I thought that she was trying to hack my computer the first time I visited her website, and it asked me if I wanted to have files ftp’ed to my computer… I went shopping for a ring this week… We both fell in love, with drunken noodles, on our first date in a little Thai restaurant, and [...]

As a webmaster, when you put a page up on the web, there may be parts of that page that you may not want to have indexed by a search engine. Many web pages contain information that isn’t unique to each page, such as the navigation for a site, copyright notices, advertising, links to [...]

Yahoo was granted a patent this week which describes how anchor text in links may be used to increase the relevancy ranking of a page pointed to by that anchor text. The patent was originally filed in 2002, and it discusses how anchor text might work while naming the Altavista search engine as a [...]

Search engine optimization is an ever growing and ever changing field, and as search engines and the Web change, so does SEO. There are no classrooms, nor college courses, no single one site or conference series or book that can help you keep up with those changes. Paying attention to a lot of blogs, news reports, [...]

Have you ever searched at a search engine and received results that weren’t very good matches? You may have searched again after changing the query terms that you used, or you may have given up on the search. For example, you perform a search, such as “pizza in Elkton, Maryland,” and you don’t receive any actual matches [...]

How well would a food search engine work on the Web? One that let you search for meals available at local restaurants, or through recipes, or at local markets where you could find the ingredients to make your meal? What if it provided information about each dish based upon flavors such as saltiness or bitterness, [...]

My original title for this post was, “The Yahoo Site Explorer Patent Application,” because the post is about a new patent application from Yahoo that describes some of the information that they would like to receive from webmasters to make their efforts towards indexing the web easier. The majority of this post does describe what is [...]

The amount of pages on the Web that a search engine could try to index is extremely large, and the approaches that search engines attempt to use to index and rank those pages is mostly an automated effort, but that doesn’t mean that the search engines don’t have people take a look at search results, [...]

When you do a search for some terms over at Google, you might get a mix of results from different types of searches, including Web pages, news stories, images, videos, book listings, and others. While we’ve been seeing results like this for over a year, we really haven’t heard much from Google on how [...]

Blending images, video, and news intelligently into search results could be a valuable way of quickly informing searchers about the different concepts associated with a search phrase. For example, if someone searches for the word “Jaguar,” a search engine often shows a large number of results with pages mixed together, about an animal, a car, an [...]

Search engines collect a lot of information from their users, much of which they don’t share with us. Some of it would be pretty interesting to see. A Yahoo patent application describes some information that many who advertise on search engines would probably enjoy seeing very much, something that Yahoo refers to as a Search [...]

Some surprising news came out a few weeks ago that Microsoft was canceling their book scanning and search program. Google’s book search continues on, and provides an opportunity to find digital copies of books online. You can also create a library of books of your own choosing at Google, with some aspects of a virtual bookshelf [...]

Web pages can contain a lot of information about various types of objects such as products, people, papers, organizations, and so on. Information about those objects may be spread out on different pages, at different sites. For example, a page may host a product review of a particular model of camera, and another page [...]

You’ve returned to your hotel room from a business meeting with a pocket full of business cards from people that you’ve met, and receipts from your business trip. One at a time, you place the cards and receipts on a desk in your room and snap pictures of them with the phone on your [...]

I don’t always have time to dig as deeply as I like into some of the patent filings that I uncover each week, and end up not writing about some interesting things that the search engines come out with. Instead of not mentioning those at all, I think I might try to do a weekly post [...]

Whenever someone searches at a search engine, they not only get information in response to their search, but they also provide information to the search engine about the things they are searching for - information which the search engine might find useful in helping other searchers. If that searcher performs another search related to [...]

A few years back, finding myself stranded on the side of the road with a broken down pickup truck and being over an hour’s drive from home, I convinced myself to finally get a mobile phone. I didn’t necessarily want to have a phone hanging at my side all of the time, and I [...]

