Search Engine Tigers

I don’t know if anyone else has noticed this, but for the last week or so, Google Alerts has been sending me messages about mentions that happened well in the past.

It’s almost as if their crawlers have gone on holiday and are running a ‘best of’ alerts through the end of the year…

This advanced operator has apparently been around in Google Experimental for over a year, but since I only came across it recently, it’s new to me, so maybe it is to you.

So what does view:map do? Basically, by adding it to the end of any regular query in Google, you’ll get a results page with a map, and on that map will be markers, and a list of listings that contains some form of geographic identifier. As you can see below posts of mine talk about trips I’ve taken and trips I’m about to take.

Now there are some false positives, I’ve never talked about Texas, but as my name appears on a popular blog near where someone else talks about working for a firm in Texas, it’s picked up, but on the whole it’s pretty good about showing the right results.

So how can this help you? Well, potentially it can enable you to see what locations your product is being talked about in conjunction with (note, not necessarily where the people that are talking about your product are). Sure only 10 listings doesn’t give you much, so go ahead and add &num=100 to the query string to get up to 100 results that mention geo-terms and see what happens. Below is the result for “Specialized Information Publishers Association”

As you can see there’s discussion about their conferences in DC, Chicago, their headquarters in McLean (hey, they’re just around the corner from me), talk about a sponsor in Hawaii, and about a board member from London. How can this help them? Well let’s say that there was a groundswell of SIPA members talking about how there really needs to be a conference in Lancaster, PA. The fact that that location would show up on this map would give them that information, and they could then investigate to see whether there really was any kind of demand for moving one of their conferences out to NYC strip mall shopping central Amish country.

All in all it’s an interesting tool, but there are some false positives that show up in the system that detract slightly from the results, which is probably why it’s still in Google Experimental. Anyway, go give it a play, and if you think of some great use for it, please share.

While doing a little updating on my Local Search slides for Search Camp Philly (pcphilly08) I noticed that between February and tonight Google has modified their disclaimer text at the bottom of each PPC geotargeting page. Take a look, back in February -

…and now -

As you can see they’ve now pushed it front and center that “You may receive clicks from outside our targeted locations”.

Last night a new search engine launched – Cuil, pronounced Cool. Normally this wouldn’t make too much of a splash, but it’s backed by $33 million of VC money, and was founded by former Googlers. They claim to have built a better mousetrap, with more pages in their index than Google. So how does it stack up?

First things first, the home page is cleaner than that of Google’s (no specialized searches listed), and they seem to be going for the anti-Google label, with the background being black, while Google’s is white.  But what about the searches?  Naturally the first one that I did is a vanity search.  Time for it to run – 8 seconds the first time, 3 seconds the next.  Ok, so it’s not as fast as Google, but what about the results?

Rather than 10 results in a column surrounded by paid listings, Cuill has gone for 3 columns containing 11 results (4 each in the first 2 columns, and 3 in the last).  Each listing has a nice chunk of text associated with it, and an image where one can be found (not always that most contextually relevant image, but an image nonetheless).

Result quality?  Hmm, not so good.  For a search engine that claims to index more pages than Google, none of the blogs that I write on, on a regular basis are there (weekly or more frequently).  However, seosfightfat, a blog I was writing for a month earlier this year shows up in 11th, 15th, 17th, 18th, 21st, etc.  Not something that you’d see on Google, with no more than 2 results displaying for the same domain.

I’d seen some people tweet that spam was a big problem on Cuil, so I thought I’d do some further searches to check that out, to see exactly what the extent of that problem was… unfortunately Cuil is no longer working, due to the number of people hitting their service to try it out today, which in itself is not cool.

So, is Cuil the fabled Google killer?  Probably not.  It’s going to take a lot of cash and luck to get any sizable chunk of the search engine business, just ask ASK, and MSN, both of which have tried throwing money at that very same issue, to not succeed.

For more thoughts and opinion, check out the various discussions on the topic linked to by the Search Engine Roundtable article on Cuill.

Last week my 6 year old daughter came home from school all excited…

Daddy, Mr Buchheit (her school principal) kissed a pig today

Really?

Yes, her name was Daisy. Daddy, you have to go to Google…(thinks for a moment)… dot com and search for Daisy the Pig

So upstairs we went to the computer, and yep there at the top of the results for Daisy the Pig was Mr. Buchheit’s new friend Daisy the pot bellied reading Pig.

There are a couple of things that I like about this.

1. This small business man was using his ranking to market himself. No need to tell the kids the URL of his site, instead just tell them to go to Google and type in the pig’s name.
2. My daughter was excited about searching on the web for something that she was interested in, and there was the added bonus that she was going to find the result that she was looking for, because it was known to be there.
3. My daughter now understands a little bit more of what I do for a living.

