Search Engine News Weblog Archive May 2004
Below find older entries to the Pandia search engine news weblog.
For the latest search engine news, go to the Pandia Search World page or the Pandia Search Central home page.
(May 20 2004) Kalena Jordan, the editor of the highly recommended High Search Engine Ranking blog, has launched a new online search engine marketing college.
Search Engine College is an online training institution offering instructor-led short online courses, online classes and downloadable self-study courses in search engine optimization.
"I was constantly being asked the same questions by webmasters about how to make their sites search engine friendly", says Kalena. "I was also asked if I knew of any online institutions that offered courses in search engine optimization. I didn't, so my industry colleagues and I decided to create one."
Kalena & Co is targeting marketing executives and small business owners responsible for promoting their company's web site , as well as students or unemployed persons wanting to become search engine optimization experts.
(May 20 2004) As Greg R. Notess and others have pointed out, the overlap between the search engines databases are not as large as one may believe.
This is one of the reasons why it makes sense to go to more than one search engine when looking for that hard to find gem of information.
Thumbshots.org now reports that they have found a general increase in overlapping search results between Yahoo and Google. There is about 40% overlap in the top 20 results for popular queries taken from Google Zeigeist.
This may indicate that the database of the new Yahoo! search engine is growing, and that the two search engines are becoming more alike as regards relevancy and quality.
Thumbshots confirm another observation made by many searchers: Plurality in search keywords within Google yields very different links. Ranking also varies with reversal in keywords.
The figures are based on searches done by using the Thumbshots Ranking tool, a new service for the comparison of search engine results.
(May 20 2004) There is a rumor going about Google planning to attack Microsoft on its home turf: desktop software. The "Puffin" software will apparently search the web as well as look for files on your own computer.
Pandia has more on the challenges facing Google.
(May 16 2004) There are several companies out there that offer courses in search engine optimization and online marketing.
Read part 2 of our article: Upcoming search engine conferences and workshops,
(May 13 2004) During the dot com bonanza quite a few webmasters grew uneasy when asked about revenue. "How are you going to earn money on this site?"
One possible answer was banner ads. Unfortunately surfers soon learned to ignore banner ads, and the income plummeted.
It was Overture (then GoTo) and Google that finally found the answer to this problem. Yes, people will most often ignore flashing and colorful banner ads, but they will click on plain text ads that are relevant to the topic of the web page at hand, i.e. the kind of information the reader is looking for.
It turned out that people trust plain text more than graphics. One of the most popular text ad programs is Google AdSense, which can be found on thousands of websites world wide, Pandia included.
It is strange, but Google AdSense has now decided to offer banner ads to its customers, thus starting to compete with other banner ad agencies. Google will offer banners of various sizes to advertisers and publishers: Banner (468 x 60), Leaderboard (728 x 90), Inline Rectangle (300 x 250), and Skyscraper (120 x 600).
The main difference between this banner ad programs and the more traditional ones, is the fact that these banners will be delivered on webpages with content that is relevant to the product or service that is to be sold. This will probably lead to a higher click-through rate for advertisers.
The ads will not be shown on Google, most likely because Google tends to avoid graphic elements that increases the time it takes to download a search engine results page.
Google AdSense image ads.
(May 11 2004) Reading is good, conversations are better. Read about venues where you can meet other people interested in web searching techniques and search engine optimization tricks and trends.
Read our article: Upcoming search engine conferences and workshops, part 1
(May 11 2004) Google knows the value of a good weblog. Actually, the company bought the Blogger online weblog service based -- partly -- on the belief that diaries of this kind represents the future for online news (and gossip) distribution.
Hence it makes perfect sense for Google to publish its own blog.
So what is it all about?
Evan Williams, Blogger program manager of Google, writes in the very first message that they are "[...]going to post stuff here - regular bloggy things: What [Google founder] Larry [Page] had for breakfast. What [Google founder] Sergey [Brin] thinks of that Hellboy movie. Which Dawson's Creek character reminds us most of Eric."
There could also be information of the more serious kind. The second message is on recruitment and Google's new engineering centers in Zurich and Bangalore. If you want to work with Google, take a look!
If you like to keep an eye on Google, it will probably be worth while to read their blog. We do not expect them to reveal any serious company secrets, but you never know.
Googleguy, a Google employee that is an active participant at the Webmaster World forums, often reveals interesting information about the company, their technology and their policies towards searchers and optimizers. There might surface a few interesting bits in the Googleblog as well.
(May 7 2004) The search engine world is now dominated by two huge players: Google and Yahoo! MSN is expected to join the lead sometime next year.
One should not forget, however, that there is another independent company out there that delivers decent search engine results: Ask Jeeves. The Ask Jeeves site is (mainly) powered by their own Teoma search engine.
Resourceshelf now reports that Ask Jeeves/Teoma has started indexing Adobe Acrobat PDF-files. As Gary Price says: "Documents are labeled with the text [PDF File] next to the title/hyperlink on the serp [search engine results page]. At Teoma the text is in green and at Jeeves it's in red."
Unfortunately there is no efficient way of limiting the search to PDF-content. Google and Yahoo! also include PDF-files in their results.
(May 6 2004) The Web is full of free electronic books, but how do you find them?
Read the Pandia Post article: The Web for Book Lovers.
(May 2 2004) Resourceshelf reports that Kartoo has launched a new search site based on the Yahoo search engine database.
This very stylish site requires Flash installed in order to work.
When you click on one of the search listings, the relevant link is actually stored by UJIKO on your own computer. The next time you search for this particular search query the pages you already have visited will appear among the first.
You may also grade a particular site by giving it a specific number of points (hearts). The more hearts, the higher it will rank the next time you search for this query.
The Heart button also allows you to edit a special Ujiko form for a site. You can change its URL, title and description. This information will replace the one given by the search engine for later queries.You can also use the heart function to organize results into folders.
Furthermore Ujiko lets you build personalized filters. You can ban sites from a specific domains, selected URLs, or sites that includes specific words.
French Ujiko
US Ujiko
UK Ujiko
About Ujiko
Read search engine news items for April 2004
Please note: The links on archived search engine news pages will not be updated!
