Wow - I noticed the "Easter Egg" for the New Year's logo over at Google, but before I read this post, I didn't really look at the results. It looks like Google's latest set of tweaks to their search ranking mechanism have made it easier to game - as unofficial Google blog puts it:

Google paid a big price when it started to index pages faster and show them in the search results minutes after they're published. The problem is that you can't rank a page that has just been created because it has no backlinks so Google artificially inflates the rankings of the recently-created pages based on historical data and the few backlinks that are detected.

As I post this (head over to the linked post for the image), Google's top search result is a splog set up specifically for this Easter Egg. I think there might be a late night for a few folks at the Googleplex over this :)

Technorati Tags: splog, spam

Mathew Ingram asks a very good question about Google's quest to get rid of things like "Pay per Post": is it a quest for purity on the web, or a simple matter of crushing the competition:

The question remains: is Google just trying to maintain the purity of the search experience, so that people don’t get misled by paid posts? If so, that’s a fairly noble goal (PPP’s disclosure policy requires bloggers to say somewhere on their site that they use PayPerPost, but not on the individual post). Or is the search giant just concerned with others selling paid links because that’s competition for AdSense? If so, that’s not such a noble goal. And how do we tell the difference?

I think a simple way to start telling the difference is my post title: Who benefits? It's time to get rid of the sappy "no evil" theory about Google, and look at them for what they are: a shareholder driven corporation, like everyone else.

Technorati Tags: google, paid posts

There was a huge blog storm over the last few days - Robert Scoble did a video and post on Facebook/Mahalo (et.al.) being a better long term answer than Google, and the flood gates just opened. Jason Calacanis has a short summary of links here;

I talked about this briefly yesterday, but this morning I was reading Danny Sullivan's tirade against Robert (and a tirade it was; he made some good points, but needed to sit on his post another couple of hours to cool down). In all of that, this popped out at me, as I've had the same thought:

Mahalo comes up next and how by using a small number of human editors, it can be harder to spam. Sure. So's the Yahoo Directory. You remember the Yahoo Directory, right? It used, um, a small number of human editors to categorize the web. Advances in crawler-based search engines meant you could get really good relevancy and be spam resistant, which caused the Yahoo Directory to effectively be abandoned by Yahoo. Mahalo's approach to custom-tailor the most popular searches is interesting -- but despite heaps and heaps of publicity the new service has had showered upon it, it still hasn't gained any real traction among searchers. Mahalo Launches With Human-Crafted Search Results from me in May describes the service in more depth.

That was pretty much my thought about Mahalo when it launched - this has been tried before, by an outfit with a lot more resources - and abandoned. I could be wrong though - the real answer will make itself known soon enough - either people will start using Mahalo or they won't. Thus far, I haven't been motivated to do so - Google is still the default for me in Firefox's search box in the upper right corner. That has more to do with inertia than with any positive choice on my part, but inertia may well be the determining factor here.

Technorati Tags: seo

I got a chance to try out Lexis-Nexis recently - to say that I am underwhelmed would be too kind. Let me see if I can catalog how it's been working for me:

• Slow as Molasses
• Power Search breaks on non-IE browsers

The latter one is simply amazing. Bear in mind that you have to pay to use this service - which again, is way, way slower than Google, and in the limited trials I've been able to put to it, it's certainly no better than Google. And to top it all off, it wants to (silently - it's not as if it warned me about browser issues) use IE rather than the browser of my choice. As I tried Firefox and Safari, I kept getting prompted as to what I should do with a DO file. As if I know :)

Finally, this just takes the cake: After I tried a Power Search using IE, this is what I got:

I suspect that my search feeds in BottomFeeder are just as (if not more) useful. At least they work :)

Jeff Jarvis has a few unkind words for a Forbes reporter who puffs up Pay Per Post. You can go to Jeff's site for the takedown itself - it's all summarized quite well by this:

Pay Per Post isn’t advertising, marketing, branding, any of that. It’s an attempt to get around Google’s and Technorati’s splog filters.

Which is exactly right. Pay Per Post is a dark side "mechanical turk".

Technorati Tags: seo

Scoble has an interesting post up on ad relevance and paid results - and it looks like Google is going with a "less is more" approach on the ad front. The part that grabbed my eye is how much more relevant the paid results were on Google (and I've noticed this in my searches as well - when I don't know a company's website URL, the Google search usually gives it to me as the first result in both the main and paid results).

All of which tells me that Microsoft and Yahoo still have a lot of catching up to do in this space.

Steve Rubel notes that Ajax based sites are screwing with Google's indexing:

According to a report, the reader content that's being added to the new USAToday.com is not going  not be indexed by Google or other search engines. That's because all of the new goodies, including reader blogs and other social-networking and bookmarking features, were built with Ajax. Man all that potential Google Juice is going to waste.

There's something mostly unsaid here: Google took advantage of the explosive growth of the internet with new and better crawling algorithms. With these changes afoot, that leaves the door open for some other smart guys to step up and do a better job. I don't know if it'll happen, but there is an opening.

Technorati Tags: Ajax