Archive for the 'Search' Category
June 4, 2008
Robots.txt Protocol Enhanced by Big Search Engine Companies
I learned today, via Search Tools, that Microsoft, Yahoo! and Google have agreed to specific extensions to the robots.txt file protocol. All of their search engines will now honor additional directives. More info from Yahoo! and Google.
What is robots.txt some of you may be asking? It is a simple text file you can place on your web site to tell search engine spiders what parts of your site they should index and which they should ignore. It has been around for a long time and these are the first additions to the standard in at least a decade.
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October 17, 2007
Internal Search Stats Coming to Google Analytics Soon
Google announced new features for Google Analytics this week. One of the best is the addition of internal search reporting. This will allow you track queries on your internal search engine in pretty great detail. Here is a nice preview of the feature and how to use it effectively.
Tracking your internal search traffic (searches within your own site) is excellent data for understanding what your site visitors are looking for and where they may be having problems finding content.
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September 24, 2007
Search Engine Optimization Tips Article
I just posted an article to my site on how to improve the placement of your content in natural search engine results. I focus on how to improve your own content and management practices in this article: 10 Search Engine Optimization Tips.
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July 31, 2007
World Bank 2.0: The BuzzMonitor
I just heard about a new open source application for tracking discussion of specific issues in social media (blogs, tags, podcasts, wikis, etc.) online: The BuzzMonitor. This was developed by the World Bank for their own purposes and then released as an open source application. From the about page:
Like many organizations, we started listening to blogs and other forms of social media by subscribing to a blog search engine RSS feed but quickly understood it was not enough. The World Bank is a global institution and we needed to listen in multiple languages, across multiple plaforms. We needed something that would aggregate all this content, help us make sense of it and allow us to collaborate around it. At the time, no solution (either commercial or open source) met those requirements so we decided to build our own.
We were playing with Drupal, a solid, open-source content and community platform for different pilots. Drupal being so flexible and module oriented, we decided to write the specifications for a “super aggregator” that would help us people understand, follow and collaborate around mentions of the organization online.
I asked Pierre Guillaume, who announced it on the Social Media Measurement Group on Facebook, how they are using it internally at the World Bank. His response:
Thanks David. We are rolling it out to communicators across the bank with a guide on how to use tagging, voting, rss feeds etc…there is, not surprisingly, a bit of a learning curve both in terms of “getting” social media and using the tool but some champions are emerging, embedding findings obtained through the buzzmonitor in their regular comm and web reports, adding relevant bloggers to their contacts etc.. We also feature the most recently voted on items on a page available two clicks down from the intranet home page, for all staff to see.
Sounds like a great tool for raising awareness of how issues important to the Bank are evolving online. I recommend listening to the online conversation as a key activity for any organization and this looks like a great tool for assisting in that. I have downloaded the application and will give it a try this week.
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July 18, 2007
Google Custom Search Business Edition
Google launched a new hosted search product this week: Google Custom Search Business Edition.
This will give you a Google-based search engine for your site, running on Google’s servers, without advertising or Google logos on it. You can also get search results as XML, which makes it possible to create a completely custom results page or to embed search results in parts of your site as related content.
However, you cannot index any content behind a login, which will rule it out for most membership-based web sites. Searching secured content will still require one of their appliances.
It costs $100 a year for up to 500 pages and $500 for up to 50,000 pages.
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June 20, 2007
Microsoft’s Hammer
Is it just me or has Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007) mania taken over the IT world?
I have heard lots of buzz about this package, especially in the association industry, but I’ve yet to see the overwhelming value in MOSS’s interfaces and services over previous versions of SharePoint. MOSS is nice for collaboratively managing documents and searching but beyond that basic project work I think its interface gets in the way. It is a horrible community platform compared to many of the open source and low-cost solutions already available.
Not to mention the organizations that are diving in head first and planning on using MOSS (with MS CMS rolled in) as the total solution for their intranet and public web sites. There is a good reason that different classes of solutions have evolved for public and intranet sites: they have vastly differing requirements for most organizations.
My advice is to bide your time and carefully consider which nails you ultimately decide to whack with the MOSS hammer.
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May 14, 2007
Big Book Stores and Amazon
So, when you compare Amazon to Barnes and Noble or Borders (just on book selling), how are they fundamentally different?
All three sell online and, while Amazon is still the best, the other two have reasonably easy interfaces for selling books. What is left? Physical stores. B&N and Borders have the liability and asset of a physical retail presence in many communities across the country. However, they fail horribly to the leverage the two together to improve overall sales.
If you are looking for a physical retail store, it is likely because you want to buy a book right away. If you are willing to wait a few days, you can just order online. But if you want it right now, say before you catch a flight that afternoon, you want to know if the store near you is carrying the title before making the trek out there. Making retail inventory available for search by store seems like a no-brainer. It relieves floor staff from having to answer as many phone calls and enables customers to find out if they can buy more immediately.
However, Borders buries this feature several levels down in their site and B&N doesn’t even offer it. What a wasted opportunity.
The ideal interface, I think, would be to set a cookie for the user’s zip code at some point and then offer local retail inventory results along with online inventory.
Gee, that sounds simple. Why don’t they do it? My guess would be that their performance measures don’t reward cross-selling between physical and online operations.
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March 15, 2007
Why Natural Search Engine Placement Is Risky as a Primary Strategy
This Wall Street Journal article, How Search-Engine Rules Cause Sites to Go Missing, provides several examples of why relying on search engine driven traffic to your site as a primary strategy brings along some risks. Your business is subject to significant impact from relatively minor adjustments to the search engine algorithms and policies.
That said, the main example in the article is of a news web site that wants to change its domain name from a .net to a .com for branding reasons (after paying $1 million for the .com address):
Such a simple change, Mr. Skrenta has discovered, could have disastrous short-term results. About 50% of visits to his news site come through a search engine — and about 90% of the time, that is Google. Some companies say their sites have disappeared from top search results for weeks or months after making address switches, due to quirky rules Google and other search engines have adopted. So the same user who typed “Anna Nicole Smith news” into Google last week and saw Topix.net as a top result might not see it at all after the change to Topix.com.
Even if traffic to Topix, which gets about 10 million visitors a month, dropped just 10%, that would essentially be a 10% loss in ad revenue, Mr. Skrenta says. “Because of this little mechanical issue, it could be a catastrophe for us,” he says.
Since Google ascribes credibility to results on domains that it trusts, changing your domain name can have significant impact, as topix is discovering.
Any business model should be flexible enough to not be overly dependent on one source of business. For most organizations, search engine placement should be an important but not overarching strategy for the company.
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December 13, 2006
Free Open Source Search Tool from IBM and Yahoo!
IBM has released a free enterprise search engine, IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition. The engine includes some technology from IBM’s OmniFind product, so this is probably prositioned as an entry level introduction to their commercial product. It is a direct challenge to Google’s Mini search appliance, according to this story on CIO.com. Yahoo! seems to have contributed some interface design expertise for the management interface.
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March 6, 2006
Purple Search
Google has posted a video of a talk that Seth Godin, my favorite marketing guru these days, gave to Google employees recently. It is a synthesis of material from many of his books and is great stuff. Seth has been following up with several blogs posts, going into more depth on points he discussed in the video.
I spotted this via about 30 feeds I subscribe to. When something shows up multiple times in several feeds in a short time frame, you know there is something to it.
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