SES New York: Andrew Tomkins, Chief Scientist at Yahoo

I’m sitting next to Lisa Barone and was going to try a live blogging race against her – sadly, the wi-fi is out and so we’ve agreed to draw. At least; I suggested that while Feeder blasted out from the speakers and The Lisa nodded and so I’m claiming the draw! Woot!

Instead I’ll bash this into Word and copy’n’paste over.

Andrew begins by offering us a detailed walkthrough of Yahoo’s vision of the next generation of search.

• Internet firmly moved from a curiosity to a substrate for life
• Content growing, changing, diversify, fragmenting
• Searching evolving in response
• Value migrating to ecosystem
• Semantics of content unlocking the value in the ecosystem

I don’t even know what he means by ‘substrate for life’.

No one ever goes online just to search – he says, wrong, I think as I do! – but Andrew explains that search is a tool that people use to get what they want.

His example begins with someone coming online to book a holiday in Tuscany. They start by searching Google! They hadn’t heard of Yahoo Search yet, he says. Hee. (I said ‘hee’ – I wonder if that’s the Lisa Barone effect). Don’t worry... the searcher winds up at Yahoo Search eventually and develops an addiction to Italian coffee.

Now we’ve got the searcher looking for information on how to make those glorious espressos. Oh no! The searcher really can’t make a decision. He’s no price confidence but finally, after checking a price aggregator, makes a decision and a purchase. Oh no! Now he has a limescale problem... and starts searching again.

Boy! I’m never going on holiday with this sample searcher. What a nervous ninny!

Yahoo thinks today we’re seeing

• Increasing migration of content online
• New formsof mediaavailable online
• Something I was too slow to write down

Things to notice

• Long-running user goals
• Search as a hub:
• Start there
• Return for resource discovery and at task boundaries
• Traverse the web broadly to compete task
• Web service integrated into the task

Gosh! I’m also sitting next to Eric from Stone Temple. Wozah!

Yahoo mentions substrate – should look this up. Oh! Perhaps I’ll twitter it.

How much content is produced each and every day?

• Published Content: 3-4Gb
• Professional web content: ~2Gb
• User generated content: ~8-10Gb
• Private text content: ~3Tb
• Upper bound on typed content: 700Tb

Users began to dominate content creation in terms of quantity five years ago.

Private Text content includes things like emails, IMs and intranet content. Upper bound on typed content is all the stuff that people type every day – you know, at work. Yahoo notes that we’re therefore miles away from getting close to that amount online.

How much 'meta data' is produced each day?

• Anchor text: 100M
• Tags: 40M
• Pageviews: 180GB
• Reviews: 10MB

Anchor texts have been the most important signal in search for 10 years. Tags aren’t likely to change the nature of search because Yahoo expect the data amounts to plateau. By tags he means as on YouTube and delicious; not meta data tags.

The big one will be Pageviews – Toolbars are used to collect trails.

• Content consumption is fragmenting – nobody owns more than 10% of WW of PVs. Yahoo has the most
• No single place will own all the content.
• Best of breed processing will operate on the web version (?)
• Value transitions to ecosystem

Yahoo’s mocking me by showing slides too complex to blog about. He’s talking about content consumption and how it’s fragmented. They’ve... er, scraped(?) LiveJournal interests and matched it against ages. I’m glad I censored all my LiveJournal interests. The over 57s are interested in death, cheese and cats.

Arhg! Facebook slide. Andrew has shared his cell phone with everyone in the MIT group which is 22,504 users. Woah. I wonder if he gets many calls. Andrew’s point is that we’re not used to this level of access control and as we become more aware of this we’ll see stress and tension on the infrastructure.

We’re used to reading whole web pages but now, with AJAX, we’re used to a more fragmented experience. He draws the parallel with the “choose your own adventure” concept. Woot. I wonder if he’s a fellow gamer.

Now we’re looking at the search interface... and understanding that the number of publishers has increased hugely.

• Few changes through 2005
• Entering period of massive change to change more complex content
• Rich media, aggregation, simple task analysis, etc
• Moving beyond the stateless query/response paradigm
• Personalization theory

Although the web grew hugely to begin with the paradigm stayed the same... until now. He’s cautious of the term ‘personalization’ as it’s easy to wreck with rogue data.

Andrew shows a Yahoo slide (I remember what Yahoo looks like – I still go there) and the Yahoo Assist layer. He’s showing someone searching for the movie “the game plan”. What does the searcher want? Do they want show times, trailers, reviews or something else? The top of the Yahoo search space is used to aggregate the ambiguous tasks to try and answer those questions. Not just Yahoo who’ve been trying these things... he shows Microsoft example (good move; keep Microsoft sweet) and then shows Google’s flight search.