When you search for something at a search engine, the search engine might not just try to find pages on the web which match the keywords that you searched with, but may first try to expand upon those keywords by finding similar or related terms. This kind of expansion of search terms can be most visible [...]

In addition to collecting a lot of information about the Web by using crawling programs to index content across the internet, search engines can learn a lot about pages and images and videos and other objects on the web by watching what we choose when we search, by seeing how we browse web pages through [...]

Search engines often provide an “advanced search” page, where a searcher can define search results they receive in many ways, beyond the simpler keyword search found on the front page search at those search engines. For example, Yahoo’s advanced web page search lets searchers select a combination of different search limitations, such as: Different relationships between keywords [...]

Many web pages contain more than one topical section, or blocks, which may make it difficult for a search engine to tell what a page is about when it is trying to index that page. These blocks may include such things as a main content area, navigation bars, headings, footers, advertisments, and other content that may [...]

What will the search interfaces of tomorrow look like? How might we be presented with information that we are interested in differently than we are today, and how might that information be delivered to us in manners that we find helpful? On Google’s corporate Quick Profile page, they tell us that their mission is …organizing [...]

When you perform a search for images at a search engine, do you ever wonder why some pictures show up before others? A recently published paper from Google, PageRank for Product Image Search (pdf), provides some thoughts on how the actual content of images themselves can be incorporated into how images are ranked for terms at [...]

Google’s Content Network provides a way for advertisers to present ads on content pages of sites whose owners have signed up for the service. Hundreds of thousands of site owners show ads on their sites from Google. The advertisements displayed are based upon the content shown on the pages of the participating sites, [...]

One of the technical issues that can cause problems with a search engine crawling a site to index its pages is when the content of pages on that site appears more than once on the site at different URLs (Unique resource locators, or web page addresses). Unfortunately, this problem happens more frequently than it should. A [...]

Imagine that someone types in a query at a search engine, and a page from your web site shows up in the results. In addition to a link to your page, there’s an animation in the sidebar that shows off the services that you offered. Under a new advertising program, you’ve subscribed to the [...]

The order that pages appear in the results of a search at a search engine may be influenced by the number of pages that link to that page, and by rankings of the pages that link to that page. When a site is linked to by a popular and trusted domain, that link might provide [...]

One of the features found at Google is the ability to receive driving, flight, or other transit information, to help you get from one location to another. Driving directions from Google Maps is one example, and Google has been working on providing public transit information in selected areas. You can also gain access to some transportation information [...]

What will America be like when the population doubles from about 280 million to over 520 million within the next 75 to 80 years or sooner? If we permit that to happen, it will have a dramatic and pervasive impact on almost all aspects of our living condition. It will mean, for example, that we [...]

Are there enough connections between email spam and search engine spam that exploring and understanding how they might be related may be helpful to search engines in fighting search engine spam? A patent recently granted to Microsoft explores some ways that might help a search engine eliminate spam from the search results it shows by paying [...]

Google is aiming at providing wireless internet access in unused television channels in the white space between channels 2 and 51 on TV sets that aren’t hooked up to satellite or cable services. While many stations broadcast between these ranges in the US, most areas have gaps where there aren’t broadcasts carried on those [...]

Yahoo is exploring an automated way of becoming a finder of talent, of top reviewers, of social network influencers. Could a search engine replace music label A and R departments, Hollywood talent agencies, publishing house manuscript readers? I’m terrified of the idea. Commercial exploitation of talent is traditionally a slow and subjective process, in which talent [...]

No sane man in the hands of Nature can doubt the doubleness of his life. Soul and body receive separate nourishment and separate exercise, and speedily reach a stage of development wherein each is easily known apart from the other. Living artificially we seldom see much of our real selves, our torpid souls are hopelessly [...]

A tool from Google that is often overlooked is Google Sets, which allows you to “automatically create sets of items from a few examples.” Google Sets was one of the first applications in the Google Labs pages. Those pages are “Google’s Technology Playground,” and contain a number programs that may or may not be tomorrow’s [...]

