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"News Archive!"
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January
Search Engine News From
www.searchengine-news.com
Google - The changes made by Google are widespread and sweeping – their most significant dance in their short but illustrious waltz. When viewed in its entirety, we see massive shifts in ranking for most every search term and we suspect this is the beginning of a major shift in the way their search engine works.
1. Word Stemming - This represents a major shift in their algorithm. Stemming refers to a search engine's functionality to include the stem of words. For example, if one does a search for "donation", results will also show for "donate". In general, there are more results and more competition for high rankings.
2. Singular and Plural - Google is now matching both singular and plural forms of words in their search results. Once again, there are more results and more competition for high rankings.
3. Semantics - We believe Google is making an attempt to serve much broader results specifically for topic areas that it has identified (note this also means money terms) in order to increase some users' satisfaction with the results. For example, in the past if you were looking for "Laptop Computers" you would primarily get commercial results. Now, however, the results are more varied covering categories that include commercial, educational and information related sites.
The changes listed above, once understood, make optimizing sites for Google manageable – yes, challenging, but manageable when combined with building good solid pages and sites that are both diverse and rich in content.
Overture - No recent major changes at Overture
Inktomi - No changes this month.
AltaVista - AltaVista and Alltheweb.com (FAST) – both are owned by Overture – merged their image search to use the same system on December 5th.
Fast - No recent changes for FAST
Lycos - has launched a feature called Sidesearch that displays the listed page in a right hand frame while keeping a mini-version of the search results on the left. The idea is to keep visitors on the Lycos site – to make their site more "sticky" – as visitors click to view the pages. It also produces even more impressions for their Overture generated ads.
MSN - MSN Search Engine in 2004? - Rumors are flying around the street regarding Microsoft launching their new search engine sometime in 2004. The majority of the whispers indicate a mid-summer launch.
ODP - No recent changes at DMOZ / ODP
LookSmart - has lost two more distribution partners – Sprinks and Inktomi.
Yahoo - Inktomi Powered "Yahoo Search" is still testing due to the reports we're getting from users who are seeing Inktomi results in Yahoo searches recently.
336-408-9075
Rich@RichsWebDesign.com
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