• Structured database power a vast majority of pages of the web
• Certainly ecommerce catalogs
• But also user generate content (eg blogs)
• Content owners open to exposing structure, but don’t see how and why
• Microformats adoption at an all-time high
• Yet, it’s produced much more...
• Waaah... he’s going too fast.

The Killer App

• Wide-ranging support for semantic web standards
• Vocabulary to surface structure and semantics
• Community tools to evolve standards and vocabulary

What is the Killer App? Search

• Publishers and search engines collaborate
• Users see richer search experience
• Accomplish their tasks faster and move effectively

Ha-ah? Want an example; let’s look at the enhanced Yelp results (I wonder if he also eats cheese steaks?). The babycenter.com site is similar in presentation; a mashup of images, links and textual advice. In fact there are loads; New York Times, Gawker, others...

Andrew reckons the LinkedIn example is suggestive of what might happen with ‘people search’ in the future. LinkedIn is a Yahoo partner. Didn’t know that...

• Microformats
• hCard, hEvent, hReview, hAtom, XFN
• More as they get adopted
• RDFa and eRDF markup
• OpenSearch
• +extensions to return structured data
• Atom/RSS feeds
• +extensions to embed structured data

Yahoo thinks this is the future; using microformats to prevent structured meta data about content to search engines. So what do we put in this data set?

• dataRSS provides a common framework for embedding structured data
• Use with RDFa, eRDF or OpenSearch
• Preferred Vocabulary includes
• Atom, Dublin Core
• Creative Commons
• FOAF, GeoRSS...
• He’s going too fast again...

Yahoo will be announcing a set of tools and wants people to work together to agree on standards (and not let be dominated by ‘one’ Search Engine. Don’t know who that could be.)

• Yahoo! Open search platform does not modify ranking
• Richer abstracts may provide more information to users and draw higher quality/quantity of clicks
• We want rich abstracts that give users a better experience
• We don’t want misleading abstracts

So Yahoo are really announcing a new form of SEO where content owners try and get shiny and attractive abstracts into the SERPs which attract clicks. Yahoo would like them and content owners to come to an agreement with what makes a good abstract. When that agreement is in place then they’ll work together to keep the good stuff in and the bad stuff out.

In fact, anyone on the web can make use of a self-service model to upload their abstracts and then anyone interested in this can subscribe to those recommendations. Ah-ah; this sounds like Google’s Subscription Links offering.

Let’s look at the ‘whole story’

• User needs becoming more complex
• Content growing, changing, diversifying, fragmenting
• Search responding by increase in sophistication
• Value migrating to ecosystem
• Unlock the value by enabling interoperability – expose semantics

Is the HTTP and HTML system the right model any more? Yahoo thinks... maybe not. Something more complex may be needed. As a result the value is moving to the ‘ecosystem’ and therefore the ‘quick win’ here is to expose the data content publishers may have locked away but which could be presented to the search engine.

Wow! What a long write up. I think that was the best key note yet. Andrew shared a lot of ideas and I’ve a really good vision of what Yahoo is up to now.

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McAnerin to Patent an SEO Technique? - IPGeoTarget

Ian McAnerin is a smart guy. On Thursday he announced a competition to help come up with the best name for his patent pending technique.

The trademark-safe name for the product is going be IPGeoTarget. It was a lucky Jill Whalen who won the prize (a hundred bucks).

We don't actually know the solution that Ian's trying to patent but we know the problem and his answer to it. The problem is fairly common in corporate SEO. If you're a dot-com and hosted in America but want to rank on engines like Google.co.uk then you'll be in trouble. Why? The initial geographic signals from your site will suggest that you're an American one rather than a British one. Sure, there are other signals that Google looks at (domain name records for example) but if your sever is in the wrong place then you have a mountain to climb.

Ian suggests three common solutions.

• register a ccTLD (not popular due to branding issues)
• host in the target country (not popular with head office, usually for political reasons)
• park a ccTLD on the .com (complicated, slow, and easy to mess up)

Ian also correctly points out that there are problems with all three. His solution looks like a plug in piece of technology that makes it look as if your site is in the UK (for example) even if your server is in the States.

There are other solutions to the three Ian listed - for example, putting a proxy server in the UK and pointing that to your main server. When the search engines try and check the geography associated with the IP address they'll (likely) to get the UK. Even this solution can be complicated and messy for big corporate clients. Some of us have software solutions in place to try and make this as easy as possible.

I think I should point out that I have every expectation that Google is going to make it much easier for webmasters to signal who the appropriate geographic audience for the site (in natural search) is.

Hopefully we'll end up with a really useful service from McAnerin in the form of IPGeoTarget. Hopefully we won't find tried and tested techniques stuck behind a patent.

Update: Ian's helpfully shed some light on the patent following this post.

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CYC – Claim Your Content

On Thursday I wrote about Cleaner Content. So did The Register.

On Friday Garret Rogers noticed Google claiming “Claim Your Content” domains and variants.

Today, Ionut Alex Chitu drew attention to a YouTube video where John Battelle interviews Eric Schmidt. Schmidt explicitly talks about CYC – Claim Your Content.

I think that’s it. Cleaner Content is Claim Your Content. This may well be an audio issue. The two sound the same!

In the video Eric Schmidt says that he believes Viacom are negotiating with Google. He points out that Google removed all the Viacom videos on request which complies with the DMCA.

Schmidt also says that the future is very much about mobile. Good. I’ve been saying this for a while so I’m glad to have some more “told you so” clout to point to!

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Personal Search

I like the phrase “Personal Search” at it seems to fit in with “Local Search”, “Mobile Search” and “Video Search” … and all the other searches we have out there.

I like the trend we are seeing towards Personalised Search Results / Personalised Search but many SEO agencies and individuals do not. I’m not surprised. Personalised Search Results threaten the concept of ‘high rankings’ as the single goal of search engine optimisation. High rankings should not be the only goal of SEO, though. If your focus is entirely on high rankings then the growth of personalised results threatens your focus. Personalised Search Engine Result Pages - PSERPS? – no, that’s a silly acronym and reminds me too much of Judge Dredd’s “perps”.

One of the reasons I like personalised search results is that it adds some marketing flare to search marketing. I don’t like link buying. In a heavily personalised search environment it is impossible to blast your way to the top for enough terms by link buying. Vanity terms start to count for less. The demographic tail of organic search counts for more. I dislike that “so-called” form of SEO where companies FTP up a bunch of pages to your site. That tactic barely brings in any traffic now. In the future it’ll bring in even less. With personalised results your ethical and clever ideas are even more clever. With personalised results then your savvy demographic targeting is a larger success than it was last year.

So perhaps I like personalised search because it does not harm my organic style of search engine optimisation. For me, SEO has always been about working with the system. Organic search is making sure your site achieves everything it should – and everything it could – in the search environment.

Above all; the thing to remember is that if your website cannot be found in search, in Google, then you’ll never be able to have searchers develop a personalised preference for your site. Organic search engine optimisation comes first and Personalised search engine optimisation is the next stage.

I’ve noticed that many clients and audience members in seminars are worried about Personalised Search though. Typically clients and seminar audiences are pro Google. If Google do something then they want a piece of the action too. The last time I witnessed a negative reaction to a Google offering was over Gmail – people really reacted badly to the idea of targeted adverts in their email. That was, in my opinion, an over reaction compounded by a lack of understanding. I’ve had some interesting questions regarding Personalised Search though.

“What if I don’t want my results personalised?” asked one attendee. It was as if she was happy with Google and did not want it to change. My response to her was to log out of Google or not opt-in to the history recording option. From her reaction I could tell she was not impressed with the options. If you’re a frequent Gmail or Google Calendar user then logging in and logging out all the time is a pain.

“What if I do a lot of online shopping for friends?” asked another. I saw her concern too. If I’m buying something for my mother than I really do not want Google to start personalising my search towards her tastes! This time my response seemed to satisfy the audience better. I spoke of trends and how one or two searches, especially out of character/out of trend searches, would not typically result in Google evolving your personalised preferences.

“If I search a holiday in Greece in the winter and then start to research another holiday for summer… isn’t Google going to show a preference for Greek holiday results? I would want to go somewhere else.” I must admit – that was a good question. It is probably one of those times when personalised results might begin at a disadvantage but, if Google had the sensitivity right, begin to swing around to your way of thinking as you ignored the Greece holiday sites and started to show a preference for another. It is also likely that there would be strong “pro-Greek” signals in your winter search, especially if you knew before your research that you wanted to go to Greece, that would not be there in your summer holiday search.

