For years now, every now and then when checking for a domain name, I tried using Google just to see if it will serve me a direct result pertaining to basic domain registration (registration and expiration date for starters). Somehow it seemed logical that a simple “whois …..” query in Google should do that. If queries like “define: …” return definitions for words, why not do the same for domains. Well, Google now returns basic domain information if you type “whois [domainname]” into the search box. I realized this a couple of days ago.

Today, I saw a post on the domain information query on Google by Danny Sullivan on Search Engine Land, and from the comments it seems other people are seeing this as well, but the feature is still sporadic, as some people are saying they aren’t getting domain info in their results. I’ve tried queries for .com and .co.uk and they worked alright. It doesn’t seem to work for .yu/.co.yu (now .rs/.co.rs), which are Serbia’s domain extensions for example. I wasn’t expecting this to work but thought I’d try anyway. Others are reporting they are still not seeing anything for domains ending with their own country extension. A post on Matt Cutts’ blog showed up a couple of days ago, which points out this new feature as well. It seems Google is using Domain Tools for domain information queries, and since this is still kinda fresh, bugs and limited availability are expected, until the addition is rolled out worldwide.

Share This

Just read this on Webmaster Central Blog - Google is testing the latest approach to content discovery by crawling HTML forms on a selected group of sites deemed to be particularly useful. Googlebot will, upon coming onto an HTMl form, determine whether form method is GET or POST. It will actually proceed only if it’s a GET form, since they want to avoid crawling forms that may require user information input (such as usernames and passwords), which all use POST. The bot will actually “fill in” text fields with words (found on the site), choose options on radio buttons and select menus, and try to crawl resulting content, and index it if it determines it’s useful and hasn’t previously been indexed.

Anyway, the experiment is an effort to try and crawl/index, what has been called “invisible content” or “the invisible internet” for years, which is a previously untapped rich source of information which over the years has stayed hidden behind processes requiring human interaction.

Share This

This is interesting. I came across this post by Cabel (Cabel.name), according to which advertising search seems to be the new direction in advertising, at least in Japan. But wait, not the search advertising you’re probably thinking of…

How about that? Cabel says it makes sense since all the good domain names are gone, and almost no one will go past the first slash after .com or .net anyway. So, why not advertise the search query that will lead the user towards the brand, product or service?

Most people turn to the search engines in order to find something anyway, even if they know the direct URL to a site (it’s still entered in the search engine query field). But there are a few problems with advertising your brand using a search query. Google owns almost two thirds of searches on a daily basis, so your advertising initiative will most likely have the user go to Google. In that case you better own the first result page, which is plausible for brand searches, or searches that are very specific to a product or service directly related to your business, but pretty unstable if you’re advertising generic or unbranded terms. If you rank 1st for a generic term and you are stable on that position, than the risk is worth it. If Google really does record click-through rate for organic search results, than an offline campaign like this could increase the number of searches for a particular term you rank well for and attract even more clicks, maybe thus cementing your number 1 spot even more. Hm, I only wish it was that simple…

Then again, the interface shown on the advertisements may be well known to belong to a local search property used by the local community, in which case it’s easier to make sure you really appear as the main result for the advertised search query. Definitely worth experimenting with. If integrated well with an online campaign, this could actually work well, for example in the UK market. Get a priority listing on a local search engine, make sure you appear on top for that particular query, and then advertise your search query locally. It shouldn’t cost too much, and the experiment result, whatever it may be, will be worth it.

Share This

As part of their initiative to open-up their search platform, Yahoo! Search is opening its search platform to third party content providers and re-designing the way users will be presented with search results. So far the results were the standard title/description combination, but the new result format will soon include user generated data such as reviews and images, as well as other useful information such as map directions, contact information, price range of services and products (if available). They state that sites like Yelp and New York Times are examples of how additional data can be incorporated into search results. Any site that can offer additional information about a particular search result can take part in shaping it for the searcher. This way Yahoo! is hoping to deliver a richer and more useful search experience to the searcher, and higher quality traffic for websites appearing in search results.

Here’s a graphical comparison of what the changes will look like:

before

after

“We believe that combining a free, open platform with structured, semantic content from across the Web is a clear win for all parties involved — site owners, Yahoo! and most importantly, our users. And by the way, users will be in complete control of the experience and will be able to turn off anything related to open search if they so desire. Over the course of the next few months, we’ll be talking more about how this platform will work and what it will enable.”

I think there’s plenty more to be seen before any final conclusion can be made about the new Yahoo! search result concept. It looks promising, but for now, it’s safe to say this is another example of the future of search and why it’s more important than ever to get a site/business listed and reviewed on portals, directories and content sharing sites.

