July 8, 2005 Archives

While we are on the subject of patents today I wanted to highlight a very good thread on Cre8asite that is talking in detail about determining document freshness. Bill Slawski starts the thread off by going into some of the recent patents namely the Systems and methods for determining document freshness. Bill goes on to say that:

One of the problems that it addresses is that a "last-modified-since" on a document is often incorrect. That means that it cannot be used to accurately gauge the freshness of a document.

Quite interesting. The thread follows by discussing this effect as "Freshrank" in that search engines are looking for updates on pages. Now the information mentioned in the patent may not be in effect current effect, but it may in some fashion. One of the members details that Google wants to see updates in content, even if its just minor ones.

Someone also details a rumor that Google is planning to do another major update this summer and planning to leave things alone for awhile. If there is any truth in that, no ones know for sure. But you know how rumors spread.

Ammon Johns provides some insight on the patent and explains that:

In other words, I really don't believe that it is all that important as to whether a page itself updates regularly, so much as guaging whether the page continues to be a currently relevant citation. The age of the links will be far more important to guaging that than whether or not the page itself has been updated (except in regards to spotting ye olde Bait-n-Switch technique).

This also implies to how they might look at domain registration time. With the recent information from the last patent about this some people rush out to register their domain for the full possible time sometimes as much as 10 years from now. While none of that can't hurt, its debatable how much good it will do. As I have explained in some forums, Google is probably considering more how long the domain has been registered, or its current life (from registration till now), not its future life.

There is some more discussion in relation to the patent and other ones that have been released lately. Worth a quick visit.

Continue discussion at Cre8asite - Google Freshness of Pages Revisited

Google recently added Currency Conversion to its list of Google Web Search Features. Gary notes that Yahoo! and Ask Jeeves both had these feature already.

Forum discussion over at WebmasterWorld.

You have seen it time and time again, especially when doing a search on a company name. It occurs when there are three or more relevant results at a particular domain name for the search query. Many SEOs do what they can to get two listings and the more results from link on a particular search query. It helps ensure the searcher clicks on your result. Obviously the more screen real estate you take up, the higher the CTR (click through rate).

Currently this works well for a search on rustybrick, I suspect it will work in the foreseeable future as well. If not, I have attached a screen capture here.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld. I know this is a simple topic, but I have never covered it before here.

msgraph, who is known for posting Google patents over at Search Engine Watch Forums posted three new threads. Each thread summarizes a patent Google released. Here they are:

- New Google Patent App: Systems and methods for improving search quality
- New Google Patent App: direct navigation to specific portion of target document
- Google's New AutoLink-type Patent App

I have yet to read any of them in detail.

So much for the catchy title... Gary Price blogged Ask Jeeves: Barry Diller Ponders Leaving Google Ad Network. Gary recaps an article, "Diller does tell Liedtke that he's considering leaving the Google ad network and forming an his own network when AJ's contract with Google expires in 2007."

Gary, as well as other analysts, believe that Barry Diller said this to be able to negotiate a better contract with Google when this one expires. But it makes you think, would Ask Jeeves Dare to Drop AdWords in 2007? That is the name of a thread I just started over at Search Engine Watch, participate, if you will.

As they promised, Google has just released for download, Google Toolbar BETA for Firefox. I wasn't even sure if it was important to write on this topic, I know many of you love Firefox, so I decided to anyway.

Forum coverage:
- Search Engine Watch Forums
- SEO Chat Forums
- WebmasterWorld