September
8, 2004
In
This Issue:
1. Challenges in Running a Commercial Search Engine
2. In the News - Yahoo's Four Things, Google Glossary
3. More News Headlines
4. This Week's Q&A - Can new web sites help our rank?
5. Wrapping It Up
_________________
Challenges in Running a Commercial Search Engine
Regular readers of this newsletter have heard me talk in the
past about how great it would be to be able to sit down with someone
inside Google, Yahoo!, or any of the major search engines to ask
questions and learn how it all works. And whenever big names from
Google or whomever get interviewed and share important information,
we always mention it here because the more we know about how search
engines work, the more likely we can make search engine marketing
an important part of our overall business strategy.
With that in mind, let me encourage you to download and read
this PDF:
Challenges in Running a Commercial Search Engine
It's essentially a PDF file containing the Powerpoint slides
used by Google's Amit Singhal at a recent speaking engagement.
Singhal
is a Senior Research Scientist at Google, and the presentation
is from IBM's Second Search and Collaboration Seminar 2004.
The presentation was given from the information retrieval (IR)
angle,
but it shouldn't be too technical. For example, in discussing
the current state of web search, one slide offers this overview
of
user habits:
- Users give a 2-4 word query
- SE gives a relevance ranked list of web pages
- Most users click only on the first few results
- Few users go below the fold (Whatever is visible without
scrolling down)
- Far fewer ask for the next 10 results
As you can see, not too technical at all. There are some
great slides showing the challenge of dealing with search
engine
spam such as cloaked pages, link farms, and such. And
toward the end,
there are even some interesting slides showing photos
from Google's early days when ... I'm not kidding ... Legos
were apparently
used as casing for their servers. I found it all a good
read and hope
you do, too.
_________________
In The News
Four Things Yahoo Can Do That Google Can't
Tara Calishain created this PDF document that talks about four
Yahoo features/tools that you can't use on Google, and she promises
another one will come soon detailing things you can do on Google,
but not Yahoo. If you're into getting the most out of your search
engines, you might enjoy reading it. Tara runs ResearchBuzz.com and has authored several search engine-related books, including
the newest called Web Search Garage.
Four Things Yahoo Can Do That Google Can't
Google Glossary Tool Launches
Google has moved its Glossary tool out of Google Labs and into
the main Google search engine. Google Glossary lets you use
the main Google search bar to get definitions or explanations
of
common words. When you type "define," "what is," or "what
are" in your search query in front of a word, phrase, or acronym,
Google will display one Glossary definition above your search results.
Here's an example:
"define
blog"
_________________
More News Headlines
Here are a few news headlines worth your time to read.
These are just some of the headlines we've posted
to OWTweb.com in recent
days.
Microsoft to challenge Google
September 02, 2004 - Boston Globe
Steve Ballmer, president and chief executive of Microsoft Corp.,
said yesterday that his company is "hell-bent and determined" to
challenge Google Inc. for leadership in the Internet search business. More headlines: http://www.owtweb.com/news/
_________________
This Week's Q&A
Hello Matt,
A friend who works in a completely different industry
was telling me recently that his company recently created several
new web sites, with each one serving to send customers to their
main site. The new sites all link to the corporate site, and
they expect this will help their search engine rankings. Will
it?
Mark
Hi Mark --
If it does, I would bet it's only a temporary bump. Sounds
like they're hoping the inbound links from these new
sites will add
to the link popularity of their main site, and help the
main site rank better. There are a couple problems with that:
1. New sites don't have enough of a reputation to help
other sites by linking to them. This is especially
true with Google,
which
over the past year has really been tweaking its algorithm
to combat schemes like this. Google is now very slow
in giving
new sites
any authority where linking is concerned.
2. All search engines frown on anything that's done solely
to boost rankings. So if these new sites have no value
to an end
user, and
exist solely for the purpose of linking to the main
site, the search engines will eventually discover this scheme
(perhaps after a competitor
informs them!). At that point, it's possible the main
site could be penalized.
What they're doing, though, would be okay if each new
site has a real purpose, offers real value to the
end user,
and is substantially
different from the other sites. We have two different
web sites for OWT, for example. There's owt.com,
which is for
our internet
access services (broadband, dial-up, etc.) and there's
owtweb.com for our web services. They offer unique
content and each
has a separate purpose. (Have a question? Email questions@owtweb.com)
_________________
Wrapping it Up
If you used Google at all on Tuesday, you probably noticed the
special logo on the site. Google turned six years old. They have
a history of creating special logos for various important dates
and events, many of which can be seen here:
Google Logos
Thanks for reading,
Matt McGee
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