Assorted Links...

Why did Adobe Buy MacroMedia?
all the reasons. no spin.

Algorithms & Patents & Spam, oh My:
Yahoo!'s Concept Network & SuperUnits

Is NickW for Blog Spam?
certainly not, when its done sloppily to one of his blogs ;)

The Wrong Tail:
people are starting to use The Long Tail without purpose. better get that book printed quick.

Yahoo! Buys TeRespondo.com:
a good post from Nacho.

Media Futures:
Media Futures, Part 1/5: AUTOMATA

Internet Advertising:
A decade in Online Advertising (PDF) - report by DoubleClick, who may get bought out soon. found on Lee's blog

Wanna Park?
viral marketing at its best: I Park Like an Idiot

Google, Search, & the Web of Trust

This post is a few bulleted points which point at the web of trust Google is trying to build.

Google has expressed intent in using user feedback to help define relevancy.
They may follow click streams to understand who your sponsors are. (also mentioned in the above patent)
Google may be doing a decent amount of temporal link analysis, especially for sites below a certain authority level. (also mentioned in the above patent)
Google created a system which stores search history over time. Google may shift how much they trust these profiles based on
- search volume
- how well a profile related to other search profiles
- location based on IP addresses (they could discount the effect of profiles which were primarily created through open proxies or in poor areas).
Installing their toolbar means they probably know what sites you own (since site owners tend to visit their sites more often than anyone else).
Google has access to registrar data. This can likely be used to help determine if and how sites are related.
Google runs the world's single largest distributed ad network. If you use that network they know what sites you are marketing. They know what markets you are in.
Google has been filtering or banning sites which have unnatural linkage profiles.

PageRank was broken from the start. The concept they were going after may still well exist though if they can get enough users of their search history tool. While other search engines still seem relatively easy to spam Google may be trying to measure web wide trust scores using much more than just raw linkage data.

Google need not stomp SEO techniques out, they only need to:

make their system differnt from other information systems (ie: many link spam techniques that do well in other engines may get you filtered out of Google's search results)
make the costs of SEO high enough that it is cheaper to build legitimate business models and brands than it is to build a business off of manipulating search results

Some people will be untouchable. They will know enough about social engineering and database programming to where they will still spam Google all day long. I am sure Google realizes that, but they want to continually increase costs to where that is an exceptionally small pool.

As SEO gets harder Google makes more money from ads. As they make more money from ads they can spend more into making SEO harder.

Now if only they could share more data with advertisers to help make click fraud easier to detect. Google bought Urchin. Why not buy, create, or offer something like Who's Clicking Who. Surely Google has the market data and it will not increase costs much to give advertisers more options and more data.

A search company which makes tons of profit organizing data should recognize that by making advertising transparent and making more ad information available they will create a more efficient market which creates more profits. The advertising community would likely police themselves if you gave them enough data and responded to feedback.

Google Personalized (Gamma)

Google Inc. (GOOG.O: Quote, Profile, Research) on Wednesday debuted a test service called My Search History that analysts said is a move closer to personalized search, which is widely considered the Holy Grail for the Web search leader and its rivals. source

to use My Search History you must register at Google Accounts and maintain an active account. Ask Jeeves have had a search history tool for a while now and Yahoo! has My Yahoo! for various personalization effects, although Yahoo! seems more focused on providing news and blog feeds and the like. I think Yahoo! is betting on the abundance of information making subscribing to channels much more appealing than searching the web. I believe Yahoo! also allows you to subscribe to Yahoo! News feeds by keyword phrase.

Personalized search allows engines to better understand users to improve search quality and ad targeting. Whoever is branded as the best market solution on that front is going to make a bucket of cash, because keeping your search history and learning the user raises the barrier to switching search providers.

It makes it hard for another search service to be as relevant if you have tons of personal information already locked in a competing service. This data will be hard to export to other systems as well, as importing huge hunks of data will also allow marketers to import large volumes of spam.

I just briefly tested Google's service. It is fairly slick. You can quickly sign in or out and it adds minimal clutter to the Google home page.

From the link in the upper right corner you are brought to a new page. It shows a calender which color codes your search volume on the right side. The left side shows your searches for that day and the results you clicked on. The my history results that you click on also show up in the Google one box area when you search for similar terms using the regular search results.

Some privacy advocates would likely go nuts with this offering. It is all opt in though. I encourage everyone to sign in, search for seo, scroll past the Japanese stuff, and click on my listing.

Presumably some searchers may be able to build up a search history.
As they build it up it could build Google's trust in that user, which in turn could potentially allow Google to use that user feedback to verify search result relevancy.

If Google decides to use this data - which I think they may - the cost of spamming might increase significantly with how they have been going after automated search tools.

I would not doubt this to do a bit more of globalizing SEO. Paying people in third world countries to randomly click certain sites. I am already building a search history today as a prospective SEO tool.

.JOBS & .TRAVEL Domain Names, Spam Research Papers

.JOBS and .TRAVEL:
to come late 2005

Cheap Promotional Technique:
throw some political ad on Google. after you get a ton of press coverage say it was an accident.

Direct Answers:
Google adds direct answers to SERPs.

Keyword Research:
Statistically Improbible Phrases (found by Ploppy)

Words which rarely occur in a search index likely are more likely to be more descriminant than common words and thus likely have greater term weight.

Search Research & Spam Papers for AIRweb:
Intallment #1
Gary Price also stated that A Taxonomy of Web Spam (PDF) was recently updated, and they covered that in the forums here. Here is a list of some of the newer Stanford research papers.

Tailoring Technology:
Jeff Weiner, VP of Yahoo! Search, chats about search and customizing software.

Webmaster Radio:
Audio archives now online. thanks to StuntDubl

Good Forum Thread:
about Google's new patent.

Encarta:
accepts user feedback and editing, although I can't imagine it is as appealing to add content next to their ads.

Oil & You:
The Long Emergency

Cool:
Stor Troopers are back :)

Yahoo! Term Extraction API Tool

The Term Extraction service provides a list of significant words or phrases extracted from a larger content. It is one of the technologies used in Y!Q.

Google Blogoscoped created a free auto linker tool, which makes adding on topic outbound links exceptionally easy. Am betting some people creating fake blogs probably enjoy the offering.

Part of Google's strong brand is PageRank, which now is of little use AND rarely updated. With all of these other good ideas Yahoo! Search is coming out with I am a bit surprised they are not providing and heavily promoting a regularly updated connectivity measurement service. Whatever happened to WebRank?

Review of Google Patent

Greywolf does a greate review of the recently awarded Google patent.

Google Temporal Analysis Patent, Google 2004 Financials, Yahoo! to Disclose API Future?

Google:
Patent dealing with temparal ranking effects - Greg Boser called this "The most important SEO related document in the last 5 years."
2004 annual financials report

Yahoo!:
to give a clear API Answer? maybe

Search Awards:
Danny Sullivan's SearchEngineWatch announced the 5 annual search awards. Yahoo! wins the outstanding search service award.

Buying Forum Sig Links, Become.com

Google Groups:
Froogle Merchants Group
also if you do not yet subscribe to SEM 2.0 it is a good list.

Buy Forum Sigs:
not sure how much value there is to it, but Sig Trader buys and sells forum post sig links. Amazing how many different ways there are to build links.

For Search Geeks:
in a forum post Xan recently mentioned
IBM Research Natural Language Processing
The retrieval of information from historical perspective

Become.com: