I swear, sometimes it’s like google is reading my mind. almost every tweek or change i’ve wished for over the last year or so, has eventually come true. To think, just one year prior to that, i was joking with a few friends that Gmail was like some kind of secret cult. At the time, you could only get in by Beta Invite. Oooh. Then, once you tried it, you never went back. What’s more, you found that you couldn’t stop telling other people about it, “converting” them, so to speak.

Today, i use Gmail, Calendar, Spreadsheets, Docs, Reader, Notebook, Groups, Trends, Adsense, Analytics, Adwords, Alerts, and now Co-op.

I’ve always liked custom search engines like Wink and Rollyo. But, even though i’ve enjoyed many of the social aspects that these sites had to offer, somehow they all still seemed quite lacking. it always bothered me that Rollyo puts a limit on the number of sites you can add per topic. And Wink has a “Sync with Del.icio.us” tool which would kick ass if i could get it to work (apparently my 3 week old sync task is still queued somewhere in cyber-hell).

Google Co-op seems to satisfy at least part of the concerns that i had (regarding time wasted and revenue sharing) and so i couldn’t resist creating a couple of my own custom search engines for you all to try out and hopefully help build. I haven’t had a chance to style them yet, but there are a ton of excellent sites in each one already so the results for searchs should be pretty interesting.

I’ll be creating a more permanent place for all of these custom search engines as soon as i figure out where – more will likely come soon – so you can keep an eye out for them or just bookmark this page for later reference. the good thing is, wherever i put them, i can always manage them from one place.

in the meantime, go ahead and try one out.
Dont’ forget to let me know what you think. Enjoy!

i guess..

but yesterday i stumbled onto something new. it represented a change in the way we have been made to think about search engines. it wasn’t focused on the usual stuff like rankings, and popularity which often overshadow things like relevence and useful content. but most importantly, it promises to give more power to the users..

they said it was an “Intent-driven Search Engine”.
they said more things like, “search sorted the way you like it”.
the project is called Yahoo! Mindset, by the way.

Although it is still in beta, the search engine is already quite functional. what it does first is give you the standard yahoo results page based on your search. but you also get a slider that you can drag to the left or right depending on your intent. right now, you can apparently only have 2 intentions, either commercial or informational. but still, it’s something..

ads.. no ads.. ads.. no ads..

also, because it uses what Yahoo calls “machine learning” technology, it will be getting smarter all the time. that is to say, right now, it is not very smart. you’re more likely to get something like:

ads.. less adds.. ads.. less adds.

to be fair though, using this search engine without moving the slider gives you the same results as a standard yahoo search. so i’d say it is safe to give it a try. and if i used the original Yahoo! search engine on a regular basis, i’d definitely switch to Yahoo! Mindset. but i don’t so..

well i’m still going to keep my eye on this one.

What makes it so smart (in my opinion)

1. it’s a new way to search, not just a new type of search
2. it uses a slider (who doesn’t like sliders?)
3. anything that gives me more ways to filter is ok in my books (ie: google’s advanced search needs to be more advanced)
4. it uses AJAX technology, always good to see new applications of this technique
5. there are no page refreshes (i think this i one of the biggest advantages of using AJAX, and i like the way it is used here)

For more information on AJAX, and it’s various implementations read » AJAX: A Closer look

In July, there was a spike in both the site’s page rank and page views. No doubt this number was a bit inflated by the fact that bloggers probably have more time on their hands in the summer. However, this number seems to be tapering off as we enter the second half of July, although some might attribute this to the Google PageRank update that occured recently. Still, considering it increased it’s rank by 1,166 in the last 3 months, i think that it might be poised to crack the top 500 (out of all other websites combined).

For those who are unfamiliar with Technorati, it is essetially a site that tracks, in real-time (nearly) what other bloggers are talking about. It is currently tracking 13.5 million sites and 1.3 billion links. Technorati tags are like search terms, and today many blogging softwares like Movable Type, WordPress, TypePad, Blogware, and Radio are already creating Technorati tags out of the very categories that you’ve created in your favorite software. But aside from using these tags to optimize their blogs, i noticed that you can also use the additional series of links and photos along the right-hand side of the keyword search results page to increase you site’s exposure.

From the Technorati Help Page:

The photos come from Flickr and Buzznet, two online photo sharing communities. If you’d like your photos to appear on our tag pages, join Flickr or join Buzznet and post your photos there. And remember to tag ‘em! Technorati includes public photographs tagged by members of Flickr and Buzznet.

The links come from web-based bookmark services Delicious and Furl. If you would like to contribute links to Technorati Tag pages, you can join Delicious or join Furl and post some links.

I am not exactly sure what the relationship between each of these 5 sites is, but i can definitely see their value from a web marketing perspective. As far as search engines are concerned, this interlinking allows site owners to improve their overall page ranking, by increasing the potential for developing referral or inbound links. It will definitely be interesting to see how these sites develop in the coming months.