Share This

Live Search introduced some improvements to their search bot, mainly concerning bandwidth usage and crawling issues. Two major changes have been introduced:

1. HTTP Compression - static files and applications responses are now being packed using HTTP compression which reduces network load
2. Conditional Get - the bot will not download a page again unless it has been modified since the last crawl session; this is regulated according to RFC 2616 specifications

The user-agent signature has been updated to show msnbot/1.1.

Share This

A couple of months ago I came across and posted about Skreemr. Basically, it’s an audio search engine, which tries to dig up audio content on the web and index it for easy(ier) searching. Well, as with all things nowadays, it’s good to have an alternative to something, so someone brought my attention to another audio search engine called Woonz.

The site has been up not too long ago (maybe two months), and I probably wouldn’t have seen it, was it not for the afore mentioned “tip”. It features a simple search engine interface - type in keywords (performer, album, song, whatever) and get results sorted by relevance, with options to listen to the song, or download it form the location where the song was found. It’s important to say that the site doesn’t store actual MP3 files on its own server(s), but simply finds locations where these files can be found. Even though there is no advertisements or traffic monetization so far, judging by what they said on one of their pages, that is sure to come in the future.

I did about two dozen searches - both general and more specific, and got fairly good results (within what I expected), although in some cases I got results which were not what I wanted, although the songs offered were in fact named correctly. For example a search for “Bryan Ferry Fever” brought back “Kiss and Tell” (the correct name of the song) so that was good. Searches for house music (David Guetta, Junior Jack, Armand Van Helden…) returned plenty of relevant results, so there were no problems there. The same proved to be true for searches such as “elvis” and “beethoven”, so classics and classical are covered as well.

There is room for improvement like site performance, showing audio file quality, size, duration, improving streaming preview performance, adding a feature like personal playlist (in the popup player, with download/purge options for later), but since the service is still young, I am sure they have plans for further development.

Share This

Google announced the release of Video Sitemaps, an extension of the Sitemap Protocol. It has been developed in order to improve the way Google indexes video content publicly available on the Internet. The idea is to make video content more searchable on Google Video. Apart from the basic information about video files such as title and URL, the video sitemap allows more detailed meta tags such as video player location, thumbnail preview location, the URL of the page showing the video.

In order to use Video Sitemaps, webmasters should log in to Google Webmaster Tools and add Video Sitemap to their account.

If you’ve got some video content lying around on the server, here’s a chance to get it indexed and get some additional exposure for your website. Apart from uploading video files to services like YouTube, this is a good way to extend video visibility and use this growing promotion trend to your advantage.

Share This

Ask.com has launched AskEraser, an application that gives visitors a choice to keep their search behavior private by telling Ask to delete all search behavior from its servers. The application has two states - “on” and “off”. “On” is on by default, and choosing “off” means all search queries throughout the endurance of that state will not be recorded. AskEraser is available for US and UK users, although the change will take effect on other major sites throughout 2008.

Online advertising is ever more reliant on user behavior as the focus on the Internet has moved towards the individual user. Giving users the choice to opt-out of privacy delicate situations is a good step forward. Facebook had this setup for its Beacon, but had to change the system to opt-in after receiving a lot of negative feedback from its user community. I wonder why default states are not “off”, and the users are asked to opt-in to tracking and user behavior based content serving rather than making them/us look for a way to opt-out. Maybe because the core of the whole privacy issue, as is the case with many other situations, is money and profit.

Share This

As continuation of the video series, started with the Anatomy of a Google search result video about two weeks ago, this is the new video featuring Matt Cutts, who explains the usage of the ALT attribute in image tags. It’s a pretty basic explanation of what the attribute does, its purpose, but again, he gives numeric data (and that’s what we all want ) near the very end of the video - the number of words to be used in the ALT attribute that won’t be deemed as spam by Google. If your site features images that are good quality and theme specific, you can do something more with them. Add descriptive ALT attributes, and show up in Google Images queries. You can then try to get links from webmasters who’d like to use an image from your site on their own projects. Here’s one way to do this.

Share This

It seems Microsoft has fixed the MSNBot issue, where the bot crawled sites calling non-existent files and accessing content through bogus search queries that had nothing to do with the actual content. In their blog post, the Live Search team have explained a couple of other issues they’ve been working on resolving:

• AdSense/Overture reporting
• Distorted site statistics with unfilterable bot traffic
• Polluted HTTP logs with inappropriate terms
• Microsoft wasn’t responding to questions

See the entire post here.

Share This