BOSS – Build your Own Search Service a step ahead from yahoo

Yahoo recently launched BOSS a new search service which helps to build your own search service.
A web services platform that allows developers and companies to create and launch web-scale search products by utilizing the same infrastructure and technology that powers Yahoo! Search. It is a new platform that offers programmatic access to the entire Yahoo! Search index via an API. It also allows developers to take advantage of Yahoo!’s production searchinfrastructure and technology, combine that with their own unique assets, and create their own search experiences.
SUMMARY:
* Ability to re-rank and blend results — BOSS partners can re-rank search results as they see fit and blend Yahoo!’s results with proprietary and other web content in a single search experience.
* Total flexibility on presentation — Freedom to present search results using any user interface paradigm, without Yahoo! branding or attribution requirements.
* BOSS Mashup Framework — We’re releasing a Python library and UI templates that allow developers to easily mashup BOSS search results with other public data sources
* Web, news and image search — At launch, developers will have access to web, news and image search and we’ll be adding more verticals soon.
* Unlimited queries — There are no rate limits on the number of queries per day.

USE FOR ITS PARTNERS & YAHOO:Its open up to infrastructure and technology to developers, entrepreneurs and companies because boss believes that being open is core to Yahoo!’s future success, opening their network, opening their own search experience via SearchMonkey, and now opening their search infrastructure via BOSS. It will lead to innovation both on Yahoo! and powered by Yahoo!. For BOSS, there’s a virtuous circle in which partners deliver innovative search experiences, and as they grow their audiences and usage we have more data that can be used to improve our own Yahoo!Second, we do see new revenue streams from BOSS. In the coming months, BOSS will be launching a monetization platform that will enable Yahoo! to expand its ad network and enable BOSS partners to jointly participate in the compelling economics of search.

ADVANTAGE FOR ITS USERS: BOSS will enable a range of fundamentally different search experiences. These new search products will provide valueto users along multiple dimensions, such as vertical specialization, new relevance indicators and ranking models, and innovative UI implementations.

FEW EXAMPLES OF WHATS POSSIBLE WITH BOSS:ME.DIUM-Medium is a start-up that’s built an innovative collaborative browsing product used BOSS to build a web-scale searchengine that leverages its real-time surfing data. By combining the depth of the Yahoo! Search index with its insight into where users are browsing, Medium can provide its users with a unique buzz-based search experience.

HAKIA-Its a semantic search start-up, which is using BOSS to access the Yahoo! Search index and dramatically increase the speed with which it can semantically analyze the web. With BOSS providing this important infrastructure, Hakia is ableto deliver a language search experience that isn’t available from any of the “big three” search providers or other semantic search engines.

DAYLIFE TO-GO-Its a new self-service, hosted publishing platform from Daylife. Anyone can use this platform to generate customizable pages and widgets. It uses the BOSS API platform to power its web search module.

CLUUZ-This is a next-generation search engine prototype, generates easier-to-understand search results through semantic cluster graphs, image extraction and tag clouds. The Cluuz analysis is performed in real-time on results returned from the BOSS API.

To learn more about BOSS and get started using the API, visit the Yahoo! Developer Network. BOSS is open to all. One can check out the documentation, get a BOSS app ID and start building the next generation of search!!

Google introduces webmaster tools access provider program

Webmaster tools Access provider pilot program,

Google has recently come up with a new option in webmaster tools where they enable hosting companies to integrate webmaster tools features into their hosting plans as well their servers. Google has recently read this new technology and it works great.

With the help of Google APIs webmaster tools can be directly integrated in web hosting control panel. For products like Cpanel its very easy to get something like running using webmaster tools hosting programm, Also hosting companies which uses Google webmaster tools will receive a badge which says Google webmaster access provider which will help web hosting providers an other reason to promote their business.

“

Yahoo rejects Microsoft icahn proposal –

Reason for denial

“

1. Yahoo!’s existing business plus its recently signed commercial agreement with Google has superior financial value and less complexity and risk than the Microsoft/Icahn proposal.

2. The Microsoft/Icahn proposal would preclude a potential sale of all of Yahoo! for a full and fair price, including a control premium.

3. The major component of the overall value per share asserted by Microsoft/Icahn would be in Yahoo!’s remaining non-search businesses which would be overseen by Mr. Icahn’s slate of directors, which has virtually no working knowledge of Yahoo!’s businesses.

4. The Microsoft/Icahn proposal would require the immediate replacement of the current Board and removal of the top management team at Yahoo!. The Yahoo! Board believes these moves would destabilize Yahoo! for the up to the one year it would take to gain regulatory approval for this deal.”

