Search Engines || Information Architecture
Google failures
Originally uploaded by Antonescu Razvan.
Today I was checkin my monthly stats when I saw a weird string in my referrals:
“google failures”
I checked it out in Google and I almost felt off my chiar laughing when I saw the spelling suggestion :))
Click the image above for a larger screen
googledefault
Originally uploaded by Antonescu Razvan.
Tonight I was testing smthg on IE7 and I needed to load Google when I saw a new box asking me to install some software in order to set up Google as default search engine.
Search engine market shares in July 2005: Google - 59.2%, Yahoo! - 28.8%, MSN - 5.5% by ZDNet’s ZDNet Research — HitWise says Google, Yahoo! Search and MSN Search accounted for 93.5% of US searches in July 2005. Google garnered 59.2% of searches. Yahoo! Search and MSN Search captured 28.8% and 5.5% shares, respectively.
Of course a post about Google 
Spotted through Search Engine Watch there is a note mentioning the fact that Google is not talking to CNET writers. Following the trails, we find this:
“Google representatives have instituted a policy of not talking with CNET News.com reporters until July 2006 in response to privacy issues raised by a previous story.”
A previous story…about Eric Schmidt (Google CEO) and some facts about his financial status. Those data were obtained by using Google and other public records (nothing illegal).
I really don’t understand why Google is pissed off on that. Johnny Long has been showing from quite a long time that Google likes storing various kinds of data and a good partof that data people would like to keep it private.
See also John Battelle’s post on this and Slashdot. And for a smiling closure of this don’t forget to check Fuckedgoogle.com’s point of view
By way of Search Engine Watch Moderator, OptimizeOnline, Google Launch Phase 2 of Longer Ad Text Beta Programme. Basically, Google AdWords will up the description character limit to 200 and then test the CTR rates of those ads versus the original ads. OptimizeOnline …
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/index.php?p=1992
As it was obvious, Google didn’t contemplate Yahoo launching their contextual ad network and already is making it’s move to consolidate the grounds
Notice anything different in your Yahoo News listings on Yahoo’s homepage, My Yahoo, and other pages within the Yahoo network where Yahoo News stories are listed? Yahoo is placing a little TV screen next to some news stories to showcase its News …
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/index.php?p=1986
This is quite a goody. Why watching only CNN when you can choose to watch multiple video versions of the same story. Add this to human moderated news (Google does that automatically) and you have a good contender to the role of news king
The Mozilla Foundation this week went “for profit” with the launch of a commercial subsidiary which will focus on the Firefox browser. The for profit version of Mozilla (Cashzilla?) will also be responsible for the development, testing, and distribution of the organization’s open …
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/index.php?p=1985
I just hope that this step will lead the way to Firefox branded browsers. Today I was looking too see if clones of Firefox exist and I was amazed to see that there are none. I mean what’s wrong in the picture? IE is not open source but clones like Maxthon and Avant Browser (to name just a few) are here for quite a long time. I expect (and also want) a Yahoo branded browser to give me quick access to the Yahoo services for example. And the ways to explore this are vitually unlimited
P.S. I am doing this kind of post as an experiment. If it works I will stick to it. The ideea is the following:
1. I have installed Blog Navigator and inserted my daily readings (more to be added soon) 2. From the daily posts I will make a selection of the most important (from my point of view) and try to add some personal comments
Mike Banks Valentine has an article based on his experience on how spiders behave when indexing. For example he concludes:
1) Google crawls 250 pages on first discovery of links to site. Then they don’t return until they find more links and crawl slowly. Google has failed to index new domain for 60 days.
2) Yahoo looks for errors pages and once they find bad links will crawl them ceaselessly until you tell them to stop it. Then won’t crawl at all for weeks until crawling heavily one day and lightly the next in random fashion.
Even though I don’t agree with it’s conclusions on Google (see this example, the part on Yahoo it’s interesting.
The complete results of his analysis is here . What I see that he ommited is what submission steps he took if any. As far as I know no one will spider your domain out of the blue 
Last night doing some research on the romanian real estate market I almost felt off my chair.
Google,Yahoo, MSN were spammed beyond recognition by a site using the old keyword stuffing technique.
Look for “chirii garsoniere” (translation rent single rooms) and see the results.
Spammed results are those that include “Delta Dunarii”. What is more curious, all the other organic results seem to be gone.
Aparently the guy used a query like “allinurl: _post.htm” to identify old message boards that allow unmoderated posting. Because those results are from old sites their relevancy in all the search engines is higher.
So…what we have heard lately…big words like “human raters” “personalization” “anti-spam filters”and so on are just cheap PR.
The proof is there that any determined low life spammer can mess with results
This week has been a busy week for PR people, journalists and bloggers. Google and Yahoo (and even Amazon’s A9) launched interesting and future will proove how usefull products.
Both Google and Yahoo made a step further in their ranking process and accepted the fact that any alghoritm can be partially replicated. To compete with that they are using the net users as volunteers raters. But the way they approached this is completly different:
Google:
Google’s way is somehow….cloaked. In order to use it you have to login to any Google service and the rest is on automated pilot. This is the G00d thing and the UGLY thing.
Yahoo:
Yahoo’s approach is rather geeky. There is no automated process and you will have to manually save the pages you find usefull in a section called MyWeb (this time Yahoo has brought Google’s BETAmania to a higher level; both MyWeb1 and MyWeb2 are in beta….). They have also added tagging functions and social functions by connecting groups of users.
What both Google and Yahoo avoid telling is to mention how those features will affect the “public” results
P.S.
If you want to see a complete summary of this full week check out Guillaume’s coverage
Just noticed that profiles of Yahoo users got a new skin similar to 360.
To see this use http://profiles.yahoo.com/id , where id=yahoo id
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