Once Upon a Time in a Galaxy Far Far Away...

from The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine

Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web [Page, 98]. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.

a few years later:

It looks bad, coming days after the recent song-and-dance at the Google Factory Tour about how much energy is supposedly expended on core search and ads. Here's a personalized home page, but don't worry, we're not a portal, Google said.

Funny, this type of inattention is exactly what made people get turned off from the portals of the past, when they lost focus on search quality. Yahoo seems to have fixed this redirect hijacking problem, but Google is still struggling with it?

Danny Sullivan, on Google's hijacking of their own site. Danny rarely sounds ticked off, but that post hints at more than a little disappointment in Google.

Google Hijacked in Google:
Official Google AdSense site bit by a meta refresh. hmm. Low quality site? more at ThreadWatch

For those who spin all the ethics stuff, do you think Google knew of the problem and was lying when they said it was no big deal? If so, is it ethical for them to tell blatent lies? If not, how is it that SEOs know more about their search engine than they do and they generally disocunt the whole concept of SEO?

Yahoo! Q Challenge:
whats up with a $5,000 prize - that surely is not much payout for the value they could create with that contest. I might need to create a similar marketing program for myself. hehehe

Exalead:
Michael Nguyen posts about some of their search features.

Novice Spam Tool:
I have not tried it, but someone promoted this site http://searchpr.info/test.php, via forum spam of course.

Yahoo! Public Site Match:
Nothing more than a PR stunt? It sure smells the part. A while ago they promoted that program a good bit, but it sure is hard to find information about it nowadays.

Masochistic Behavior:
reading IHY forums. I don't know anywhere else where a single comment can return pages about what a horrible person you are. SEO is doomed. We are all evil. hehehe

Lots of good ones in that rant thread, but one of my all time favorite Doug quote:

Most journalists I know of at least fall on one side or the other.

Another scary thing with that thread is I find myself agreeing with Glengara!

Open Source Rank Checker:
I have not tried it, but a friend pointed me to this software. I am not sure how it plays with Google, since they have been blocking some automated software.

OPD Should Close Shop?
Danny Sullivan weighs in on the ODP's recent site submission status closure.

Black Market Porn:
UK bans selling porn DVDs over the web. UK prostitution market to soar ;)

Funny:
There is a website that qualifies you and prints out your ordained ministor certification in under a minute. A person today tried to justify me giving away my business model to them because they spent the minute to print one out.

Evolution of Yahoo! Search:
article about Yahoo! creating their search service. thnx to RC

SimCity was always one of my favorite games. kpaul recently noticed a new site by the name of Chicago Crime, which overlays crimes with their locations using Google Maps. Pretty scary to see that in Chicago there was over a murder a day last month.

What kind of ad marketplace would Google have if they:

• integrated Google maps and public data into a social network

• which linked to - or allowed people to upload - business feedback (think Local Froogle)
  • should I buy from here?

  • what other businesses are cheaper or provide better service?
  • should I consider working here?
  • who else is hiring in this field or near here?

  and destination reviews

  • is this place worth visiting?

  • when is best?
  • who has the best travel deals?

They also could show the history and trust rating of reviewers, as well as letting you determine how many social connections away you were willing to accept reviews from, maybe they could match up personalities or demographic profiles if people gave them that data, or they could let you create your own combined metric.

Add a strong recommending engine technology to that (like how Amazon.com says "of the people who viewed this product ultimately 37% ended up buying XYZ") and Google will serve ads that know what you want even when you don't.

Google has data worth lots and lots of money. It will be interesting to see how they aggregate content and collect feedback to leverage their market position.

Any merchant heavily exposed to the web which is not building communities or other hard to replicate assets may end up in the hurt locker in the next couple years.

Google's ad serving technology is still somewhat primative. As time passes and more major networks leverage their market postions more and more merchants will get marginalized by the forces that be.

The purist will hate the ads, but if RSS is going to transition from early adopter to mainstream it will need to pay for itself. The two options are that the RSS post is a summary that brings visitor to your site to see ads or you place ads in your feed. Google wants ads in your feed.

Google, wanting more ad inventory, has opened up Google AdSense for feeds (of course, BETA).

You are supposed to have at least 100 subscribers to sign up to the new AdSense for feeds program.

It's kinda funny how Google determines how feeds are supposed to work so that they justify creating more ad space, for better usability for the user of course ;)

Syndicate the full text of your articles. The more content that is available in a site’s feed, the better the user experience, and the more likely people are to subscribe your feed. If you can’t put the full text of your articles in your feed, then in addition to the headline of each article, include as informative a snippet as possible of the article’s text.

Typically most people do not view a feed until after they subscribed to it, so how does showing the full content of your post in your feed make people more likely to subscribe?

Search Engine Spam Workshop:
List of some of the presented papers. I will likely review some of those pretty soon.

What Every Good Marketer Knows:

People are selfish, lazy, uninformed and impatient. Start with that and you’ll be pleasantly surprised by what you find.

more from Seth

Mobile Social Software:
Google buys Dodgeball.com. see also: The Significance of "Social Software"

New Google PR Blog:
Marrissa Mayer's blog

If Search Engines Could Read Your Mind:
an interesting article by Chris Sherman. here is an exerpt:

We'd much rather waste time scanning results and clicking back and forth among less-than-useful pages than craft a really good query or use search refinement tools.

But while we're doing this, the search engines are observing our behavior, and learning from our fumbling activities.

SEO Press Releases:
a fun one :)

The relevance of "relevance":

• thread at SEW

• NanoContext
• RustyBrick rates search relevancy, although the data might be biased by the people who take the test (likely SEOs) here are some early results

Yahoo! Music:

Visitors to Yahoo's Music Unlimited will pay $6.99 a month for access to Yahoo's 1-million-song library. That's less than half what Napster and Real Networks' Rhapsody charge for similar services that permit the transfer of songs to portable music players. source

FindWhat:
down to $4.30 per share. other small search providers continue to hurt as well.

Gooooogle:
outgrowing coolness and forgetting their core products?

War a theme for everything?
New UK based search blog by Neutralize: Search Engine War. BTW, the new Legos Star Wars video game is amazing.

Time Management:
Creative Commons flash file

SEO Multitool:
GoLexa (sorta like a combination of Google & Alexa data with links to other stuff like WhoIs & IP Address) from Fantomaster