Search Engine News

Google has a lofty ambition when it comes to image search. The world’s largest search engine hopes to do for image search what it did for regular text search–make it a whole lot more reliable. How it plans to do this is outlined in a new research paper written by two Google scientists. According to the NYT: The company said that in its research it had concentrated on the 2000 most popular product queries on Google’s product search, words such as iPod, Xbox and Zune. It then sorted the top 10 images both from its ranking system and the standard Google Image Search results. With a team of 150 Google employees, it created a scoring system for image “relevance.” The researchers said the retrieval returned 83 percent less irrelevant images.

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It’s Monday morning and there are no official statements from either Microsoft or Yahoo on the passage of the Microsoft-imposed three week deadline to respond to its takeover offer. (The deadline passed on Saturday.) The Wall Street Journal has a quick assessment of where things stand. Silicon Alley Insider also posts (picking up on an item from AllThingsD) the argument that senior execs within Yahoo want the sale to happen and fear the stock crashing otherwise.

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Bill Slawski analyzed a newly published patent application by Google named Rendering Advertisements with Documents Having One or More Topics Using User Topic Interest Information. In short, the patent application documents methods Google can use to make Google’s contextual ads, AdSense, more behaviorally relevant to the user based on Google Toolbar data. Of course, this is just a patent application it does not mean Google is using any of the methods listed in the application, but it does mean Google has deeply looked at using such methods.

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When it comes to search, Microsoft is ever the egg while Google remains the chicken. Just a week after news of Google amping up its efforts in the world’s largest nation, Microsoft is revealing its plans to make headway into China. But just how serious is Microsoft about this oh-so-important market? Only 100 employees are currently dedicated to Chinese search while Google will be adding 200 to its existing 600 person staff this year with expectations to continue adding to its numbers along those lines in coming years.

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I’ve personally never found Google Product search all that useful, but hopefully that will change now. Google Operating System reports that Google Product Search has undergone a redesign, of some sort. In the past, Google Product Search just showed you results, but did not group stores offering to sell the same product, with reviews and technical specifications. Now, for some searches, Google groups store results, shows reviews on Google and also shows product specifications.

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Anyone who knows the best conspiracy theories of the 20th century can’t blame Dylan Stephen Jayne for trying to sue Google. Every good conspiracy theorist knows that playing certain songs on LPs backwards is a Satanic chant. The number of clues on the Beatles’ Abbey Road and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover that “Paul is Dead” (Paul McCartney) are too numerous to mention. So it must have come as a shock to the Conspiracy Theory community that Google prevailed in an appeal of the most bizarre lawsuit ever filed against the search engine.

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Yahoo recently announced that they are moving away from a $0.10 fixed minimum CPC to a variable minimum bid. However, there are some differences in how Yahoo calculates minimum bids tcompared to AdWords. These differences are important to note as you switch between these PPC engines so that each account is properly optimized for each engine according to how the bids are calculated.

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In today’s online world search engine rankings can make your business succeed, and while rankings in Yahoo and MSN are very valuable, their combined market value is still less than that of Google. This makes achieving top rankings in Google that much more important. In this three-part series on How to Optimize for Google we will touch on a number of important aspects for top Google rankings including website optimization, links, Google Webmaster tools, and a number of other considerations. The focus of Part 1 will be with on page website optimization.

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A variety of interesting research papers on search have come out of WWW2008, the 17th International World Wide Web Conference. Some I’ve blogged already. Below is a rundown on those and some other papers that may be of interest. For the attention-challenged, I’ve also included my now patented “Twitter” summary for some of the interesting or more accessible papers, to tell you the highlights.

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A new research paper from Yahoo and Cornell University — with search legend Jon Kleinberg as one of the coauthors — provides a fascinating look at how a search query such as “red sox” or “hurricane deal” can be centered around a physical location — including one that changes over time.

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