Maybe not the first time, but certainly newsworthy to me. Google are running what is effectively an ad for the T-Mobile G1 (Android based) mobile phone on the google..co.uk home page.
The link goes to a page on Google, that leads to the T-Mobile site.
We are working with one of our clients on a Vertical search engine targetting a specific sector and were mulling over some of the issues with search today.
Now, amongst all of the goodies out there including Intent search (why has Mindset been shut down Yahoo?) and the promise of Semantic search, the closest we have got is categorised search results where the thousands of results are dropped into folders. So watch this space for something along those lines…
And very serendipitously the raison d’etre came to us via Google’s recent claim of indexing a trillion pages, we-knew-web-was-big and the 10th Anniversary page at www.google.com/search2001.html and the application of a bit of sums that suggests there are over 750 times as many pages out there. So each search potentially returns 750 times as many results - too many to handle. Hence the need intent/categories.
I suspect the search world will become very interesting over the next few years.
It’s official. The best way to generate traffic to your site is to start blogging. Matt Cutts says so. As head of Google’s Web Spam team, if anyone knows about driving traffic then he should.
As mentioned in his keynote speech at PubCon Search marketing conference in Las Vegas, it’s something I’ve half suspected for some time myself after looking at stats for a given site’s visits compared to blog traffic for the same site.
Just look at the way blogs work. Regularly updated content. Well structured content which is search engine friendly (depending on platform choice). The ability to aggregate content with RSS keeps users engaged, thus promoting return visits. Having good content will encourage in-bound links. The potential for community building around commenters has the potential to increase the keywords added to a post which may help drive the post up the rankings.
As a very low effort but high impact way of getting a message out there and dipping your toe in ‘community’ it is unbeatable.
(via FutureLab)
Yesterday Google announced on their blogs a new service they have in closed beta which will become a serious threat for the likes of Wikipedia and Squidoo, two other user-generated knowledge repositories.
Knol as it’s known, or unit of knowledge, allows users to share their knowledge in a very structured way. As Google say, there are a lot of people out there who know a lot of stuff. Google are providing them with the space to share that knowledge with the wider community. The difference between this and Wikipedia is that where Wikipedia is a collaborative effort - lots of people contributing to a single article, knol places the author of the piece at centre stage. So, over time a single user could virtually publish everything they know for public consumption at no cost. In fact, if what they write is popular Google will share ad revenues should the writer wish to pump some Google Ads into the page.
What’s also interesting about this is that it is open to absolutely anyone. It won’t be a pre-moderated, vetted walled garden approach. So the quality of some of the stuff will be questionable. But, and here’s where it get more interesting, there will be the usual social features of rating and commenting, as well as being able to continue the article through posing questions to the author as well as adding content. So, the good stuff should float to the top. Couple this with Google’s half decent search technology and it could be an awesome tool.
One thought though. Wikipedia often appears high up the Google rankings by the very nature of it’s widely linked pages. How are the ranking weightings going to work in the future when Wikipedia is ‘up against’ a Google-built service which will obviously be optimised for its own voodoo search algorithms?