NewSunNetworks

John Gruber / Daring Fireball : iPhone Apps on the iPad

Has it ever occurred to you that you may have keywords on your site that are misleading to search engines? Or that you need to take a look at all of the keywords you are trying to rank for, and think about the different meanings and contexts that those could be taken in that are unrelated to your actual product, and then eliminate other seemingly unrelated words that to a search engine could be misconstrued as an indication of one of those other contexts? At SMX West last week, WebProNews sat down with Bruce Clay of Internet Marketing firm Bruce Clay, Inc . who made some interesting points about understanding searcher behavior, intent-based search, and how that should affect keyword research. Note: We talked to Bruce about quite a few search-related topics, but this subject is focused on more toward the end of the video (about 20 minutes in). Clay talks about Google delivering more personalization in search results, taking into consideration things like how prior queries influence future queries. “Ranking is going to be less of a measurement,” he says. “We’re going to be focused on more the traffic.” “When I decide I’m selling a hammer, I have to actively go out of my way not to have certain things appear in my site, because the search engines could be confused about what I’m talking about….I don’t mean the Armand Hammer Art Museum at UCLA. I don’t mean a bowling ball…you know, the things that show up for hammer are all over the board,” says Clay. “One of the things that I think is important, and that we’ve been working on is how do we actually do keyword research without knowing the behavioral aspects our personas that are actually going for our product? You have to understand personas now a little bit better - what kinds of things are they likely to search on, in sequence - before they type in hammer…so if they’re on an arts and crafts site, and then they type in hammer, I ought to understand that behavior in sequence, so that I can better do my keyword research and determine how I’m gonna put the words on my page. I don’t see a lot of people even thinking that way.” Personalized search is nothing new. Google’s been personalizing search results for some time, based on various indicators, and it appears that Google is looking for more ways to deliver users a personalized experience ( whether they want that or not ). Between personalized search and other sources of information infiltrating search results pages, traditional SEO is becoming harder to accomplish, and Bruce says, even ineffective. That’s why it may become increasingly important to focus on relevant elements of the SERP for queries you hope to be found for.

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Examine Your Site’s Text, Reduce Chances of Search Engine Confusion

I am still in Israel, so no video recap this week again, I apologize but here is the text alternative. Google dropped SearchWiki for Starring search results, which makes me very happy. Yahoo celebrated it’s 15th birthday. We posted the…

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(Text) Recap of Weekly Search Buzz :: March 5, 2010

First, the good (well, “promising”) news : the ads will appear in Twitter search results; in other words, they’ll be targeted and theoretically not too obtrusive to Tweeters. the ads will operate off Twitter’s API so you’d imagine over …

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Social Media Influence: Social Media News & Intellegence » Twitter …

Twitter’s finally ready to unveil its ad service, and it’s going to look a heck of a lot like Google’s. Sources tell Peter Kafka of All Things Digital that Twitter intends to allow companies to place ads using a self-serve program, and that they’ll show up in search results, much…

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Twitter Apes Google’s Ad Model

Jennifer Valentino-DeVries / Digits : Apple’s Tim Cook on the iPad and the Company’s Mobile Future … Tim Cook, Apple’s chief operating officer, is one of the keynote speakers at Goldman Sachs’ annual tech conference in San Francisco.

According to this article Search Atheism On The Rise , only 51% of people trust information provided by search engines and that number is down from 62% in 2006. That’s interesting and to add to that, it goes to show, once again, don’t optimize for rankings, but do so for your users. Humans are getting smarter, children are adapting to internet/computer usage quicker and faster than we ever did when were were that age (30s here) and with that comes the understanding that what Google or other search engines bring up as search results may not be the authority on the subject or is always worth debating. Even though your website is #7 or on page two, remember there is still a good chance that you’re site is doing pretty good in the search results. Being #1 on Google or other search engines is surely one thing but getting hit for long tail searches or deep search results is another.

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The Future Of Search: Will #1 Always Be #1?

