SEOTops

Search engines are competing with each other to provide quality service to their customers. A latest concept under discussion in the search engine market is how to return images, videos and news related to a particular query for the customers. This is a best way of informing the users on the various concepts connected to a search word.

This has the greatest benefit that, the search result will have more pictures and less text. So the concepts will be illustrated more clearly to the people. Searchers can get more concepts which are connected to that particular query. Hence they will be able to make a selection easy over the others.  The search results will be narrower using this and hence users can focus on the particular concept connected to that keyword of query. The search engine experience will be more wonderful for the users using this concept.

The future search engines will return a result like this:

This is a universal search method and illustrated search will be smarter using this. Search engines are looking forward to implement this in the near future so that users will increase in number for their search engine.  Users are expected to get more benefit using the method.

Google and Digg have been on and off negotiations for the last few months, but it looks as though there has finally been a breakthrough as sources state that not only will Google be purchasing Digg in the next couple of weeks but that Microsoft will also drop its three year ad deal.

The question is though will Digg remain the same as it is now or will Google give it a total revamp maybe applying a no follow links to submissions which would not be so great for some peoples SEO efforts. We will see what the next few months hold in store.

It turns out that choosing a potential vice presidential candidate is no big deal, thanks to Google! Republican presidential hopeful John McCain jokingly remarked that the incredibly popular search engine has made his job of scouting for vice presidential hopefuls much easier.

“You know, basically its a Google!!”, he announced amidst raucous laughter at a fund-raising luncheon when asked to comment on how his selection process was going. He also commented that he found the reach of the Internet today to be remarkable.

Vice-presidential hopefuls go through an excruciatingly rigorous screening process to determine how much help they might offer to a presidential candidate to clinch the White House and to make sure that they have no hidden skeletons that might be damaging down the campaign route. McCain, who is a senator from Arizona, clinched the republican ticket earlier this year. He said he still had some time left to decide on Number Two.

Yahoo has finally gathered all the anti-trust information required to make a decision on giving the nod on an ad outsourcing deal with Google, but it has just begun to explore that very issue for a possible scaled-down agreement with Microsoft, according to sources. This means that any deal requiring Yahoo to turn over its search related business completely to Microsoft is not imminent.

February 1, 2008 was the date when Microsoft attacked Yahoo with an unsolicited bid for a full buyout at $31 a share. This led Yahoo to review various anti-trust ramifications connected with the issue. In mid-may, Microsoft withdrew its offer and came back three weeks ago with an announcement that it was restarting talks – this time around, the discussions were about a partial transaction and not a full outright purchase.

Both Yahoo and Microsoft will try to save time by using some of the existing anti-trust material gathered when the full takeover was on the table, but this won’t guarantee a speedier review process by the federal regulators. Representatives from both Yahoo and Microsoft declined to comment on the issue.

Every major search engine uses an automated approach for indexing the net and serving relevant content- that’s a given. But what hundreds of young upstarts are trying to do is look for innovative ways to include human input into the equation. Omgili offers an interesting and unique mix of automated approach and the human factor.

Omgili sends out an automated crawler to index the web like any other search engine would. But that’s where similarities end; Omgili goes a step further and tries to specialize its results. It scans millions of online discussion boards, forums and similar discussion-based resources from all over the world. To see the result of this in action, search for, say, a certain brand of digital camera on Google and Omgili. On top of Google’s result page, predictably, will be the manufacturer’s page for that product; But here’s the surprise, Omgili will fill your page with links to various online discussions about that particular camera, helping you find out what other real people thought about this product rather than give you the device’s specs.

This young search engine includes a number of nifty features aimed at increasing its usefulness as a search tool. Omgili Search Aid is a feature that lets a user search within the search queries performed by other users. Product Reviews is targeted exclusively at serving information from product review sites. Omgili Buzz displays the top topics at that point of time in various categories such as news, videos, movies etc… And yet another feature, Google@Omgili, empowers a user to do a simultaneous search on both search engines.

If you are interested in finding out about what other people are saying about topics that interest you, Omgili might be the tool you have been looking for. It is far from perfect, but it certainly shows the direction that the next generation of “Specialized” search engines must take.

If you thought there exists a search engine for every possible cause and reason, you thought wrong! TFTHostels.com is the web’s first exclusive hostel search portal. This search engine integrates the directories of every major hostel booking website, giving a one-stop solution to an online hostel-seeker for the first time ever and saving considerable time and money in the process. Services offered include:
Search the largest online directory of hostels anywhere in the world
Compare rates and specs, check availability and location
Check out reviews and recommendations
Zero in on the perfect choice and book your hostel online

This cool new search engine is in the beta stage and derives its horsepower from Travelers for Travelers. The service is currently free and does not charge additional fees to favor a certain hostel/booking service over another, according to the website. Marco Van De Kamp, the Head Honcho at TFTHostels, recommends combining his service’s capabilities with Twitter, Google Blog Search and Summize to get all the latest recommendations and reviews on the hostels that his service serves up.

And speaking of Google, it announced its Website Workout contest at the recently held SMX Seattle Conference. The idea behind the contest is to help four businesses to “pump up” their websites; to specifically generate more leads, sales or signups, whichever the case maybe. Enter the contest by answering a few simple questions on why exactly your website needs to be pumped up! The four chosen winners will benefit from the expertise of Google’s consultants who will put its Website Optimizer tool to work on identifying and testing the best combinations of page design, graphics layout and copy and other web page factors that will yield the best possible conversion rates for the site. Google is accepting entries through June 17, so get going!

