Google has made quite a few acquisitions lately, and one of them — the DoubleClick acquisition — brought them a search engine marketing company on board as well.

Google has been heavily criticized for this. A search marketing company will have search engine optimization as one of its main objectives, and people will soon begin to suspect that a company that is owned by Google will have certain advantages when it comes to insight into Google’s algorithms.

It is the ability to understand the ranking methods of Google that counts most in the search engine marketing business.

The French Publicis Groupe will now take over the DoubleClick Performics search marketing business from Google.

According to the press release Performics now employs nearly 200 search marketing specialists with employees in Chicago, San Francisco, New York, London, Hamburg, Sydney, Singapore and Beijing.

The business will report to Curt Hecht, President of the VivaKi Nerve Center, a part of Publicis.

Google has kept one part of Perfomics, namely the affiliate marketing business, turning it into a competitor of heavy weights like Commission Junction.

We believe Google has made a wise move. To keep the affiliate marketing business makes sense, as it broadens Google’s advertising portfolio. To offer search marketing services, on the other hand, is too much of a conflict of interest.

See also Read/Write Google Sells Performics Search Marketing Business to Publicis Groupe

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At first I thought Twitter was a really bad idea: Instant access to a lot of useless information. But it is actually a lot of fun and has some real life applications.

I sometimes lurk on Twitter’s public time line, amazed to have a glimpse of the lives of people all around the globe and what they are doing right now. But in addition to being fascinating, it’s confusing and very, very fragmented.

With these search tools, you can single out the topics you are interested in. Then you can follow Twitter activity for your topic — live.

Twitscoop

Paris based Twitscoop sports a live tag cloud showing what’s hot on Twitter right now.

As you watch, a word grows to indicate higher activity for that particular term. New words appear others disappear. Click on a term to see a live stream of tweets featuring the word in question.

You can also type in a query. The search results are not live, but are updated every 20 second. The results are displayed in the right margin, which is too narrow to display enough info for my need. If you click one of the results, you will see entire tweet, but this takes you away from the search results.

In addition to the tag cloud and the search box, the front page also contains a list of “hot trends”, 10 words that have been popular on Twitter lately. Pointing your mouse to a word brings a pop-up with a chart showing popularity over time.

At present, there is no RSS available.

Monitter

Monitter is a Twitter monitor that lets you monitor Twitter activity in your browser. It is inspired by the Twitter client TweetDeck and buzz engine Popurls.

You can search for and follow tweets for three search phrases at once. As more people share information relevant to your queries, the view changes. It’s easy to follow the development and definitely addictive.

Monitter also lets you filer tweets by language. Right now, those languages are English, Spanish, and German.

Each search has an RSS feed.

Summize

Summize is another way to search Twitter in real time.

With Summize, you can search for a topic like the iPhone or Iran’s nuclear program. There are plenty of buzz options here for anyone interested in anything: Politics, music, sports… And when there’s breaking news, this will be a great way to stay on top of it.

You can choose to show results in any language or to extract tweets in Arabic, Dutch, Danish, English, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, and Thai.

Update: It was announced today that Summize is acquired by Twitter. There are plans to use Summize to offer better search on Twitter.com.

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Google recently updated its public keyword research tool by adding what seems to be pretty exact numbers for how many people used a particular keyword phrase during the last month.

Anyone trying to sell search engine marketing services, would probably be interested to know that in July 2008 this was how many people search for:

search engine marketing: 246,000
search engine optimization with a z:673,000
search engine optimisation with an s:22,200

(This tells us that the public at large still hasn’t totally absorbed the new broader concept of “search engine marketing” and anyone trying to sell such services must keep that in mind.)

Google also provides the average numbers for the last 12 months.

This tool may also be used by people interested in social trends. “Obama” got 1,220,000 searches in July, “McCain” 450,000. These are not votes, mind you!

Surprisingly, Yahoo! had decided to kill its own Overture keyword research tool at the same time as Google improves its service. What were they thinking?

Another great keyword analysis tool that we recommend is Wordtracker. You may try it out for free.

The SEO dream team!

This week, however, we witnessed the birth of a new large scale search engine, the first one in a long time.

Cuil (pronounced /ku:l/ or “cool”) seems to rely less on link popularity and more on the content of the web pages they find when ranking results.

Immediately this strikes us a step back, search quality wise, as this is a method other search engines left years ago. Such an algorithm is, for instance, easier to spam.

Still, the people behind Cuil are experts with long experience from search engines like Google and AltaVista. They may have tricks up their sleeves we haven’t seen yet.