There were the typical questions from marketers who have employed a search agency and wanted to know whether they could still see if the company was doing a good job for them. The log out and check the “natural organic” results option was there. In addition, search engine optimisation agencies doing a good job will tend to have a positive effect on traffic. Personalised search does not change how you record traffic and other web metrics from your site.

I do like personalised search results but I do wonder whether an opt-out more graceful than simply logging out might be a good idea. If Google’s users like the search quality they get from Google and understand how their results are being personalised to them then I can see why they would want to take an active role in preserving those search results.

Perhaps a “Personal Search” option should be considered by Google. A Personal Search would be one which you did not share with the search engine’s memory. A Personal Search, maybe Private Search is a better term, is one which did not influence your personalised history or search pattern.

I can tell this will be a subject which I’ll find my thoughts drifting back to again and again this year. It is also going to be one which remains a hot topic for a while to come. Just wait until the mainstream marketing media starts to write about it in force.

One final and ironic note, over at Google.co.uk, when Google personalises my results they say I'm getting personalized results. No. I don't spell the word that way. Personalised results but not localised results!

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Designing your RSS for Mobile Devices

I travel a lot. I travel an awful lot. In the UK we have offices in Edinburgh, London and Manchester and I've staff in each one. Around the world we have offices as far a way as New York, Russia and Korea. Needless to say - we've clients in equally as far flung locations!

When I travel I need my BlackBerry. It keeps in touch with email. There's a handy app for Google Maps (though a paper map is always quickly). There's also Google Reader Mobile. Many ARHG readers will know what it's like to aggregate (easily) over a hundred RSS posts a day. If I'm away for several days then there can be a mountain of posts to sort though if I don't check the mobile reader.

First off the mobile reader, which you can check via your normal browser, strips away everything apart from the first five RSS headings. If you want, at a click, you can mark these all as read. When you do the reader fetches the next five. It fetches them quickly. Posts are marked as read as you read them unless you click to leave them unread. You read from one post to another.

A really clever bit is that you can select those RSS posts which only offer a summary, click through to the full post but still stay (somewhat) inside the reader. I can read the likes of ZDNet (who don't give away much of their post in the RSS nodes) without having to persuade the BlackBerry's browser to download the normal HTML page.

I highly recommend Google Reader's mobile version.

Could it be better? Sure. Of course! I subscribe to both The Register and Brand Republic because each site is cracking for news. Each site, however, is a very busy RSS feed and when I'm trying to review my RSS at the end of a long day on the BlackBerry I wish there was a way to mark all the posts from any given publisher as read.

There are some RSS feeds that I can't cope with on the mobile reader though. One of my regular reads is Andy Beard. I read his blog because it mixes marketing with technology in a way that many others do not and Andy's not afraid to say what he thinks. So, I like Andy's blog. I've taken him off my Google Reader though. Why? His posts aren't kind to slow and small screen devices.

Here's what a footer looks like from an Andy Beard post on the web.


Here's what a footer looks like from an RSS point of view.


It's much longer! When you're on the mobile device you really don't want to download a picture nor is a feedflare for facebook or trackbacking. The related links are nice, subtle and useful on the web read but clutter on the mobile device.

I'm just using Andy Beard as an example here. There are many other blogs with a similar approach (Search Engine Land has a largefeedflare ) and until Google Reader offers me a "for mobile / not for mobile" switch I'm left to subscribe to mobile safe (safer) feeds and check the others by hand when I'm at my laptop or PC.

As it happens, I expect we'll see more mobile enhancements to Google Reader and other RSS aggregators.

... roll on WiMax, huh?

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eWorld

I'm at eWorld on the 20^th/today to present on New Search Technologies.

I love this topic! So much to talk about. In fact, with only 30 minutes for the presentation there is too much to talk about.

One of the slides I've had to cut is a quick discussion on "new search methodologies". At Search Engine Strategies Chris Sherman has a good slide which bullet pointed meta tags as a failure and then led on to the current trend of tagging. I love the juxtaposition. The relationship between meta tags and tagging is very close.

Is tagging a failure? That's a great debate (more than a bullet point could allow in the time Chris had) Certainly the meta keywords are not worth much these days than the "easy era" (but how often do you see a site ranking well which has inaccurate meta keywords). The meta description is, in my opinion, vital. This is the tag which has the best chance of enticing searchers to click through into your site. One Google patent application would lead us to conclude that this click through rate is very important. If this blog had a low click through rate for the search [Andrew Girdwood] then I could see why Google and the others would begin to drop my rankings for that term.

