Search Engine Optimization News Blog

Twitter continues to rise in popularity, and 3rd party sites/tools are offering the potential for massive use of the site, including fully utilizing the networking ability of Twitter.

These are the best overall tools you can use to maximize your twitter time:

Twitter Local – This is a simple 3rd party client that lets you see tweets from Twitter users based on location. You can keep up to date on breaking news events, weather updates and other such information easily in any location.

Twellow – Twellow displays Twitter users organized by their industry. This helps you decide ‘who should I follow on Twitter?’ – especially if you use it as a networking tool for your business.

Twellowhood – This is connected to Twellow, and lets you see what Twitterers live in any location that you choose to investigate.

TweepSearch – If you have 1,000 people following you and need to see how many are working in internet market, you can use this handy tool to sort your followers and categorize them.

Twitter Search – This is the basic; it works well and can be implemented in almost any situation for incredible results.

People Search on Twitter – People were overjoyed last year when Twitter brought back this function which allows you to search for people on Twitter.

These sites and tools should help you better network with others on Twitter. And if you suddenly in the market for a new job, these tools can help you there as well!

Two search engines have also launched that have worked out an authority filter on Twitter info. They are called Twitority and Twithority, and don’t sort by the same criteria. The idea is that tweets are ranked according to an algorithm based more on authority than popularity.

Twitority lets you sort your search results by any authority: “any”, “little” or “a lot” in descending or ascending popularity. There are no live update of search results and no RSS feeds offered.

Twithority displays search results in two columns: by rank, using the authority algorithm, and by time which is simply the most recent results for your query. There is an RSS feed from each column, but no real time update.

Start implementing this valuable tool!

For at least fifteen minutes in the morning all searches in Google returned results with a warning “This site may harm your computer”.  All the websites listed in the search results were flagged with this warning. Users of Google were also wondering if Google has been hacked. Few others were wondering if all servers of Google have crashed. Users from various countries including Canada, India, Japan, Turkey, Portugal and Thailand noticed this problem. During this problem, Firefox was well for a short time was blocking access to the flagged sites. The problem was noticed only with Google’s website search results; Google news and other blog searches were still working fine.

This issue was approximately started by 9:00 am EST and was recurring for at least fifteen to twenty minutes many regular users of Google as well had started using Yahoo to get the desired search results. This has certainly become a threat for Google and immediate attention towards the issue could be the only way to have the users of Google retained. There might have been economic losses as well as for a search giant serving millions of users all over  the world with millions of queries and search results every second being in a situation when no user uses and clicks on the search result (that too for twenty minutes) would have certainly cost more.

Looking at what had happened today with regard to Google search results, millions of users all over the have been worrying and were wondering on what alternative can be used to replace Google’s service. Though Google’s service has been remarkable over all its lifetime, users were still forced to use Yahoo and other search engines to get their work done. Investors who have invested their money on this search giant have also been wondering if there would be any change in their share values because of the problem that took place today. It was a problem for website owners as well to a certain extent as users searching for specific keywords did not visit their websites despite the fact that they were ranking top on Google’s search results expecting more traffic. This would have also affected them in small percentages.

The problems are no more noticed and everything was repaired very quickly. All searches seem to be functioning normally now. However, the media and the users are all still awaiting Google’s explanation on the cause for the problem. Everyone is also curious to know about what security precautions have been taken to avoid such issues in the future. Though nothing has been officially announced, few online media reports guess that Google was probably working on its latest anti-malware and were in the process of testing it. However, Google as of now has just said that they are not sure on why the problem occurred but that have said that they would explain in later. Answering to questions raised by BBC News a Google’s spokes person has said, “There was a fault. We don’t know the nature of it yet. Everything has been solved. We are still making initial enquiries”.

Google has released an update to their popular Ad Planner traffic model, to help media buyers improve their advertising campaigns. The updates include:

1.  Altered ‘Unique Visitors’ to ‘Unique Visitors (users)’ so you can see the estimated numbers of real world visitors.

2.  Added the ‘Unique Visitors (cookies)’ metric, which can help you cross-check and compare metrics like you can with Google Analytics’ unique visitor metrics.

3.  Put Unique Visitors (cookies) and Unique Visitors (users) metrics on a site’s profile page allowing users to have a broader overview of how a specific site can support their media planning.

4.  Added demographics for Australia, Brazil, Japan, and Switzerland, bringing the demographics total to ten countries.

5.  Created Pre-defined Audiences (representing commonly used audiences). Users can now run experiments using various criteria without having to go through manual selection.

