Social Patterns Michael Nguyen on Search Engine Marketing

I missed a ton of stories last week so here’s a recap if you haven’t heard them by now.

Google launched in China, sued by Microsoft, and counter sued. Google stock taking a slight hit. Microsoft launches Virtual Earth and Google Maps provides hybrid view.

Looks like there is another Yahoo update in progress. This time around, Tim Mayer didn’t give us an official “weather update”.

Update: Tim Mayer a bit slower than the forums, but gives us the 3rd Weather Update. Awesome. Google, how bout you guys?

What happens if someone files a DCMA complaint against your domain to Yahoo?

Brian Turner from Platinax believes your domain will be removed from the Yahoo index and that Yahoo does not check the validity of DCMA complaints.

And I should know – the domain that you’re reading this on, www.platinax.co.uk – was removed from Yahoo! search in November 2004, apparently after such a complaint – a complaint that I was never even made aware of.

Interestingly enough, no DMCA complaint has apparently been filed against Platinax via any other search engine – and even after Yahoo! finally confirmed that a DMCA complaint has been made to them against this site, Yahoo! will not provide any details of the complaint.

Looks like Niall Kennedy got a chance to review Yahoo RSS Search before it was pulled down.

Tomorrow Yahoo SMS Search launches. Text 92466 to test it out now. (via Om Malik)

Update: More news over at Yahoo Search blog.

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 Maps API. A9 Block Level Maps.

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

Yahoo, in conjunction with Revenue Science, has been testing its contextual ads on web pages based on user behavior. (via AdWeek)

In contrast to Google’s AdSense, Revenue Science’s technology targets ads to user behavior. By tracking a user’s site behavior, Revenue Science and Yahoo are hoping to attain better results than ads based on page context.

If Yahoo can successfully combine contextual advertising with behavior targeting, they will be offering a better solution for publishers and advertisers – win win for Yahoo and everyone using their advertising network.

David Sifry, CEO of Technorati, is calling out Google and Yahoo to explain why their reported results are sometimes much larger than their viewable results.

Can someone from Google or Yahoo help me to understand why their reported results are sometimes 1000 times larger than their viewable results? I look forward to being educated.

This comes as a response to Tristan Louis’s comparisons between Google, Yahoo, and Technorati’s results.

Update: Danny Sullivan and Tristan Louis talk about Link Counts, Site Counts & Index Auditing.

Tristan Louis compares Technorati, Yahoo, and Google on indexing the blogosphere. Here’s what he concluded:

Yahoo! generally does a better job at indexing the blogosphere than Google does. We know they have been working hard to improve their index and here’s proof that they are getting results

Even if Google is the one with the motto about not doing evil, Yahoo! seems to be the one interested in giving equal opportunity to the little guy: smaller blogs seem to have a better chance of being recognized by Yahoo! than they do of being recognized by Google

While the front page of Google advertises they are currently indexing over 8 billion pages, it is very difficult to find ways to support that claim via the link feature they are offering: this can be seen as confirmation that Google does not tell you about all the links it has in its index.

Sure volume counts but in the case of search indexes, they may count against sites: if one is less likely to appear in Google than it is to appear in Yahoo! and the Google index is much larger than the Yahoo! one, then, if Yahoo! and Google had the same amount of traffic, a single blog could find itself receiving more traffic from Yahoo! than it does from Google. This would be due to the fact that each individual page in Yahoo! has more weight than it does in Google.

The top 100 blogs have other 56 million links in the Yahoo!. That’s a lot of links and clearly shows that links are the currency of the blogging world. It would be interested to get data that would help analyze how much interlinking exists across those sites.

Tim Mayer announced earlier this morning that Yahoo will be updating their index tonight – so expect some changes in the SERPS tomorrow.

I hope Google starts following Yahoo with these weather updates. Instead of having search engine marketers predict future index updates, the search engines could inform you before an update – would save you a lot of trouble and build a bettter relationship between search engine marketers and the search engines.

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.