Further proof that Google is everywhere… If you pick up a copy of the January / February Men’s Health magazine (you know, one of those ones that you see on the shelf at the supermarket right above the candy counter), in between the articles on “5 ways to meet the love of your life” and “5 ways to double your salary in 2 years” is an article on Douglas Merrill, the CIO and VP of Engineering for Google. In this article he shares his 4 rules for organizing your life in order to reduce your stress levels:

1. Empty your Head – Your mind can only hold 7 things at a time, and incomplete tasks take preference, so if you clear your head, you’re going to reduce your stress levels.
2. Swap Filing Cabinets for scaffolds (tools for managing different parts of your life) – not surprisingly he recommends Google tools, such as Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Spreadsheets, etc.
3. Redefine organization as search – Don’t attempt to store everything in your head, use a personal online database and search it when you need answers.
4. Leverage other people and their ideas – If you hire bright people from diverse backgrounds with different skill sets, and divide the work up right, you’re going to naturally become more organized.

Naturally the article goes into more detail on each of these than I’m giving you here, but you get the idea. There were a couple of other interesting facts mentioned in the article (not counting the fact that he’s my age, my height, and 25lbs lighter), with the most interesting being that he typically doesn’t travel with a laptop, if he’s going somewhere all he needs is his iPhone. Now it doesn’t say if the other people he travels with bring their laptops with them though.

Google announced yesterday that Google Transit has moved from Google Labs and is not integrated in with Google Maps. This is great news for those of us that want to travel into a city using public transportation (there’s no way I’m driving into DC and fiddling around finding a parking space when I have a decent metro system available). Unfortunately, they don’t have every public transit system in the application yet, but they will be rolling out over time. So if you live in / travel to the Bay Area or Orange County in California, Tampa in Florida, or Hampton Roads in Virginia (among others shown here), you can play with it now. For me and trips to DC, I’ll just have to wait…

A letter from Google regarding changes with Google Base and support for submitting business locations…

Hello, 

At this time, we're transferring support of Business Locations
bulk uploads from your Google Base account to your Google Local
Business Center account. If you are currently submitting Business
Locations bulk uploads for inclusion in Google Maps via Google
Base, please begin submitting your updated Business Locations bulk
uploads via the Google Local Business Center found here: 

http://www.google.com/local/add/uploadFeed 

If you've encountered problems submitting your Business Locations
bulk upload to your Google Base account over the last few weeks,
we recommend that you resubmit your Business Locations bulk upload
using the Google Local Business Center. Google Base will no longer
support the "Business Locations" item type. Instead, please begin
to access and manage your information through your Google Local
Business Center account. You'll be able to access this account
using the same email login and password you used for Google Base. 

This change will allow you to submit new locations individually
and in the feed format, all from one centralized account. There
will be no need to access your Google Base account for business
locations purposes going forward. 

Please know this was a recent change and we apologize for any
inconvenience this change may cause you. Google Base is a beta
product, which means it is constantly changing and developing. We
are confident this will provide you with a more comprehensive user
experience. 

Sincerely,

The Google Team

A couple of weeks ago I, and every other columnist for Search Engine Land was asked to write a local or mobile article for their special series of ‘Local Search Week‘ and ‘Mobile Search Week‘. I had an idea as to what to write, and did the initial investigation, but just didn’t have the time to write anything up, so instead of it being over there, it’s now over here.I decided to take a look at the various mapping systems out there, and see if they really were all created equally. I did a number of direction requests, and compared the results. For most of the searches the directions were fairly similar, with the ‘Whitehouse to Disneyland’ trip providing the biggest differences, with Yahoo taking a northerly route to start, while MSN & Google headed South. However, at the end of the trip, Yahoo & Google went the same way, while MSN went their own route. (The order in the image below is Yahoo, Google, MSN).

So what about timing? Obviously the title of this post gives you an idea of how those results came out. For virtually every trip that I put into all Yahoo, Google, MSN & Mapquest, Yahoo came back with the fastest time to the destination. The only divergence from that pattern was the Whitehouse to Disneyland trip, where MSN beat Yahoo into second place. N.B. MSN could not find a route from Anchorage, AK to Miami, FL.

So, if you’re going to travel from Anchorage to Miami, Yahoo will save you 4 hours over mapquest (while traveling only 67 fewer miles), even traveling from Scotland to the South of England will save you 2 hours over Google maps, despite traveling 2 more miles…

While doing a search to determine differences in SERPs due to personalization, I noticed that when I was logged in and receiving personalized results there were PPC ads displayed. When I logged out and performed the same search, no PPC ads.  At least there was the same number of organic results…