people shaking their heads in wonder, TechCrunch has an idea: follow the lead of Ask.com. Jason Kincaid confesses that Ask’s ad — the one that shows a young woman “exercising” (ahem) on a stripper pole in her house — actually made him curious enough to click through […]
Search 3.0: The Blended & Vertical Search Revolution
This has been a remarkable year. After years of no real dramatic evolution in search, the third generation finally arrived. Google calls it Universal Search, and I’ve been tending to say “blended search” as a generic name for the change that’s now hit all the major search engines. But in doing the agenda for our upcoming SMX West conference, a […]
Addicted to Link Research?
It’s been a little over a week since MS Live Search disabled linking related advanced queries. The post itself announcing the decision was short, but the commentary that followed it was anything but. What’s the big deal? The search engines never had to give us this data in the first place. The actual operator, link: […]
Finding Search Engine Freshness & Crawl Dates
A reader emailed me today noticing that Google was showing a date next to his listing, which made me think this was a good time to revisit how, when and where search engines show crawl dates for pages. These dates are a useful way for site owners to understand how often they are being revisited […]