Cuil had some serious difficulties the first day of its launch and the reviews were mixed (see below), but the search results are not bad.

We always welcome new professional actors in this market. Ask’s plan to abandon its own search technology, and the present Microsoft/Yahoo! fight means that Google have too few serious competitors. That is not good for innovation, within or outside Google.

Read more about Cuil in Lars Våge’s article here at Pandia.

Read also about Google’s Knol, which mistakenly has been labeled a Wikipedia competitor by the press. It is, actually, more like Squidoo, a site gathering content written by experts and enthusiasts.

Here’s more interesting search engine stuff from around the Web:

• Microsoft Live Search Gets a New Look with ‘Hotspots’!

  Live includes background images on search page (PageTraffic Blog July 31 2008)

• Yahoo Survives Annual Meeting, Re-Elects Board, Microsoft Cries Foul

  Today Yahoo survived its long-anticipated shareholder meeting. (SE Land Aug 1 2008)

• Yahoo! Introduces new Features to Yahoo! Maps!

  PageTraffic presents a large number of new features on Yahoo Maps (Aug 2 2008)

• Cuil - long on marketing, short on effectiveness

  Phil Bradley is not too impressed about the new search engine (July 30 2008)

• Presenting: delicious 2.0 (finally!)

  If you’re a delicious user, you’ll be happy to know that none of your favorite features have changed one bit (About July 31 2008)

• Cuil: Good, But Not Great

  In Read/Write’s test Cuil performed nowhere near as well as Google. (July 28 2008)

• Cuil Stumbles out of the Gate

  The site has had performance and availability problems throughout the first day, and asearch market observers has declared the engine’s results unimpressive. (PC World July 28 2008)

• Dinosaur sightings: Old search engines

  Screenshot gallery of ancient search engines (News.com Aug 1 2008)

• July 2008 Search Engine Market Share

  Google remains the champion (EMP undated)

• After weird first date, Icahn avoiding Yahoo shareholder meeting because it’s like, totally awkward

  Yahoo shareholder rebel avoids shareholder meeting (Industry Standard July 31 2008)

• Will Cuil Kill Google?

  The Motley Fool takes a look at the new search engine (July 28 2008)

• Google Knol/Wikipedia Comparison Faulty

  Andrew Lih argues that Knol cannot be compared directly with Wikipedia (July 28 2008)

• Shopping Search Engines and the “Amazon Tax”

  On New York State’s collection of sales tax from online merchants based outside its borders (AltSearchEngines July 29 2008)

• Knol launches onto the world

  Google has just launched Knol: a unit of knowledge onto the world (Phil Bradley July 24 2008)

• Health Search Part II - Trusera

  Trusera offers an online health network where you can find and share real world experiences with others who’ve been there. (AltSearchEngines July 25 2008)

• Exploring Ways to Make Search Better than Ever

  Rob Knies of Microsoft Research on 16 papers Microsoft Research has had accepted for SIGIR 2008, the 31st annual conference of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval. (undated)

• Microsoft’s Browser Rank

  Microsoft has been working to find ways to know exactly which pages to index and reindex without spidering the bulk of the Web pages each time. (Beyond Search July 26 2008)

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Apart from Google AdWords, affiliate agreements are probably the main sources of income for many “non-professional” web site owner.

The recipe is easy: Find products that are relevant to the topic of your site. Sign up for an affiliate agreement and get percentages of the sales generated from links on your site. In other words: You (normally) get paid per sale, not per click.

Amazon’s affiliate program is probably the most well known of these (an one of the least profitable from a webmaster standpoint).

There are also several affiliate companies that gather a large number of affiliate programs under one roof. This makes it much easier to handle a large number of agreements, as there is only one user account. Moreover, services like Commission Junction will send you one monthly check for all your income that month.

Now Google is entering the same market, launching the Google Affiliate Network .

The new network is based on the DoubleClick Performics Affiliate network, recently purchased by Google.

Among the present advertisers we find Barnes & Noble, Citi and Verizon.

Note that the Google Affiliate Network is separated from Google AdWords, meaning that you cannot generate data from them both using one web site entry.

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By Pandia Guest Writer Lars Våge, Internetbrus

According to Cuil the search engine is three times as big as Google, Yahoo and the others, with more than 120 billion web pages in its index.

The last time I saw figures this high in relation to other search engines was for Recall, the short lived full text search of the Internet Achive in 2003. (That being said, Google now claims to have found 1 trillion pages on the web).

Anna Patterson from Stanford University was responsible for the Recall Project, and she is actually one of the founders of Cuil.

