Nilhan Jayasinghe » MSN

Brand matters when it comes to search engines

nilhan — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 07:53:35 +0000

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 – the majority thought that Yahoo! and Google performed better than MSN and the internal engine.

Rel=nofollow fixed says Matt Cutts

nilhan — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 11:25:57 +0000

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 usually about Viagra, gambling or ‘reviews’ about the adult industry. When some blogging platforms introduced the trackback feature, where a post would automatically link back to a site linking to it, you could spam by remote.

The no=follow tag was soon introduced – and most blogging platforms adopted it. All links added in the comment section would have the tag automatically added letting the search engines know, the link was not added by the author of the blog. This could allow search engines to ignore the link and stop it from interfering with the link calculation. Soon, he tag was adopted by many SEO and site owners as away of stopping PageRank leak (Yep, many still worry about this) and more recently Matt Cutts, even asked link sellers to adopt it to prevent the wrath of Google.

All seemed well, until people started to notice that links tagged with the rel=nofollow could still pass anchor text, and may be a bit of PageRank, the effects were supposedly minor – but definitely some value, providing you could scale it up.

In a recent post on Dave Naylor’s blog, Matt Cutts says Google has fixed it. Hope this time it’s for real. The real impact won’t be immediately seen, but as the effects propagate across the net, I’m sure there’ll be many sites in link networks effected by the knock-on effects of this fix.
I’d prefer they didn’t completely ignore rel=nofollow links, but use other qualitative factors to determine, if some value should be passed on.

Microsoft to acquire TellMe

nilhan — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 23:04:08 +0000

Microsoft has announced that it will be buying the voice recognition company TellMe. A leading player in the field of voice operated phone services, TellMe announced the launch of the first Voice search service earlier this year. So not very surprising that Microsoft wants to acquire their technology. This acquisition makes perfect sense for both companies.

With the backing from MS, we’re sure to see some significant jumps in the advancement of voice for mobile. Something the mobile industry is in desperate need of.

Bush Google bomb fixed?

nilhan — Sat, 27 Jan 2007 16:52:01 +0000

Finally Google has changed their algorithm to prevent Google bombing from working. All the old favourites like a search for ‘miserable failure’ which returned the George Bush page on the White house site, and ‘liar’ which returned the Blair page on the number 10 site have been cleaned up.

According to Google, they have made a change to the algorithm which prevents Google bombs from working, as opose to manual intervention

One way to do this is to compare the content on the page to the anchor text in external links. If there’re a lot of the same anchor text which doesn’t match any words on the page, then they can be fairly certain of a Google bomb and ignore those links. If one of the words in the bomb apears on the page, or a query word apears on th page then it shoud still work. So, a search for ‘White house failure’ will stll return the Bush page.

As long as you’re a bit more creative on the choice of words for the bomb and piggyback on existing words on the page and links, it would be hard for Google to stop it without making more drastic changes to the link text part of their algorithm.

Wonder if Yahoo! will follow? As for MSN, they seem to have manually prevented the Bush page appearing for ‘miserable failure’, but Blair’s still there for ‘liar’.

One sitemap protocol for Google, Yahoo! and MSN

nilhan — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 14:16:47 +0000

The three big players in search have finally agreed to a single protocol for submission into their indices. Google Sitemaps was is a system for enabling site owners submit their web site through a XML version of their URL feed. While, Yahoo! Introduced their own version soon after, the two systems required different formats which made it clunky and time consuming. The thought of any other engines like MSN introducing their own version would have taken things back to the 90’s when sites had to be manually submitted to every engine separately.

The announcement today to use a unified protocol is great news and this kind of collaboration can only be a good thing, and hopefully will lead to more efforts to improve the web for site owners, search engines and users. The last time these guys got together, they introduced the nofollow tag to combat comment spam in blogs, and there’re many other areas where knowledge sharing could help, from removing spam to understanding user behaviour.

You can read more here Google, Search Engine Watch

MediaWhiz acquires Text Link Ads

nilhan — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 22:31:42 +0000

New York based ad firm Media Whiz has bought Text Link Ads. These guys are in the business of brokering links, which can help sites to rank in search engines. I’ve seen Patrick Gavin many times at various search marketing events, but have managed to stay away from buying their services. I’m very surprised about this deal. While link buying can be a necessary evil in SEO, I’ve never been convinced in the longevity of using brokers. Good luck!

Blinkx to power MSN video search

nilhan — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 12:33:37 +0000

Microsoft signs deal with Blinkx who will provide search functionality for MSN video. According to Suranga Chandratillake Blinkx co-founder and CTO, this could mean millions of dollars in additional revenue.

Blinx goes way beyond searching through text titles, descriptnios and user defined tags, into decoding words from speech and even attempting to recognise images. In video terms, this is like jumping from a meta tag engine to Google.

In a post a few days ago, I was talking about the greater funding provided by the major search engines to advance voice recognition for mobile search , so, I’m all in favour of the move by Microsoft. Which I think will only help research and development in this exciting area of search.

On-page optimisation

nilhan — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 21:06:01 +0000

I realised, for a search blog, this one was starting to forget it’s roots. So, thanks Dave N for bringing some sanity back into the the world of SEO with his breakdown of important on page factors for a ‘good ranking’

Couldn’t really argue with any of it – top man.