Social Patterns Michael Nguyen on Search Engine Marketing

Looks like Yahoo has been working under the radar on a jobs search engine. (via Joel Cheesman)

In addition to providing job listings from organizations which have paid to have their listings posted on the Yahoo HotJobs web site, Yahoo is now including job listings they have collected from the Web.

The Yahoo HotJobs search results pages separates listings from sponsored job listings and listings found on the Web. There are three types of listings on Hotjobs: Sponsor Companies, Featured Jobs and Jobs Results from the Web.

Sponsor Companies: Sponsor Companies are organizations which pay for premium placement. This is your normal sponsored type placement. Sponsor Companies may appear based on the category you select, the keywords you enter, the location you choose or a combination of these factors.

Featured Job Results: Featured Job Results are job listings from organizations which have paid Yahoo! HotJobs to have their listings posted. The order of these results is determined by how relevant your listing is to the search query.

Job Results From the Web: Job Results From the Web are relevant job listings that have been collected from across the Web. The order of these results is determined by how relevant your listing is to the search query.

Yahoo has been aggregating job listings from local job listing sites like Careerboard, Jobvertise, and Backpage. In addition to collecting job listing sites, Yahoo has also been pulling job listings from corporate, school, and government sites.

For an example, look at this search.

Yahoo just released My Web 2.0 yesterday and brings a whole new dimension to search.

My Web 2.0 is a social search engine. Yahoo combines the power of search technology and the power of personal networks to deliver a search engine that is based upon your trusted community. Web 2.0 searches your trusted network of contacts for pages that you and your contacts have saved.

With the release of My Web 2.0, Yahoo has added a ton of new features – all based upon community based searching and extending personal networks.

Continue reading Review of Yahoo My Web 2.0 Beta

Google Earth combines satellite imagery, maps, the power of Google Search and it’s free.

Update: Wow. This rocks.

Microsoft announced Friday that they will be integrating several new RSS features in the next version of Windows, code-named Longhorn. The Longhorn Browsing and RSS team also announced a new RSS extension, to be released into Creative Commons, called Simple List Extensions. The extension will allow users to publish a lists as feeds and introduces a change to the RSS specification that many are not too happy about.

RSS functionality in Longhorn will make it easier for users to discover, view, subscribe to RSS feeds, and extend the RSS into more applications – which is a good thing.

Check out the demo video here.

Amazon’s A9 has improved its interface and added some new features. (via SEW) I’m really liking the AJAX feel and the new location of the check boxes.

Continue reading A9 Adds New Interface Changes

MSN released several improvements to its search engine this week. (via http://blogs.msdn.com/msnsearch/archive/2005/06/21/431288.aspx)

They’ve added local search, sports instant answers, and new operators.

We’ve added FileType:, one of the most asked for operators, which restricts documents to a particular filetype. InAnchor:, InURL:, InTitle:, and InBody: are now available to find keywords in a particular part of the document, or in anchor text pointing to a document. We’ve augmented the Link: keyword that finds documents that link to a particular page with LinkDomain:, which finds documents that point to any page in a domain. Finally, we’ve added a new experimental operator called Contains:. Contains: returns documents that contain hyperlinks to documents with a particular file extension; for example, contains:wma returns documents that contain a link to a WMA file.

Google has begun releasing some of its Ajax code (the stuff powering Google Maps/Gmail), starting with a JavaScript implementation of XSL-T. This allows your web browser to fetch XML documents directly from the server, and perform the format conversion locally – saving time and bandwith.

MSN just released Local Search combined with Virtual Earth. Danny Sullivan has a review over at Search Engine Watch.

I just noticed that Yahoo is allowing users to block search results. You click the “block” link and this prevents the result from showing up in future searches.

I can see Yahoo using this data to implement Bayesian filtering for personalized web searches. As people continue to block and save sites in My Web, the filter gradually will define what people see as spam or relevant.

Although this data may be used to influence Yahoo’s general search rankings, I believe this will remain a personalization feature. Since Bayesian filtering is trained on a personal basis, there is no need to extend the training to the general index. Keeping the training on a per user basis, will minimize spam use of the block link.

Update: Rand is going to block About.com from his searches.

Jeff Boulter is hiring for a new Yahoo site:

It’s for a new Yahoo! site focused on technology – cell phones, cameras, computers and other nerdly gadgets. Find ‘em, compare ‘em, buy ‘em and use ‘em.

If you ever wanted to play with cool toys and get in on the ground level of building an entirely new Yahoo! site, here’s your chance!

The job listing says you’ll be part of a team building new site for users to discover, find and use consumer technology such as digital cameras, MP3 players and computers. Gavin O’Malley reports that “A Yahoo! spokesman said that while the company is planning to broaden its tech editorial offering, the exact form it will take is not yet clear”.

Jeff Boulter is the engineering manager for Y! News, so I expect the new Yahoo site to combine tech reporting, editorial content, and shopping – sounds like a revamp of Yahoo Shopping with more content?

What’s your guess?

Golgotha over at the Digitalpoint forums has created a great linking visualization tool. Labeled as a Pagerank decoder, the tool is actually more useful for visualizing networks and small communities.

The tool is built in flash and is real is to use. Add some pages, connect the dots and the tool calculates PR for your linking network.

Try mapping out your real network and see what it returns.

Yesterday Yahoo! snatched up two more companies: Blo.gs and Dialpad.

Blo.gs is a blog tracking service and a ping infrastructure. A ping service like blo.gs is essentially a hub for the world’s blogs – almost every single blog software pings blo.gs by default. Blo.gs is so tied into the blog network (Technorati, Feedster, PubSub all work with blo.gs), that it would be much harder to recreate blo.gs and made much more sense to purchase the service.