In this team we also find a certain Mr Louis Monier. Yepp, that was the man that created AltaVista. Both Anna, Louis and some other members in the Cuil team have until recently been working for Google.

Does size matter?

So to what extent does the size of the database mean anything for search engines?

Given that most of us seldom go beyond the first page of results and its 10 links, it does not mean that much. Only very specialized search queries (or very badly constructed search phrases) deliver such a small number of results that you can really compare results between search engines. So far I have failed to see examples of Cuil delivering more hits than the others.

As regards the relevance of Cuil’s search results, it is decent, but not particularly impressive. There is definitely more work to do for Patterson, Monier and the others in this area.

In the press release they talk about “content-based results, not just popular ones, providing different and more insightful answers”. If that implies that they mean to skip link analysis altogether, they should probably think again.

Anyway it is always exciting to test a new big search engine.

User interface

The user interface is a bit more engaging than the others (Ask.com excluded). Instead of a linear list containing 10 hits and the odd addition of a YouTube video — like in Google — we get three columns of hits.

Each result includes a text extract that is longer than the ones we find among the other major players, and there are pictures to illustrate the search results. This means that there are fewer results visible at the same time, but the result page look more attractive.

Strangely enough some of the images are not from the relevant web site. For a search for our site internetbrus.com, one of the results were illustrated with a rather attractive butterfly pattern!

The background color of Cuil is pitch black (meaning that the layout is energy friendly) and the other colors are ultramarine and grey. The area with the results have a white background.

Interesting features

There are a couple of features here worth mentioning. As in Yahoo and Ask you get suggestions for queries as you are writing in the search form, which may help you save time.

Cuil will also suggest alternative and more focused queries in the search engine result list. These alternatives are presented as tabs. When searching for Sundsvall, I got tabs for the major sport teams Gif Sundsvall, Sundsvall Dragons and Sundsvall Hockey. That’s not bad considering most of those pages are in Swedish!

Explore by Category

Then there is the Explore by Category feature. At first I believed these were automatically generated clusters, but instead Cuil seem to be using some kind of named entity recognition.

What makes it different is that you not only get recognized names of persons, places or events found in the text of the relevant web pages. They are actually divided into meaningful categories like bebop-pianists, Indian cricket players, Swedish football league clubs, composers writing for pipe organ and so on. I have not seen anything like this before.

If you click on a link in the Explore by Category window it helps you focus your search, as the category is added to your search query. This is similar to what happens when you choose to focus your search using Cuil’s alternative search phrases by clicking on the tabs.

Privacy

There is unfortunately no documentation of the search syntax available as of yet, but that will probably be added at a later stage.

Cuil does not keep any information in search logs that can be used to identify the searcher. In other words: The people behind Cuil seem to be aware of the stronger demands for search engine privacy that we nowadays find for instance in the EU.

We’ll have to wait and see what happens to Cuil and if they are able to improve the weaknesses mentioned above. Regardless: It is inspiring to see that there are people out there who wants to give us new search alternatives.

This article was originally published in Internetbrus, a Swedish blog on search engines and Internet searching that has been online since early 2001. It is written for both searchers and educators.

Internetbrus is owned and edited by Lars Våge and Lars Iselid. Lars Våge works as a librarian at Mitthögskolan and a programmer for JL Informationsteknik. Lars Iselid is a librarian at the Umeå University Library, freelance journalist for the computer magazine Datormagazin. He can be found blogging under the pseudonym Cyrille at Iaslash.org.

Lars and Lars are co-authors of a book on Internet research: Informationssökning på Internet.

Last week Google made its new site, Knol, open to all the world. Until then only beta-testers had been able to read and contribute.

Knol lets anyone write an article about any topic of interest.

Then readers may make comments and rate the article. They may also may suggest addition and rewrites, but the first author retains control of the text.

The author has the last word

It is the empowerment of the first author that makes Knol different from the Wikipedia. In the Wikipedia anyone may (normally) go in and edit and expand on an article.

In Knol the author may reserve the right to accept or reject such rewrites. This is called “Moderated Collaboration” by Google.

This alternative way of doing it means that some of the articles become less like the authoritative and scholarly encyclopedia articles we find in the Wikipedia, and more like essays.

Google encourages you to include with a large number of weighty references, but they do not force you. This means that there are room for more personal texts here, and more than one article on any particular topic.

Google clearly hope that the best articles will float to the top, based on traditional link analysis, the number of comments made and (presumably) traffic.