Board Decision:

“Yahoo! Board’s conclusion that the current proposal is not in the best interests of stockholders is based on a number of factors, including:

— The revenue guarantees suggested, which are conditional and subject to reduction, are well below the search revenue that the Company is expected to generate on its own and in association with its announced commercial agreement with Google. That agreement alone is estimated to generate $250 to $450 million of incremental cash flow for the first twelve months following implementation, while allowing Yahoo! to remain a principal in paid search;

— The success of the remaining Company is critically dependent on Microsoft’s ability to effectively monetize search;

— Microsoft/Icahn’s proposed Traffic Acquisition Costs rates are below market;

— The proposal calls for Yahoo! to sell its industry-leading algorithmic search business and its related strategic and valuable intellectual property portfolio for no incremental consideration; and

— Many of the components of the headline value that Mr. Icahn and Microsoft put forward, such as the spin-off of the Yahoo!’s Asian assets and the return of cash to stockholders, are steps that could be taken by Yahoo! on its own and the Board continues to evaluate these options.

Mr. Bostock concluded, “Microsoft and Mr. Icahn are trying to dismantle the Company and deliver our search business to Microsoft on terms that would be disadvantageous to Yahoo! stockholders. We are prepared to let our stockholders, not Microsoft and Carl Icahn, decide what is in their best interests and we look forward to the upcoming vote.””

Search Engine Optimization Blog Team,

Google trifecta successful free Google 3some seminar

Google recently conducted the Google trifecta seminar which was successful. First time webmaster tools, Website optimizer and Google analytics came together for a free online seminar. It was a grand success. Event is currently available as an archive. Enjoy it here

http://w.on24.com/r.htm?e=113541&s=1&k=CB05AB57071FCC9968D5BAE69762C198

Youtube not private anymore after viacom lawsuit ruling.

Following up on Viacom lawsuit where Google might loose their internet freedom , now the judge has ruled saying Google has to handle all username and IP addresses for Youtube account holders. This is an horrible situation for internet freedom.

“Google will have to turn over every record of every video watched by YouTube users, including users’ names and IP addresses, to Viacom, which is suing Google for allowing clips of its copyright videos to appear on YouTube, a judge ruled Wednesday.
Although Google argued that turning over the data would invade its users’ privacy, the judge’s ruling (.pdf) described that argument as “speculative” and ordered Google to turn over the logs on a set of four tera-byte hard drives.
The order also requires Google to turn over copies of all videos that it has taken down for any reason.
Viacom also requested YouTube’s source code, the code for identifying repeat copyright infringement uploads, copies of all videos marked private, and Google’s advertising database schema.
Those requests were denied in whole, except that Google will have to turn over data about how often each private video has been watched and by how many persons. “

I already said if losing this lawsuit will lead to various other lawsuits which will totally affect internet freedom and some point internet will be a whole regulated place than what it is now. I hope Google comes out well with this lawsuit.

Yahoo Search Index and ALgorithm Update July 2008

Yahoo Recently updated their Search index. As per their official announcement changes were made to the ranking, indexing and crawling issues. I have seen recent surge in Yahoo’s crawling capabilities. Their Crawler Yahoo Slurp has been hitting hard on our sites and our client sites. Infact on some sites Yahoo has more indexed pages than Google. Also traffic from Yahoo has increased in double the numbers i am sure this is due to the change in their ranking algorithm. Lots of our inner pages rank in Yahoo now which looks like a very good indication of top rankings for many inner pages.

I hope yahoo doesn’t mess with the current algorithm since it looks very much rewarding.

Official News here ysearchblog.com/archives/000596.html

Search Engine Genie Solves your SEO problems

This post is a bit of a Marketing hype. We at Search Engine Genie had been helping Webmasters and Site Owners solve lot of problems with their site. Most of them come to us asking us to fix a flash or dynamic site in SEO point of view, with Search engine penalties etc. We do our best and guide them or work on their site to get it out of any potential Search Engine Problems. If you are looking for solutions to your Search related problems contact us by sending an email to our support team.

Google comes closer to ethical SEOs and SEO companies

Google recently rewrote their SEO page in Google Webmaster help. Before it used to focus on unethical SEOs now they have a more standard document where they give credit to companies who help Search engines deliver better results and webmasters / site owners develop better websites . According to Google good seos

• Reviewing and providing recommendations on your site content or structure
• Technical advice on website development: for example, hosting, redirects, error pages, use of JavaScript
• Content development
• Managing online business development campaigns
• Keyword research
• SEO training

Well those are good points are most of them are basic stuff handled by any SEO company or SEO consultant. Apart from this good SEOs provide ethical ways to build quality back links. As we know Back links plays a very important factor when it comes to Search Engine Rankings especially in Google. Getting natural links through traditional ways are an important way for top rankings in Google.

1. Write articles which are useful and unique for users. This will help relevancy of the website as well as attract visitors which will result in back links.

