SEO Dance

Everytime Ask.com goes through changes, it makes me miss Jeeves that much more. Their latest rebirth, though, might be the closest thing to their former search engine.

Ask.com has decided to stop trying to compete with Google. They will retool their website to appeal to married women. Women will be able to find a recipe, find help with their children’s homework, and other related topics. Ask.com will be returning to its original idea of answering questions that are relevant to women’s issues.

In 1996, Ask established itself as a search engine that people could ask questions and find relevant results. Ask would display a list of questions to help narrow down search results and display only relevant results.

Ask will lay off 40 people, about 8% of its workforce.

I believe this to be a good move for Ask.com. What made them unique was their natural-language search engine, where people could ask questions and find exactly what they are looking for. I was coming around to the new Ask.com since their relaunch last year. It is a good search engine service but for plain search results, it’s hard to beat Google. Sadly, that’s what most people are looking for - just search results - not related content or songs they might be interested in because of their search.

Being 5th when it comes to search engines, this restructure of Ask.com seems like a wise move. To be able to focus on one area could possibly generate more loyal users. Moms are always busy. To have a search engine that can find what information they need without having to sort through pages of search results should be quite popular. Now if only Ask.com will bring back Jeeves.

Software giant Microsoft is once again vying to buy Yahoo! Friday Microsoft offered Yahoo! 44.6-billion-U.S.-dollar merger offer, or 31 dollars per share. If the sales goes through, could the combined forces of Microsoft and Yahoo! dethrone the king of search engines Google?

The La Times has an interesting story where it puts the search engines to the test for the search word coffee.

It’s hard to imagine that even the dominant Microsoft teaming up with Yahoo! could take down Google and become king of searches. The search results for Yahoo! might be just as good, or even better for some keywords, than Google, but it will take a huge campaign to convince Google die hards to turn their browsers away their favorite search engine.

For more details on the Microsoft/Yahoo! merger, check this news story.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales launches the much anticipated search engine, Wikia. Wikia search is an alpha stage but with its simple design could gain popularity in the search engine world.

Wikia is a long way from dethroning Google and still needs a lot of work admits the folks at Wikia. It’s fun to play with new search engines. I like to search my name and was sad to not see anything related to me or the two words I typed in the first page of results.

So for now I will not be getting rid of Google, Yahoo! or even MSN as search tools. Still Wikia will be one to keep an eye on in the future.

Social networking is hot right now, so it only stands to reason that taking part in various social platforms will help you get recognized. Websites like Twitter can provide an easy way to update your website content on the fly. A new service, Utterz, looks to rival Twitter with a few neat tricks up its sleeve.

Once you get past the cow puns (utter, be herd, etc), Utterz is a fun service that lets you share pictures, audio, and video content. You can add tags to your media as well as a caption. You can also update your Utterz page from your cell phone, making this an equally appealing option as Twitter.

Of course, Utterz has widgets galore that allow you to showcase your latest utter on you blog or blogs. Once you’ve set it up for display, you can submit your website for consideration to be featured on Utterz. Utterz might still be in beat but shows a lot of promise. All of the social networking perks are built in to Utterz. Build your profile, share your favorite websites, send messages, invite friends, etc. There is plenty to explore with Utterz. With being able to share photos, videos, or even audio makes it a more dynamic choice for the “what are you doing?” type of social network services.

Add connections, send out notifications, and other interesting ideas are right at your fingertips. While Twitter may be more well known, look for Utterz, with all of its features, to start showing up on social networks and blogs.

In the news this week, Microsoft unveils a new search engine, Tafiti, which means “do research” in Swahili. The new search engine is geared toward more people doing research than the average web surfer.

Here is a roundup of stories on search engines and what they are doing right and wrong.

This past week the Search Engine Strategies conference was held in San Jose, CA. Here is another roundup of stories of news from SES August 23rd.

There is so much to read and catch up on. This week has been a little hectic around here. Hopefully I can find a break from moving this weekend and get a good handle on the SEO news of the week.

Some of search engine news making headlines this week ending June 23rd.

Comscore.com releases U.S. search engine rankings for May 2007. Google gains ground while Yahoo! stays the same.

Google partners will Dell to make their Google search engine appliance. The rack-mounted yellow server uses Google algorithms to index a company’s entire infrastructure. Google says that pay having Dell build the appliance will allow Google to focus more on the software.

Microsoft to tweak Vista’s search after complaints filed by Google claim the program slows down competing desktop search engine programs.

eBay is once again buying Google ads after a dispute between the two Internet giants over Google’s plan to throw a protest party because eBay doesn’t allow Google checkout to pay for auctions.

Web Targeted, a Utah SEO firm, has a new home at SEO.com. The new domain wasn’t cheap. The purchase price was $5 million. Dave Bascom leads Web Targeted and has been reported as believing this domain name will help to give his company an edge in the fiercely competitive world of search engine optimization services.

There is no doubt that some web surfers looking to learn more about search engine optimization will blindly type in SEO.com. A great domain name is only a part of the equation to garner a true web presence. It’ll be interesting to see if the high ticket priced domain actually pays off for the company.