You go to a search engine, and type some query terms in the search box. A list of results is returned by the search engine, and you visit a link to one of the results that appears. Looking through the page, you may not see your query terms on the page itself. [...]

At the approach of spring the red squirrels got under my house, two at a time, directly under my feet as I sat reading or writing, and kept up the queerest chuckling and chirruping and vocal pirouetting and gurgling sounds that ever were heard; and when I stamped they only chirruped the louder, as if [...]

Google Local Search uses address information that it buys from data suppliers like telephone companies. Sometimes street numbers or other location information for businesses are missing in the information provided by those data suppliers. How might Google fill in the missing information? One way might be for Google to search the web [...]

A number of search engine researchers look at queries that searchers type into a search box, and break them down into three kinds of queries based upon the intent of those searchers - navigational, informational, and transactional. Navigational queries have been seen as searches where someone searching intended to find a specific known site. [...]

Would you use an internet mapping system that could show you changes in distances to places that you’ve identified as you move around? How about one where specific templates could be created to show you information about locations to help you with tasks such as home hunting or school hunting or vacationing? Google explores those kinds of [...]

How much might the usability of a web page matter to a search engine? If that search engine were to look at an approximation of the layout of a web page, it could try to understand how good of a user experience visiting that page might be, and evaluate the page based upon certain [...]

If a search engine could understand the layout of a web page and identify the most important part of a web page, it could pay more attention to that section of the page when indexing content from the page. It could give links found within that section of the page more weight than links [...]

Between December 2005 and April 2006, researchers from Microsoft collected information about the searching and browsing activies of hundreds of thousands of Windows Live Toolbar users, with permission, to learn about the sometimes unranked and unindexed final destination pages that searchers ended up at in response to queries entered at Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft’s Live.com. So [...]

On one level, a search engine indexes a web site by crawling that site one URL at a time, collecting information about what it finds at that address, and indexing the information found so that it can be served to visitors later. But, the process can be more complicated than that. For instance, a search engine [...]

A new patent application on near duplicate content from Google explores using a combination of document similarity techniques to keep searchers from finding redundant content in search results. The Web makes it easy for words to be copied and spread from one page to another, and the same content may be found at more than [...]

Imagine exploring millions and millions of news pages and other documents to find information about events that are scheduled to happen in the future, to help predict the future. This kind of future search, or future retrieval, might be able to support the making of decisions in many different fields. News information could be used [...]

A lot of web pages and documents reuse the same text in sidebars and in footers at the bottoms of pages, like copyright notices and navigation sidebars. Computer programmers will sometimes use the term “boilerplate” code to refer to standard stock code that they often insert into programs. Lawyers use legal boilerplate in contracts - often [...]

Do you use MyYahoo as a portal page every time you access the Web? If you were away from your computer, and had a few minutes to spare, would you consider calling that page, and listening to it over the phone, to get your stock picks, or horoscope, or sports scores? A newly granted patent [...]

Search engines are getting smarter about the phrases that they see and understand online, and Yahoo recently published a patent application that describes a number of the ways that they learn about and understand the use of phrases in documents on the Web. Exploring how Yahoo might use phrases to rerank search results may show how [...]

Many patent filings and papers from the search engines discuss ways that they might shuffle around search results to try to provide more relevant responses to people’s searches. Imagine a search engine changing around the results that you see, not based upon the time that a page is published, but rather on some estimate [...]

Google was awarded a design patent today on an interesting looking interface, in a patent titled Display device showing user interface. Design patents sometimes leave you guessing as to what it is that you are actually looking at, and they can appear somewhat unusual. With two sliders, and what seems to be a [...]

Recently I wrote about a Yahoo adaptation of PageRank, called User Senstitive PageRank, which required that a lot of data be collected about visitors to web sites, including their clicking and browsing habits. A couple of Yahoo patent applications from last week refer to User Sensitive PageRank while describing the collection of user data and Web [...]