Still, it could be that some users will find Knol less trustworthy compared to the Wikipedia because of this somewhat more flexible regime. On the other hand, many readers may find more personal articles refreshing.

Simplistic design

The design is very simplistic and boring in a 1990’s kind of way. It is transparent and uncluttered, though, and easy to navigate.

There is a content box with an index at the top of the left hand main column, followed by the text itself. To the right is a short biography of the author (if he or she has included one) and a list of other contributors, followed by links to reviews.

The search field covers Knol only, but we are pretty confident that the Knol articles will quickly find their way into the Google index.

Knols will have to compete with the rest of the web

We do not believe Google will give them special treatment search engine ranking wise, though.

This means that the number and quality of web pages linking to the articles will mean a lot.

Given Wikipedia’s head start, this means that Wikipedia articles covering the same topics normally probably will rank higher than Knol’s for a long time.

Why would anyone like to write for Knol?

TechCrunch makes a big deal out of Google’s kind offer of sharing the AdSense revenue with the author, and thinks that this will lead to a large number of articles on popular topics and relatively few on more narrow subjects.

We are not so sure about this. There probably will be some people out there that will start writing articles on popular topics in order to get some advertising revenue, but the competition will be fierce and only the best articles will rank well.

The rest will soon find that a one page article on the Web does not bring in much revenue. You will have to write many to make a difference, even i Knol becomes a hugely popular web destination.

We think writers will be more motivated by other factors:

1. Fame. An article on Knol may make you and your expertise known world wide. We already see serious researchers and scientists publish on Knol because of this. Over at Wikipedia they are anonymous. Here they can brand themselves with a picture and a biography.

2. Evangelicalism. Whether you are passionate about rice puddings or breast feeding; here is your chance to reach an audience. People who do not have their own sites or blogs, may use Knol to express themselves. The social aspect of Knol, including the feedback from readers, will definitely make some potential authors more motivated.

3. Web site promotion. We have not seen much of this yet, but it will become very tempting indeed to write an article on a topic relevant to your site. (Note to self: Write Knol on web searching…) There is nothing to stop you from including a link to your own site.

4. Search engine marketing. Knol can obviously also be used for search engine marketing purposes for the very same reason: You may include links to your own sites or the sites of your SEM clients.

However, if these are just spammy link collections they will not rank well, and links from these articles will have close to no positive effect on the rankings of the pages they link to.

Google will have to apply the same rules to Knol as to any other site. Duplicate content can, for instance, not be rewarded.

Spamming Knol

We guess we will soon see a large number of articles on how to use Knol to spam the search engines. Please note though that Google has become pretty good at identifying spam, and that there is no such thing as a free lunch in this area.

However, if you are willing to write a content rich, high quality, article on a topic, it could become an efficient tool for some search engine marketing purposes, especially as regards the promotion of informational sites.

It might be less efficient as a tool for marketing products and services. If you write an article on lawn movers and include only one link — i.e. to the home page of your own brand — you can be sure that your competitors will link to theirs in the comment field.

So far the links in the comment fields are not “nofollowed”, meaning that they count search engine ranking wise.

On the other hand, this means that we will soon find search engine marketers becoming avid commentators over at Knol, boasting to their clients about how many links they have generate for them over at Knol. Watch out, folks! Links to your Viagra site form the most popular Knol on Roman Catholicism may backfire.

Is Knol a Wikipedia killer?

We do not think Knol will be able to dethrone the Wikipedia, for the simple reason that Knol is something different.

With time it may become a useful supplement to the Wikipedia, though, and an alternative source of information.

If Google manage to generative a living social community over at Knol, Knol might even bring in a lot of knowledgeable writers.

Is Knol a useful tool at the moment?

There are far to few articles over at Knol right now to use it as an independent tool for intelligence gathering. That will probably change.

What is more serious is that Google has not included navigational tools beyond the search field. Authors are not asked to tag the articles, so Google cannot generate a tag cloud for the front page, helping browsers find their way around the site.

At the moment there is only an eclectic selection of articles included on the front page, and we do not know how they are selected.

Nor are the authors asked to put their articles into specific categories, making it hard to give Knol a directory structure.

This lack of structure will make it harder to navigate the site, and it will also make it harder to encourage more socially oriented readers to become active commentators. Such valuable contributors deserves help to identify what articles may be worth their attention.

And the name?

We continue to think that the name sounds a bit daft, even if we do see the reference to “knowledge”.

And we find it very strange that Google has chosen a name for where the dot com domain is owned by someone else. We are sure the German machinery company Knol will get a lot of unwanted traffic, because of this.