Here are a few stories making the news this week. Google makes news on a couple of fronts and another search engine prepares to launch.

Google responds to privacy concerns. Google was recently rated “worse on the web” when it comes to their privacy policy. Google has sent a letter to the group addressing their concerns. One of the concerns was the amount of time Google keeps search engine reports. Google officials say that they are working on to implement that after 18 months the collected data will be stripped of any compromising information.

Powerset to launch a natural language search engine. Startup Powerset’s natural language search engine looks to make keyword searches a thing of the past. Powerset will let users type in a sentence or thought into the search engine and return results based on that. Powerset hasn’t launched yet but people can sign up to be notified when they do launch as well as get a sneak peek at the service.

eBay pulls ads from Google. eBay, outraged over Google’s plan to throw a party in Boston for eBay auctioneers and buyers, pulled their ads from the search engine giant. The party was supposed to be a protest of sorts since eBay doesn’t offer Google Checkout as one of the payment options. eBay owns PayPal, the checkout service they do offer. Google has since apologized for the debacle. eBay hasn’t yet put their ads back on Google.

Search engine ads are projected to lose market share within five years. An interesting article that says more advertisers are preferring video ads.

Mahalo, the human powered search engine, is looking for savvy part-time researchers. The Greenhouse program will pay users to research a result page. Candidates who qualify for the Greenhouse program will be paid between $10-$15 for each search result. The ideal candidates will have experience with Wikipedia or other social media website.

The Mahalo team consists of 40 full-time editors who will oversee the search results submitted from the Greenhouse researchers. Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis reports that over 4,000 search results have been covered and that another 500 are added weekly.

To apply to become a part-time guide, fill out the Greenhouse application form at Mahalo.com.

Sometimes I get nostalgic for the good ole days of AskJeeves. It was so nice just to ask Jeeves a question, and he would return categorized results. When Ask.com dropped Jeeves, their search engine seemed to lose all appeal to me as my searches never turned up anything useful.

Ask.com has undergone a web metamorphosis and not only has a new look but a re-engineered approach to searching the World Wide Web. The new look is clean and simple. If that white background isn’t for you, then click on “skins” to add some color to it. The “advanced” tab allows you to search for words in a website’s title or URL. You can also limit a search to one domain. This could be very useful if you visited a website and can’t find some information that you had read previously.

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ReviewMe, the pay per approved review service from the Text-Link-Ads creators, has an ongoing promotion both for advertisers and reviewers.

New advertisers who would like to get their sites or products and services reviewed to boost their online presence can enter the special coupon code “trial” at the coupon code upon checkout to avail of a 50% discount.

What is it for bloggers or publishers? 100% of the review payout goes to the blogger.

This is only good for the whole month of February. Better start purchasing those ReviewMe reviews now.

Reviewme, paid reviews, blog monetization, Reviewme promo

The Best Links in Life are Free.

Don’t you agree?

Tino Buntic is one of those bloggers who is indirectly advocating this. His project of linking to 2000 Bloggers in one page has been doing mojo to the Technorati rankings of those he has linked to.

If you’re on the 2000 list already, check your Technorati rankings; they’ve been increasing for everybody (that’s a nice unintended benefit). if you’ve just been added, check Technorati in a few days and you’ll see that your own rankings are increasing as well.

If you’d like to join in the fun and grab yourself some sweet link together with other 1,999 bloggers, leave a comment to Tino Buntic’s blog post - 2000 bloggers.

via Work-at-Home Business Opportunities

DMOZ Open Directory Project is a collaborative effort of thousands of directory editors, which has just stopped from accepting submissions. The search engine marketing industry has speculated that it has reached the end of it because of a wide plethora of controversial reasons.

But just recently, Search Engine Roundtable reported that forum members discovered that DMOZ ODP has reopened for submissions. Yes, the unavailable page does not show anymore like it used to. I have just witnessed it myself and submitted this blog to DMOZ just a few minutes ago!

Websites submitted to the DMOZ Open Directory Project benefit from the inbound links whenever other directories who use the results of this open source directory get spidered or crawled by search engine bots (little critters that check out updated data and helps in indexing a website).

DMOZ OPD, DMOZ submission, directory submission, open directory

Domainers, the enthusiasts of the domain name industry, who buy and sell domain names are gaining more from the domain name market as time passes by. Domain name transactions are a proof to this.

Just recently, Domain Name Values Weekly revealed the Top 20 Domain Name Transactions of 2006 by polling 30 domain name experts.

The leading criteria for the rankings? Which domain sale will provide the most value for the buyer over the long-term (4+ years).

Here are the top 20 domain name transactions according to domain name experts:

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At least according to David Temple, because he has another view of who should really be noted as the Person of the Year..

I’ll tell you which of you is the person of the year. While you are cryin’ because your YouTube wasn’t dugg, or your linkbait didn’t work, or wondering whether Britney was wearing underwear or not, American men and women are fighting a war!

Too much for imagining people taking a stand ovation for you after reading that Time’s linkbait, huh?

But if you have been one netizen who generate content for the Internet for the good of the afflicted, then, yeah, you’re right YOU really are worthy of being labeled as the Person of the Year.

person of the year, NY Times, David Temple, social media