Just for kicks, check out one of the first versions of Google “Wayback” in 1998. Pretty retro, isn’t it. You can actually link to these older versions of websites, making this search engine ideal for researchers, who need to be able to reference really old material from the web, or see the history of a website over the course of time. However, you can not search by individual terms like most modern search engines. You can only enter a URL for the site you want to lookup, then choose from a particular month and year. More types of searches will likely be available in the future. The site is also developing a category based search that groups websites and lets you get a feel for what the internet was like at certain key point in the past. Right now you can search from these 4 different collections of websites: September 11, Election 2000, US Government, and (my personal favorite) Web Pioneers.

And that’s not all..

From their site:

“The Internet Archive is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public.”

Other things i saw on the Internet Archive site that interested me are:

• Open Source Movies – are movies contributed by the community.
• Canadian Libraries – that have joined the Internet Archive to scan this set of books as part of a volume book scanning pilot project. A Kirtas APT 1200 located at the University of Toronto was used to try to achieve a 10,000 pages per day scanning rate.
• Live Music Archive – is a community committed to providing the highest quality live concerts in a lossless, downloadable format. The Internet Archive has teamed up with etree.org to preserve and archive as many live concerts as possible for current and future generations to enjoy.

There are just too many amazing things happening on The Internet Archive site to describe here, so I just bookmarked the site once I got there. The main home page itself is rather overwhelming, so don’t get frustrated if you’re not sure where to go when you first arrive. Also, the site itself is relatively slow (presumeably because of the huge amounts of data in the archives). So be patient, investingate it one page at a time, and you should be alright.

In an attempt to wade through all the junk sites that pretend to talk about search engine optimization, i’ve started a small list of sites that actually discuss the topic in an intelligent way, contributing something valuable to the debate, and don’t just try to sell you something. I will try to keep this list short, and up to date, so check back occationally.

• Search Engine Roundtable
• Organic SEO Wiki
• WebmasterWorld
• Digital Point Forum (thanks Martin)
• HighRankings Forum
• Search Engine Watch
• Google Ranking Factors ( Vaughn Aubuchon )
• Search Engine Guide
• SEOmoz
• SEO Blog

Most of these sites monitor (and speculate on) current SEO trends, track changes in search engine policies/algorithms, and explore various marketing theories/techniques. They tend to look at the bigger search engines like google, bing, and yahoo. Many experienced (resisted the urge to say ‘seasoned’) SEO experts cluster around these sites, which makes their forum sections especially valuable for learning about the topic in general.

Additional articles and information:

These sites were once in the “little list” but have fallen from grace..
They remain here mostly because they still have something useful to add, but may not be updated as frequently or as completely dedicated to the subject.

• Internet Search Engine Database (ISEDB)
• Google Page Rank – Tips and Tricks
• Singapore Web Hosting Blog – Category: SEO
• Tracking Organic SEO Benefits
• Search Engine News Review
• HReal SEO.net
• Search Visibility Report
• SEO / SEM Blogs

RSS Search Engine Marketing (RSSEM) is a term i keep reading about, and many sites are using rss technology to boost their site ranking. Listing rss feeds on these types of sites has the dual benefits of, additional visibility (on the rss directory), and increased inbound links (higher overall site ranking).

These are a collection of sites that are either directories themselves or provide useful links to site that will list your weblog or rss feeds. Note: most webmasters caution site owners no to submit to too many directories at once, and this may raise a red flag with major search engines like google, and result in some form of penalty which would utlimately affect your site’s ranking. The best advice seems to be to grow your links slowly, intelligently (because we are not robots), consistently, and over a significant amount of time.

Sites with links to directories:

• RSSTop55 – Best Blog Directory And RSS Submission Sites is a great site, updated regularly.
• Fagan Finder – Blogs and RSS Search Engines has search engines, reference, tools, and more.

List of Directories:

• 2RSS.com – RSS feeds, RSS directory, RSS software, RSS scripts, RSS articles, RSS syndication, XML, RDF, news.
• Blogdex – is a research project of the MIT Media Laboratory tracking the diffusion of information through the weblog community.
• Feed Shark – Submit your RSS feed for free!
• Daypop – a current events/weblog/news search engine
• Syndic8 – is a directory of thousands of syndicated feeds from around the world.

I think TechBlog has just been sandboxed. For those who are not already familiar with this term (and i wasn’t until recently), it refers to a theory that new sites will get indexed by google, ranking quite well at first and then disappear (for months) from the search engine entirely. Also referred to as the yo yo effect [SearchGuild.com], or ever-flux, these sites usually reappear after a while.. as long as they continue to produce fresh content and relevent links.

Since TechBlog has been online for less than a month, it would definitely be classified as a new site. The site validates as XHTML 1.1 and CSS 2.0, there is plenty of relevant content, and lots of anchored text. It ranked #116 in Google for the term: “techblog”. That’s not bad for just a few weeks online. Yesterday it dropped to #118, and today it is completely gone; only sites with inbound links remained. Very weird, and so i did some research.. and hence this post. I’d like to think that i followed all the (unwritten) rules – maybe too well – and so obviously google got suspicious. But now that i’ve got googlebot’s attention, i need to keep on posting, and try not to do anything that might get the site flagged (blacklisted).

