Search Engine News Weekly Report – Clusty, Yahoo, and MSN
The end of September and beginning of October has seen some changes in search engine news and the addition of a new search engine into the second tier search mix – Clusty. Additionally, MSN is planning on including search in their new Messenger update (in the same way Yahoo did) and the ability to build link popularity via java powered linking scripts. Yahoo has given My Yahoo a facelift while Google has been accused of cencorship within their new Google News China. One of the biggest changes in search which will effect search engine rankings is that Yahoo is apparently testing (and integrating) search result pages with 10 listings instead of the previous 20 which were listed on Yahoo search results pages. Here’s a run down of this week’s search engine news.
Clusty Search Engine Launches
Vivisimo this week unveiled Clusty.com, the first full-service search engine site powered completely by Vivismio’s breakthrough clustering technology. Instead of simply presenting long lists of results, Clusty.com groups search results into folder topics, giving users a quick overview of the main themes in the results and letting them focus on topics of interest. Designed to relieve consumers of information overload and provide easy access to information that is usually overlooked with current search engines, Clusty changes how consumers do general Web searches as well as shopping, blogs, gossip, images, Wikipedia and people searches.
More on the Clusty Search Engine
MSN Messenger To Add Search Engine Feature
Microsoft is planning to limited beta release the latest version of Instant Messaging client MSN Messenger as early as next week. The screenshots of one of the early leaked release were available on tech sites earlier this week but were later removed on Microsoft’s request. The planned release date of the final version is expected to be in the early 2005.
Messenger users will also notice integration with MSN Services like the search engine and even blogging.
More on MSN Messenger and Search
Google and Chinese Censorship
Recently Google, in the own words, explained their position on operating in China and their censorship of certain news stories on the Chinese version of Google News. Google News has also been looked into in the United States because of political bias reports. Some people seem to think that the Google News algorithm is serving better political play and supportive articles for George W. Bush on searches for “Bush” than they do for John Kerry on searches for well, “Kerry.” While the US version of Google News is giving results from all sorts of different news services, Google News China is practicing true censorship by excluding non-Government approved (non PRC) news resources.
Read more on Google News and its expansion into China
My Yahoo’s Facelift
Yahoo is now allowing My Yahoo users to test out the new My Yahoo layout. Yahoo! lists the new features to be found at the new My Yahoo here. Jeremy Zawodny has some great information on this in his entry named New My Yahoo Beta, Featuring RSS and Atom. Anyway, I was smart enough to compare the old with the new before switching directly to the new design. Here are my first impressions of the new my yahoo design.
See the difference in My Yahoo
Yahoo Dropping Results from 20 per page to 10.
WebMasterWorld has an interesting discussion on the effects of Yahoo’s change from 20 results per page to 10 results and how this will effect those listed for rankings such as #8 or #9 (now bottom of first page) and those at rankings such as #11 or #12 (top of 2nd page).
Google Adwords Traffic Estimator Explained
Google added this great feature that helps AdWords customers figure out an estimated level of traffic that they should expect to see based on the CPC value and keyword phrase. But ad features are added, it adds an additional level of complexity for the end user. A thread at Search Engine Watch brought in a response from an official AdWords representative. I’ll highlight some points in his post, that I hope will add more insight into how Traffic Estimator works.
Read up on the Google AdWords Traffic Estimator
Do Search Engine Spiders Pick Up Url’s in a Javascript Menu?
This subject has been discussed before in length, but solutions have remained personal opinion. A thread over at Highrankings addresses some interesting issues regarding whether or not a search engine spider can extract links from a javascript menu. If the javascript is external, then it can not read past it, but what about a menu that is completely in the code? Will a [noscript] tag work well as a solution to a javascript menu? I have played around with the [noscript] tag when using a javascript menu, and as one member points out its may not be the most aesthetic solution in the serps. What you get is a long list of urls in the snippet instead of a description.
Can Javascript links hold the same value as HTML links for search engine optimization? Read more and share your ideas
Feedster’s RSS Feed Job Search Engine
RSS is hot and RSS search engines continue to get hotter by taking advantage of all of the bandwidth draining RSS feeds that are literally running all over the web for all different types of content oriented sites. Recently RSS search engines have concentrated on the RSS feed innovators including blogs, news feeds, and political commentary sites by making indexes of such targeted content searchable. Now Feedster is taking a new step into condensing the feeds of job offerings into a searchable database which can even be read via a news aggregator.
More on RSS and Feedster’s Job Search Engine