The very common sense speaks that the listing of your website on the 1st page of SERP gets a distinct advantage over the others in brand promotion or direct/ indirect sales. The situation becomes even worse when we listen that the recent survey shows that 68% visitors hardly bother to visit the subsequent pages, when they perform any search activity. On the other hand, this has again become evident from ComScore research, a Global Internet Information Provider, that Google is ahead significantly from the search engines, as the preferred choice of the visitors.

This is also revealed that Google focuses much more on quality links than the others. The continuous passion for innovation has helped Google to forge ahead. The example of their constant endeavor towards providing improvising search experience to the users have always been found in several stages and the dynamism is even revealed from the fact that they have even changed the favicon off late. Please note that the phenomenal concept of localized search engine had been launched by Google, who had initiated the same with a geographic search box with the famous mapping features. However, as the scope of merger between Yahoo and MSN have become a dream by now, Google remains the indisputable leader today and it will certainly maintain its No.1 position for a considerable length of time to come.

Now, what should be the impact of the culminating effect of the facts provided above? Perhaps, it once again reinforces the need for the webmasters and website owners to optimize their websites keeping Google primarily in mind. The real life synergies show that the leader is always surrounded by several appeasers for his clout. So, other search engines have to pay homage to Google for their own survival and your Google orientation will earn the befitting honor from others when Google enhances your rank.

In order to comply with the private needs for websites Google plans to slowly do away with the search queries erasing them in a matter of a year and a half to two years. This came back to back with other group strategies which Google declared it wants to implement so as to improve its imparted services.

They will be opting for a new data retention policy which makes it virtually impossible for users to be attached to what they search for on net. The plan is that Mountain View Internet Company will cloud the information it collects about users who browse through Google. Google will thus purge mostly all private relevant information about the source of queries so that no one can trace the queries back to individual users.

Kurt Opsahl, an attorney praised Google’s decision declaring that it was heading in an appropriate direction. Previously AOL had made a high-profile blunder by posting 19 million search queries online as part of a research project. Unfortunately the information was used to identify some of the users arising in public outrage to be followed by a string of resignations within the Company.

Various foreign laws and cyber legislations in force enforce Google to log user information for up to two years in the legal context. Google said the reason for incorporating newer schemes were in response to the reviewed feedback from privacy groups and the Norwegian Data Protection Authority. Google said it believes in such regular updates which keep it off malpractices and disorders which are bound to creep into companies of its stature. It further reiterated that it wants to remove its deficiencies right from its roots instead of trimming just the shoots. Thus Google said, providing a transparent environment to users is all it is about.

It may be quite obvious but most people know for a fact that computers and search engines can’t really “see” visual images. Unlike humans, search engines are not advanced enough to interpret each and every object within images and this causes numerous problems for both Internet companies as well as day-to-day search users. When you tap into Google (or other lesser-known search engines for that matter), the search engine locates images using a text-based process. What happens is that the particular engine starts searching for text surrounding the image, such as captions and phrases within the links. The weakness in this searching process is that the results returned are not optimal, because the engine cannot recognize what’s in the image and instead churns out results while heavily relying on text to evaluate the content.

With Google announcing that they will be unveiling a new algorithm to eradicate frustration and difficulties pertaining to image searching, searching and collecting relevant visual content will no longer be tedious. This new technology has been formulated with the aim evaluate all the images on the Internet and rank them in order of importance whenever a search query is done. During a recent web conference held in Beijing, China, Google boasted that they are the first search engine to gain the ability to do away with conventional methods of examining images and their content to determine their relevance to a submitted query. They added that this technology works by recognizing a graphic-based pattern in a series of images. Then, using that visual benchmark, Google will then assess the relative importance within an image and comparing it to the rest.

Sounds confusing? Don’t be. Say if you were to search for “Nike”, Google’s brand spanking new engine will recognize the iconic swoosh instantly and groups a set of similar images and rate highly those that contain the logo prominently, instead of depending on the image captions alone. Nifty isn’t it?

Not since PageRank, one of the best search-based algorithms to surface since the year 1997, did other similarly significant tools pop up. Incidentally, PageRank was created by Sergey Brin and Larry Page who are, surprise surprise, Google’s very own founding fathers. Now with the advent of this new image-search engine christened “PageRank for Image Product Search”, you can bet your shares in Google that a new web revolution is set to take the world by storm.

Google stated to the LA Times reporter that they were more than willing to work with online privacy officials regarding the online privacy of online users.  Privacy protection officials claim Google is holding user information and cookies for up to 2 years.  Google was warned in May of 2007 that they may be in violation of user privacy rules making Google be one of the first engines to cut down the time they store cookies to 18 months and later to 13 months as time passes.  (Imagine Google being the one being warned!)

The new requirements are recommending that Google and other search engines should only store cookies for up to 6 months.

This could play a big factor in Google’s current ways of providing users with targeted ads.

Google was reported last Friday to say they were looking forward to helping the online privacy officials to explore ways to improve privacy online for all internet users.

As an Internet user myself, I have to wonder what way Google will use to get around this so they can continue to target users with geographically correct advertisements, as I know this is a big business for Google and it’s advertisers currently.  Will it be an opt in to Google Ads? Or will they just simply have to reset the cookies once every 6 months in order to comply with the privacy issues under the gun?