2. Provide widgets that are useful and for free which will pay by itself through quality back links.

3. Impress the big authority and GOV sites by providing what they want they will link to your site if you can provide things they want to see and use often.

4. Make your site link worthy by making it as a useful hub for targeted users / customers. Good contents, attractive graphics, tools, forum, blog will all help If you have regular repeated visitors then you have achieved something. Repeated visitors are important since word of mouth referral is important for spreading the word which will result in quality back links.

According to Google some useful questions you can ask a SEO company:

• Can you show me examples of your previous work and share some success stories?
• Do you follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines?
• Do you offer any online marketing services to complement your organic search business?
• What kind of results do you expect to see, and in what time frame?
• What’s your experience in my industry?
• How long have you been in business?

I agree with all those questions they are pretty straight forward and covers a lot of things. If a good SEO gives a clear answer for these questions i am sure he can relied upon. I respect Google and will live by their stance on SEO even before this updation i never had anything against their rules. Its their search engine and they set the rules for it. We need to live by it. If we can’t and if something wrong happens we need to face consequences. This is how it is and this is how it should be.

Vijay

Adobe provides technology to Google and yahoo to crawl flash

Adobe in their recent press release said they have given Google and Yahoo their technology to access and crawl RIAs and flash files. Till now search engines had lot of restrictions crawling flash content but now we can see a lot of improvement and lot better crawling by Search Engines.

“Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced the company is teaming up with search industry leaders to dramatically improve search results of dynamic Web content and rich Internet applications (RIAs). Adobe is providing optimized Adobe® Flash® Player technology to Google and Yahoo! to enhance search engine indexing of the Flash file format (SWF) and uncover information that is currently un discoverable by search engines. This will provide more relevant automatic search rankings of the millions of RIAs and other dynamic content that run in Adobe Flash Player. Moving forward, RIA developers and rich Web content producers won’t need to amend existing and future content to make it searchable — they can now be confident it can be found by users around the globe.”

Read press release here

Google uses Search Logs effectively to combar Webspam

Fighting web spam using effective tracking of logs and click through data.

Matt Cutts Senior Software Engineer and Lead of Web Spam Team in Google recently made an interesting post on how Google effectively fights spam using Data collection.

Web Spam is the most annoying part of Internet today. Especially more than 85% people uses search engines to land on any site for the first time Search Engine Spam should be totally avoided when it comes to user search experience. Search engines have always had the taunting task of fighting web spam from the day they came into existence. Google is one of the search engines which used effective anti-web spam methods to combat search engine spam. This is one reason they are keeping their position on top of all search engines.

First time i have seen Google really acknowledge that they are using log data in their algorithm to combat spam. According to Official Google blog

“Data from search logs is one tool we use to fight web spam and return cleaner and more relevant results. Logs data such as IP address and cookie information make it possible to create and use metrics that measure the different aspects of our search quality (such as index size and coverage, results “freshness,” and spam). Whenever we create a new metric, it’s essential to be able to go over our logs data and compute new spam metrics using previous queries or results. We use our search logs to go “back in time” and see how well Google did on queries from months before. When we create a metric that measures a new type of spam more accurately, we not only start tracking our spam success going forward, but we also use logs data to see how we were doing on that type of spam in previous months and years.

The IP and cookie information is important for helping us apply this method only to searches that are from legitimate users as opposed to those that were generated by bots and other false searches. For example, if a bot sends the same queries to Google over and over again, those queries should really be discarded before we measure how much spam our users see. All of this–log data, IP addresses, and cookie information–makes your search results cleaner and more relevant.”

As per Matt cutts IP address and search logs do play a role in judging the quality of results delivered to users. I personally feel this is a good option i know there are some IPs that spam the search engines more than the regular IPs if Google is able to monitor the IPs pretty well they can effectively block automated queries and this can be used in search algorithm. Some keywords will always be spammed more than others, Google as they say can use these type of tracking to impose more filters to those kind of phrases. As a person with more than 5 years of experience with search engines i can see Google imposes stronger filters for certain phrases than others. For keywords like Cancer, mesothelioma more gov, org authority sites rank which for keywords like auto transport, real estate commercial sites do a better job. Really enjoy the way the results are displayed since i don’t like to see a commercial site when i search for medicine related information. Most of the time commercial sites provide much lesser value to users than non-commercial sites. There are areas where we need to see more commercial sites and there are areas that needs more information sites to be dominant. Only way to get this right is to check through the hysterical data and search logs and see what keywords are searched more from where, what the user did after clicking the data etc. User tracking can be done effectively using strong filters and effective methods.

Search Engines are facing problems every day. Apart from Web spam and search engine spam they see DDOS attacks, excessive bot activity, scrappers etc. To stand on top they need to keep working on stronger methods to combat spam.

Official Google Blog post here