Personalised search, privacy and user personas
One of the main issues around personalised search is privacy. Most people feel a little bit uncomfortable with the idea of a search engine attempting to deliver results based tracking us as individuals. Like when someone constantly finishes your sentence, because they think they know you so well (annoying? I know! I do it […]
Ad-supported YouTube Videos – a win win for everyone?
The recent Google move to extend the AdSense model to YouTube Videos seems obvious, but you must admit – it’s a neat solution.
Similar to Adsense (contextual advertising) – A publisher can have videos from youTube embedded on their site with ads placed above and below the video.
The Publisher can chose to have content from […]
Google universal search eye tracking study
Gord Hotchkiss has just published Enquiro’s recent eye tracking study on Google Universal at Search engine lands.
There seem to be a fundamental shift in scanning when an image is introduced into the results. While the first reaction is to head to the top left corner of the results, seeing the image, people are moving […]
Google adds Feed stats to Webmaster console
I was pleased to read that Google’s webmaster central console was going to start showing feed subscription stats. So, I logged on to check it out. Well, stats may be a slight exaggeration. It’s more of a ‘stat’.
The good news is your Google webmaster central console now shows the number of subscribers aggregating your RSS […]
Google Universal at SES San Jose 2007
As this was the first major search event following the launch of Google Universal, no surprises about which topic would really dominate this year’s conference. Let’s say I didn’t see any spare seats in any of the sessions on Universal, 3D, Blended or any of the other terms devised to describe the new search […]
SES San Jose 2007 - Evil link buying
The session on paid links was probably the most heated discussion this year. Rather reminiscent of the click fraud debate last year. Unfortunately for Google’s Matt Cutts the odds were stacked against him, being the only search engine representative on the panel. A real shame that all the other engines stayed out of this […]
Brand matters when it comes to search engines
A research study at Penn State’s College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) – placed identical search results taken from Google into four different results templates – Google, MSN Live and Yahoo! as well as an in-house search engine.
When these pages were shown to the experimental subjects and asked which pages results were more relevant […]
Rel=nofollow fixed says Matt Cutts
The first time the major engines collaborated, it was to introduce the rel=nofollow tag to combat comment spam on blogs. Comment spam where anyone can add a link in the comment section of blogs was getting to the point, where it was almost impossible o administer a blog without spending hours deleting unrelated comments […]
Search history and privacy
Both Google and Ask announced their plans to improve privacy protection for the user. A search engine needs to identify and track the user for a variety of reasons, from being able to service search preferences like how many results should be returned on a page to returning contextual results through personalisation and detecting click […]
Impact of Google Universal Search
As Google continues to rollout Google Universal, the search industry is starting to wake up to major shake up. The placement of content from other Google products within the main natural search results creates a host of issues – all of which is yet to unfold.
So, what are the main concerns
• For commercial queries, insertion of […]
