April 20, 2007 Archives

It's been two weeks without me because of SES and I know you've missed this little new Search Engine Roundtable column that highlights the events within the search community.

So, what did happen in the past two weeks? (To be fair, I'm highlighting them all!) We've been presented with financial reports, broken accounts, immersion in new social media endeavors, and new functionality. Where to begin...

Continue reading "Weekly Search Buzz RoundUp - 4/20/07"

A WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums thread mentions that the Google (GOOG) is performing very well in the stock market, with a net profit of 69%.

What is the secret to Google's financial success? Advertisements. From the DigitalPoint forums discussion:

yup, making profit on both advertisers and publishers. smart price the publishers and decrease the quality score of the advertisers, thus charging more and more for keywords. it's a no lose situation for them as long as they control both ends of the equation. no wonder they are making money hand over fist...

On Search Engine Land, Barry refers to additional articles related to Google's Q1 earnings, including the financial tables.

Meanwhile, Yahoo (YHOO) has performed dismally in Q1 with a 11% decrease in earnings, despite its release of Panama. A WebmasterWorld thread has more:

The drumbeat over Panama raised expectations

Barry weighs in on the financials of Yahoo as well in Search Engine Land. One of the articles he references is that Yahoo is evaluating whether Terry Semel, Yahoo's current CEO, is truly the man for the job.

Discussion about Google's earnings continues at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld. Discussion about Yahoo's earnings continues at WebmasterWorld.

On a recent WebmasterWorld thread, a member asks how the multitude of identical news stories in Google News are handled.

Question: how does the dupe issue effect google giving me credit? The articles are identical but I am not sure how the templates or their presumed trust factor will effect them.

He monitors the addition of the numerous news stories and sees that they are initially all indexed. However, he then notices that after a period of time, those other pages got moved to the supplemental results.

These findings were supported by another WebmasterWorld user, who wrote:

Initally they will all be indexed. Then some will fall out of google entirely, many will be go supplemental. Then all will drop to low pr...

In one of the Google News Support pages, Google says that the news articles are weighed in by its algorithm and relies on "collective judgment of news organizations to determine which stories are most deserving of inclusion and prominence on the News homepage." I assume that all other pages are supplemental.

Discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

In a Google Groups thread, a merchant from the United Kingdom asks if he can bill his customers in USD rather than in GBP:

Can I bill in USD, rather than in GBP and they pay via a USD credit card?

Deborah, from the Google Checkout Team, responds with the answer:

If a customer places an order with a U.K. merchant, the purchase will be made in GBP. If a customer places an order with a U.S. merchant, the purchase will be made in USD.

If you have any further questions about this, you can feel free to respond in the Google Groups thread.

Imagine the Google search results grouped by category. Let's say we do a search for DVD players and up comes two results per category. The categories include:

• Comparison Shopping
• Reviews
• Stores
• References
• Forums
• Blogs
• News
• Manufacturers

That is exactly what more and more people are seeing in the Google results. Here is a screen shot taken from Lee Odden, note Philipp Lenssen spotted this also.

Not only are these results no longer ordered by pure "relevancy," they are now first grouped and then ordered in relevancy.

For example, using the case of DVD players above, if we have ten results on the page, they are all ordered by relevancy. Then Google decides to group them. Now, the most relevant result will probably be the first result, which is it in the dvd players case (i.e. bizrate.com is number one in both examples). But what if the next relevant result is the 6th most relevant result but the only other result on the first page that falls within the same group as the most relevant result (i.e. videohelp.com in our example)? So the top two results, in the grouping case, will be the 1st relevant result and the 6th most relevant result. Is this an issue?

Here is an image illustrating the example above, for a full size image click here:

There is even a WebmasterWorld thread on this and I also posted a summary at Search Engine Land.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Yesterday Google announced that they are renaming the "search history" section to "web history" because it is now a more fitting name. Google Search History Expands, Becomes Web History by Danny Sullivan is the ultimate and most detailed write up I have seen on this. Danny explains that the change in name is "to reflect how it has expanded to track what Google users do as the surf the web." Of course, this can mean some big privacy issues - so I would recommend reading Danny's article to understand more about the expanded features you can get in your "web history."

- View your web activity. You know that great web site you saw online and now can't find? With Web History, you can.
- Search the full text of pages you've visited. Web History allows you to search across the web pages, images, videos and news stories you've viewed.
- Get personalized search results and more. Web History helps deliver search results based on what you've searched for and which sites you've seen.

The forums just starting talking about and the early onset is confusion.

But some are thinking about the SEO implications:

I think the implications of this would become bigger for SEO as it becomes more popular. It adds another criteria for the SERPs and its something that is hard to control depending on the algorithms used to determine the results given due to personalisation.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.

Kevin Gibbons started a thread at our forums, Search Engine Roundtable Forums, noticing that LinkedIn is not properly labeling one of their Google AdSense ads as an advertisement.

Google requires that all ads should be labeled with "Ads by Google" or some other form of label so that people know these are ads.

The top, one line ad on the LinkedIn page is not labeled as such. There is an ad unit on the right side, in a box, that is labeled correctly. Here is a screen capture.

As you can see, there is nothing describing to a human user that this top link is an ad. If you mouse over the link, you can see that the destination URL takes you through a Google AdSense link.

Is this against Google's terms of service? I assume they are a premium publisher, but even premium publishers are required to mark the ads as ads.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Side note: If you want to connect with me, my profile is at http://www.linkedin.com/in/rustybrick and I think you can email me at barry.schwartz at gmail dot com to connect.