10e20 Blog

I’ll admit it, I am a search addict. I search all day long morning, noon and night; on the move on my mobile, at home and at work.

Each day, 7 days a week, I spend no less than 4 hours conducting well over 150 queries, searching and scanning search engine result pages 2, 3, 4 even 10 pages deep. Organic results, I can’t get enough of them.  Descriptions, domains, URLs, Titles; I’m sick and obsessed with them. I search at least 4 different search engines , 6 social media and bookmarking sites, 3 social news sites, 2 blog search engines and 3 comparison shopping sites every day. Web, images, video, books, you name it, I search it.

I search until my eyes hurt and are bloodshot, ’til I have a headache, my fingers hurt, my arms tingle with pins and needles, my elbows are sore and my legs feel numb. Then I search more, almost until I forget to go to the bathroom.

I remember when I first experienced the power of the Internet. I was in middle school hanging out with a friend. We decided to use the computer in my father’s office and got online to chat. Of course that led to starting trouble within the chat room and getting kicked out, but the feeling of connecting (even if it was very juvenile and idiotic) was lasting.

Well both myself and the internet have evolved since then (thankfully). We are in the midst of Web 2.0. I mean, look at who Time’s person of the year in 2006 was- it was me, or was it you?

Now you can sell your handmade t-shirts to someone in California, post a video so millions can see it, raise money for a certain candidate or cause or even connect with a classmate that now lives in Boston.

Yesterday I spoke with Alex Pham from the Los Angeles Times for an article she was doing about Jason Calacanis’ new “search engine” called Mahalo. The article was published today and I am quoted in it:

Calacanis, a New York native who lives in Brentwood, said Mahalo didn’t have to keep up with everything — just things that most interest people.

“It will take some time to complete, but when it’s done, it will be glorious,” he said. “Until then, we invite people to compare our results with any search engine out there. For results that we do have, they’re going to be five to 10 times better because humans have thought about them.”

Mahalo faces other challenges. With editors behind each search, there’s the opportunity for bias, said Chris Winfield, president of 10e20, a New York search-marketing firm.

What goes through your mind when you read about the silly lawsuits against Google accessing portions of your website? What do you think when you visit the Internet Wayback Machine and find hundreds of pages of your site in its full form (almost)? Most of you wonder what is going on in the minds of these clueless people. Don’t they understand how the web works?

That’s right, folks. In case you’re not in the know, the web works in a certain way. A brand new site generally does not get indexed in search engines for a period of months. Over time, the search spiders find your site and your interlinked pages begin getting crawled. Eventually, someone will search for something and your website will hopefully come up.

A link for Image Results for darrent williams is the first link you see. Right underneath it lies three pictures of Darrent Williams. Think about the traffic those sites are going to get as a result of people clicking on those images and then through to their sites. The lesson - optimize your images.

For more information on optimizing images for search engines take a look at Grant Crowell’s recent post on SearchEngineWatch appropriately titled Optimizing Images for Search Engines.

It may be impractical to start a search engine in the US with Google’s stronghold within the country, but other countries are aspiring to become national search powers, with French President Jacques Chirac’s acknowledgment that “We must take up the challenge posed by the American giants Google and Yahoo.” Initially dubbed as a “European search engine,” Germany and France are parting ways to create their own search engines. Germany will have a search engine called “Theseus,” and France’s search engine will be called “Quaero.”

The year 2007 will be interesting to follow with these competing engines, especially in light of China and Japan doing the same. Has Google already reached its peak? I’d say so.

Actually, if they do, it’s news to me.

But I found this comment on their blog about Black Friday extremely interesting:

Start by typing “Black Friday” into Ask.com’s Blog & Feed search. You’ll find blog postings everywhere about Black Friday sales. See a blog you like? Just hit that pull-down menu and subscribe to it on your preferred service. We let you subscribe via Bloglines, Google, Yahoo, even AOL… it doesn’t matter to us. We’re uniters, not dividers.

We’re uniters, not dividers?

Where were you when the sitemaps standard became the norm? How come I haven’t heard that Ask.com is adopting the same standard as Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google? Do they unite only on certain fronts?

I’m really confused.

The October search results are in. According to Nielsen//NetRatings report on the Top US Search Providers, Google is still on top. Of searches within the US, Google has 49.6% of the search engine market share and a 23% increase from last year. In second place comes Yahoo! with 23.9% of all searches but a 30% growth index over the past year. Ask.com, too, went up in usage over the year — 25%. At 2.8%, Ask.com is at #5 behind MSN/Windows Live Search and AOL, but the 25% jump is pretty significant. (My guess is it had to do with its aggressive commercial campaigns.)

MSN, on the other hand, seems to have seen an 8% decrease over the year — which is unfortunate because it’s working on improving itself. I’m interested in seeing how this will play out over the coming months.

Often times in the SEO business and even in personal website endeavors, we run into the question of why only some pages are indexed in the search engine results and others not. Waiting is a big deal — returns just never seem immediate. We wonder how to make our pages indexed faster and consider submitting directly to the search engine to expedite the crawl. We wonder when the site is finally partially indexed if Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft will ever reach those pages that are clearly linked on a page that was already indexed. We realize that there’s more we can do but wonder what format in which a site should be submitted to each individual search engine and we curse under our breaths because the format requirements were different for Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. (Didn’t we just design a site and already deal with formatting inconsistencies between Internet Explorer and Firefox? Why this?!)

Google is everywhere. From its desire to publish ads in newspapers to its move to position itself in the radio market to Eric Schmidt’s statement that “Your mobile phone should be free” (since Google ads will pay for cell phones, of course), one sincerely wonders where Google is headed next. Are we in for an ad-based world where every media element that surrounds us is infiltrated by Google?

Google is a search company, but from its recent announcements of saturating traditional media, it is also a serious marketing company. There’s no doubt that they want to monetize anywhere and everywhere. But where should the line be drawn? With Google positioning itself so firmly in everyday media, it’s questionable where they’re headed. What’s next? Popular books with ad excerpts by Google — because it’s simply possible (and because they’re Google)? Will Google create another ReviewMe? They certainly have the capital to fund and compete well with the recently-launched service and can compensate their participants well (the YouTube deal closed today for $1.775 billion, not the original $1.65 billion), including providing their participants with products they’d want reviews from. That essentially allows Google to kill two birds with one stone…