Occasionally I run into search results pages that seem to capture what’s wrong with search. This morning is a case-in-point. I was trying to find video of Eric Schmidt’s keynote at the Mobile World Congress. The “Mobile World Live” site (that was supposed to show it) just “blows,” to use the vernacular. So I was looking for alternatives. And here were the results of my query just 20 minutes ago for “eric schmidt keynote” (click to enlarge): Most of the results were blogs or sites trying to capture AdSense clicks by excerpting a paragraph and an image from the Engadget story (with a link back), the only one with any real content. The other substantive results were older keynotes (two YouTube thumbnails and a TechCrunch piece). Of 10 or so links above the fold the majority were essentially spam. This is back to the days of the travel affiliate sites.

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What’s Wrong with Search?

This is part of a regular series of posts on search experience updates that runs weekly. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. - Ed. From enhancements in real-time search to Vancouver happenings at your fingertips, this week included a number of exciting search launches: Winter Games info in search results As the 2010 Winter Games kick off, we’ve made it easy for you to follow all of the action in Vancouver. Now, when you search for the latest results for your favorite sport, you’ll see the information you’re looking for just above the search results. Looking for the latest schedules? They’re just a search away. And if you’re interested in following how your home country is doing, you can quickly view the latest medal count. All that’s left for you to do is cheer for your favorite team and enjoy the games! Example searches: [ men's hockey ], [ alpine skiing schedule ] and [ medal count ] Google Buzz in real-time search Tuesday, we announced Google Buzz as part of our efforts to help make the web more social. Buzz is a new way to start conversations about the things you find interesting, allowing you to share updates, photos and videos right in Gmail. When we launched Buzz we made sure that we had it integrated into real-time search. Since real-time is all about searching what’s happening right now, including changes to webpages, the latest news articles, new blog posts and fresh microblog content, it only seemed natural to include Buzz. Maps of more countries in search results Many of us use online maps so frequently that it’s easy to forget that many countries lack detailed, street-level digital maps. But thanks to people adding their local knowledge to Google Map Maker , the local search results for places like Romania , Iceland, and Peru now include a map. In fact, as of this week we’re able to show a map everytime we show local search results. As a result, the efforts of global citizen cartographers are really serving the needs of local users, schools, city planners, and tourists. Example search: [ catedral de lima ] Aardvark acquisition This week, you might have seen our announcement that we’ve acquired the technology company Aardvark. Aardvark allows you to easily tap into the knowledge and experience network of your friends and extended network of contacts. The way it works is quite simple — you just send a question in plain English, like you would when speaking with a friend. Aardvark then acts as a hub, figuring out who might be able to answer your question, and then responds with an answer

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This week in search 2/14/10

This is part of a regular series of posts on search experience updates that runs weekly. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. - Ed. From enhancements in real-time search to Vancouver happenings at your fingertips, this week included a number of exciting search launches: Winter Games info in search results As the 2010 Winter Games kick off, we’ve made it easy for you to follow all of the action in Vancouver. Now, when you search for the latest results for your favorite sport, you’ll see the information you’re looking for just above the search results. Looking for the latest schedules? They’re just a search away. And if you’re interested in following how your home country is doing, you can quickly view the latest medal count. All that’s left for you to do is cheer for your favorite team and enjoy the games! Example searches: [ men's hockey ], [ alpine skiing schedule ] and [ medal count ] Google Buzz in real-time search Tuesday, we announced Google Buzz as part of our efforts to help make the web more social. Buzz is a new way to start conversations about the things you find interesting, allowing you to share updates, photos and videos right in Gmail. When we launched Buzz we made sure that we had it integrated into real-time search. Since real-time is all about searching what’s happening right now, including changes to webpages, the latest news articles, new blog posts and fresh microblog content, it only seemed natural to include Buzz. Maps of more countries in search results Many of us use online maps so frequently that it’s easy to forget that many countries lack detailed, street-level digital maps.

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This week in search 2/14/10