Gary has a new site called Docuticker keeping track of some of the newer search and other useful research papers / documents.

More info about Docuticker

(thanks to Andy)

Daniel E Ross and Danny Levinson (of Yahoo!) recently created a whitepaper titled Understanding User Goals in Web Search, which aimed to figure out "why are people searching?"

The underlying relevance-ranking algorithms that determine which results are presented to a user might differ depending on the search goal. For example, queries that express a need for advice might rely more on usage- or connectivity-based relevance factors, while those involving open-ended research might weight traditional information retrieval measures (such as term frequency) more highly.

They broke the searches down into three broad groups (and subgroups of these groups).

• Resource - be entertained or interacting. not just finding info on the page - free online video games, pornography

• Informational - read or learn something - lists, advice, locate
• Navigational - going to a single topical hub - Amazon, Ebay

These findings came from 3 sets of approximately 500 AltaVista searches each.
The study found a few interesting things about web search:

• Nearly 40% of searches in each of their search sessions were non informational.

• A large percent of informational searches were aiming to locate a product or service vice find information about it.
• "Just over 35% of all queries appear to have the kind of general research goals (questions, undirected requests for information, and advice-seeking) for what traditional information retrieval systems were designed."
• Navigational searches were much less common than expected (~13% of total search. Incidentally 62% of searches were informational and 25% were for resources.

They stated the lack of distribution of AltaVista and its reputation for having powerful search capabilities might have thrown their research off and they hoped to eventually be testing Yahoo! results.

Originally found on Cre8tive Flow blog.

Recently Mike Grehan interviewed Jon Glick, who is Yahoo!'s Senior Manager for Web Search. You can read all the good Yahoo! Search stuff (note to self: stuff is a generic word to use in anchor text) in it, or look at my synopsis below. Yahoo! Search
How was Yahoo! Search Made?

The goal in creating Yahoo! search technology was not, you know, let's take a piece here a piece there...AllTheWeb was very, very good at was rebuilding indexes and keeping very high levels of freshness...Alta Vista had a really good core technology called MLR (machine learn ranking).

The best of breed parts of those engines were included with some of the best parts of Inktomi to make the new Yahoo! Search.

Meta Keywords
How is Yahoo! Search using the meta keywords tag?

Each keyword is an individual token separated by commas...For best practice you just need to remember it's for matching - not ranking...‘laptop computers’ will count for ‘laptop computers’ and not ‘laptop’ or ‘computers’ separately.

Essentially this is a good place for synonyms & misspellings (I tend to have some of them in my copy anyway)...Each keyword phrase is unique and separated by commas, so you will not have set off a flag for laptops if you use a meta tag such as
<meta name="keywords" content="Yahoo! laptops, computer laptops, compaqt laptops, compak laptops">

but you will also want to get words such as "lap tops" and "compaqt lap tops" in your meta tags. Each version helps to get your file included in that specific subset of search results, but has no influence on rankings.

Meta Description
How does Yahoo! Search use the meta description tag>

Yes we do use meta keywords. So let me touch on meta tags real fast. We index the meta description tag. It counts similar to body text.

Page Title Tag
How should I write my page title tag?

The title tag? My biggest recommendation is write that for users! Because that's the one real piece of editorial in the search listing that you can absolutely control...We typically show, roughly 60 characters. That's the maximum we'd show. I'm not a professional copywriter, so I can't tell you "is short and punchy better than lots of information..."

Affiliate Marketing
Why does Yahoo! hate affiliate marketers?

Well let me just say first that, in that sense Spam has gotten a lot better over the years. You don't really much have people trying to appear for off topic terms as they tended to. You now have people who are trying to be very relevant. They're trying to offer a service, but the issue with affiliate Spam is that they're trying to offer the same service as three hundred other people.

They also touch on Site Match, search personalization, SPAM, linkage data and other hot search topics...also linked to this visual thesaurus tool at the end of their eMarketing News newsletter.

Some good info about SEM, websites, and the future of search.

Nick Scevak of Jupiter Media recently showed a yummie pie graph which showed

• 16% of businesses surveyed outsourced search engine marketing

• 15% do not do search engine marketing
• 69% do search engine marketing in house

This shows some amazing room for growth potential within the industry.
Nick also stated that his biggest fear with paid search is that we may have unrealistic expectations based on amazing performace and returns for early adoptors.

Cheryle Pingle of Range Online Media stated that a large portion of the current growth in search is due to the growth of the economy.

Michael Sack of Inceptor stated that of the term space the bulk of commerce comes from a few hundred thousand terms. He believes this year that large companies will begin to buy out markets to place them out of the reach of smaller businesses.

Geoff Ramsey of emarketer.com also had many yummie pie graphs. His graphs he showed at the SEMPO meeting showed that

• from 2000 - 2003 the search marketing industry has increased about 10 fold

• from 2002-2003 search engine marketing had a 145% year over year growth rate
• 22% of US households have broadband
• Yellow Pages currently make $14.3 billion annually, whereas paid search is currently only a 2.2 billion dollar industry.

Also at SEMPO Google announced that it is now supporting search engine marketing and sponsoring SEMPO as the rising complexity and competition in the industry is preventing many business owners from being able to functionally use the marketing systems.

Fredrick Marckini of iProspect quoted a stat from StatMarket which stated the average retail web site conversion rate is 1.8 - 2.0%

Greg Boser of WebGuerrilla also provided a few good link tips on the day. When buying links, 501 C organizations are a good place to look. He also stated that he has seen unlinked URLs in TXT files count as backlinks. Some other good link ideas offered by others include trade organizations, tools, and specialty directories.

Many people have certain restrictions which prevent them from being able to download the Google Toolbar, which was designed for the windows operating system. The Google Toolbar was one of only two locations Google intended to display Google PageRank.

How do I get Google PageRank Without the Google Toolbar?
Well there are a couple options for extracting Google PageRank without the toolbar.

• The Google Directory: The Google Directory is created from an RDF dump of the Open Directory Project (DMOZ). To find out your Google PageRank using the Google Directory the page must be listed in DMOZ. Please note that the scale for Google PageRank is different in the directory and toolbar. The PageRank in the Google Directory will show slightly lower than the PageRank in the Google Toolbar.

• Top25Web offers a free PageRank tool which extracts the PageRank of any given URL you type in. You can enter a series of pages to find out the PageRank of all of them.
• Here is another free PageRank script.
• ABC PR: ABC PR offers a free software download which extracts the checksum and Google PageRank for a given page. This software sometimes is a bit shakey, and is against Google Terms of Service.
• Web Rank Info: Web Rank Info offers a free web based PageRank estimation tool. While I am not sure how exactly they compile this data, it is rather acurate. It also approximates the PageRank out to two decimal points.
• Optilink: Optilink is link analysis software which has the ability to organize search results based on Google PageRank. Obviously this is against the Google Terms of Service, but many SEO's and professional webmasters use this software to speed up the link generation process. (cost for the full version $224)