This is a short, but good one. Social Patterns blog has a post that appears to logically detail how Google determines whether or not to give a site extra "snippet" links in the SERPs. Summary:Google snippet ...
I can't understand why I can't find any tech bloggers talking about Yahoo!'s re-designed homepage. I noticed it last weekend and have been waiting all week for someone to put together a post on it. It's possible that I'm one of the rare IP addresses who gets to see the page, but if Google did something this radical, it would be on top of Digg, Slashdot and probably the NYTimes to boot. Since wh...
Xan's got some highly relevant distillations of presentation material from the IR conference she attended 2 weeks ago. From MSN: Ruiha Song et al. from Microsoft resea...
Based on my communications with several folks and our observations on those sites whose rankings we monitor, it would appear that sometime late last week (or over the weekend) Google shifted around some rankings. Our best guess as to what happened: Global popularity/authority of a domain was slightly devalued when calculating rankings of deep, internal pages (and/or) ...
Sunday night before the Simpsons (a new one written by Ricky Gervais of the original, British version of "The Office", FYI), we're flipping channels and I catch the tail end of a segment 60 Minutes is doing on Tiger Woods. At the very end, there's a promotion, showing Yahoo!'s search home page (not the usual Yahoo! home page) and telling viewers to search for "...
I couldn't find a good recipe for Chinese Beef & Broccoli at Epicurious this weekend, so I headed to Google, where, lo and behold, they have what appears to be another new feature - query refinement via recipes. I may have just been busy when the search blogs reported on this, but I can't seem to find it in archives at SEW or SERoundtable, either, so maybe it is new. Screenshot below for &q...
The poor results for SEO got me thinking about the ways in which engineers would measure the quality and relevance of the search results for a query. I came up with a few quick ideas, but I'd love to hear feedback and ideas. Perhaps a small article/project can bubble up from this brew. Psychology of Searcher Informational vs. Transactional query (looking to research o...
This morning I did a site command (just to check if I had joined the supplemental issue club) and found out that for some reason Google believes one of the pages is written in Japanese. Though the issue is nothing new (I've seen it bouncing on and off occasio...
Someone should tag this post for the Googlers (I heard there's some sort of secret tag they all watch at del.icio.us). McSweeney's has a laundry list of hilarious replacements for the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button. Why couldn't I think of linkbait like that?A couple of my favorites: "...
Welcome to SEOmoz blog readers and SES NYC participants who may have seen me speak at the Search Algorithms session. You've reached the right page - congrats! The following is a list of useful resources for where to find information about patent applications, research that may affect search engine technology and algorithms and general data on the function of modern information retrieval engine...
I noticed via SEJournal that Yahoo!'s "Search Light Award" was given out yesterday in New York to Honda's interactive ad agency for their "Element" SUV. What I don't understand is why... T...
Jim Westergren sent me an email about his new article on Google's RK datapiece. Apparently, it was first reported at WMW, but Jim's done a reasonably good job of pulling out the important pieces and conducting a bit of research. RK is basically an XML tag that appears in Google's fe...
This afternoon, I enjoyed the hilariously disturbing experience of talking to Yahoo!'s Platinum service team about including a site in Sitematch. A consulting client of ours contacted us several months ago about his site's de-listing in Yahoo!'s index. Our strate...
Silicon Valley Sleuth has a good piece on items they searched for at Google that people surely don't want revealed. Everything from payroll excel files to passwords to remote desktop logins. It's an unsecured world and Google is just waiting to show it to you. The funny thing is, I wonder if anyone would ever think to...
