Cuil Potential google competitor or an other major failure

cuil.com a new search engine released today claims to overtake Google. It is co-founded by former Google employee . Google’s Anna petterson is the co-founder of Cuil.

“In her two years at Google, Anna Patterson helped design and build some of the pillars of the company’s search engine, including its large index of Web pages and some of the formulas it uses for ranking search results. Skip to next paragraph
The makers of the Cuil search engine say it should provide better results and show them in a more attractive manner.
Now, along with her husband, Tom Costello, and a few other Google alumni, she is trying to upstage her former employer.
On Monday, their company, Cuil, is unveiling a search engine that they promise will be more comprehensive than Google’s and that they hope will give its users more relevant results.”

Due to too much bragging Cuil is down now,

I get the following message:

“We’ll be back soon…
Due to overwhelming interest, our Cuil servers are running a bit hot right now. The search engine is momentarily unavailable as we add more capacity.
Thanks for your patience.

They are not even ready for 1% of load Google gets but they want to beat Google lets see.

nytimes.com/2008/07/28/technology/28cool.html

Spammer Gets Jail – AOL user spammer gets jail

A spammer who spammed AOL users badly with his junk pharmacy spam got 26 months of Jail term. I am sure the Jail term he got is something he deserved. I wish all email spammers in this world gets Live jail terms. They are terrible low lifes.

Matt cutts announces pagerank update

Google’s Mattcutts was the first one to announce a pagerank update which is in progress. Pagerank is right now visible in most of the places.

A simple cartoon showing matt cutts announcing pagerank update July 2008.
http://www.searchenginegenie.com/google-page-rank-update-comic.htm

July 2008 Pagerank Update in Progress July 2008 current Pagerank Updated datacenter 209.85.173.147

We are currently witnessing the July 2008 Pagerank update. Pagerank updates happen once in 3 months and the current Google page rank update is in progress. Last pagerank update was around April 28 2008 so its exactly 3 months and we have the 2nd quarter update.

You can check your pagerank using our pagerank checker tool we have set it up to query the updated datacenter:

http://www.searchenginegenie.com/search-engine-page-rank-checking.php

Current updated datacenter is :

July 2008 current Pagerank Updated datacenter 209.85.173.147

I hope you have new pagerank for your sites. 🙂 enjoy our free tools and don’t forget to link to it.

Vijay

PAVING WAY TO SEMANTIC SEARCH:

PAVING WAY TO SEMANTIC SEARCH:

This Blog is all about semantic search & its web standards & how it’s helpful to Yahoo & its users. Yahoo is one of the biggest search engines. Semantic refers to searching large semantic web datasets, which is a typical problem for semantic web search engines & also refers to methods of searching web documents beyond the syntactic level of matching keywords. Semantic web is helping to shape the next generation of search transitioning from syntactical search to semantic search & yahoo search is supporting this technology. By supporting semantic web standards, Yahoo! Search and site owners can bring a far richer and more useful search experience to consumers. Semantic search has attracted a lot of attention in the past year, largely due to the growth of the semantic web as a whole. The term semantic search itself is popular enough to be considered overused. And, as an integral member of the Yahoo! SearchMonkey team, Peter refers to the benefits that SearchMonkey is experiencing with the semantic web and calls out the opportunities to integrate with both NLP and semantic web technologies. On the whole there are many benefits of semantic search and it’s more effective than syntax based search.

ysearchblog.com – source:

Yahoo and Microsoft gain more market share but still Google leads way ahead

Some of the popular websites are Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, & Ask. Among these search engines Yahoo & Microsoft showed increment where as Google declined to great extent compared to previous years. The percentage of searches handled in US by five search engines are 61.5%, 20.9%, 9.2%, 4.1%, & 4.3%. Finally, a change – Google slips while Yahoo and Microsoft gain. Now there comes a question whether Google is in trouble?? The answer will obviously be no because of raw number of searches, June 2008 was another record breaker for Google. But Google dropped from 61.8% in May 2008 to 61.5% in June 2008, the first time a share drop has been shown over the past year since December 2007 (when it went from 58.6% to 58.4%).On other hand Microsoft showed its first gain in the past year. After many months of incremental decline, Microsoft rose from an 8.5% share in May 2008 to 9.2% in June 2008. This is likely a factor in Microsoft’s rise. By this it has achieved great success but at the same time Microsoft is hoping that program will generate more than a 0.7% rise in its share, and that’s all it has gotten so far. Clearly the program isn’t a massive initial game changer that some thought it to be. Instead, if Cash back is going to be a success, clearly now it will be something that happens over time. Let’s see if that indeed happens in the coming months. The other hand even yahoo too is showing a rise. After months of drops with the occasional rise, Yahoo posts two straight months of gains, i.e. 20.4% in April 2008 to 20.6% in May, then 20.9 percent in June 2008. I think there’s great rise in Yahoo & Microsoft. Lets see the actual number of searches each handled versus market share:
Google: 7.1 billion
Yahoo: 2.4 billion
Microsoft: 1.1 billion
Ask: 501 million
AOL: 471 million
By this we can tell that Google still shows a gain. Google went over the 7 billion searches served mark. Whereas Yahoo, at 2.4 billion searches, & Microsoft, at just over 1 billion searches, which didn’t break any past records but at least got closer to territory it held a year ago. On the whole there is a great increment in yahoo & Microsoft compared to previous years & Google declined a bit but then too created a record!