Some changes made recently that may have contributed or caused this to happen are:

1. Changed the description metatag
2. Changed the keywords metatag
3. Added WordPress Plugin: Rewrite-titles
4. Added WordPress Plugin: Google SiteMaps
5. Posted for 2 weeks then nothing for 3 days

Most advice seems to point at the need for continuing to develop the site despite being delisted, and keep updating it. Do not panic, that sort of thing. We’ll see how it goes.

Follow up: As of yesterday (July 26, 2005), this site started showing up on google results pages again. After 12 days in a box, it’s good to be indexed again. All i did was post regularly, and do my thing. i guess i passed the google test, because the site ranked #102 (yesterday) for the term “techblog”. although today it seems to have fallen to #105. still an improvement though..

Follow up #2: Great News! As of yesterday (July 30, 2005), this site ranked #44 for the term “techblog”. Then something remarkable happened. Today (July 31, 2005), the site turned up on page 1, ranking at #5. that’s quite a jump. no rank to #5 in 15 days.

Follow up #3: Not So Great News.. As of yesterday (Aug 09, 2005), this site ranked #8 for the term “techblog”. Then for some strange reason, today (Aug. 10, 2005), the site dropped to page 4, ranking at #33. bummer.

Follow up #4: Soon Afterwards – A few days later (Aug 12, 2005), this site fell a little further, ranking #43 for the term “techblog”. the only thing that i noticed since the drop, was that google was indexing the lite version (?style=lite) instead of the main homepage. Then, today (Aug. 16, 2005), the site climbed out of the fifth page and up to #40.

Follow up #5: A New Low – Only 4 days later (Aug 20, 2005), the site fell even lower, ranking #56 for the term “techblog”. Google is no longer indexing the lite version (?style=lite) of this site and is once again listing the main homepage. Not much else to report except that the google cache for TechBlog has finally been updated (after almost a week).

Follow up #6: How Low can you Go – 10 days later (Aug 30, 2005), the site fell much lower, ranking #96 for the term “techblog”. Google is indexing the site properly, and the drop is probably the result of my current obsession with redesigning this site. Hopefully, more posting will prop the site back up.

Follow up #7: The Yo-Yo Effect at it’s best – 8 days have passed (Sep 07, 2005), and the site hit an all time low, ranking at #112 for the term “techblog”. But then cut straight back to the top, landing on page 2 with a rank of #19. Not exactly sure why.

Follow up #8: Up and up – another 8 days since the last follow up (Sep 15, 2005), and the site is back on page 1, ranking at #9 for the term “techblog”. It fell slightly from the #6 spot two days earlier (thanks to a generous link from techcrunch.com)

Follow up #9: Smooth and steady – over a month has passed since the last follow up (Oct 21, 2005), and the site remain on page 1, ranking at #4 for the term “techblog”. Also, to my surprise, the site has been given a Google Page Rank of 3. Some pages, like the “Extended Live Archives” post even got a PR4. Finally, all that work has paid off.

Here are some does and don’ts regarding SEO, including ways of improving a site’s ranking on search engines like google.

Note: This is a summary of the advice provided by googlerankings.com, the complete list can be found by visiting their site.

Search Engine Optimization Tips:

1. According to research done by Entireweb 31% of people enter 2 word phrases into search engines, 25% of all users look for 3 word combinations and only about 19% of them try their luck with only a single word.
2. Do not choose broad keywords that are under fierce competition, narrow keywords that nobody looks for, or keywords don’t relate to your site.
3. Do not use keywords or images with filenames or ALT attributes that may get your site filtered or banned from search engines.
4. For best results, optimize one page for one keyword, and use lots of relevant content, well laid out into separate pages.
5. The title tag should not be any longer than 70-100 characters, including spaces ( Google – DMOZ ), and 60 characters ( scrubtheweb.com ).
6. The title should not begin with the domain name. It is often considered as spam.
7. The Meta Description Tag shouldn’t be any longer than 25-30 words ( DMOZ ), 100 characters ( Google ), 150 characters ( scrubtheweb.com ), and 200 characters ( searchenginewatch.com ).
8. The Meta Keywords Tag shouldn’t be any longer than 268 characters ( AltaVista ), 378 characters ( searchenginewatch.com referring to google ).
9. Separate keywords with the “, ” ( comma, space ) character combination. ( Most search engines use either character as the separator ).
10. You should not use any Meta Keywords, not even within phrases (which are also allowed) more than 3 times. It is often considered as spam.
11. The text in the body of the page should contain the keywords right at the beginning.
12. Do not overuse keywords. Neither keyword should take up more than 12-24% of the entire body text. It is often considered as spam.
13. Do not use too much content right on the front page. Both loading time and redundancy of additional words used will reduce the chance of showing up in relevant searches.

Again, these basic steps are just a condensed set of suggestions taken from a much longer list provided by googlerankings.com. Be sure to compare these recommendations to the
Webmaster Guidelines provided by google.com. For additional information be sure to read: The little list of SEO sites.