SearchPath Blog
SearchPath Internet Marketing Blog - Thoughts, ideas, humour, information and more ...
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Anna Patterson and three other ex- Google employees have released a new search engine, called
Cuil (pronounced "cool") which they claim has superior technology, and produces more relevant results.
One of Cuil's features that its owners claim seperates it from Google is the size of its index - 120 Billion pages. This, Patterson claims, is three times the size of Google's index. Google came back this week on the Google blog stating that Googlebot regularly crawls 1
trillion URL's, but doesn't index them all to improve the quality of their index.
Another attempted USP of Cuil is the fact that they don't store browser's history, unlike Google. Cuil says on its privacy page: "We have no idea who sends queries: not by name, not by IP address, and not by cookies (more on this later). Your search history is your business, not ours." This move was taken to rail against the creeping privacy and data protection issues raised by Google's ever expanding web prescence.
The layout oy Cuil's search results is different too. Rather than having the standard 10 text links in the SERPS, Cuils results have images and larger descriptions, plus drop down menus to explore further.
Probably Cuil's most interesting feature is the way it deviates away from the PageRank-dominted world of Google towards an engine of latent semantic indexing (LSI) and intelligent text scanning. Instead of using the number and quality of incoming links to a site as the primary metric used to calculate its rankings (like Google), Cuil uses LSI to more intelligently scan the text in a document to determine its relevancy. LSI looks at the other words in the page besides the keyphrase and uses complex language algorithms to work out how related words in the document are, and what the page is really about.
Despite these quite interesting features, and the publicity given to the ex-Googlers by the media, I don't rate Cuil's chances of making serious inroads into Google's market share very highly. Google is simply so dominant, and so many so-called "Google killer" search engines have come and gone, that Cuil will in all likelyhood fall by the wayside after the intial buzz subsides.
We will see how things turn out for Cuil over the coming months.
Wednesday, July 09, 2008
Big big SEM news today - you can now see the (approximate) number of times that a keyword/phrase is searched for in Google in the past year or month when you use its Adwords keyword tool. For many internet marketers, myself included, this comes close to finding the holy grail of business on the web.
Up until now the only data given in the keyword tool has been the "green bar" of search popularity; a very rough and pretty inaccurate guide as to how popular the search term was that you entered into into the tool.
For Google to give away its search data in this way marks a sea change for the web giant, who, up till now, kept their search data confidential. The reason for this was assumed to be Google wanting to keep its search results as pure and free from SEO influence as possible. Now, with the credit crunch beginning to bite, marketing and advertising budgets are being squeezed, which is having a knock-on effect on online advertising. The adding of traffic to the keyword tool can be seen as a sweetner for businesses looking to occupy web space; it gives them certainty in an uncertain environment, something that business owners crave.
A corollary of Google making its search data available is the effect it will have on keyword research tools such as Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery. So long a staple of SEOs the world over, these tools have now surely become surplus to requirements. After all, why would you want to base the focus of your SEM campaign on keyword data that comes from little-used meta search engines such as Dogpile, rather than the search engine that the vast majority of people use - Google.
Another thing to consider by the releasing of this data is the effect it might have on Google, searchers and webmasters/marketers:
The effect on Google is likely to be positive as, as been previously stated, the release of search data is likely to encourage marketers to buy advertising from Google, which will in turn reflect well on Google's profits.
The effect on marketers is massive, as I mentioned earlier, as there will be accurate keyword research data fro the first time, making planning digital marketing campaign's a lot easier and more accurate.
The effect on searchers is perhaps the most interesting. One view is that now that marketers and SEOs have the Google search data it will result in a better user experience, as marketers' strategy and campaigns will be more aligned with their market's needs (what they are searching for). For example, when previously it was thought that the most commonly searched for term for car rental was "car rental", then Google's data shows it to actually be "cheap car hire", then the people searching more often for the latter term will get more choice and (hopefully) more quality sites than they would have done before. So consumers are matched with products more easily, which is the goal of marketing, and capitalism in general.
A more sceptical view is that the release of the Google data is a step too far in the marketers favour and seachers would be better serviced by more distance between marketer and customer in the digital space.
I'm inclined to agree with the first view, but then, being a marketer, I'm biased!