Since I spend a lot of time over at the web site of the US Patent and Trademark Office, looking for patent information, sometimes I get questions from someone about the goings on over there. Charlie Anzman noticed recently that both Apple and Adobe (warning - audio and video start playing on arrival) were touting new [...]

The Internet has transformed the way we find and listen to music over the past few years, and a band can be much more accessible to their audiences than in the days when record labels, distribution chains, album sales, and radio had a much larger role in choosing music for us. I had the chance to [...]

If you’ve been paying attention to offerings from search engines on how to make widgets for websites, you may have heard of a program from Google that allows java developers to take their programs and make them usable on web pages in the form of widgets. The Google Web Toolkit is “an open source Java [...]

How effectively can a search engine automatically create annotations for images and videos, so that they can be good responses to searchers queries? How much of that can be done without human intervention and review? A newly published Google patent application explores the topic, and comes up with a method of annotation by comparison to [...]

When you start typing a query into the search box at Yahoo, you’ll see a dropdown appear under the search box with some suggestions predicting queries that you may want to see Web search results even before you finish typing. But presently you only see those suggestions for Web search results. I wrote about those [...]

If you’re a Google Earth fan, or just want to get a better idea of what might be happening behind the scenes at Google Earth, a newly published patent application takes a close look at the KML (Keyhole Markup Language) used by Google Earth, and interactive aspects of how that markup language works. The patent filing [...]

I write a lot about patents and white papers from search engines, and sometimes the subjects covered in those documents can get technical pretty quickly. I encourage people who are just starting out in SEO to leave comments, and ask questions, but I know that sometimes a closer look at some of the basics may be [...]

Not too long ago, if you entered in Google the phrase (without quotation marks) “a room with a view,” you might have received some warnings that your query contained “Stop Words.” Stop words are words that appear so frequently in documents and on web pages that search engines would often ignore them when indexing the words [...]

PageRank is an algorithm that measures the importance or quality of a Web document. It can be used in a number of ways by a search engine, such as being combined with relevance factors to rank search results, or to determine which web pages to crawl (pdf) and how frequently to crawl them, or [...]

Initial nominations for The First Annual Semmys Awards, honoring individual blog posts & articles in the Search Engine Marketing Industry, came out last week. SEO by the Sea was honored with 14 nominations in 6 different categories amongst that initial group. The initial nominations will be reviewed by judges chosen from the Search Engine Marketing Industry, [...]

At Yahoo, if you’ve ever seen the words “Also Try” at the top or bottom of a set of search results, along with a list of selected queries, then you may have seen part of Yahoo’s internal relevance and variety checking process in action. Determining Relevance and Variety The process that provides those “also try” results also [...]

Imagine that you surf the Web regularly, and bookmark pages that you might revisit. You may take those bookmarks, and organize them into categories. As part of a personalization process, you may get to select how much influence each bookmark might have upon your future searches. The bookmarks and categories that you choose for each might [...]

Two new patent applications from Microsoft, originally filed June 29, 2006, and published January 3, 2008, describe how information collected offline in many different ways, such as credit card use, grocery discount membership cards, cell phone usage, interaction with digital television systems, and more, might be used by Microsoft to target advertising to you online, [...]

There’s a potentially huge untapped advertising market on the Web involving personal ads that point people to the profile pages of advertisers who might want a little more attention for their personal pages. One that could point people to personal profiles from places like Orkut or MySpace, LinkedIn, or PlentyOfFish. How many of [...]

One of the standard rules of search engine optimization that’s been around for a long time is that “search engines cannot read text that is placed within images.” What if that changed? How easy or difficult is it for a search engine to recognize text within digital images and video, and index that text? Three [...]

After lots of speculation about a Google Phone, or an operating system from Google, we see a patent application published at the US Patent and Trademark Office, and assigned to Google, that primarily focuses upon a user interface for displaying search results on the small screens of handheld devices, and which suggests the use of [...]

I toyed with the idea of a recap of top posts from the year. I sifted through stats, and made a list of the most visited SEO by the Sea posts. I started going through my archives, and making another list of my favorite posts. And then I looked at the size [...]

Ok, so why is a blog that usually focuses upon internet marketing and search related patents publishing a post about saving amphibians? The short answer is that I was asked very nicely, by Jeff Davis of Frog Matters and Amphibian Ark. The longer answer is addressed by some other folks who are also posting about the Year [...]

Unfortunately, there are web pages that can be harmful to visit. Google researchers discussed the identification of malicious code on web pages earlier this year in The Ghost In The Browser: Analysis of Web-based Malware (pdf). The paper’s authors tell us that the focus of delivery of harmful code to computer users has [...]

I rarely write about the search marketing industry here, focusing mostly instead upon search related patents and papers, and an occassional event. There are some happenings and posts that I do want to point out though. First is from my friend Kim, who writes about the 2007 Awards for Support and Inspiration. I’d [...]

Choosing the right character set for your web page might mean that it is easier for a search engine to understand what language your page is in, though there are also other ways that it might be able to determine that. But, what about when someone types in a query? - How does a search engine know [...]

In my last post, I wrote about how Microsoft might use an automated method to identify blogs, and how that method might work. I wondered why they might be interested in doing that, and received some great comments on the post. One reason I that appealed to me is that a search engine would want [...]

A new Microsoft patent application has some interesting statements within it about blogs. First it tells us of the value of blogs and blogging: Blogging has grown rapidly on the internet over the last few years. Weblogs, referred to as blogs, span a wide range, from personal journals read by a few people, to niche [...]

I really enjoy going to some of the major conferences in the Internet Marketing and Design industries, but there’s a lot of positive things that can be said about meeting people in small groups and comfortable settings to share ideas and stories and experiences. The SEO by the Sea blog was originally launched out [...]

Ok, my title is a mouthful, but you have to love a patent filing that uses South Park characters in examples. Even if it is a somewhat odd patent filing. Kyle, Stan, Kenny, and Cartman are programmers who report their daily code production to Mr. Garrison. Kyle creates a node datum 1001 reporting 111 lines. [...]

There are often three pieces of information about pages displayed in search results to searchers in response to a search: Page title, The URL where that page can be found, and; A summary of the page in the form of a snippet or snippets, taken from either a meta description tag, or a description [...]

Since I wrote about the Google toolbar with my last post, it didn’t seem like a bad idea to write about the Yahoo Toolbar. I hadn’t really planned on doing so, but a new Yahoo patent application showed up that talked about how a user’s browsing history, collected through the toolbar or a browser [...]

If you sit at more than one computer on a regular basis, and you use some of Google’s toolbar features, you may like a new offering from Google in the newest version of their toolbar. If you share a computer with one or more people, you may also appreciate having a toolbar that is configured [...]

How does a search engine use information from anchor text in links pointed to pages? Why and how do some pages get crawled more frequently than others? How might links that use permanent and temporary redirects be treated differently by a search engine? A newly granted patent from Google, originally filed in 2003, explores [...]

Run a social network, or participate in one? You might find a couple of Yahoo patent applications interesting - they discuss some of the challenges in understanding how communities interact with social media sites over time, and how the interests of users of those sites evolve over time. If you run a social media application [...]

I came across a new patent application from Google this morning which appears to discuss how Google Health, an unlaunched service from Google, might be financed. The patent filing is: Method and apparatus for serving advertisements in an electronic medical record system The document lists Eric Sachs as inventor, who started the project in 2006. Here’s [...]

Joel Tachau. who is a Senior Information Architect for Avenue A | Razorfish, wrote a long and very detailed paper for his Master of Science degree at the University of Oregon, on personalized search, which was published in June of this year: Analysis of Three Personalized Search Tools in Relation to Information Search: iGoogle, [...]

