Organic SEO Blog

When I clicked on the above sponsored listing that appeared in Google, I was a bit curious to see what’s new in hakia… and to my pleasant surprise, there were tons of new features present among search results…. organized in different tabs like Headlines, Basic Information and FAQ, How it Works, History, and so on… but when i want through each of them, I found most of them to be useless, and not very much relevant to what I searched for…

I quickly typed in ‘president of india’ and was disappointed to still see Abdul Kalam’s name again and again as in Google, Yahoo and MSN. I tried a few more keywords including my name, and a few tech terms… but couldn’t find anything interesting in Hakia

And, as they’ve said in their ad… I decided not to tell about Hakia.com to anyone.

When I search ’search engine’ in google, I would be happy to see results in the following order…

#1 Google.com
#2 Yahoo.com
#3 Live.com
#4 Ask.com
and so on…. because I’m very sure that these are the top search engines as on date..

But interestingly, google ranks searchenginewatch.com as its #1 result instead of ranking itself as #1. Though searchenginewatch.com offers a great deal of information about search engines, it is not the result that a normal user expect while searching for a ’search engine’.

Google also seems to be stupid enough to rank its own competitor search.live.com within Top10 rankings, without even ranking itself in the first page. If this is the case, then it clearly means that Google needs SEO for itself and also indicates that Google’s ranking algorithm might probably be inaccurate.

Scientists from the Taiyuan University of Technology, Liu Wei and Chen Junjie, have developed a technology which might return better results based on users search query. Though the technology seems to be nothing new and relates to meta search, the team believes that their “intelligent agent search” can return accurate results when a search for something like “apple” will only return fruit related results (instead of Apple computers) when that’s what people were looking for.

The Chinese government has a long standing policy of censoring its Internet population. Decisions to remove content from search engines by companies like Google, for example, have been front page news. Still, those imposed limitations have not stopped scientists there from creating new technologies, which are designed to provide the foundation for more accurate searches.

Mahalo.com is a new search directory that is human-powered, and when you do a search on Mahalo, you don’t search billions of web pages like you do at Yahoo!, Google or Windows Live, but browse a relatively tiny index of searches that have been prepared for you by Mahalo employed web searchers.

The search results have then been filtered by these employees, called guides, and when you do your search, only the really good stuff will appear. So even though Mahalo calls itself a search engine, it is really a directory or a web catalog.

Mahalo  means “thank you” in Hawaiian and the entire site has a friendly, sunny atmosphere. There is a reason for this: Mahalo’s distinguishing feature is its human touch.

Microsoft is said to be willing to pay the heavy price it would cost to acquire Silicon Valley’s most successful Web portal, Yahoo! And this deal would do more good for Microsoft than anything else the company has done in its efforts to catch up to Google in that market. But an acquisition like this would be a monster deal for Microsoft. Even before getting to the potential integration challenges, Yahoo wouldn’t come cheap.

The renewed talks comes in amid growing threat by search engine and online advertising giant Google for both the companies. In fact, Google replaced Microsoft as the world’s top brand only last month.

Microsoft Corp. is offering financial incentives to large enterprise customers to encourage their employees to use the MSN Live Search service. “Microsoft Service Credits for Web Search” a Powerpoint overview of the program contains the following.

“Employees search the web daily with tools from Google, Microsoft, or Yahoo. OEMs and web sites are already earning credits based on searches that their users bring. Now, your organization can earn credits for Microsoft web searches and redeem them for Microsoft or preferred partner deployment and training services. More searches earns more credits towards the services you value.”

The cash being offered is not exactly small - between $2 and $10 USD per computer per year, along with signing bonuses. Though that may not sound like a lot, when you consider it going over thousands of computers in a large corporate network the figure really begins to mount. Even if these credits can only be redeemed for more software or training, it is certainly an enticing offer.

Business looking to optimise their websites efficiently should not neglect Microsoft’s Live Search and Yahoo, even though Google can sometimes seem like the be-all and end-all.

search.wikia says

“Search is part of the fundamental infrastructure of the Internet. And, it is currently broken.

Why is it broken? It is broken for the same reason that proprietary software is always broken: lack of freedom, lack of community, lack of accountability, lack of transparency. Here, we will change all that.

Jimmy Wales, the founder Wikipedia claims that his company is ready to take on the might of Google and Yahoo, and grab as much as 5% of the search engine market.

Google and Yahoo are both ‘black boxes’ that keep their ranking algorithms a closely-guarded secret. Wales’s idea is to get users to work together to improve search engines, just as Wikipedia users do now.

Despite a lack of visible progress in catching up with Google, Microsoft still believes that it will eventually turn the tables by improving the quality of its search results and by changing the way computer users search.

Susan Dumais, a veteran Microsoft search expert, has built a tool to help determine relevance called Personalized Search. It pulls together several hundred results and then compares them with the index that Windows users can build of the documents on their hard drives, a feature called Desktop Search.

Microsoft researchers are exploring other ways to exploit clues about the context of a search as well as conversational-style interfaces that will be more powerful than the way users now enter and modify search terms.

Microsoft seems to be researching a lot trying to figure out how users will search 10 years from now, and are planning for it. However, as of now, the Winsows Live Search results are still burried under spam for most of the terms, while Google seems to have reached a position to attract more and more online searches conducted worldwide.

India’s #1 search engine and social networking site, has seen remarkable growth since it was acquired by Web2Corp four months ago, and will soon be adding another new feature. Starting on March 15, 2007, ByIndia.com will have keyword powered advertising available that is similar to Google or Yahoo. Ads.ByIndia.com will feature keyword listings on the top of the page as well as on the right margin, similar to AdWords’ functionality. However, unlike AdWords, inline images will be supported on advertisements on the right margin, affording advertisers an opportunity to reinforce advertisements with extra visual punch.

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Being into Search Engine Marketing for more than four years, I’ve been thinking about posting a blog on search engines for quiet a long time; and in this New Year 2007, its time now to start sharing my thoughts on Search Engines; and optimizing websites for better rankings.

Internet marketing has rapidly grown over the years. Businesses big and small are trying to reap the benefits that an online presence offers. And an online presence for an existing business, regardless of what it may be, does often mean increased return on investment. And given increasing competition, with everyone having logged on, in a manner of speaking, just having a website is not enough.

Thus, each and every website requires presence in a search engine result page to get noticed. SEO is a process of arranging a website’s content to obtain high rankings in various search engines, and includes tailoring on-page text as well as choosing the proper keywords for a page’s meta tags. And it is a lot more than this…