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Archive for the ‘search engines’ Category
Monday, September 12th, 2011
If you read blog posts like this one you might come away with the impression that your small local business is insignificant, worthless, and doomed to get lost in the great cyberspace shuffle. Don’t believe it for a minute. First off, Mike Blumenthal is absolutely correct about Google’s algorithm. It is impersonal and computational. But that doesn’t mean you don’t deserve a better ranking.
What should you if you find your small business not having the ranking in Google Places that you think it deserves? Will writing a letter to Google make it better? Not likely.
What I suggest is studying Google’s rankings to get some kind of clue as to how the rankings are the way they are. One of the most important things to remember about Google Places rankings is that they are based in part on distance from the searcher. So if your business is located in a southern suburb of your city and a searcher on the north side of town is looking for your type of business, you may or may not appear in their search results depending on how they write their query and how much competition you have. That’s vague, I know, but that’s how the algorithm works.
If you feel lost in the cyberspace shuffle and you’re wondering why your business isn’t ranking better in Google Places – or anywhere else – contact an Internet marketing expert for a consultation.
Tags: Google Places, search rankings, small business
Posted in search engines | 3 Comments »
Sunday, August 14th, 2011
I don’t think many Internet marketers would question whether or not social signals are used in search. It’s pretty clear that they are. The only question is, to what extent?
Facebook and Bing have a very close relationship. In fact, if you are logged into Facebook, then take a look at Bing’s home page. You should see along the top navigation menu a little Facebook icon next to your name. If you click your name or the down arrow, then you’ll see a link. Click that link and it takes you to a page explaining Bing’s social search feature.
In short, Bing allows you to see what your Facebook friends like, not necessarily what they are searching for. And your Facebook friends can see what you like.
Google does something similar with Google+. If you conduct a search on Google, you’ll see a +1 icon next to the search results. If you +1 an item and you are logged into your Google+ account, then that item will appear on your +1s list. The same for the people you connect with through +1. Then you can see each other’s +1s – if that person has set their preferences to allow you that privilege.
But Google goes one step further. On the search results page, it will tell you which of your Google+ friends have shared an item on Google+ or on any social network they’re a member of. So you can really watch what your friends are sharing.
This is just the tip of the iceberg on social signals. There are plenty more, and I think the search engines will get a lot more sophisticated using those signals for search purposes. It will be interesting to watch.
Tags: bing, facebook, google, search, social signals
Posted in search engines | 2 Comments »
Saturday, June 4th, 2011
It’s not often that all three major search engines (Google, Bing, and Yahoo!) team up together on a project, but this time the project is well worth the mutual cooperation. The three search giants have partnered to launch the site schema.org, which helps webmasters define structured data for their websites for easier searchability.
First, you might be wondering what is structured data? It is also called microdata, or microformats. This is a type of markup that defines more narrowly specific content on a web page that humans might understand when they read the text content, but that search engines would have a difficult time understanding from the text.
The Schema.org website uses this example:
*h1*Avatar*/h1*
(note: replace * with < and >)
Avatar is a term that can be used in more than one context. For example, it could refer to the movie or it could refer to your Web graphic or profile picture. The simple html tag H1 tells browsers how to render the text, but it doesn’t tell search engines the particular context of the reference.
To fix this, you could add a schema to your html code to tell the search engines what “Avatar” means. If you are referring to the movie, then you’d enter code that looks like this:
*div itemscope*
*h1*Avatar*/h1*
*span*Director: James Cameron (born August 16, 1954) */span*
*span*Science fiction*/span*
*a href=”../movies/avatar-theatrical-trailer.html”*Trailer*/a*
*/div*
Itemscope is the schema and the content that falls between the div tags is the microdata that defines that schema.
The brilliance of schema is that it is flexible, so flexible in fact that webmasters can define their own schema beyond the definitions offered by the search engines. If those schema become popular enough, then the search engines will begin to use them for search indexing purposes.
I encourage you to look over the schema.org website and see if you can identify any web pages that could benefit from defining microdata. It could push you up a little in the rankings by helping the search engines define your content a little more clearly.
Tags: bing, google, microformats, schema, yahoo
Posted in search engines | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, May 17th, 2011
Are you concerned about search privacy? If so, then you might be interested in two smaller search engines. Google and Bing, the leading competitors in search, store your search data for up to 18 months. But Blekko and DuckDuckGo are banking on you wanting more privacy than that.
Blekko – Blekko stores your search data for 48 hours, and that’s it. But the problem with Blekko is that your searches are confined only to sites that you or your friends tell it to search. The search engine makes use of “slashtags,” which are akin to Twitter’s hashtags. The intent is to cut out spam and undesired results from your searches. This type of search engine can be useful to your business if you can train your customers to use it and add important search terms related to your website as slashtags for their searches. Good luck in that.
DuckDuckGo – DuckDuckGo is more traditional in that they do crawl the Web and return search results based on keyword-related queries. And they do not collect your private information at all. Nada. You can also turn the privacy features off, if you prefer.
DuckDuckGo even refers you to two other search engines (on its privacy page) that do not collect your private information: Ixquick and Scroogle. The latter seems to base its results on Google search results, but it appears to be the only one of the four sites mentioned in this post to do so.
Are these smaller search engines good? Can they be good for your business? You’ll have to test them. I ran a test at both Blekko and DuckDuckGo. I was impressed that SBM was No. 1 at DuckDuckGo for the search phrase “small business marketing minnesota.” Of course, I’m No. 1 in both Google and Bing for the same phrase.
If you train your customers to conduct private searches at these search engines when searching for your business or services that you offer, then you might get some traffic from these sources.
