Organic SEO Blog

Yahoo is taking the next step in its “open” strategy with the launch today of BOSS: Build your Own Search Service. The BOSS program will allow third parties to build their own search engine using Yahoo’s index and ranking methodologies as a base.

The goal of BOSS is simple: to foster innovation in the search industry. Developers, start-ups, and large Internet companies can use BOSS to build and launch web-scale search products that utilize the entire Yahoo! Search index. BOSS gives you access to Yahoo!’s investments in crawling and indexing, ranking and relevancy algorithms, and powerful infrastructure. By combining your unique assets and ideas with our search technology assets, BOSS is a platform for the next generation of search innovation, serving hundreds of millions of users across the Web.

It’s a giant step beyond anything Google has done in open source. Google has released a ton of code, but not its search algorithm till now….

A long wait has come to an end Google has added a new feature to the external keyword tool, which now shows the approximate search volume numbers. You can now see statistics on the approximate number of search queries matching your keywords. This data allows you to better plan your budget and pick keywords most likely to return quality leads, which in turn can help improve your ROI.

Advertiser Competition: This column shows the number of advertisers worldwide bidding on each keyword relative to all keywords across Google. The shaded bar represents a general low-to-high quantitative guide to help you determine how competitive ad placement is for a particular keyword.

Approx Search Volume [Previous Month]: This column shows the approximate number of search queries matching your keywords that were performed on Google and the search network in the previous calendar month. This number is specific to your targeted country and language as well as your selection from the Match Type drop-down menu. Learn more about the Keyword Tool’s search volume statistics.

Approx Avg Search Volume: This column shows the approximate average monthly number of search queries matching your keywords that were performed on Google and the search network over a recent 12-month period. This number is specific to your targeted country and language as well as your selection from the Match Type drop-down menu. Learn more about the Keyword Tool’s search volume statistics.

For most people on the Web, if Google or Yahoo cannot find something, it doesn’t exist. That has been one of the biggest drawbacks to creating a Website in Flash. Search engines could see the file, but they could not see what was in it. Until now.

Adobe today announced an optimized Adobe Flash Player that will be added to the search engines of Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. under agreements with the two Internet firms. The tool will help the search engines better index dynamic Web content and rich Internet applications (RIA) that include the Flash file format, or Shockwave Flash (SWF).

Becoming visible is one thing, actually ranking highly is another. Google currently can find about 73 million Flash files on the Web. But until Adobe makes it easy for the average Webmaster or blogger to link deeply into those Flash files, they are not likely to appear at the top of many search results.

Having failed to acquire Yahoo, Microsoft has now apparently set its sights on a new target, and is rumored to be eying a $100 million acquisition of powerset.com, a natural language-based search engine that is only usable on Wikipedia and Freebase.

One has to now wonder how much of a boost in the search market the acquisition will net them over time :), as we know that Google has been a bit dismissive about semantic search and it didn’t do much for Ask Jeeves either. Anyways, this could at the very least help Microsoft distinguish itself in the search space, but with all the hundreds of millions they’ve already spent beefing up their search engine perhaps their problem isn’t technological as much as it is a branding issue.

Google wants to make it easier for marketers to pick appropriate Web sites for their online ads with a new tool it announced Tuesday called Ad Planner. It seems that Google is moving into the Web measurement market to compete against companies like Nielsen Online, comScore, Quantcast and Hitwise.

Using Google Ad Planner, you can quickly create media plans and export to a .csv file, which can be opened in most spreadsheet applications. Or, you can export to DoubleClick’s MediaVisor, which helps you manage all your other media planning, buying and campaign management activities.

For now, those interested in using Ad Planner need to submit a request to Google.

A couple of years back phishers mostly targeted big American financial institutions, but nowadays phishing attacks have spread to other countries and languages as well and also target smaller companies, and phishing adwords accounts seems to be the target of the day.

If you think you’ve fallen prey to a phishing scam you should contact Google immediately through this form. You can also forward phishing emails to phishing@google.com

However, It is very important to stay informed about current Internet scams to be sure that you do not become a victim.

Google announced that the page load time metric is now a live factor that will influence your quality score and your minimum bids for your AdWords ads. Read more about it in their official blog…

Dear Google AdWords Customer,

We were unable to process your payment.
Your ads will be suspended soon unless we can process your payment.
To prevent your ads from being suspended, please update your payment information.

Please sign in to your account at http://adwords.google.com/select/login (different destination url) and update your payment information.

This is the first time I’m hearing about this, and one client, who recently opened an account with adwords, and outsourced the account to an SEM agency has fallen prey to this phishing mail. Landing pages have been changed, and hundreds of keywords were added to the account. Luckily, Google has stopped delivering ads after some time, as it has detected some kind of suspicious activities in the account. However, hundreds of dollars have already been drained out from the account…

This post comes as a warning to all new ppc advertisers…

I’ve now stripped off the nofollow attribute from links on the comments in my blog. Here’s a chance now to get a free back link from organicseo.in by just commenting to any of my posts. I’m sorry for those who have genuinely commented earlier to my posts, which were lost while I moved my blog from Rediff hosting to Dotster.

Comon’ just add a comment now, and get a quick free backlink

Wikia Search, the open-source search engine launched sometime back by Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, will begin letting public participate in building its index by adding, deleting and rating Web pages. Starting today, if you do a search on the engine and don’t like the results, you’ll be able to change them. Your changes will apply not just for yourself, but rather for everybody.

During its “alpha” period, which started in January, Wikia Search has drawn about 20,000 registered users who have in turn made about 60,000 edits to search results and written about 25,000 mini articles.

The editing you can do on Wikia Search is extensive. If you think a result on a search result page is too low or too high in the listings, you can influence its position by rating it. You can delete entries entirely or hand-write new ones. You can also rewrite the text of a search result, including adding code to the result.