Whatever your view on the merits (or lack therof) of this dramatic move by Google, one thing is for sure, its going to cause big ripples in the search engine pond.
Tuesday, July 08, 2008
Two sites in one day - a record even for us!
Yes today we launched another new site, this time for Comparo, a UK property developer. Their new site can be seen at
http://www.comparo.co.uk/.
This relatively simple site is designed to display the scale and scope of Comparo's development experience. We have integrated Google Maps into the site to display the various development locations, enabling visitors to drill down into sites they want to view.
We've been working hard putting together a new site for Discovery Initiatives, the leading provider of wildlife conservation-based holidays.
The site can be seen at
http://www.discoveryinitiatives.co.uk/.
We've put together an extremely advanced CMS for DI that enables them to quickly and easily update their site, while interlinking between different tours in an 'Amazon-like' way ie when people view a tour, they see suggesitons of other tours that might be interest them.
We also implemented a 'last-minute trips' page that automatically displays trips leaving in the nxt 30 days. Once trip dates have passed, a trip is automatically removed from the site, ensuring all trips shown are current.
Of course, being an Internet Marketing Agency, we have not forgotten DI's rankings - the site is fully search engine friendly and compliant. Users have full access to change change pages titles, heading tags, descriptions etc.
For more details of our
web development services, please call us on 01285 643 496.
Thursday, July 03, 2008
It can be seen on SEO Rountable
here. Its quite long, but worth persisting with. Its not often the SEO community gets the opportunity to fire questions at a spread of Googlers for a good length of time, even if their answers are a little on the short side.
Matt Cutts answers a few questions, and makes some interesting points. For example, he answers a question from a webmaster regarding whether google indexes data in its main index from Google Books: "Morris, I don't think that we count publications from Google Scholar in our backlinks right now unless we already found the document on the web anyway as if it were a regular web page."
He also gave an interesting answer to a question about 301 redirects:
"Oliver Gonzalez - 5:10 pm
Q: Is there any limit on the number of redirections 301, a Web site?. In a large site, if you change the URL structure, is the optimum time to do it with 301? or is best done gradually.
Matt Cutts - 5:17 pm
A: There's no per-page limit on the number of 301s you can do, so you could move 100K pages to 100K new location. However, if we see a really long chain of redirects, eventually we will decide to stop following the chain."
The post is definitely worth checking out.
Google announced on its Webmaster Central Blog on Monday that it has improved Googlebot's Flash-indexing abilities (see the post
here). The algorithm tweak, which was developed in conjunction with Adobe, allows Googlebot to index textual content in a variety of Flash files, from Flash menus, buttons and banners to self-contained Flash websites.
The Googlebot tweak, as far as I can see, is related to the recently-announced improvements in spidering online forms (see my blog post in May
here) where the spider now automatically clicks every combination of buttons, menus, and checkboxes, and submitting words from the site in text boxes in order to retrieve information.
The Official Google Blog commented: "In the past, web designers faced challenges if they chose to develop a site in Flash because the content they included was not indexable by search engines. They needed to make extra effort to ensure that their content was also presented in another way that search engines could find."
Now, apparently, webmasters still have to do this, only less.
The reception to this news has been warm, but with some reservations. Some bloggers, me included, have taken Google's reticence to announce that all Flash content is spiderable to mean it is still potentialy unsafe to use Flash extensively. Until Google announce that ALL Flash content is fully readable by Googlebot then using Flash more than intermittently is a dangerous tactic, given the well-known indexing problems experienced by webmasters whose sites have a large amount of Flash content.
Google has altered the Webmaster Help Section on what to look for in an SEO, putting more emphasis on the positive aspects of what SEOs do. You can see it
here. The page now talks about how SEOs can help with such tasks as keyword research, content/structure development and technical advice.
Previously the Webmaster Help SEO section emphasised all the nasty tricks that SEOs employ in an attempt to game search engines or business owners. Such advice cannot have helped the perception of SEO's by many people who read the page. What sometimes happened was ethical web companies (such as SearchPath) got tarnished with the same brush as the black-hat spammers.
The Google Webmaster blog put it thus:
"Previously, the article had focused on warning people about common
SEO scams to look out for, but didn't mention many of the valuable services that a helpful
SEO can provide."
Hopefully these changes will redress the balance a bit, and show a more balanced view of SEOs to Google's users.
