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Google Chrome Adds Blocking Feature to Chrome

March 7, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Search engine optimization is a growing business. Content farms as they have become known as are sites that utilize search terms in order to game the Google system. There is no doubt that content farms are on the rise. A leader in the industry, Demand Media, just took their company public with an IPO. That’s because there is great profit to be made by getting the right kind of articles to show up in the first page of Google searches. So what is search engine optimization?

Search engine optimization utilizes key terms to get pages ranked ahead of other pages. The problem comes when people doing the searches realize the pages they are pulling up are not particularly useful and don’t have the data the user had in mind when conducting the search. Often times, the article can be completely irrelevant to the topic at hand after the first sentence or two necessitating the need for the user to click through more pages to find what they want.

At the root of search engine optimization is money. Indeed, advertisers only pay when there ads are getting a large amount of views. Utilizing search terms allows for marginal articles to appear near the top of a search page and it isn’t until the user is well into the article that they realize this isn’t the page they want. By that time, the advertising clicks are collected and the SEO product has done its job in full.

If these pages really bother you, you can certainly install Google Chrome and block the root site of those pages. In the long term, it’s difficult to say if search engine optimization companies will be around for a long time or not. After all, the articles are not completely useless. eHow is considered a content mill site even though it helps millions of people learn new things.

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Facebook-Bing Tie Up to Beat Google Search

November 22, 2010 By Leave a Comment
Image representing Bing as depicted in CrunchBase
Image via CrunchBase

The Facebook and Bing tie-up seems a threat to the Google search engine. Fuelled by the idea to make search more personable, this alliance will bring in new technologies that Google might not have. The two companies want search from being the traditional querying for pages to making it more of a personal experience.

Bing is hoping that this partnership will get it a larger share in the search engine market. To beat Google in its own den is tough. Google is now a word that is synonymous with searching information on the Internet. After being in the search engine space for so long, it’s really going to be a paradigm shift if Bing beats Google in the search engine market.

Bing has started off with adding a feature called “Liked by your friends”. Search results from the Bing search engine will have this new feature. This makes results more personable. You must be logged into your Facebook account to get this. But Bing has said that it will not share information with Facebook. If you are searching for something, Bing will not share your search information with Facebook. Also, the personable search feature is not imposed on you. You can either select this feature or deselect it, and the Bing search engine will not add this feature to your search results.

Another strong feature of the Bing-Facebook partnership is the Facebook Profile Search. Bing will scan a person’s network on Facebook. It then uses this network data to modify the search results of this user. What we can see here is a social distance kind of algorithm that bases the relevancy of search results based on the user’s relationships with others on his or her Facebook account.

The strong development on the Bing-Facebook front is something that Google needs to ponder about. All said and done; only time will tell if Bing does become the number one search engine. Until then it’s wait and watch.

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Search Engines: Finding What You Need

October 11, 2010 By Leave a Comment
Utopian Scene
Image by Visual Legacy via Flickr

For some people, search engines never seem to work the way that they should. You might enter a few words, in a combination that makes perfect sense to you, and find the results are less than ideal. For example, if all you want to do is find a cheesy pizza on a Friday night, and you happen to enter that into a search engine, you could find a restaurant called the Cheesy Pizza that’s 200 miles from your home, or a recipe for cheese pizza to be made at home. It doesn’t make sense to the average user why, sometimes, these engines seem intuitive and capable, and other times they miss the mark by 200 miles.

SEO & search engine marketing have a lot to do with the results you get when you search using popular search engines. If you want to find a cheesy pizza near your home, then you have to enter the information into the search engine in a way that its algorithm knows how to interpret. Search engines honestly do want to give you the most useful information possible, so that you will continue to patronize their service, rather than a competitors. How do search engines interpret what “cheesy pizza buffalo” means to you, and how to help you as quickly as possible?

If you are searching for something something a little more complex than your Friday night snack, you might want to phrase it as a question. For instance, if you need to find out how to update drivers on your laptop, you might want to include the model number of what driver you are looking for.

With Google’s new instant results, you’ll find each letter you enter changes the pathway of where Google intends to direct you. It even offers suggestions in a drop-down menu of things you might be typing. Google’s search engine uses automatic bots to search every web page that’s linked on the entire internet. It sounds impossible, but it’s true. Suspicious pages are reviewed by humans, but these programs are pretty effective. When they are flawed, you can find that “cheesy pizza buffalo” will lead you to porn, a princess with an eating disorder, and the latest disgusting flavor in fad bubble gum. Usually, though, these bots will take to you restaurants in Buffalo that serve pizza, or, pizzas with buffalo sauce on them.

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