Then there's the robots meta. Right now the assumption is that search engines are allowed to index and spider by default. Could that change? Look at Google's promotions in Belgium. Imagine helping create a million dollar CMS, omitting the robots meta only then to discover you needed to say "index,follow". That would be an expensive oops.

Search engines have invented two new meta in recent years too.

We have the "noopd" meta tag. That's a glorious tag. I love it. Live Search/MSN had it first. Kudos, much kudos, to them.

Then there's the sitemap XML verification meta tag which Google brought in. That's very helpful where you can't upload .html files (like on Blogger, for example).

What next? Could we see more meta tags? I think so. I think we'll see a resurgence of location and location encoding for sites. It's an appropriate way for webmasters to help search engines geo-target organic results.

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How commercial is your blog?

SEOmoz's decision to charge money for access 'premium' content interests me. It's a brave move and I'm going to be really interested to see how or if it works. The SEO world can be bi-polar at times. This move doesn't align easily with the divisions.

You could just about argue that there are two broad types of SEO services; off-the-shelf and the consultancy. Off-the-shelf is often cheap; sites that submit your URL to thousands of directories (don't do it!) or people keen to automated as much as possible (often spammy). The consultancy option can be on the brand-aware side where the full search agency provides copywriters, project managers, synergy with off-line and add-ons like "just for your company newsletters".

Before you even get to examining which style of SEO service the searcher/prospect might be interested you should consider two types of search; research and commercial.

Blogs are typically match with research searches. Agency sites are typically more commercial. Those of you who remember the Florida update will remember a time when Google swung SERPs in favour of research.

SEOmoz's new service sits in the middle of research and commercial. It also sits in the middle between off-the-shelf (you get what everyone else gets) and agency (you can ask questions).

As it happens, according to MSN, different blogs and web sites in general have a different likelihood of being commercially focused or researched focus. Different searches also have a different likelihood of being commercial or research. As it turns out the search [SEOmoz] is one of the least commercial searches out there.

Here's a quick top ten table of blog searches (not URLs) which I watch according to Microsoft.

Commercial Intent in Blog Searches
Marketing Pilgrim	0.8083
Search Engine Watch	0.52685
bigmouthmedia news	0.30985
Bruce Clay Blog	0.052504
Search Engine Land	0.04503
Highrankings	0.037111
SEO by the Sea	0.024741
Search Engine Journal	0.022691
SEOmoz	0.021125
TopRankBlog	0.012143

Microsoft's tool to measure this intent (closer to 1 is stronger) can be found over at their adLabs but be aware it does change.

I found the results interesting. So I took an even wider scatter of other sites I read - I call them "thought leaders" and compared the commercial intent for brand searches. As a rule, the blog searches were more commercial, even compared to the FT.

Commercial Intent in Thought Leaders
Brand Republic	0.47332
ZDNet	0.44741
Dvorak	0.14606
Diggnation	0.081619
FT	0.076693
Techcrunch	0.070139
Search Engine Strategies	0.060776
The Register	0.058502
WebProNews	0.035844
Telegraph	0.021519

It certainly looks like Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim a search term that MSN considers highly commercial. This could well be due to the word "marketing" delimited with spaces. Does anyone have a blog search term that's more commercial? Does anyone have a blog any less commercial than Lee Odden's TopRankBlog?

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CondéNet and Flip.com

In a few days Flip.com launches. It'll be a great experiment. A very interesting experiment into the power of social media and marketing in this "new age" of user driven leadership.

Of course, for Condé Nast Flip.com is not an experiment. It's a business. One that they hope will succeed. It was only a few days ago that I found myself writing about Condé Nast's Stylefinder.com as a fashionable sister to Reddit. I do wonder if Reddit's lack of style embarrasses the sisters. If you scroll to the bottom of Flip.com (currently in holding page phase) you'll see that the social news site is missing from the list of sister brands.

I like Flip. It's going to be a like MySpace however there's a lot of clever marketing going on. Even with something basic like the banner slot Flip.com is different. As the girls sign up to Flip.com they're allowed to pick and target advertisers who will appear on their Flipbook. Don't like H&M as a brand? Not posh enough for you? Then you'll not let them advertise on your Flipbook.

Oh yeah; Flip.com greatly interests this search marketer but the real target demographics are teenage girls. All too often, teenage girls are too smart for their (and our) own good.

The best bits of Flip and CondéNet's experiement (sorry, business model) is the almost guerilla use of content. There is free image content on Flip. The girls get to scoop up this content and add whatever they like to their Flipbooks. The girls get to show off by having the best Flipbook.

