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Archive for the ‘Search News’ Category
May 27th, 2009 | 
Author: Think back, way back. Remember when Alta Vista was senonomous with search? How time flies. Google came along and re-defined what search means and the rest is history, or is it?
Is Twitter the next Google? Maybe not yet, but to a large extent, Twitter is re-defining what search is by introducing the concept of Real Time Search.
There is an element in Google’s algo that attempts to deal with real time search, QDF (Query Deserves Freshness), however is this enough for Google to claim that it can feed the latest results in real time? Not really, hence Google’s recent launch of search options.
The power behind Twitter’s search engine lies in the user generated content (Tweets) that populate it’s database with the latest happenings in real time (up to the second).
While Google will eventually index the latest news (and it’s getting faster at doing so) it has some way to go before it can emulate the Twitter model which currently owns real time search..
What’s the solution? Well short of Google buying Twitter, I don’t see one. Watch this space.
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An agreement was struck yesterday by the three main search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN) on the adoption of a new tag to tackle canonicalisation in the SERPs.
Canonicalisation is the challenge of having multiple pages of the same page due to outdated software such as a content management system or forum. Examples of pages that out put duplicate content include:
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Having the same content on the www and non www versions of your homepage or internal folders.
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Printer-friendly pages
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Forum threads with session id’s
An example of the new canonical tag which is placed in the HEAD of the page (where Title and Meta Description tags are placed) looks like this:
<link rel="canonical" href=http://www.yoursite.com/forum>
By placing the above tag in the <head> of pages with similar content, you would inform search engines that the page is a copy of the URL www.yoursite.com/forum and that all popularity and strength of any other duplicate pages should be passed on to that URL.
Previously, canonicalisation was addressed through rules placed in the .htaccess file of a domain. This tag while more manual, is much easier to understand by less techie webmasters and is a fantastic development on the part of search engines.
Official announcements by the three search engines can be found here:
On Thursday, Google officially launched its much anticipated “Search Wiki” application found within its personalised Google search accounts. This move was hardly a surprise especially as Google’s been dabbling with the idea of search Wiki as an experiment for some time now.
The idea behind search Wiki is simple. Google now allows users to custom design their search results from within their personalised Google search accounts. The method by which to personalise the search results is very simple and can be accomplished with a single click on a link found next to the title of the results which brings that search result to the top of the page. Search Wiki also allows users to add new sites to the results and manage them in the same way. Google also allows users to comment on the search listings and these comments can be publicly shared.
What does this mean for the future of search? Well, in a nutshell, more personalisation means better search experience for users and less work for Google trying to figure out who should rank on the top results.
Other search engines are using a similar concept of search result management, most prominent of which is Wikipedia search engine which has also recently launched its version of Wiki search in a feeble attempt to compete with Google.
How Will Personalised Search Affect SEO?
Search engine optimisation will still play an important part in search since websites will still need to be visible for the general public and best practice search engine optimisation is still the only way to do that without continually paying for PPC ads.
The launch of Google Wiki search is definitely one of the significant milestones in the development of search and it will be really interesting to see how this effects Google’s search results over the next few months. Watch this space…
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Over the past few months, two new search engines have been creeping their way into the limelight; Cuil and Wikia Search.
Quil (pron: Cool) was started by ex-Google engineers who now claim they have an index larger than that of Google’s. While Wikia Search (brainchild of Wiki founder Jimmy Wales) harnesses the power of the masses to build the largest human edited search engine)
I used both engines over the past few weeks and while both offer new features, I don’t think Google will lose sleep over either of them, here’s why…
Cuil: The results are presented in blocks of text including a picture scrapped from the site they’re displaying. The results page is too confusing as it provides too much information and looks more like a spammy affiliates page than a search engine results page.
Wikia Search: Better results display but the results themselves need much improvement. More importantly, since users can edit and review results, the database is very much open to spamming.
Having said the above, its still good to see others trying to improve on what Google currently offers in terms of search.
Adobe recently announced it is has developed its Flash technology to enable search engine spiders to read the content within it.
In the past, search engines like Google were able to pick out links embedded in Flash files but unable to index the content within the Flash file. So even though humans were able to read the content, search engines couldn’t actually see it.
Last week all this changed when Adobe (owners of the Flash technology) announced that new technology within their product will allow search engines to read all content within a Flash file.
What does all this mean?
For Flash developers, this is a Godsend. They will now be able to continually create beautiful Flash sites regardless of the fact that it was previously “unfriendly” to search engines. But is it search friendly now? The answer is no.
Even though search engines will now be able to read content within a Flash file, the fact that it is usually only one file with loads of content crammed into it makes it unfriendly to search engines.
Search engines like sites that are multi-paged, with content categorised into folders/subfolders with a broad to narrow keyword mapping structure (ie the homepage targets the broadest keyword (most general) and as you go deeper into the site the keywords become more narrow (more specific or “long-tailed”).
Final ruling on Adobe’s new Flash technology…
Well the jury is still out on this one but my guess is that Flash sites will still lag behind their much leaner HTML cosines in the search engine result pages (SERPs).