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Posts Tagged ‘Search Engine’

What is Google Caffeine and how does it impact SEO & Social Media?

15
September
2009

Google’s next gen search engine Caffeine became availabe in Aug 2009

Andrew Bates

Client Services Manager

In Aug ’09 Google unveiled its next generation search engine called Caffeine.  Likely in direct response to Microsoft’s Bing search platform, Google Caffeine is focused on faster, more relevant search that takes into account social and viral media sites.  With improved “temporal relevance,” Caffeine is said to have better results than the old Google when returning breaking information.

SEO and social media thought leaders have been putting the new Google through its paces at the publicly available Google Caffeine test sandbox.  For comparison, initial tests focus on: Speed, Accuracy, Temporal Relevance, and Index Size. 

What are the differences between Google Caffeine, old school Google, and competitors like Bing? 

Well the speed is definitely noticable.  Search comparisons show that Caffeine is easily two times faster than the old Google. 

Old Google search for “Dog” yields results in .25 seconds:

Google Caffeine search for “Dog” yields results in .12 seconds:

What about the accuracy?  Although all blended search options do not seem to be live in the new Google, there does seem to be an increase focus on keywords.  Time will tell, but so far Google Caffeine is incredibly accurate.

How is Caffeine on Temporal Relevance and finding breaking news?  The jury is still out.  Google Caffeine frequently returns the exact same results as the previous Google or Bing.

Where is the most noticeable improvement next to the speed?  The new Google Caffeine index appears to be many times larger than that of the original Google, but Bing still seems to return the greatest number of indexed results on a consistent basis.

Mashable’s SEO expert Ben Parr gives a great overview in his recent post “Google Caffeine: A Detailed Test of the New Google” with some excellent examples of searches he performed in all 3 environments.

 So how will Google’s Caffeine search platform influence SEO and social media? 

First Google Caffeine impressions:

-       It is fast, with a deeper index

-       There is an increased focus or weight on keywords

-       There may be an increased weighting on domain authority & some authoritative tag type pages ranking (like Technorati tag pages + Facebook tag pages) with potentially slightly more weight on exact match domain names

-       Caffeine likely has an improved comprehension of related words and synonyms

-       Google’s new search may have increased the relevance associated with video and image results while decreasing the volume of multi-media returnWhat do you think?  Try Google Caffeine against your favorite search site at Google Caffeine test sandbox and let me know what results you see.

- @AndrewBates

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Cuil: Better Than Google?

30
July
2008

Former Google employees create their own search engine which could reduce Google’s market share.

Stefanie Berliant
Media Coordinator

According to ComScore, an online measurement company, in May 2008 Google held a 62% share of the U.S. search market followed by Yahoo at 21% and Microsoft at 8.5%. This month, another search engine, Cuil, joined the list of Google competitors which also includes Teoma (whose technology is used by Ask.com), Vivisimo, Snap, Mahalo and, most recently, Powerset, which was acquired by Microsoft this month. What gives Cuil an edge over all the other competition is that it was created by Anna Patterson, Russell Power and Louis Monier, all former Google engineers.  

Patterson built and sold a search index that probed old websites for the internet archive to Google in 2004. Patterson and Power worked together on the same team at Google. Monier was the former chief technology officer of AltaVista, the best search engine before Google launched in 1998. Monier also helped build the search engine on eBay’s online auction site. This group is also teaming up with Tom Costello, who built a once-promising search engine called Xift in the late 1990s. Costello later joined IBM where he worked on an "analytic engine" called WebFountain.  It is clear that this team has extensive knowledge in this space and also of, Google, the industry leader. Because of this, the possibility of creating a more comprehensive and efficient search engine seems more realistic.

Patterson emphasizes that there will be many differences between Cuil and Google.  For example Cuil’s search index is 120 billion web pages. Google has an index of 8.2 billion web pages as of three years ago (when Google stopped publicly announcing its index count).  Cuil’s results are gathered by the actual content of a page, not by ranking the quality and quantity of links as Google does.  The results on Cuil are displayed with photos, and the layout resembles that of articles in a magazine. The results page on Cuil also includes additional categories related to your initial search, conveniently displayed in a drop down menu.  Additionally Cuil will not track the users search histories, as Google does. 

Cuil faces several challenges such as building a better search engine and winning over the public who are loyal to the Google brand.  However, the bigger question is, if Cuil raises the bar for search engines, how will this change the world of online marketing?

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Using The Internet To Make Travel Plans

3
June
2008

A recent study shows that more vacationers are using the Internet to make their travel plans

Ryan Moss
Media Coordinator

With summer comes family vacations, and according to a recent study conducted by OTX, families are using the Internet to make travel plans more often then not. Over 70% of those surveyed planned on taking a family trip this summer, and about 75% of those same people will be using the Internet to make their plans. With the economy struggling, consumers are likely to focus on price, which is exactly what advertisers in the travel industry should emphasize.

When deciding where to take their vacation, families in the U.S. rely on a few sources for information. About 50% of respondents referred to friends and family for recommedations and information, while only 21% used travel books. For those that use the Internet when looking for a destination, 72% use search engines, 58% use online booking sites, 26% use consumer testimonial sites, and 19% use travel information sites.

As seen in the chart below the number of consumers who use the Internet to make travel plans has been increasing since 2000. 

Online Travel Buyer Penetration Among US Consumers- eMarketer

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PDF Optimization

4
April
2008

PDF downloads are a great way to publish content to your site and establish extra conversion points for any interactive marketing campaign. Optimizing those PDFs on your site however, is particularly important and often overlooked…

Keith Vera

Account Manager

PDF downloads are a great way to publish content to your site and establish extra conversion points for any interactive marketing campaign. Optimizing those PDFs on your site however, is particularly important and often overlooked during the creation process. If PDFs are not created correctly search engines will not be able to index their content, and like all un-optimized content, that PDF will be a wasted opportunity to improve search engine rankings.

Galen De Young recently blogged about the different strategies marketers can use to optimize PDFs for the web, as a follow up to Marketing Sherpa’s article: How to Optimize Your PDFs to Increase Search Traffic: 10 Steps

Below are several key takeaways from both Galen’s blog and the article:

    - Not all PDFs are created equal: PDFs that are picture based or are scans of original documents will not allow engines to index the text. Instead create PDFs straight from Microsoft Word documents

    - Use the PDF properties to add an optimized title for the document

    - Build links into all of your PDFs

    - Make sure to use keyword-rich anchor tags to link to your PDFs

    - Specify the reading order in the document so the engines know which text is the most important and will help you with the indexed description of the document

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