Archive for March, 2007
Google has made a investment and public commitment to being a “green” company. Meaning they source carpet and sofas made without PVC, paints without volatile organic compounds, and cafeteria food from local growers. Now Google has gone one step further, and begun to generate it’s own electricity, and rolled out the largest commercial solar deployment in the US.
It’s Whiteboard Friday again and Rand follows-up this morning’s blog post by discussing the importance of Meta Description Tags.
Seems like Microsoft either experiences some problems with its queries processing or plans to re-build its services structure. The latest news that alarmed the whole SEO community was the post in Live Search official blog that they have disabled the link:, linkdomain: and inurl functionalities in the search engine.
For those of you who use some of the advanced query syntax in our search engine such as link:, linkdomain: and inurl:, you may have noticed that this functionality has been recently turned off. We have been seeing broad use of these features by legitimate users but unfortunately also what appears to be mass automated usage for data mining. So for now, we have made the tough call to block all queries with these operators.
We are doing our best to get this back online as soon as possible in a manner that allows folks that use this functionality for real queries. We have a few good ideas up our sleeve on how to enable this, but want to make sure we are making the right changes that will give you the functionality you want and all of our customers the experience they deserve.
Yahoo! Search blog has announced today the move of their web crawler. With the acquisition of Inktomi a couple of years ago the crawler was set at inktomisearch.com. So everybody interested could see in the log data a visit of Yahoo crawler to their site under this domain name. However, for further the crawler will be removed to crawl.yahoo.net domain.
There are some reasons that could make you keep an eye on Yahoo bot migration process as citing Yahoo blog:
Is 4.4% a big deal? Well, when it goes about search it is! According to Nielsen//NetRatings’ research 4.4 % is the drop in search volume Microsoft search engine has experienced for the last 2 years which basically equals to approximately 7 billion lost searches (about 300 million per month).
The share of MSN Search starting from February 2005 till February 2007 decreased from 14% to 9.6% while Google’s share rose from 46% up to 56% for the same time. The drop is party explained by the Search engine rebranding from MSN to Live Search, party by the stability of Google’s and Yahoo’s performance and Microsoft’s reluctance of searching for new markets and opportunities.
An amazing website traffic estimation tool which name speaks for itself – AttentionMeter - has been found by us recently.
This site popularity metric tool gives its users a platform to estimate the traffic and popularity data from 3 sources: Alexa, Compete & Quancast. For even greater comfort a possibility to compare up to 5 domains is provided.
Google has just implemented quite an amazing feature - Plus Box.
Tending to make the search faster and easier Google added this icon 
to some search results clicking which a user gets additional information about the original search result.
The types of information shown currently with Plus Box results are stock data (NYSE, NASDAQ, and AMEX info) and maps.