Tags: privacy, search, search engines
Posted in search engines | 3 Comments »
Wednesday, February 2nd, 2011
Google claims Bing is copying its search results. Ouch! That’s a bold claim. Bing responds:
“We use over 1,000 different signals and features in our ranking algorithm,” Bing vice president Harry Shum said Tuesday, referring to the mathematical code that search engines use to choose their results.
I’d be curious to know if any of those signals and features include crawling Google’s search results. If so, that could be a problem. Here’s why I think that’s possible:
Suspicious of their new rival, Google engineers set up random results on their site for a series of unlikely search terms, such as “hiybbprqag.” (Google arranged for the nonsense word to point to a Los Angeles theater seating plan on its search engine.)
“Within a couple weeks of starting this experiment, our inserted results started appearing in Bing,” Google said in a statement on its official blog Tuesday.
Evidently, Google thinks Bing could be doing something underhanded as well. Just looking at this story, it doesn’t look good for Bing.
I think competition is healthy. I certainly think Bing has a right to improve its search results and try almost anything that it thinks may help searchers find the information they are looking for. But if a nonsense search term invented by Google appears in Bing’s search results, that’s a huge red flag. I’m about 99.9999% sure that should never happen.
So why not 100% sure? Well, because of this response from Bing:
Bing gets “a small piece” of the data for its algorithm “from some of our customers, who opt-in to sharing anonymous data as they navigate the web in order to help us improve the experience for all users,” Shum said,
If some anonymous Google employee submitted the nonsense search result to Bing in hopes that it might make the company look bad, then that would be on Google. That would certainly be unfair and nefarious. Is that what happened? It’s possible given that Bing does allow for anonymous data sharing by its customers. If I were Google, I’d want to know just how Bing got that search result in its own results. If I were Bing, I’d definitely want to make sure the problem isn’t with my own internal processes. Both companies have a reason to ensure the truth comes out on this one.
Tags: bing, google, search, search results
Posted in search engines | 3 Comments »
Saturday, January 22nd, 2011
Here’s an interesting point. It’s your business and, so long as you don’t break any laws, you should be able to do whatever you like to promote it. If some of those activities breach Google’s guidelines, then that’s Google’s problem, not yours. Do you agree?
That forms the basic premise around an argument put forward by Todd Mintz at Search Engine Journal recently. It’s easy to agree with the general philosophy behind his argument, especially when he points out that quality sites are doing it everyday and getting away with it. The problem is, there are plenty of sites out there that are not ‘quality’ and they too are getting away with breaching Google’s terms of service.
We don’t have a ‘right’ to appear in Google’s index and therefore search results. If we want search traffic, then we need to abide by the rules that Google puts in place. Todd’s argument is fine so long as you add one rider – can your business survive without any traffic from Google (or any of the other search engines for that matter)? If your business can, then you most likely care little for search results now anyway.
To state that it’s your business and you can do what ever you like with it is too simplistic. If you’re involved with Facebook, you need to follow Facebook’s terms of use; in fact, the same is true of any online activity. I even have a set of guidelines that determine whether or not I publish your comments – rules are rules. If you can survive without a particular service, then go ahead and ignore those rules – Todd’s right in that aspect – it’s your business, so if any activity hurts your business, that’s your problem.
Tags: google, search results, Social Media
Posted in search engines | 1 Comment »
Friday, January 21st, 2011
Since 1980, decades have belonged to one strong innovator. The 1980s belonged to IBM, also known as Big Blue. Then, in 1990, Bill Gates introduced Microsoft and that company became the dominant business technology giant for the next ten years. Google arrived on the scene in 1998 and for the last decade the world has bowed to its authority. But who will dominate for the next ten years?
From my perspective, it appears that Facebook could be poised to dominate the technology sector during the course of the next decade. Why, I say?
For starters, Facebook has arrived from almost nowhere to emerge as the most trafficked website online. While that doesn’t mean that it will dominate the decade, it does mean that Google is not necessarily top dog any more. And there still is no clear indication that Facebook has or will develop the same financial clout that Google has enjoyed. But, there’s no clear indication that it can’t either.
Yesterday, a new chapter in Google’s storybook emerged when Eric Schmidt announced that he would no longer be its CEO. That doesn’t necessarily spell a decline for Google, but it is a significant change.
Almost every day now you hear about the growing rivalry between Google and Facebook. I think it will be interesting to see how these two companies grow in the next couple of years. The power play has begun, but how will it end?
Tags: business, facebook, google, technology
Posted in Social Media, search engines | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, December 1st, 2010
If you had the chance to steal 200 million users from your competition, would you consider that success? Well, Bing recently announced that it has snagged that many users from its strongest competitor, Google.
This is actually pretty significant. I don’t know how much that will affect the total market share of these two search engines, but a few more deals like this one and Bing could gain considerable distance on Google. Trying to win searchers through TV and radio advertising, or word of mouth, could take a very long time. But convert publishers who have an exclusive agreement with your largest competitor and you make good headway.
Look at it this way: Bing just gained on Google by 400 million users. Google lost 200 million and Bing gained 200 million.
What if that happened with 5 other exclusive deals that Google currently has in place? That would be a total shift of 1 billion users from Google to Bing. Do you think that would be noticeable?
I don’t really know how poised Bing is to make that kind of move, but if they did it once, then they could do it again. And Microsoft is just savvy enough to make deals like that. Google has partnerships in place with certain computer manufacturers to have a built-in search feature on computer desktops. A few of those for Bing with large computer manufacturers and we could see some evening of the score. What do you think?
Tags: bing, google, search engines
Posted in search engines | 1 Comment »
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