Category Archives: Search

Yahoo! Search Marketing Launches Sponsored Results

Advertising, Internet, Search, Websites

Yahoo! have been in the search engine and search marketing game for a long time. Recently, Yahoo! Search Marketing increased their offering to match those of Google by allowing sponsored search results.

Using Yahoo! Search Marketing, you’re now able to have your advertisements listed along side the normal Yahoo! search results. In a similar fashion to that of Google, you have two general positions where your advertisements can be placed:

  • Directly above to search results in a wide banner style
  • On the right hand side of the search results, stacked in a tall skyscraper shape

Yahoo! have also included one more advertising position:

  • Directly below the search results in a wide banner style

Its interesting that Yahoo! have included the advertising space below the main results. Typically, the lower section of a web site is under developed. There is significant amounts of research which describes the benefits you can receive by optimising the lower section of your web site. If the price of that advertising space is right, I think it might turn out to be a fantastic value proposition for advertisers.

Without signing up for Yahoo! Search Marketing, it seems reasonable that you’ll be paying more for the advertising space directly above the search results; as they are more visually prominent and look similar to natural search listings. Second will probably be the sponsored search results on the right and the cheapest will probably be the advertising at the bottom.

There are a couple of things I don’t like about Yahoo! search results:

  • There sponsored advertising isn’t always clearly marked. As an example, the right hand side advertising is quite clearly marked, however the above and below is not.
  • Yahoo! seem to always present a lot of other stuff in search results. For example, you are likely to see alternative search suggestions, the top advertising block, some Yahoo! shortcut links and finally the actual natural search results.
  • As a derivative of point #2, the search results page feels cluttered and busy

To the defense of Yahoo!, they do place little icons beside each block in an attempt to separate them. For a savvy internet user, they will probably notice and associate the icons and realise there is something different about those results. Unfortunately, I expect that an average user probably won’t; at which point they are clicking on advertising without knowing it.

Google, Yahoo! & Microsoft Collaborate For The Greater Good

Internet, Search, Websites

Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft have collaborated for the greater good and are all going to support a standardised XML sitemap protocol.

Google was the first to implement the XML sitemaps in June 2005 as a beta product. After a few months of public testing, the beta tag was removed and the service was ready for general consumption. Since that time, Google Sitemaps gained a significant amount of momentum.

Its wonderful to see that Yahoo! and Microsoft didn’t implement another format specific to their own search engines and have collaborated with Google. With the standardised XML format, its now possible for content publishers to feed Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft search engines off the same physical file. That point alone is a huge bonus for the publishing community though I think even more significant is that the standardised format will have the same semantic meaning to all search engines as well.

What Is A Search Engine?

Internet, Search

A search engine is typically a software application which is capable of receiving requests and returning results based on a simple human readable text phrase or query. The query is received and the search engine then evaluates the request and attempts to find the most relevant results from its database. The relevancy of the results returned is based on complex rules and algorithms which rank each unique resource in its database. The results of a search request are typically sorted in descending order based on relevance to the search query.

Search Engine Types

There are three main types of search engines:

  1. human generated
  2. automated or algorithm based
  3. a hybrid of the two previous options

A human generated search engine is what is now generally considered a directory. Users submit their sites and the administrators of the directory review and include sites on their discretion. If a particular web site is included into the directory, it is evaluated, categorised and subsequently placed within the directory. The most widely known human generated search engine in existence today is the Open Directory (dmoz.org).

An automated or algorithm based search engine does not rely on humans to provide information for searches to take place on. Instead, an algorithm based search engine relies on other computer programs, known as web crawlers or spiders to provide the data. Once the web crawlers or spiders have provided the data, separate computer programs evaluate and categorise the web sites into the directory.

The hybrid search engines combine both human generated and an algorithm based approach to increase the quality of the search data. In these systems, the internet is crawled and indexed like an automated approach; however the information is reviewed and updated as this process takes place.

Search Engine Strengths & Weaknesses

Each technique described above has its own strength and weaknesses. In a directory style search engine, the quality of the results is often very high due to a physical person reviewing the content on the web site and subsequently taking the appropriate actions. Unfortunately, due to the ever increasing number of web sites and content on the internet, requiring human intervention to rank and categorise a web site doesn’t scale.

In a purely automated approach, the search engines rely on the speed of software applications to index the internet. While the human based approach might allow for tens or possibly hundreds of pages to be categorised simultaneously; a search engine spider or crawler is capable of doing thousands or millions of pages simultaneously. The obvious problem with this approach is that since the search engines rely on algorithms, the algorithms can be exploited. In years gone past, “webmasters” cottoned onto how these type of search engines worked and started abusing the system by including keywords into their site which had nothing to do with the primary focus of the page or domain. The search engine would spider the site and suddenly an online shoe shop is coming up in searches for porn, drugs, gambling and more.

The hybrid based approach attempts to resolve the two aforementioned issues by crawling the internet using software applications and reviewing the results. The algorithms which rate and categorise a particular web site are tuned appropriately over time and the results they produce are monitored very closely to ensure accuracy of the search results. Companies which implement a hybrid based approach have teams of people whose soul purpose is to review the validity of various search results. If they find results which they would consider to be out of place, they are marked for investigation. If the results they expect do not come up, that is also noted down and sites can be manually included into the search index.

Now that you know what a search engine is, keep your eyes peeled for a follow up on how search engines work.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): Demystifying The Black Art

Internet, Search

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a black art to a lot of people. Anyone publishing content online that is looking for a lot of exposure for their product, service or general announcement really need to know about it. The unfortunate reality is that most people don’t know about SEO and those that do, know that they should do it but don’t really know what it is.

In the coming weeks, I’m going to release a series of short, simple to understand posts about what search engine optimisation is and how it roughly works. Through these simple posts, I’m hoping to demystify the black art of search engine optimisation a little so that the less savvy content publishers can understand it and start taking advantage of it.

Below is a short list of some of the items that are going to be covered:

  • HTML <title> element
  • HTML heading (<hX>) elements
  • Content
  • URL nomenclature
  • Keywords
  • HTML <meta> data
  • HTML markup
  • Images
  • Inbound links
  • Outbound links
  • Intersite links
  • …

Google & Pingomatic Sitting In A Tree

Blogging, Internet, Search, Software, Websites

Following on from my previous post about Google Blog Search accepting pings, it appears that Pingomatic is already sending ping messages into the Google Blog Search service.

By default, WordPress only sends pings into Pingomatic, which then distributes them to a lot of other services. To verify that Pingomatic has already been updated, the previous post title and URL were amended. A few minutes later, you could do a search using the Google Blog Search and the newly amended title and URL were visible in the results.

I love a good service.