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SearchWrite SearchNews
Caching Better Results in Search Marketing
Vol I, Issue 023 06.30.05
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CACHING THE LATEST RESULTS IN SEARCH MARKETING....

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Google Closes in on Personalized Search
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The quest for the Holy Grail of Web searching -- the ability to offer search results tailored to each person's interests -- may have taken an important leap forward Tuesday.

Google announced it is publicly testing a new service that uses the search histories of individuals to influence what search results they see. Google is hoping the customization will make the results more relevant and useful to searchers.

The Mountain View company is the first major search engine to take this approach to personalization -- and the first to seriously test the privacy boundaries of Web searchers.

The service, available at www .google.com/psearch, is optional. Users must have a Google account and agree to let it store a record of their search histories, including every Web page they visited while logged on.

Each time a user conducts a search, Google will compare the top 1,000 results to that person's search history. Web pages that might hold the most interest will float to the top of the results.

``We're looking at the searching you do, in part, as well as the clicks, to try to understand what things interested you, what Web pages you responded to,'' said Marissa Mayer, director of Google's consumer Web products. ``And we're re-ordering your search results based on that.'' 

As an example, Google said that a user who types in the query ``bass'' would get results ``about the instrument and not the fish if that person was a frequent Google searcher for music information.''

Google users can control their privacy in several ways. They can avoid logging into the Google network, and bypass personalized search entirely. They can log in, but delete personalized search from their Google account. They can tell Google to pause the recording of their search histories. Or they can inspect their search histories and remove any items.

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Yahoo! Social Search: With a Little Help from your Friends
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Yahoo has released an early beta version of My Web 2.0 for a limited number of users. It is a new kind of search engine – a social search engine – that complements web search by enabling users to search the knowledge and expertise of their friends and community in addition to the web. 

Anyone can save, tag, and share knowledge with their community.  The result – a new search experience that combines web search with what a trusted community has tagged and shared. Users can build their community by inviting their contacts via email or by importing existing social relationships from Yahoo! Address Book, Messenger, or their 360° community. My Web 2.0 then leverages the Yahoo! 360° personal network platform to enable people to manage their search community.

My Web 2.0 is powered by Yahoo!'s new MyRank Search Technology, which provides search results based on the shared knowledge of the people they trust.  This social context is also supported by the My Search History capability, (launched in My Web 1.0 ). Over time, you will see Yahoo! integrate MyRank technology across other Yahoo! applications and services.

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Supporting Affiliates with Augmented Keyword Buying
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Dinnerware manufacturer Pfaltzgraff has grown online affiliate sales by 400% in its program’s first full year. The company, which sells directly on Pfaltzgraff.com in addition to supplying the brand wholesale to retail stores and their sites, bids directly on keywords where they aren’t being covered by affiliates. “It’s a conscious strategy for us to just bid on what fills the holes, ” says director of e-commerce and database development Howard Blumenthal. “We want to give our affiliates the benefit - they are doing a lot of specialized work for us. But they don’t bid on everything,” says Blumenthal. For example, he points out, many affiliates focus their own keyword bidding strategies on Google, leaving the same terms uncovered on Yahoo. Some search engines include plurals of keywords in bids; others don’t, which leaves them open for separate bidding. Blumenthal points out that what works for Pfaltzgraff in terms of encouraging affiliates to bid on trademarked keywords wouldn’t necessarily work for every brand.  “It’s going to be different for different companies, depending on the product line and the competition.”

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Google Unveils Video Viewing Software
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Hyperactive Google unveiled a video-viewing channel on its Internet-leading search engine Monday, creating another media outlet that may open new moneymaking opportunities for a company already so profitable its stock has tripled to above $300 in 10 months.

Watching the amateur and professional videos in Google's index requires free software available at http://video.google.com . The software, consisting of about 1 megabyte, won't do anything except stream Google's videos through the Internet Explorer or Firefox Web browsers. The limited scope of Google's viewer means it won't be competing _ for now at least _ with the popular multimedia players made by Microsoft Corp. and RealNetworks Inc. But the new Google viewer will give Web surfers their first chance to sample the material that the search engine has been stockpiling since April when it initially invited people to submit videos. While all the currently available videos are free, Google hopes to eventually charge for some of material in partnership with the content providers.


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SEO Tip of the Week:  Capitalization
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People spend a lot of time worrying about capitalization, especially in relation to meta tags. This is because some search engines are case-sensitive, which means a search for "Entertainment" will bring up different results than a search for "entertainment."

No one wants to miss traffic, so some people have taken to listing every variation of a word in their meta tags. For example, returning to the Entertainment example above, they might list

entertainment, Entertainment, ENTERTAINMENT

The problem with this is that these repetitions may trip a search engine's spam detector, especially when dealing with phrases. For example, imagine just some of the variations for "golf courses"

golf courses, Golf courses, Golf Courses, golf Courses,
GOLF COURSES, GOLF courses, golf COURSES

It gets even worse if you decide you need to include both singular and plural forms, but that's another issue.

So what should you do? The simple answer is to relax and stick with lower case. That's because practically everyone searches in lower case. 

Hub Finder is an open source link analysis tool which looks for co occurring backlinks.  Simply enter in the full address of various competing websites. Where there backlinks overlap it will show in Hub Finder's results. Pages which link to similar resources may be authorities on that topic. That means that some of these pages may be more inclined to be receptive to link requests and their links may have a greater implied value.

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