In the official Google AdWords blog, Trevor Claiborne, Inside AdWords crew member, reminded us that:

Our goal is to provide you with the most accurate site information for better planning and decision-making, and we’re excited to kick off the new year with an improved traffic estimation model as well as several other features.

The new traffic estimation model should help reduce some of the confusion that often surrounds tracking the number of unique visitors to your site. When creating campaigns, many advertisers use media planning tools, including Ad Planner, to look at unique visitors based on estimates of real world users.

However, publishers typically rely on web server logs or web analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, to measure unique visitors based on cookie counts. Discrepancies arise when these two types of unique visitors are compared. …our new model improves our traffic estimates. You’ll notice our page view estimates are now more accurate and consistent with web server measurements.

Hopefully this tool will continue to improve throughout 2009.

A recent update to Google’s browser Chrome managed to sidestep an issue with Hotmail. Hotmail had been barring the competitor’s browser from entering by checking the user agent. This is unfortunately not uncommon, and is implemented simply because some sites assume certain browsers can’t cope with their HTML/JavaScript/stylesheets. Chrome got around the block by implementing a change which makes it appear more like a Safari browser when encountering *.mail.live.com.

Google’s Matt Cutts spoke up on the issue:

Normally you think of web pages being faster to update than client-side software downloads. In this case though, Chrome updates near-weekly, much faster than Hotmail did. Another illustration that velocity and speed of iteration matter.

Omar Shahine, who claimed he’s a Microsoft employee, came back with a rebuttal:

That’s a rather naive statement. You think that Hotmail is a web page and you expect a service with hundreds of millions of users and thousands of servers to stop what it’s doing, fix a bug for a browser that the majority of its customers do not use, and spin up an out of band release? We’ve already committed to addressing this issue in our next service release (already started to roll out to the site) which IMHO is an acceptable reaction.

Matt again:

The equivalent code on the Hotmail side would be if (user-agent == Chrome) { render_mode = Safari; } . Hotmail has had months to do this simple change and hasn’t.

Google’s Mark Larson weighed in on the Chrome update note, saying they’re deploying this new workaround “While the Hotmail team works on a proper fix”.

One can’t really make a blanket statement that Microsoft was sabotaging competition. It could be that they just have different priorities than making sure they are compatible with Google Chrome … although it has been pointed out that a similar problem with IE would likely have been fixed almost immediately. (What? Microsoft favoring their own product over Google‘s? You don‘t say!) .

Then again, it could be that Microsoft is simply committed to thorough testing for every new browser. Chrome does make use of rendering agent Webkit (which is also used in other browsers), but Microsoft may see enough differences to feel it warrants checking it in detail.

A new search engine named Sagoon has been launched recently and it reads that is still in beta stage. As of now, it has a very clean feel with no graphic elements and no clutter what so ever. The layout is very simple and neat and hence appealing to the eye. The clean layout makes us expect a lot from this new search engine. It has five search categories or options namely web, news, video, directory and classifieds.

From the outset, we are not sure whether this new search engine has the capability to crawl the World Wide Web or whether it is just scrapping results from various search engine acting just like another meta search engine. In its launch press release that it does state that it uses Sagoon’s own index, Yahoo Boss and other larger companies in the online information industry. It carefully avoids using Google in its press release.

When a search was tried in this new search engine, the order of the results varied from the Google’s search results. This indicates that it is not powered by Google. However, when you make a search you will be in for surprise because, on to the right you will see, “Ads by Google” under sponsor links. This makes us feel that Sagoon is not as big as it projects itself in the home page; it is trying to generate revenue from Google adsense. They should have rather tried something different to build their brand name.

However, the search results are arranged in a very neat fashion and no clutter what so ever, every listing is separated by a separator line. When a search is made, you will get options for browsing images and videos as well. Sagoon has its headquarters in Washington DC and its regional office in New Delhi.

In the About Us page, they promise the following, “We are also in the process of adding unique features by developing semantic search and natural language processing. Our artificial intelligence technology, moreover, assesses user needs and demands in order to provide them the best quality content that they are looking for.”

When it does come up with a semantic search features, then it will be a great contribution to the online search industry. It will change the entire search trend and it will affect the way websites are promoted online to get good rankings in search engines.

Does Sagoon have the potential to compete with the search industry giants, Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL? We need to wait and see show this new search engine fairs in meeting the users needs. Will it be as intuitive as Google? That is the litmus test for its success or failure. Whether we like it or not we end up comparing all the search engines with Google and it is not without reasons. Google has proved itself to be the master of the online search industry. It will be a worthwhile goal to compete with this online search giant.