Steve Yegge, an engineer at the Google Kirkland office, recently posted to the Google blog about the Kirkland office’s third birthday. He also announced the opening of an engineering office in Fremont. Both locations are in the Seattle area — Fremont is just north of downtown and Kirkland is across the floating bridge on the […]
Compete and Nielsen show Microsoft gaining search share over the summer, while comScore and Hitwise show the company losing share. Regardless of these numbers, however, Microsoft is confident that the search engine it’s reintroducing tonight in conjunction with its Searchification event will be a substantial improvement of the current version of Live search. Vanessa Fox […]
As the Wall Street Journal reported this morning, real estate and local search site Zillow announced another round of investment — this time a whopping $30 million. That means the company has raised roughly $90 million since launching in early 2006. Among other intended uses of the money, the site will be growing its sales […]
Last week, I wrote about the overall people search landscape, which, while not new, has been recently expanding and making full use of all that is shiny Web 2.0. Spock is the latest of these services to leverage social networks, intelligent web crawling, and community involvement. Spock launched in private beta in April, then in […]
Can you imagine trying to sort through billions of web pages without a search engine? Inconceivable! They make it easy and fast to find information. Now how about finding one of the six billion people on the planet. Where’s the Google of people search? As it turns out, an entire industry of people search engines […]
SEOmoz released its latest SEO quiz today, which is now getting some buzz as folks poke at the accuracy of the questions. Below, my own spin through the test, which constantly had me disagreeing with many of the "answers," plus some links to more of the chatter about it.
Some webmasters may know of Google’s Maile Ohye through her work in Google Webmaster Central, but now she plays a new role explaining issues about search privacy, in a new video from Google. It’s the first of several videos on the subject that Google has announced that it will be doing. I found the first […]
The Google Webmaster Central Blog announced more detailed warning are now being displayed to those using Google Sitemaps, when minor problem are spotted. Previously, Google showed any problem, be it large or small, as an error. Now small issues that are “confusing or inaccurate” are considered “warnings” and large issues that make sitemaps unreadable are […]
Today’s Wall Street Journal featured an article entitled Start-Ups Make Inroads With Google’s Work Force, which focused on emerging potential retention problems at Google (in particular vs. Facebook). Yahoo has recently shed – both voluntarily and involuntarily – a number of high profile employees and suffered negative publicity from some of those departures. Now it […]
Two top Google engineers leave — to Benchmark Capital from VentureBeat reports Bret Taylor and Jim Norris, top Google engineers, have left Google to work at Benchmark Capital, a venture capital firm. Taylor and Norris were largely responsible for the development of Google Maps as well as other Google products. Taylor was the project leader […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
Google Webmaster Central product manager Vanessa Fox is heading for pastures new — jumping over to become product team lead at real estate start-up Zillow. She’ll be overseeing the development of new ad, feed and email products there. Vanessa talks about the move more on her blog, saying:
Vanessa Fox posted an update to fake German Google webmaster penalty notifications that I reported yesterday. In that post, she explained that the emails sent from [email protected] warning that your site will be banned from the Google.de index are fake. Google will temporarily be halting the notification of webmaster penalty emails until they can “provide […]
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 […]
Vanessa Fox of Google Webmaster Central announced an upgrade to their anchor text reports. Anchor text reporting was added last month, as Danny’s Google Now Reporting Anchor Text Phrases article covers. In that, he had some wish list items. The new features include some of those and other changes:
I’ve written before about how there are many women are involved in search and search marketing, but blogrolls like ours can still feel man heavy. Fortunately, there are some new blogs up from women in search, including Google Webmaster Central’s Vanessa Fox. Here’s a round-up.
For years, Google’s link: command (and see here) has deliberately failed to show all the links to a website. This came out of Google’s fear that site owners simply wanted the data to try and manipulate rankings — which was pretty true. Instead, they only provided a sampling of backlinks. Today, that changes. Google Webmaster […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web:
Google’s Matt Cutts has issued a weather report on Google indexing and ranking issues, which I’ll get into below. In addition, I’ll recap a number of Google concerns that I’ve noted over the past two or three weeks. I’ve been saving these to follow up on when I’m out at Google later this month. I’m […]
Matt Cutts called for Google to have more people blogging and monitoring communities interested in their products and hints at leaving Google.
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web:
Vanessa Fox at the Google Webmaster Central Blog posted tips on using images on your site. In short, she explains that: (1) Don’t put the bulk of your visible text in images, use real text (2) Use alt tags to describe the images (3) Do not keyword stuff the alt tags (4) Alt tags are […]