Tag Archives: Search

Google's focus in 2009 – Search

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In saying that Google’s focus in 2009 will be search, I appear to be going out on a limb.  It is tough to find anyone else who pins it down so precisely.

Many seem to be following the traditional advice on forecasting.  If you are making forecasts, make a lot of them.  For example if you check The Big List of 2009 Marketing Predictions then you can find almost any forecast you might wish to make about Google.

ZDnet cuts it down to 15 and I must admit TalkBack 10 of 15 would seem to have merit.  That states: Google’s 2009 focus: cost control and revenue.  Prudent management forces that, but it still does not suggest what Google’s focus might be in the sense of giving some direction.

You might think the latest BBC video on Google’s focus in 2009 might give the answer. It poses the question: Google dominates the world of web search but will it get lucky in finding new ideas?

Their technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones went to Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters to find out. They even interview Matt Cutts who seems to suggest Google will continue to allow a lack of focus in its research activities.

Perhaps the most telling item in the video comes from a search startup in Mountain View, Kosmix.  Venky Harinarayan and his business partner Anand Rajaraman co-founded Kosmix in 2005

In the Kosmix blog, they state the following about the future of search.

Current technology can come close to answering (simple) questions but it gets harder as the questions get more complex. An ideal information extraction system would not only be able to answer all these questions but will be able to tailor the answers to your needs.

According to ReadWriteWeb, that may be exactly what Google is beginning to offer.  They ask, Did Google Just Expose Semantic Data in Search Results?

In what appears to us to be a new addition to many Google search results pages, queries about birth dates, family connections and other information are now being responded to with explicitly semantic structured information. Who is Bill Clinton’s wife? What’s the capital city of Oregon? What is Britney Spears’ mother’s name? The answers to these and other factual questions are now displayed above natural search results in Google and the information is structured in the traditional subject-predicate-object format, or "triples," of semantic web parlance.

That is why I come down firmly on the view that the simple answer on Google’s focus is as always search.  In lean times they may even focus more strongly on search while not forgetting the bottom line.

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Can Google see your website?

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Warning: this post is entirely conjectural and may have no basis in fact.

There is an interesting post by Loren Baker that encourages companies to develop video websites promoting their brands.  Their existence can be flagged by putting them on.TV domains.  He suggests that one should Take Advantage of .TV Domains for SEO and Reputation Management

There is a very large untapped market of creating .TV niche and business oriented online video sites which your business may be overlooking in your online marketing and search engine optimization strategy. If your business has a strong brand, then people are searching for your brand online. 

One way to attract that same user who is searching for your brand, and build the value of your brand in search results, is by launching a .TV site which is an online video representation of your company. By doing so, not only will you have another authority and valued site which should rank highly for your domain name, but you will also be engaging your customers in a form of social media.

He points out that this will ensure that companies are more visible in Google universal searches.  In any such search there will probably be a video within the first half dozen items.  If an image is associated with the brand, this image may also be referenced.  News items may also be included if the company is making news.

Having multiple online files associated with the company or brand clearly makes the company more visible in such searches.  An intriguing question is whether these multiple online properties have any synergistic effect in the regular Google keyword search algorithm.  Google has been very clear on the importance of hyperlinks in confirming the authority of web pages.  Most other facts about the algorithm are carefully kept confidential.

How important are images in the Google search algorithm?

A commonly held view is that images in a web page give zero information to the search robots.  It is emphasized that one should use Alt attributes to provide information on the subject of each image.  Nevertheless Google is trying to extract more information from images.  This can be seen in the Google image search that can now be done to find faces.

Given these developments, it is reasonable to infer that perhaps an image in a web page may be assessed for its contribution to the relevance of the page.  If there is an associated video file, perhaps this could also contribute to the relevance of a given web page.  If this view is correct, then any given web page may pick up contributions to its relevance from other associated video or image files.  This would encourage the creation of such associated picture files to improve the search visibility of a given web page.

It must be emphasized that this is all conjecture.  However nothing has been lost if the conjecture is untrue.  Creating associated images or video files may in any case contribute to the visibility and ranking in Google’s universal search listings.

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Visitors Bounce

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Bounce may be a word that you have not used much in the past.  It is likely to become a hot word in 2009.  We are talking here particularly about the way visitors to online web pages eventually move off elsewhere.  The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave the website from that web page.

If they move off to another web page in the same website, then that is normally a confirmation that they are finding something of interest.  It is the very best indicator.  It may well be far less open to manipulation than the emphasis on hyperlinks that is at the heart of the Google PageRank approach.  That is why I believe the answer to Eric Enge’s question, Do Search Engines Use Bounce Rate As A Ranking Factor, must be in the affirmative.  Google has all the data needed to use this approach and it must only be a matter of time. 