YAHOO ANOUNCES SETTLEMENT WITH CARL ICAHN

YAHOO ANOUNCES SETTLEMENT WITH CARL ICAHN

Yahoo who is a leading global Internet company announced that it has reached an agreement with Carl Icahn to settle their pending proxy contest related to the Company’s 2008 annual meeting of stockholders. Under the terms of the settlement agreement, eight members of Yahoo’s current Board of Directors will stand for re-election at the 2008 annual meeting. In view of the settlement agreement with Mr. Icahn, and the termination of the proxy contest, Robert Kotick who is one of the board members has decided not to stand for re-election to the Board at the 2008 annual meeting & following 2008 annual meeting Yahoo board will be expanded to 11 members. Carl Icahn will be appointed to the Board. As part of the settlement agreement, Mr. Icahn, who owns an aggregate of 68,786,320 shares, or 4.98% of Yahoo common stock, has agreed to withdraw his nominees for consideration at the annual meeting and to vote his Yahoo shares in support of the Board’s nominees. Yahoo chairman told that they are gratified to have reached this agreement, which serves the best interests of all Yahoo Stockholders. And they look forward to work productively with Carl and the new members of the Board in continuing to improve the Company’s performance and enhancing stockholder value. Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Jerry Yang told that agreement will not only allow Yahoo to put the distraction of the proxy contest behind us, it will also allow the Company to continue pursuing its strategy of being the starting point for Internet users and a must buy for advertiser. Icahn is very pleased that this settlement will allow him to work in partnership with Yahoo’s Board and management team to help the Company achieve its full potential. He believes that this is a good outcome and he’ll have a strong working relationship going forward. He is also happy that the board has agreed in the settlement agreement that any meaningful transaction, including the strategy in dealing with that transaction, will be fully discussed with the entire board before any final decision is made. On the whole both the parties are ready for this agreement & yahoo being a world-class company with an extremely bright future, and collaborating together, I believe, the Company achieves its ambitious goals.

Google’s Amit Singhal talks about technologies behind Google

Amit Singhal – Google Fellow and senior Google scientist has come up with a beautiful explanation on how well the technologies work behind the ranking algorithm of Google,

I agree with Amit that Search has come a long way from being a just a search engine to understanding more of users queries on what they want. Now Search engines can understand synonyms, complicated queries, language queries and a lot more of these type of stuff that were once far away from Google.

As per Amit Google has grown to a massive index from what it had been before. Now they have an index in multiple tera bytes before it used to be some Gigs Only. Now Google’s advancement in understanding pages had come a long way before it used to just be the keywords on the page title, and the backlink anchor text now it has become much more better. As he points out in the article even without the phrase “galleria sprovieri londra” the site sprovieri.com ranks No.1 because Google has much more sophisticated system to identify the authority of
a site.

Some of the examples he has given for understanding queries is excellent. Kofee annan is for someone searching for kofi annan and Google does say whether you are looking for it, similarly when someone searches for Dr.Zhivago then he is actually searching for a Dr with the name Zhivago where as when he is searching for “rodeo dr” he is actually searching for Rodeo Dr a road . similarly he talks about other queries like “back bumper repair” ramstein Ab, b&b ab which searches for Bed and Breakfasts in Alberta.

The most surprising query is the one where he talks about the new york times square’s famous church. Obviously New york times or Ny times refer to the famous magazine or website Nytimes.com. Now when a search like “new york times square church” Google has to figure out that its actually about the church in Madison square New york. Now when you check the query Google actually understands it pretty well and guides to the right site. Similarly as Amit Points out understanding the users are an other major factor. Google has to be the best in figuring out where the users actually came from that way they have the option to understand and deliver relevant results based on their local area requirements. Google does this very effectively.

