The Search Engine Blog

Archive for July, 2008

Someone is a genius…..besides me of course <grin>. The folks at Microsoft have redesigned Live Search and given it a new background. They plan on changing these regularly. But wait, there’s more! Hover your mouse now and receive a popup absolutely free. The popup will let you see more information related to the photo. The more information helps you use more of Live’s features that you might not know existed. Brilliant move on their part. Great marketing!
Now how many of you are thinking, “How can I capitalize on the searches that Live is sending people to?”. If you didn’t think of that, you need to hire someone like myself. It’s opportunity time for MS and for you.

Live Search : New home page helps you explore more on the Web

A new search engine in town is being compared to Google. cuil (pronounced cool) has an impressive number of web pages indexed and a nice interface to the web, but Google it isn’t….at least not yet. Still, it’s worth checking out and popping in once in a while to see if they continue to improve. One very noticable thing is that the images they display can’t always be found on the resulting web site. Some of our listings showed images I’ve never seen before so I know it’s not old images. Some links were old and led to different (new) sites or 404 errors. Good luck to them. It ain’t easy taking on the big boys of search.
Cuil

Microsoft takes others ideas and does them better. At least that’s what some claim, and now they are out to show Google how to do PageRank better. That shouldn’t be too hard as PageRank numbers are flawed anyway. Microsoft’s ranking system is based on user behaviour. The more clicks and user actions they record, the better your site ranks. Live.com, Microsoft’s search engine, has millions of users so they think they can deliver some useful ranking numbers based on this model. While the idea isn’t new to this planet, it does seem to be what people want.

Microsoft tries to one-up Google PageRank | News – Digital Media – CNET News.com

The Google cache was way behind on dates for a number of sites according to this Webmaster World.com post.
Google cache not up to date?

It seems to be back on track now with major sites now reporting current dates. One poster even jokes that perhaps Google ran out of room.

A must read interview regarding search rankings and how links impact you. If you can only read one online marketing article today, this is the one. Read it, think about it, put it into action.

Yahoo’s Priyank Garg Chats with Eric Enge

Lively lets you create a virtual 3-D world where others can chat with you and even help you create your 3-D world. This is so ’98. In computer terms, that’s ancient. You can add a virtual room to your site hoping others stop by to chat. Personally I’ve got better things to do, but perhaps it may be a needed feature for certain sites. Perhaps it’s time for something retro that wastes even more time. Naw….

Lively – Welcome

Yahoo! announced an update for their search index. There isn’t much buzz about it in the forums. Perhaps there isn’t much of a change, or no one cares about Yahoo!. Perhaps it’s because everytime they update they seem to totally screw it up and end up hitting the undo key.
Yahoo! Search Blog: Weather Report: Yahoo! Search Index Update

Happy fourth of July. Check out the search engine logos for today’s celebration!

Yahoo! has some animation.

MSN some very basic fireworks in their logo.

And Ask with a nice of one of our founding documents.

Dogpile disappointed us with nothing special today.

Happy fourth!!!