Edison is a new search engine algorithm code to be launched by Ask.com instead of Teoma, the algorithm they use currently. Edison is algorithm code which merges two search technologies Teoma and Direct Hit of Ask.com.

Apostolos has leaked the information in SERoundTable. He said,

• Direct Hit uses click data to determine relevancy for rank. So the more clicks, the higher the click popularity, the higher a page would rank.
• Teoma uses hubs and authorities to determine relevancy. In a sense, it uses the “wisdom of the crowds” to determine relevancy and show the best results they can.
• They will be combining the best of both Direct Hit and Teoma into one engine.
• They have been tagging for three plus years

Search Engine Land also has an update about Edison. Apostolos Gerasoulis feels this will be the most powerful algorithm in search.

Mark

SEO Tags : Ask.com, Search Algorithm, Edison, Teoma, Direct Hit

TechCrunch has written that Google Takes Partial Ownership of Maxthon Browser yesterday. TechCrunch has already discussed about Maxthon Browser and its really fine working with it and they have made a statement that Maxthon is a great alternative for Internet Explorer.

About Maxthon Browser,

Maxthon has had over 80 million downloads of its browser, and over half of its users are in China. Maxthon-originated searches may account for up to 25% of total Baidu traffic, according to one source.

Google is expected to invest around $1 millon and it is a part of much larger strategic deal between these companies. The default search option is to be changed to Google due to this deal. This deal may replace Baidu in China and Yahoo in other countries with Google.

Mark

SEO Tags : Google, Maxthon Browser, Search Engine, Baidu

thefind.com is a shopping search engine which has scored A+ in vertical search. Read write web has blogged about this search engine. According to Siva Kumar, CEO of thefind.com the search engine means,

TheFind.com is a discovery shopping search engine optimized for lifestyle products such as clothing & accessories, home & garden, sports & outdoor, kids & family, and health & beauty.

The find.com has used web 3.0 framework.

The search engine indexes all products and lists it in order of best selling brands, styles and stores. The results are shown in large pictures and a brief description on mouse over in the pictures. This is a very different internet shopping experience than the largely text based results offered by Google, Shopping.com, etc.

Mark

SEO Tags : Search Engines, thefind.com, Shopping Search Engine

SEOmoz has released the version 2 of the Ranking Factors. Rand of SEOmoz has posted a blog about it here. The study was conducted with the help of about 37 experts around the world. The study was mainly focused towards Google Search Results.

According to the article :

Top 10 Ranking Factors in 2007:

1. Keyword Use in Title Tag (4.9)
2. Global Link Popularity of Site (4.5)
3. Anchor Text of Inbound Link (4.4)
4. Link Popularity within the Site’s Internal Link Structure (4.1)
5. Age of Site (4)
6. Topical Relevance of Inbound Links to Site (3.9)
7. Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community (3.9)
8. Keyword Use in Body Text (3.9)
9. Global Link Popularity of Linking Site (3.7)
10. Topical Relationship of Linking Page (3.6)

Aravindhan

Tags : SEO, Search Engine Optimization

Google introduced a link bomb fix in January, Site with George Bush was shown as the first results for search terms such as failure and miserable failure. This issue has been fixed and again this site has used the word failure and was placed second for failure.

Search Engine Land has briefly explained it. So as a result of usage the top search engines has placed their site this way,

• Yahoo: failure, ranks 1st; miserable failure, ranks 1st
• Google: failure ranks 2nd; miserable failure, not in first page of results
• Microsoft: failure, not in first page of results; miserable failure, ranks 1st
• Ask: ; failure, not in first page of results; miserable failure, ranks 4th

So using these search terms Failure and miserable in the site will make Bush a failure again and again in terms of Search Engines.

Mark

SEO Tags : Google, Yahoo, Search Engines, Ask, Microsoft

Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable has made a post on a WebmasterWorld thread, the thread is about a site losing its ranking in Google because they used NoFollow attribute for linking some of their internal pages. The site has used NoFollow attribute for their privacy policy, contact us page, user agreement and so on.

The NoFollow is a link attribute value used to instruct the search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index. The NoFollow link attribute was originally created to block search engines from following links in blog comments, due to spamming in blog comments.

Reply by a WebmasterWorld member :

Well placing rel=”nofollow” on existing links on a site would impact several things.Only part of which is strictly PR related, depending on how Google looks at things the related link text should be made moot, the page that is doing the link just had an update done to it, and the page linked to should have also lost an IBL. So could this affect ranking etc? Yup.

Barry Schwartz explanation on how Google treats NoFollow:

Google will not crawl a link that has the nofollow attribute on it. Adam Lasnik of Google specifically said that. But of course, Google will crawl the same URL if it is linked to elsewhere, without the nofollow attribute.

So, if Google won’t crawl a link that has the nofollow attribute associated. And if these pages are not linked to from other sources (typically a privacy policy, contact us page, user agreement, terms of service type of page), then they won’t do well in the search results. Plus, those pages (the ones that are linked to using the nofollow tag) will not benefit your other pages on the site.

Aravindhan

Tags : SEO, Search Engine Ranking, NoFollow

SEO Home has reported that MSN UK autofills the searchbox with the term today with ” Euro 2008 results” and yesterday with “The Apprentice BBC” and making relevant ads as you search the term.

The search takes you to buy Euro 2000 tickets. These seem to be a type of advertisement.

Mark

SEO Tags : MSN, MSN UK, Autofill search term

Neil Patel from Pronetadvertising has created a fun game and to know more about search engines. Neil Patel says,

Search Engine Smackdown is a fun game where you can be the Google founders (Larry & Sergey), Yahoo founders (Jerry & David), or Microsoft founders (Bill & Paul) and duke it out with each other in a wrestling ring with Danny Sullivan

So there will be a question about search engines and answering it will make you win and a wrong answer will make you smack down. Three continuous correct answers will make a specail move for you. Search Engine Smackdown requires version 8 of the Flash player or higher to run.

Represent yourself with your well wishing company and smack down the one you don’t like.

Mark

SEO Tags : Pronetadvertising, Search Engine Smackdown, Search Engine Game

link: command operator is currently offline for the past two days in Live.com. The link: command operator returns a blank page for the past two days (for eg: link:http://www.rankquest.com returns an empty page). All other commands like site: and other commands work as usual.

The discussion from seroundtable, Digital Point and Webmaster forums also states the same.

Mark

SEO Tags : MSN, Live.com, link: command

Google has been testing their home pages, to have the classic page very effective and userfriendly. Various test based on this are conducted. Google Systems already made a post about it few months back.

Now Google is testing the classic page design to change the navigation links in the pages. The links to Google’s services were detached from the search box and were moved in the top left corner.

The portion marked in red is moved to the top left.

Mark

SEO Tags : Google Home Page, Google, Classic Home, Google Systems