Overall Google has been doing a great job and i wish Amit and everyone behind Google’s algorithm to bring more innovative things

Official Blog post here
Vijay,

How to submit a re-inclusion request Google’s official video – transcripted by SRequesting reconsideration in Google how to remove banned site – Video

Requesting reconsideration in Google how to remove banned site – Video transcript

Posted by Mariya Moeva, Search Quality Team

Hai I am Mariya Moeva from the Google Search Quality Team and I like to talk to you about reconsideration requests. In this video we will go over one how to submit a reconsideration request for your site. Lets take a webmaster lady here as an example. Ricky a hard working webmaster who works on his ancient politics blog everyday lets call it example.com one day he checks and sees that his site no longer appears in Google search results. Lets see some things to know whether he needs to submit reconsideration requests. First he needs to check whether his sites disappearance from the index may be caused by access issues. You can do that too by logging into your webmaster tools account on the overview page you will be able to see when was the last time Google-bot successfully accessed your webpage. Here you can also check whether there are any crawling errors for example if your server was busy or unavailable when we try to access your site you would get an URL unreachable message alternatively there will be URLs on your site blocked by your robots.txt file you can see this by URLs restricted by robots.txt.

If these URLs are not what you expected you can go to tools and select analyze robots.txt here you can see whether you robots.txt file is properly formatted and only blocking parts of your site that you don’t want Google to crawl. If google has no problems accessing your site check to see if there is a message waiting for you in the message center of your webmaster tools account. This is the place where Google uses to communicate with you an put information to you on webmaster tools account in the sites that you manage. If we see that there is something wrong with your site we may send you a message there detailing things you need to fix to get back your site in compliance with Google webmaster guidelines. Ricky logs into his webmaster tools account and checked that there are no new messages. He doesn’t find any messages if you don’t find any message in the message center check to see if your site has been on is in violation on Google’s webmaster guidelines you can find that in the help center under the topic creating a Google friendly site how to make my site perform best in Google. If you are not sure why Google is not including your site a great place to look for help is our Google webmaster help group there you will find many friendly and knowledgeable webmasters and Googler’s who will be happy to look at your site and give suggestions on what you might need to fix,

You can find links to both the help center and the Google help group at Google.com/webmasters to get to the bottom of why his site has disappeared from the index Ricky opens the webmaster guidelines and starts reading. In quality guidelines we specifically mention completing avoiding hidden text or hidden links on the page. He remember that at one point he hired a friend named Liz who claimed to say he knows something about web design and that he can make the site rank better in Google. Then he scans his site completely and finds blocks of hidden text on footer of all his pages. IF your site is in violation of Google webmaster guidelines and if you think this might have affected the way your site is ranked in Google now will be a good time to submit a reconsideration request. But before you do that make changes to your site so that it falls between the Google

S webmaster guidelines. Ricky removed all the hidden text from his pages now he can go ahead and submit a request for reconsideration. Login to your webmaster tools account under tools click on request reconsideration and follow the steps make sure you explain what you did wrong with your site and what steps you have taken to fix it.

Once you have submitted a request you will receive a message from us in the message center confirming that we have received it. We will then review for compliance with the Google webmaster guidelines. So that’s an overview of how to submit a reinclusion and reconsideration request. Thanks for watching and Good luck with web mastering and ranking.

Search engine optimization URL change is it recommended?

Search Engine optimization URL change from static to Dynamic

Many have asked the question what happens if the URL is changed from html to PHP or ASP or vice versa. Well in Search engine optimization URLs shouldnt be changed often. Search engines recognize a page based on the URLs so once they are indexed its not recommended to play with them much. Google assigns pagerank to individual URLs based on backlinks to that page from other pages from the site or from external sites. So if a Url is changed it will affect Search engine optimization. The pagerank of that page is lost and Google also have to drop that page from the index. Also till the page is dropped you need to wait or Google will index the new page with the new URL which will result in lots of confusion happening. Duplicate pages will be created and at times the version you want to have will drop off. So its important to decide which version of urls you want to use whether php or asp or html or htm or what ever decide before you start designing the site. There is no difference between a PHP url and a html URL so if you think in future there will be dynamic contents in the page better name it PHP or ASp or any dynamic extension of the code you want to use.

Ok if you have unavoidable reasons where you want to change the page extensions then make sure the old pages are 301 redirected to the new pages that are created that way you won’t loose the value of the old page. 301 redirect for all coding is available online you can use it.

Best recommendation don’t change URLs unless you have unavoidable reasons. That is the best for Search engine optimization purposes.