Fighting SPAM is everyone’s concern these days. E-mail providers try to create advanced Spam-filters that send offensive and disturbing emails out of your Inbox to a “Spam” folder (and, of course, sometimes valuable, long-expected messages from certain contacts end up there as well). Search engines are struggling hard creating sophisticated algorithms in order to present the most “relevant” results to the user – their success is somewhat moderate, I would say.
There is, however, another option. Grant USER the ability to “mark” certain domains as “unwanted” and “untrustworthy” aka spam. According to Google’s Matt Cutts, the search industry market leader spam fighting team “has definitely discussed this” and the option has a chance of appearing in Google search tools. Of course, Cutts was very clear about “not pre-announcing things before they lunch”, but the hint is there.
Based on the experience and data of the now-extinct SearchWiki, the feature of “user blacklisting” can be quite useful and successful. The intention is, reportedly, to provide the user with the ability to mark domains and create blacklists for any given keyword. This data, associated with user’s Google profile can be stored on Google servers, making it an effective tool for fighting spam or other unwanted content, which is regarded as irrelevant by a specific searcher.
With so many Search engines out there (beside the “Big Three” of Google, Yahoo and Bing, there are also ask.com, duckduckgo.com, aol.com and many, many others) it is pretty hard to make an impact on the Search Industry. You have to present something completely new and fresh in order to persuade searchers to use your engine. Of course, bringing the “most relevant” search results can do the trick, but who knows what is really “most relevant”? And people will probably prefer sticking to the familiar look of, mostly, Google, or some other Search engine they have labeled as “my favorite”.
A different approach is to apply to user convenience. A user-friendly GUI, new way of presenting the results, easier navigation – all these features have the chance of attracting potential searchers. And Untabbed.com has made a move in this direction. Powered by Google, Untabbed.com presents the “usual” list of search results. The nice thing is that you don’t have to open a new browser window or tab to view them (although you have an option to do that as well). When you click on certain link in the result list, a mini-window opens, presenting you the related page. The content is optimized within the mini-window, making it easy to read. Clicking another search results link will open another mini-window then another and so on. Those windows can be, of course, maximized to the size of full browser window – but with most users using bigger monitors, this is probably not necessary.
One major drawback of the new search is that when you click a link INSIDE the mini-window, it will still open in the new browser window – a rather inconvenient step “backwards”. Hopefully, this can be improved in the near future.
Everybody knows that Yahoo US has teamed up with Bing in order to fight Google in the North American search market. In other parts of the world, however, strange things are happening.
Since the start of 2011, Yahoo and Bing are also a joint force in Australia, Mexico and Brazil. In the UK, however, the deal has not been sealed yet. And although people are saying that it is only a matter of time, noticing that certain Yahoo search results look identical to Bing and speculating about “two different indexes”, it is yet to be seen whether Yahoo UK will be powered by Bing in the end. Why not, anyway? Where will Yahoo go? To Google? Well, yes!
Yahoo! Japan, for example, has made a partnership with Google. The deal (Google US will supply the technology for Yahoo! Japan) was recently approved by the FTC (Fair Trade Commission) – a body responsible for preventing monopolization of the markets. And although the ratification is not permanent, and FTC stated they will monitor the activity of the combined team closely, it was a major hit for both Microsoft and local search engines. Yahoo US was not very happy either, but was unable to stop the move, as it only own about 30% of Yahoo! Japan.
With Google being the most popular search engine in the world, and particularly in the US, it is not yet gained enough ground in non-English speaking countries. While in India, the UK and Australia Google is the runaway leader in Search Engine competition, there are still countries in which local search engines are quite successful in opposing the G- giant. Baidu is number one in China (and there is also a new player in the SE field, supported by the government – goso.cn), and most former USSR-countries internet users (Russian speakers) prefer Yandex over Google.
Yet, Google is trying hard to get into the local markets. Recently, it has reported a successful takeover of the number one spot in Czech Republic, surpassing the local leader Seznam.cz in the first week of 2011.
Seznam, however, does not agree, stating that the statistics are not conclusive, and presents different figures, such as having almost 70% of Czech internet “population” with about 4 million users. Moreover, Seznam.cz emphasizes the misleading inaccuracy, as Google statement is based on report that takes into account both local and global pages, while Seznam only concentrates on Czech-based domains. They are also accusing Google of “refusing to participate in official measuring”.
Well, whether Google report is accurate or not is not very significant. The important fact is that Google puts an enormous amount of effort to increase the grasp of local, non-English-speaking markets.
Several polls, conducted recently, approve that the search engines are still regarded reliable by the internet users, yet the influence of “spammers” worries many searches.
Over 33 percent of the responders to the question: “Have Google’s Search Results Become Less Useful To You?”, said that the spammers “have gained a significant foothold”. Over 40 percent responded with the “kind of” statement, making a total of over 75% percent noticing the negative influence of “noise” on Google Search. With less than 4% stating that results got better, it seems that the spam issue needs to worry Google algorithmists.
Nevertheless, almost 90% still find Search Engines (and most use Google, of course) do either “excellent” or “good” job of finding relevant information, and about two-thirds of users rate Google results as “useful”.
With other search engines trying to close the gap between the runaway leader in the Search Industry, they might well switch their attention to inventing better search algorithms. Yet, there is no guarantee that those will produce less “noisy” results. And even if they do, and Google will lose a considerable amount of market percentage – the spammers will probably quickly adjust their techniques to alter these “new-search-algorithm” results as well…
Yahoo! had several troubles in the recent years. Geocities was shut down, as were several other features. And with over half a thousand workers fired in the end of 2010, people started asking questions about the future of a former search industry leader (how long ago was that?) and its satellite products.
Flickr, on the other hand, is a popular service, and, contrary to so many other projects and applications launched by Yahoo! and Google, generates certain profit. However, according to some general evaluation, this profit is not so high, to say the least. Thomas Hawk estimated 50 million per year, which is, of course, a tiny income for a corporation of the size of Yahoo. This led to speculations about the possibility of yet another cut by Yahoo! – this time of the beloved photo-sharing service.
Well, do not worry yet, Flickr fans. Those rumors were refuted by both Flickr Cal Henderson (who also commented that the figure of 50M is incorrect, since Flickr makes money via advertising, and not only by selling Pro accounts, as was presented in the Hawk’s estimation) and Blake Irving, Yahoo Product Chief. When asked in a recent twitter chat about Yahoo! commitment to Flickr, Irving enthusiastically tweeted “Hell yes we are!”, mentioning Flickr product and team, its strategy and profitability.
Google Webmaster Tools are a popular feature, servicing hundreds of thousands and maybe even millions of website owners and web analytics over the world. Everybody works with the provided numbers, without questioning the reliability of the data. However, ask a mechanical engineer – and he will tell you that everything in this world has a “tolerance” and no value is absolutely accurate.
The same mechanical engineer will tell you that usual general acceptable tolerance is about 1%, so when certain parts should be 10 inch, it can easily measure 10.1 inch or 9.99 inch – and will still pass the Quality Assurance test.
It seems, Google is not yet ready to go into Product Design. Reportedly, the numbers offered by Google Webmaster Tools are only 90% accurate. According to Google’s Asaph Zemach, who was asked about number of impressions staying constant for three months time: “…when you see 24,900,000 you should really think 25M+/- 2.5M…”
Thus, if you think that your website is ahead of competitors, with 50 million impressions compared to their 48 million, they might be already ahead of you, as your actual figure might be as low as 45 million and theirs – as high as 52 million… As usual, statistics can be deceiving – and Google’s +/-10% just makes it more so…
Well in the past, most rapid drops in a websites search engine rankings were caused by off site factors. Bad links, too many links too fast, too many exact match anchor text links, too many footer or site wide links etc. Recently we are seeing more keyword specific or page level penalties which are turning up to be caused by on site factors. Google is starting to look carefully at websites. They are becoming picky about internal link structure and placement of navigation, content quality and placement, and general over optimization on site is becoming a BAD thing.
We were trying to sort out why a particular website we were working on dropped hard in the rankings. The back link profile was not bad, and the links were not built overnight. The website was old enough 2006, and had been growing organically for several years. We tweaked a few things on site and off site to no avail. We decided to try something sort of outside of the box, we blocked Googlebot. Why block Googlebot? Well it permitted us to see if the problem was off site or on site. Low and behold within 2 weeks, we had lost a ton of long tail traffic, but we recovered all the keywords search results that had been dropping. Which showed us that the back links alone were fine, and strong enough to carry the website in the serps without any content :-).
Now we know, we have some on site work to do.
It is widely known that Google has many local rivals in the Search Engine field. Many Russians prefer Yandex over Google, Israelis use Walla and in China there is Baidu. Most of those engines are extremely localized, providing relevant search results and successfully battling with Google in the local market – especially, since they use local language in countries with relatively low English level among computer and internet users.
Almost half-billion China-based internet users are a huge marketing potential. It seems, Chinese government has recognized it, deciding to launch a new search engine, which will be the first state-owned SE in the world. After over half a year of trial version (how do you say “beta” in Chinese?), goso.cn is now fully operational and available. The idea is to implement elements of social media into the engine – such as videos, photos and comments sharing. Mobile version is expected as well.
Of course, competing with Baidu and Google is not an easy task – but with the support of the government, goso can well become a healthy search engine alternative in few years time.
The marketing has always been about customer’s psychology – learning the specific needs of a potential client and trying to satisfy them. Google has demonstrated once again that targeting certain audience is mandatory. And if you are into SEO, you should be aware of it.
According to one recently published study, Google Search results on a smartphone will vary by over 80% from those produced by a desktop computer query. If you think about it – this is actually quite logical to have a slightly different search algorithm for smartphones. For example, smartphone users like downloading various applications. Thus the mobile Google Search presents many results that include the word “app” or “download”. Brand filters and store filters cannot be applied to mobile Google search and it is even more biased towards “local” domains, with Google places usually appearing higher in the vertical results list.
With the smartphone market growing quickly, it seems as only a matter of time when “SEO for mobile” will become a separate branch in the industry.
