01.06.2009
Search Engine News
Whew this month was a hell of a ride wasn’t it? I think May is enough to get us all hyped up for the next couple of months. We got an answer engine who looks promising, a “bling” search engine on the way, and a new real-time communication & collaboration product from the Big G!
New Competitors on the Rise
Last May 16th, Wolram Alpha was released. There was so much hype about it becoming the next Google Competitor. It still has some search errors but definitely a promising “answer-engine”. After its release, we’ve seen a mixture of reactions. Before it’s release everybody seemed to have anticipated it to be the next Google contender but unfortunately Wolfram found a niche of its own (or so I think it has). Matt Asay has an interesting say on Wolfram and its architecture of failure. While Rafe Needleman is quite positive that Wolfram Alpha Does What Google Can’t. What’s your take on this people, let me know your judgment.
Santosh Jayaram, Twitter’s Vice-President, has announced that Twitter Search will soon be able to crawl links posted on the site as well as index the content pages which may result to their own ranking system. So real time search plus ranking system will definitely put Twitter Search on a spot against Google (in some way I think).
Windows Live Search initially announced that they will be releasing a new search engine under the brand name, Kumo (which in Japanese means “cloud” or “spider”). read more
26.05.2009
Search Engine Optimization
So while I was busy lining up topics to cope with the long absence of blog posts and coming up with both offline and online marketing strategies for client sites, I stumbled on a blog post by Tom Gara, Is SEO our Friend? Enemy? Frenemy? Well it really got my attention when he said:
SEO is the bad guy here. It is the reason that you can rarely find what you want on “commercial” google searches.
What you really want when you type “computer stores in Dubai” is to find a great blog post or newspaper article, written by somebody who knows and cares, listing the city’s best computer stores. Sure, someone like CompuMe or Jumbo Electronics could spend more money on getting to the front page, but then, so can anyone, including some random page of googlebait whose entire business model is to get clicks from google searches and surround useless information with ads. “
Google rocks when it comes to factual information (finding a company website or wikipedia entry or whatever), but type in “boutique hotel in Hong Kong” or “cheapest flights from Dubai to London” and you will get page after page of spam – spam that has been well optimised to make it to the front page of google search results.
Of course, I had to leave a comment to somehow defend my profession but I felt like that wasn’t enough. So here’s my take on Tom’s article. read more
30.03.2009
Search Engine Optimization
About 3 months ago, while planning for topics in the launch of Click-Dubai.Com, I conducted a survey to get to know the top search engines used within the UAE and Middle East regions.
In today’s settings it would have been wise to have channeled that poll through Twitter but back then I tried my LinkedIn network through their useful Answers section. Fortunately, my connections were generous enough to share their insights.
Oh before we go to the results, one thing I forgot is to set the parameters of the poll like naming only the top 3. But instead I laid down a generic question that prompted the participants to provide as many search engine names they think are popular within the region (I don’t know if that’s good or bad, but it did arrive to a certain conclusion nevertheless). read more