Dialpad is a VoIP provider. Yahoo’s purchase of Dialpad will allow them to offer VoIP service without relying on the service of another company. Yahoo will most likely leverage Dialpad’s VoIP services to improve Yahoo! Messenger.

Yahoo is moving real fast in order to integrate communication services into one single package.

Here’s how they are setting up to be the market leader in the communication space.

Communicate online and connect with people – Yahoo 360 + Yahoo Messenger
Share photos – Flickr
Communicate by Voice – Dialpad
Link to the world – Blo.gs
Track and Share information – Blo.gs + My Yahoo + RSS

Now combine all that communication with search. If I need to look for some information about a local sushi restaurant, I can check my local network for human recommendations, view photos, get some Yahoo local search information, see what is being said about the restaurant online and make the reservation on Yahoo Messenger.

Yahoo is taking it’s portal strategy to a higher level – communication and content creation services.

What the heck is a canonical URL? I didn’t know what a canonical URL was at first either, so don’t worry if you don’t know.

Canonical essentially means “standard” or “authoritative”, so a canonical URL for search engine marketing purposes is the URL you want people to see. Depending on how your web site was programmed or how your tracking URLs are setup for marketing campaign, there may be more than one URL for a particular web page.

The problem most search engine marketers run into deals with domains. Sometimes if a domain is not setup properly, the domain URL (domain.com) and the www domain URL (www.domain.com) are considered individual web pages. Since both pages maybe indexed by Google – you could get hit for duplicate content and at the very least you would be splitting your link popularity.

The easiest way to protect your site is to redirect all forms of your domain to one “standard” URL – a canonical URL.

Continue reading Cleaning Up Canonical URLs With Redirects

Intresting post over on kuro5hin about Google’s latest aquisitions and future prospects.

Out of all the emerging web companies, my bet would be for Google to grab Technorati.

Technorati is a blog search engine that aims to index and search what is happening on the web in real time. Think of Technorati as a conversation search engine and would integrate well with Google’s new personalized homepage. Google is weak in areas that Technorati excels.

Yesterday, Dave Sifry announced the public beta of Technorati’s redesign. I like the new features, but prefer the old design. Technorati is a blog search engine that tracks over seven million weblogs.

Here are some highlights from the beta announcement:

* We’ve improved the user experience, making Technorati accessible to more people and, specifically, people who are new to blogging. We’ve tried to make it very simple to understand what Technorati is all about, and make it easy to understand how we’re different from other search engines.
* We’ve learned from the incredible success of tags, and brought some of the those same features into search, as well as expanding tag functionality. Now, if your search matches a tag, we bring in photos and links from flickr, furl, delicious, and now buzznet as well.
* We now have more powerful advanced search features. You can now click the “Options” link beside any search box for power searching options.
* We’ve added more personalization. Sign in, and you’ll see your current set of watchlists, claimed blogs, and profile info, right on the homepage, giving you quick access to the stuff you want as quickly as possible.
* New Watchlist capabilities have been added. For example, you no longer need a RSS reader to watch your favorite searches. Now you can view all of your favorite searches on one page. Of course, you can still get your watchlists via RSS, and it is even easier to create new watchlists. You can also get RSS feeds for tagged posts, just check the bottom of each page of tag results!

SiliconValleyWatcher reports that Google plans to use trucks equipped with lasers and digital photographic equipment to create a realistic 3D online version of San Francisco.

Google seems to be really pushing into local search and mapping – both offerings could benefit from this.

As you can see, the images produced by this technology are very high resolution and accurate. Stanford researchers, funded by Google, are trying to make it possible to produce these pictures in one pass by and along curves.

Since Danny Sullivan already covered the overview of Google Sitemaps, I’m going to take some time to explain the Sitemap protocol.

What is the Google Sitemap Protocol?

The Google Sitemap Protocol allows you to tell Google what URLs on your web site is ready to be crawled. The Sitemap contains a list of URLs and some meta data about the URL such as when they were last modified, how frequently the content changes, and the priority of the page relative to other pages.

The Google Sitemap is in an XML format using some very simple XML tags. So if you know how to alter HTML files, you will be fine with Google Sitemaps. XML is a bit more strict than HTML, so you will need to remember to encode all your data values (fix those &’s!).

Continue reading Breaking Down Google Sitemaps XML

Google just launched a new program called Google Sitemaps, allowing webmasters to submit individual pages (in a feed format) for faster indexing.

Danny Sullivan has a comprehensive review of the program, so I’ll skip the overview.

The big thing here is you can tell Google which pages to crawl and how often to come back. Google does not promise that they will crawl your pages, but they do say they will make an effort.

Mark Draughn from Windypundit got his hands on a beta release of Google Earth.

I’m having a hard time deciding which mapping product I’m more excited about – Google Earth or MSN’s Virtual Earth. Both are going to be great, but I wonder which one will allow developers to extend the initial application. (like Housing Maps for Google Maps)

Check out his review and the new features from the release notes.

On Monday, Findory launched their personalized advertising engine. Designed to serve ads based on reader behavior, Findory is offering personalization on both content and advertising fronts.

Findory is feeding personalized keywords into Google AdSense to generate highly targeted ads. These keywords change as you continue to use Findory and the ads become more personalized and targeted as Findory’s systems gather more data. Philipp notices that the variables google_kw_type and google_kw are being used in Findory’s AdSense code.

If you did not know, google_kw_type and google_kw are used in extreme cases for sites with targeting issues. I would not recommend adding these to your sites, because it is against the terms of service to use them without permission from the AdSense team.

Findory changes the keywords for google_kw each time a page is reloaded in order to serve the most targeted ads every time. Very cool and very innovative. Although google_kw and google_hints have been used before to serve targetted ads based on content. I believe Findory is the first company to target Google AdSense by reader behavior.