When I talk with someone about how a search engine works, I find it convenient to break the process down into three parts, because there are three primary functions that a search engine performs. These three parts are Crawling, Indexing, and Serving Results. I like using this three part breakdown because I find that it [...]

I am in Las Vegas this week, speaking at, and attending the Webmaster World Pubcon Conference. I will be speaking at two different sessions, both on the first day of the conference. The early session is going to be a round robin presentation on SEO 101, with Moderator Jake Baillie, and speakers Bruce Clay, Ash Nallawalla, [...]

You sit down at your computer, and start working on a document, and visiting the Web to find information. A program on your computer considers the way that you move your mouse, and the speed at which you type, and recognizes you as one of the people who use that computer, and looks through your past [...]

A patent granted to Google today explores Web spam and the manipulation of documents and links on the Web. It describes how the rankings of pages may be influenced if they are identified as “manipulative.” The identification of manipulative documents, how they might be grouped together, and how they could be treated by [...]

Google introduced a new tool in October of last year, the Website Optimizer, that enables website owners to test out different versions of pages on their website. Some new patent applications from Google focus upon testing and optimizing landing pages for conversions, using a tool that is very much like the Website Optimizer. There’s a [...]

How might statistics created from user query logs be useful to search engines and to searchers? A Google patent application published at the World Intellectual Property Organization, Systems and Methods for Generating Statistics from Search Engine Query Logs (opens in new window), explores how such statistics might be created. The filing lists Olcan Sercinoglu, Artem [...]

Where will many Google employees be five years from now? How many will be running their own technology companies, and pursuing their own projects? How many will be investing in other companies, and helping to drive innovation? Georges Harik was one of Google’s first 10 employees, the Director of Googlettes and a Distinguished Engineer [...]

The evolution of language used to discuss a topic can be interesting. One of the words that seems to be increasingly tied to Google is “platform,” as in the Android mobile platform and the Opensocial platform. Mike Elgan wrote an interesting post earlier this month about a combination of these platforms in Making the Google [...]

Google published three patent applications on Google Notebook this week, which describe the fundamentals of how the program works, and provide a hint at how notebooks may influence some search results. The nice thing about the Google notebook is that it has the potential to be a helpful research tool, enabling you to quickly save [...]

A couple of months back when I was traveling, I wrote a quick post about a new PageRank patent issued to Stanford University on PageRank, and asked if anyone would be interested in trying to break it down to see if it it had anything interesting in it. David Harry took a look in [...]

If you could limit the results of a search at Google to a specific point of view, would you? Depends upon what I mean by point of view, doesn’t it? I’ll get to that below. A Google patent granted this week shows a screen shot of an advanced search that could have been: There are a [...]

The advertisements from search engines that we see accompanying search results, or on portal pages, or as part of a content network, are often related to the query used in our searches or the content of the pages that we are viewing. Would ads which we view that are more targeted towards our interests be more [...]

What’s a good way to organize the index of a search engine? A way that is fast and returns a lot of relevant results? Maybe one that doesn’t need to be search the whole index to find results? A newly granted patent from Microsoft provides some interesting insights into indexing by document, and how [...]

There was news this week about being able to get directions and map information from Google at kiosks located at certain gas stations, as well as coupons. Might we see more from Google at kiosks sometime soon? Maybe magazines that could customized and printed at kiosks? The gas station kiosks wouldn’t work as a [...]

What is the most important part of a page? If a page has images on it, what images are the most important ones? If a search engine were to try to understand whether or not any images on the pages of a site were related to each other, how would it go about figuring that [...]

Over the past few months, Google has been publishing a number of patent applications about adding customized applications (modules) from third party developers (sources other than Google) to a wide variety of personalized web pages. These seemed to cover much more than the creation of add-on content for Google’s personalized homepage, though they use [...]

The Web provides opportunities for people who share common interests to find each other, and engage in conversations. While I was in Washington on Friday, I got a kick out of watching a duck enjoying the cool mist rising up from the water flowing from the tidal basin into the World War II Memorial, [...]