How much are you willing to pay the Germans for the knol.com domain, Google?

See also Phil Bradley’s presentation of Google’s Knol, which includes links to other articles on the topic.
Knol is open to everyone Google Blog

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The fact is that no one knows the exact number, and the fact that a lot of the content is hidden behind database search forms means that we never will.

Still, the search engine companies make a living out of spidering the Web, trying to find all the good stuff, and they probably have a pretty good idea about what size we are talking about here.

The Google Blog now reports:

“Recently, even our search engineers stopped in awe about just how big the web is these days — when our systems that process links on the web to find new content hit a milestone: 1 trillion (as in 1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs on the web at once!”

The blog truthfully reports that this is not the total number, as Google has not indexed all the pages there is. Moreover, there are problems of defining what a web page is:

“Strictly speaking, the number of pages out there is infinite — for example, web calendars may have a ‘next day’ link, and we could follow that link forever, each time finding a ‘new page. We’re not doing that, obviously, since there would be little benefit to you.”

It is, in truth, a mindbogglingly large number. The first Google index in 1998 (the year Pandia was created) had 26 million pages, and we thought that was a huge amount of information!

In ten years the Web has changed our lives in ways that it is still hard to understand. The only comparable technological innovation we can think of is the printing press, but it tool several hundred years before that one had a similar effect.

See also our article The Size of the World Wide Web from this February.

The search engines’ robots go wherever they want as long as they find links to follow. This means that they may index everything they find on your site or server unless you tell them explicitly not to.

There are several reasons for doing so. You may have pages with duplicate content, in which case it makes sense to tell the search engines what pages to index and what pages not to include in the search engine database.

There are two ways of telling the search engines where to (or not to) go:

(1) You can add a meta tag to each and every page explaining what to do, or you may (2) add a text file called robots.txt to the top directory of your site.

Our Search Engine Marketing 101 tutorial explains how to use the meta tags.

See our article on the robots.txt file to learn how to set up such a file.

The following table is adapted from the Live Search Blog, and includes the new standards. The rules described in the guides referred to above still work.

HTML META tag Directives

See also:

Robots Exclusion Protocol: Joining Together to Provide Better Documentation Live Search Webmaster Central Blog
One Standard Fits All: Robots Exclusion Protocol for Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft Yahoo! Search Blog
Improving on Robots Exclusion Protocol Google Webmaster Central Blog

The Web Robots Pages
Controlling how search engines access and index your website Updated Google presentation of Robots.txt

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You score points for searching, voting and commenting and if you invite your friends, Scour will add 20% of your friends’ points to your balance.

From my point of view, the money is the least interesting part. For one thing, in Scour’s own scenario, an average of 4.5 searches per day translates into 25 US dollars a year. So unless you invite lots of friends, you won’t get rich using Scour.

I’m more interested to see if the social search concept of Scour is an improvement on standard web search. If it is, I’ll return even if they don’t pay me. So how does it work and is it any good?

How does it work?

Scour enables discovery through user feedback, friends and groups. When you enter a search query, Scour searches Yahoo, Live search and Google and the rank the results will reflect the recommendations of the users.

To help with the ranking, registered users can easily vote for their favorites by clicking the thumbs up icon — or the thumbs down icon for the search results they find inappropriate or poor.

Users can also improve Scour and add information to the search results by commenting on search result. You can further improve your search experience by connecting to users who have recommended sites you like, users who seem to have similar interests to you.

You can choose to view results from your favorite search engine, still with the whole social search system of Scour intact.

Is it any good?

Scour is easy to navigate and the search results are uncluttered even though there is quite a lot of information related to each search result: You get the title of the page along with a summary (from the description meta tag) and the URL. Then you are informed of the site’s ranking in Yahoo, Live search and Google and you have the option to vote and/or comment.

It is easy to vote and comment, but there is no button to click to save comments and no way to know whether your comment is saved or not. Half of the comments I entered seemed to disappear into cyberspace.

You can search for web sites, images and video. But only web search is enhanced by Scour’s social search model. I can’t think why. With the horrible signal to noise ratio on Youtube, I would love some recommendations from a social search engine like Scour.

A the moment, though, Scour is brand new and the comments are few and far between. If Scour achieves the critical mass of active users necessary for web communities to function, it might become a “valuable” resource (yes, there’s a pun here )

Scour demo

Other Pandia articles social search:
Introduction to social search
How to make use of social media in search engine marketing
Introduction to Mahalo
Wikia Search review
Nsyght review
ChaCha review

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