The proportion of visitors who bounce away from any website is a critical measure of performance.  Having sticky websites that hold visitors as they move from page to page gives the best opportunity to achieve whatever objectives the website may have. The one major exception is all those web pages where someone clicks away and the website gains revenues by the move.  Google is a major partner for such web pages since the major part of its revenues comes from AdWords ads.  Provided they move away via the AdWords ad, a high bounce rate here is not a problem.

For all other websites it is best to be considering how to lower that bounce rate.  It is not just a matter of opening links in a new tab as one person suggested. 

Nor is it just a matter of only including links to other web pages within the same website.  As Matthew Ingram pointed out, even the New York Times has now realized that including links to other websites may be the smart thing to do.

There have been hints for a while now that the New York Times was going to start adding links to third-party content on its front page, and now it appears to have finally happened, with the launch of something called Times Extra. The paper has been doing this for some time now on its technology front page, using links aggregated by BlogRunner — the meme-tracker the company acquired a couple of years ago — as well as through content-syndication agreements with blog networks like GigaOm, VentureBeat and Read/Write Web.

The very best way to make a website sticky is to give visitors what they are looking for.  That is what will bring them back again and again.  Even the New York Times is showing the way.

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SearchWiki or Search Sticky

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Recently Google has introduced a new feature in search: SearchWiki.  This allows searchers to modify the search results they obtain and even add comments for future reference.  This is how Google describes SearchWiki:

SearchWiki lets you customize your Google Web Search results by ranking, removing, and adding notes to them. You’ll see your changes whenever you do the same searches while signed in to your Google Account, or until you decide to undo them. You can also see how other users have tailored any given search results page with their own notes and changes.

Since as usual this feature is in Beta version, perhaps one should not be too critical.  However I and others find the usability of this approach somewhat lacking, and the comments of other searchers are rarely useful.  Allowing people to vote seems quite often to bring problems.  Whether this is an approach that has a future would seem to be very questionable.

On the other hand an e-book that came out today seems to offer much more potential.  Watching what people do rather than what they say can be much more instructive.  We all leave electronic footprints wherever we go on the Internet.  Google has all of this data from which it can better sense which web pages individuals find more relevant.

That is the basis of the e-book that David Leonhardt has brought out today.  It is called Sticky-SEO and it is free.  It does not take long to read and it is certainly very thought-provoking. 

sticky seo

The book suggests that Google will be incorporating much more intensively the data it has on how people move through websites.   If you immediately use the back button to get back to the search results, that presumably means the web page is not relevant to your needs.  On the other hand if you stayed on that web page for quite a time then moved to other web pages within the website, the web page was probably highly relevant.  The argument is certainly very persuasive.

Google is certainly capable of following this mechanism and it would be much more foolproof than the now discredited PageRank approach.  Creating sticky websites seems to be a laudable aim for us all.  Go read the book if you need more convincing.

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Google Chrome Manual

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John Brandon asks this morning whether interest in Google Chrome is already waning. He feels that:

People use IE because it comes pre-installed and does mostly what they need it to. Walk into an office and glance around — you will see a lot of IE. Those who know better use Firefox because it is more stable, more secure, and faster. Where does that leave Chrome? I think as a third option for early adopters. But those who just need to get work done, who use Gmail and are too busy to mess around with bugs have probably all switched back to Firefox.

Just after the launch there was an initial flurry of interest. Mark Evans commented that a number of people had checked it out with some like Walter Mossberg liking it and others like Alec Saunders suggesting it was all a shell game. Mark Evans even questioned, What Took Google So Long?

Some experts such as John Andrews even warned that ‘under the hood’ there was a Google Chrome Bait ‘n Switch. That was because of some unfortunate language in the Agreement that all users had to agree to. Google beat a hasty retreat on that one but it still left a negative impression for some.

Google Chrome

By now, everything in the garden should be lovely. However like John Brandon, I am still left with the question as to whether this browser really has any natural customers. Clearly the power users find it lacking, yet the novices may well find its apparent simplicity somewhat baffling. I am still trying to get the Omnisearch field to accept searches with other search engines. I should be able to type ‘Yahoo cheeses‘ and get a search on Yahoo for cheeses. Perhaps the problem as PCWorld explains is that I am using Windows XP.

Type ‘google fish sticks’ to search for fish sticks on Google. The same syntax works for Yahoo, Amazon, Live Search, and other sites that are already recognized by Google or that you add. This feature, though nifty and promising, proved inconsistent in the early going: It worked for me most of the time on a Windows Vista PC, but two of my colleagues who were testing Chrome on Windows XP machines had trouble getting the feature to work.

It is all very well to have an ultra-simple browser like this, however a user manual is always obligatory. The only one I could find is the Power User’s Guide to Google Chrome. That title is an oxymoron if ever I heard one.

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