Michael Gray noticed that Google News is continuously indexing old stories on some sites as new stories. Yes, this is the exact issue that influenced United Airlines stock price drop just a week ago. Google blamed the Tribune for the article not containing a date, which is a fair accusation. But As Michael shows, Google […]
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.
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 […]
The Yahoo Search Blog announced the August 2008 weather report today. Sharad Verma of Yahoo Search said, “We’ll be rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the next few days. As you know, throughout this process you may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index, but expect […]
Today, the Search Engine Roundtable has a post explaining that Google News only shows results for news articles up to thirty-days old. To access any older news content, you must use Google News Archive Search. The thing is, not all Google News sources are included in Google News Archive Search. In fact, you must qualify […]
How big is Google’s web index? Google hasn’t said for years and still isn’t saying — but it is blogging today about how it "knows" of 1 trillion web-based items. Joy, we haven’t had a search engine talk about pages it knows about to confuse things since the Lycos days. Glad to have Google making […]
Matt Cutts of Google has posted another one of his debunking theories post, this time on the Google Toolbar aiding Google in indexing content. Matt said, “if Ken Simpson is implying that the Google Toolbar led to these urls being crawled, then he’s mistaken.” Ken Simpson was paraphrased in an InformationWeek article saying, the “Google […]
The Google Blog posted their third entry on how Google rankings work. This write up is more about the technology behind their ranking system. I’ll bullet point some of the key points for you all:
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 […]
Yahoo has warned us of an up and coming Yahoo Search index update. Priyank Garg & Sharad Verma of Yahoo Search said Yahoo will “be rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the next few days, but expect the update will be completed soon.” The last Yahoo update was just […]
I reported at the Search Engine Roundtable this morning that Google said if your robots.txt is unreachable, your site might not make it into the Google index. By unreachable, Google means that if your server simply times out and does not return any server response when Googlebot attempts to access your robots.txt file, then it […]
A reader sent us an example of the new Google Merchant Search live and in the wild. What’s Google Merchant Search? After a little poking around, it appears to be a new but unannounced program in beta where people can comparison shop services like loans. Here are the Google Merchant Search FAQs, and here is […]
Previously I’ve covered what I dubbed Search 3.0, how search engines have evolved toward blending vertical or specialized results into “regular” web listings. Today, the step beyond that: Search 4.0, how personal, social and human-edited data can be used to refine search results.
The Yahoo Search blog posted a new weather report today. The report tells us to expect some fluctuations in the search results found at Yahoo Search. Priyank Garg & Sharad Verma of Yahoo said, that they are releasing “some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the next few days.” Expect some “ranking […]
Check this out, a search on jennifer convertibles in Google shows for Embassy of the Republic of Croatia to the USA sporting a Jennifer Convertibles stock quote feature. Yes, Google thinks that Convertibles & Croatia are the same thing, in a sense. Both the main Jennifer Convertibles result and the Croatia site have a stock […]
A Google Prototype for a Precision Image Search from the New York Times covers a new research paper (PDF format) from Google that talks about a way of ranking images based on analyzing "visual links" between them.
Yahoo Search says it’s rolling out a new search update. Yahoo’s post says the company will be “rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms. While we expect the update will be completed soon, as you know, throughout this process you may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index.” […]
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:
One of the biggest search challenges has long been that the major search engines like Google cannot crawl material that can only be retrieved through the use of forms. Now Google is filling out those form to obtain the information previously hidden, the company has announced.
Brian Ussery has discovered a revised copy of the Google Quality Raters Guidelines, which he archived on his own site. The documents are used by Google Quality Raters to aid them in classifying queries, measuring relevancy, and rating the search results. To do so, the Quality Rater must understand how Google works and this document […]
Yahoo Search sent me a note that tomorrow they will be rolling out a new update. Yahoo told me that they made “some changes to their crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms.” The update is expected to be a quick one, but you may notice “ranking changes and page shuffling in the index,” according to Yahoo. […]
Google’s Matt Cutts has lent his personal blog to the Google Images search team so they could debunk a rumor that Google censored an image of an Egyptian football player, Mohammad Aboutrika, stripping off his team jersey during the African Cup Of Nations to show a "Sympathize With Gaza" T-shirt underneath. No censoring, says Google […]
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 […]
A week ago we wrote about Google’s Mysterious Position Six Penalty. The phenomenon described has now been confirmed by Google’s Matt Cutts in one of our Sphinn threads on the topic. It appears from Matt’s comments that the drop for pages impacted was an “unintended consequence,” as Glengara puts it in a WebmasterWorld thread, to […]
One of the most recent Google theories floating through the forums is the “position six penalty.” The signs of being hit by a “position six penalty” is when you see your number one or two rankings shift downwards to position number six in Google. Many people first started noticing this happening in mid-to-late December. Aaron […]
Yahoo has announced the first Yahoo Search update of 2008. Sharad Verma said Yahoo has been rolling out updates to their “crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms” over the past couple days. Yahoo tells us the update will be done soon, but you may notice “some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index.” I reported […]
In the past, searches involving for “stop words” — prepositions, pronouns, articles, and other small words like “be” or “to” — would return a warning saying that these words were “a very common word and were not included in your search.” Now, searches involving stop words no longer do this. Here is a before and […]
Robots reading cereal boxes in the supermarket? Googlebot at the art museum? Street signs and building addresses snatched from Street View images for local search, image search, and product search? Three new patent applications published at the U.S. Trademark and Patent Office this week explore the intricacies of reading text in images taken from Google’s […]
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 […]
Raven SEO Blog spotted Microsoft’s Live Search indexing Google AdWords ads. The example given was a search on colorations paint, which returned Google AdWords ads in the 3rd and 4th position. Here is a screen capture showing one of those listings:
The Yahoo Blog issued a weather report for changes to rankings in Yahoo Search, along with news that they are now supporting the X-Robots-Tag directive — a way to control indexing of content that cannot accept meta robots tags.
After a year of discussions, ACAP — Automated Content Access Protocol — was released today as a sort of robots.txt 2.0 system for telling search engines what they can or can’t include in their listings. However, none of the major search engines support ACAP, and its future remains firmly one of "watch and see." Below, […]
For the past few years, I have been silently listening to and observing other search engine optimization (SEO) professionals speak and write about the topic of search-engine friendly web site design. I’m the one in the back with the black wig, sunglasses, mustache, and trench coat. All joking aside, I am genuinely interested in how […]
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 […]
The Yahoo Search Blog has posted that they are currently undergoing an index, crawl, and algorithm update. Priyank Garg of Yahoo said: Over the last few days, we’ve been rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms. While we expect the update will be completed soon, as you know, throughout this process […]
Last month Facebook made user profiles available to everyone — including anyone not logged in to Facebook and search engines. Today it announced it was opening up the application directory and application “about” pages. In terms of privacy, this means that if you comment on an application anyone can see that comment, although anyone not […]
Locally Type found a mistake in a Google search result, showing a Yahoo Maps URL but with a plus box that reveals a Google Map. Here’s the result that lead to the post: Needham, MA 02494. The actual Yahoo Map is a link down on the page.
BlogStorm has found that Google News might actually index Yahoo contextual ads.
The Open Directory’s home page appears to have gone missing from Google’s search results. For example, a search on dmoz (the Open Directory’s nickname) does not return the home page in the search results. Here is a screen capture: Similarly, searches for open directory or open directory project also don’t list the site at the […]