WMW Search Engines and Webmasters

Brief review of WMW search engines and webmasters panel. Rahul Lahiri / Ask Jeeves:
Referenced Jim Lanzone's Cre8asite Forum thread.

He also said misspelled anchor text has little use, although I am not so certain I agree with that. It is almost always more convenient to accidentally place misspellings on others sites instead of your own content, unless your content is user driven.

Eytan Seidman / MSN:
Emphasized how important user feedback is in improving their products. They quickly rolled out their local search offering due to requests / popular demand. He also talked about their search near me and direct answers in the search results.

Tim Mayer / Yahoo! Search:
Talked about data compression to lower hosting costs. Said Yahoo! Search's mission statement is to Enable people to find, use, share, and expand all human knowledge. He also spoke about many of the products Yahoo! has recently rolled out, like Yahoo! Q, Mindset, and the like.

Matt Cutts / Google:
Said Google is not using WhoIs privacy information in any way, but they may eventually.

He said the AdSense hijacking error was a 2 week old bug, not the same thing that was happening in other hijack cases. In the past their heuristic for finding the canonical URL was the version of a page with the highest PageRank, but he said they had problems with that and it is solved. I believe some people may still be having issues with it though.

If a site other than your own shows up when you do a site: search for your domain then that is likely a problem.

He would like feedback on canonical errors sent via the feedback mechanism on Google.com/support, using canonicalpage as the subject.

Reinclusion requests can be sent the same way, except they want "reinclusion request" as the email subject line.

For AdSense junk sites people can click on the ads by Goooooooogle and give the feedback "spam report" on it. Sorta amazing that they talk about how important quality control is and that they expect others to do it for them free. He also went through a funny page generator AdSense site by the name of Vitalizer Plus Hexagonal Water.

The most recent update recently finished, and people can send feedback to jun05feedback@googlegroups.com.

I got to hang out with Matt for a bit today and he is way cooler than I would have ever though. Sorta like Danny Sullivan in being a killer class act.