The content is supplied by the advertisers. It's not branded. There's not even a logo. They're simply trying to make fashion merchandise cool. They're trying to get the girls interested. CondéNet charges the advertisers for the honour of supplying content.

It gets better and braver. The girls get to vandalise the images as much as they want. As a Flip.com user you're allowed to scrawl "this sucks!" over anything you want in your Flipbook.

Mike Shields over at Mediaweek has a source which suggests advertisers may be paying between $300,000 and $500,000 per content package.

Some people close to the project are talking. Jessica Ulin from OMD (sister agency of PHD, part of the Omnicom family) who deals with Johnson & Johnson's Clean & Clear has described the approach as the holy grail. In fact, Ulin and I seem to agree that this is an experiment.

“Advertisers are experimenting in speaking to girls in a way they want to be spoken to,”

“The way that advertising is woven into the site is pretty unique,”

“It’s all self-selected. It makes for a more qualified viewer. It’s really the holy grail, when a user identifies with a brand so much.”

As usual I'm left to hope that search engine optimisation and PPC have been thought about from the outset. Flip will use Flash and that's tricky.



(The I support nofollow still enjoys 1 sole supporter.)

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Intent is Keywords 2.0

I'm surprised at how long it is taking the SEO community to twig to this - search engineers have been talking about it for years. The key is to work out what the searcher wants. If someone types in 'Hoover' are they after the branded vacuum, the dam or the FBI guru? Hoover is the keyword but it is the searcher's intent which is most important.

Let's say you've a client who sells MP3 players from their website. That's all they do. Are you going to go away, do some research and then conclude that keywords include "ipod", "zen", "mp3", etc. Ah! Perhaps you'll talk about the long tail and claim that the keywords are keyphrases that include "black 80gig ipod with free shipping". That's better but that's not good enough.

The intent phrase there is 'free shipping'. What does that tell you? The searcher is rich enough to go for the 80gig but poor enough to care about the shipping. A student, then? We can also be fairly sure that this searcher is ready to buy. If they're thinking about shipping then they're not researching. It would be best to target a "buy" page to this intent phrase. A buy page is unlikely to have an essay of text on it. Many SEOers who try and persuade their client to shoehorn as much keyword laden text on to their 80gig ipod page as possible.

But what about the 80gig ipod? The MP3 client should have some strong and authoritative ipod pages. In this example an authoritative page is one which offers useful information about ipods and actually gives people a reason to link to it. That's a tough call. Could you write a page about ipods that actually stood out well enough to persuade people to link to it? This is where social media (social search) can factor in as we could button this page to encourage users to tag it in search engine friendly social bookmarking sites.

The authoritative pages are the first stage in the search cycle. They target the researchers. They're there for people talking about ipods online and should begin to enjoy natural forum and blog links. The authoritative pages link to the buy pages. Yeah, it would be worth having a different page for "free shipping" than the normal "shelf page" if you can avoid duplicate content issues. Users intend to avoid body content that they've read already.

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Personalised Search Loops

Can personalised search cause feedback loops? Or, put in another way, should Google mark down Google for being Google?

Google has pages in the SERPS. It has its own help and support pages, for example, and these are the most likely to be returned in any SERPs. One of Google's webmaster pages currently does well for [search engine optimisation] in Google.co.uk. Google Directory and Google Answers pages are also returned whereas the likes of Google Finance are robots.txt excluded from the index.

I use Google a lot. An awful lot. I use Google personalised search. It makes sense that the personalised search knows that I use Google a lot ... and, um, does it then bias my results in favour of including Google pages? If I click on these Google pages in Google's own SERPs then I could again show Personalised Search that I like Google's pages.

Is this personalised search? Or is this just personalised search rewarding itself?

If Google was to apply a penalty to itself, to expect a bias towards Google and therefore weigh its own domain down then that's an advance towards other search engines with similar content pages. Yahoo's travel directory has great search engine status for tourist attractions, for example.

So should Google weigh down the other search engines then? Or has Google just found an excuse to apply a "personalised penalty" to its rivals in this case?

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2006 Searches

At this time of year everyone is discussing what the next big search stories and innovations might be. It's great fun reading all the speculation. Of course, some of us have a much better idea than others. The search engines themselves are offering little peaks here and there (or not so little in some cases).

It took a visit from Google for me to crawl through the snow, travel on two buses and make it to work today. As is the case with everyone else in such a privileged position there's nothing more that can be legally said.

I think John Battelle's 2006 predictions have been especially good. John's certainly a man in the know, too.

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