WebConnoisseur

Social search engines have become more and more popular this year with sites like Eurekster’s Swiki, Rollyo, Google Co-op Custom Search, PSS, Yahoo Search Builder, and MSN Search Macros, but Search Wikia brings in a new spin: it is an effort lead by the founder of Wikipedia.

Search Wikia, which was mistakenly called Wikiasari by some, is still a bit fuzzy on the details. It aims at being a community-built search engine, but appears to be in the very early stages (even the name appears to be up for grabs). Wikipedia certainly has a large audience, much in-part due to the search engines ranking it so high, so there’s a good chance they will have some success getting it off the ground. What will make Search Wikia different is that:

• It is built by a team of non-paid editors
• It hopes to become an open-source search engine with the success that other open-source programs have acheived
• It runs as a non-profit
• It may put it’s own highly successful organic search listings in other engines at risk because it is basically challenging the hand that feeds them.

As of now, Search Wikia is nothing to get excited about, but it will be interesting to keep an eye on it to see if it develops into something people will actually use. You can learn more by visiting the Search Wikia site.

I’m not referring to the tagging you may be thinking of. It seems there’s a few friendly games of tag going on in the SEO community (and in the general blog community). I was just tagged by Lyndsay Walker. Seems like games like these have been going on for a decade (mostly in email), but I decided I’ll participate because it gives us SEOs some fun information about eachother (and provides exposure to some of the lesser-known SEO blogs, like my own).

Five Things You Didn’t Know About Me:

1. I’ve appeared as an extra three movies: Twin Peaks: Fire Walks With Me, The 6th Man, and Prefontaine.
2. My Wife does real-life CSI stuff. She’s a Forensic Scientist and helped with the Green River Killer Case when she first started years ago.
3. I was the captain for 13 different Intramural sports teams in college. Intramurals were very competitive @ the University of Washington. There are literally hundreds of teams (some featuring Division one athletes), but there is no prize for 2nd place. My team took 2nd place twice in Soccer , but finally took the championship in volleyball. 
4. I have a dead man’s tendon in my knee. I blew out my ACL playing soccer a couple years ago and went through the whole painful ACL surgery/recovery thing. I wonder if I will ever get to learn who the donor was (maybe I don’t want to know).
5. I like to snorkel in foreign countries. I’ve snorkeled in: Australia, Fiji, Mexico, Venezuela, Cayman Island, and Kauai (I know, not a foreign country, but it felt like it).

My turn to tag 5 bloggers: Sean Mulholland, Shaun Ryan, Wendy Boswell, Bill Tancer and Eric Peterson.

You can track the SEO tag meme here: http://www.soloseo.com/blog-tag-tree.html (hopefully he fixes my last name).

Thought I’d share my thoughts after attending my first Pubcon in November. Overall it was a great experience.

SES vs. Pubcon:
As a more advanced SEO, I must admit I like how SES has advanced level tracks. At PubCon panelists were often answering very basic questions, which I’ll admit are amusing, but of no value to a large percentage of the audience. As with SES, the networking and face-to-face time is what is of most value.

Search Industry
I really love this industry. Despite how competitive search marketers tend to be, people are very welcoming in person. You’d expect most SEOs to keep their strategies or tactics completely secret, but by sharing small nuggets with each other, friendly SEOs become even smarter, which is extremely important in this fast-moving highly complex industry.

Shout Out
I especially enjoyed my time with Neil & Cameron, Matt Tuens, Dave & Sally, Lyndsay, Sara W, Jessica B, Rob Snell and limited time with Rand and Joseph M. It was great to finally meet Todd Malicoat, Eytan, and HLM.

People who I didn’t bump into that I enjoyed spending time with at SES San Jose include: Danny S, Elisabeth O, Matt C., Greg Boser, Vanessa Fox (hopefully I’ll catch all of you at my next conference).

There are dozens of others I shared a meal or brief conversation with. Each conversation was a pleasure!

I’ll be attending my first PubCon, starting today! Being trapped in-house doing SEO work, I always look forward to these conferences because they are my only chance to speak SEO with others. I find it valuable to speak to the wide range of people, from Google engineers to out-of-country black-hat search-spammers. Knowing what each is doing can help you build a strategy that will ensure the long-term success of your search placements because many of the algorithms are built in an effort to weed out spam, even at the cost of well-intentioned sites.

MSN Search, being the newest of the big engines, is still trying to get a handle on search spam and had been slowly chipping away at it, but the problems are now getting worse since the switch to MSN Live.

In particular, MSN’s duplicate content algorithm penalties are too sensitive and too severe, causing a simple hack to be an effective way to remove a competitor’s site from the rankings. Let’s hope MSN fixes this right away and even takes notes as to who threw up content hoping to exploit it once it became known.

Credit to ThreadWatch for the find.

Google snaps up another Web 2.0 company. This time it is Jotspot. Jotspot is a wiki platform allowing for groups to colloborate, including via spreadsheets, calendars, email and more. In my opinion, wikis have a promising future. Wikipidedia has already proven the model, but once wikis become popular in smaller niches we’ll really see what their potential is. Though I don’t know the terms of the deal, this was a smart purchase by Google (can’t say the same about YouTube).

If you look at Google’s purchases, most of them would be deemed software purchases rather than content purchases, which is good. They are products that help people find things or enable them in some way. When Google starts purchasing content sites, I’ll be worried. Who wants their content finder to also be the content producer? Its like the many AOL users who don’t realize their is a whole “Web” to discover outside of the AOL blinders.

Of the major search engines, Yahoo seems to be most inclined to buy content sites. Google base was a project where Google came close to being a “publisher.” The project has changed over time and I must say I was unimpressed with it. Spending 5 minutes in base, you’ll easily see why most people choose to go to the existing leaders in job listings, real estate, autos, hotels, recipes, etc.

It is no surprise that George Bush uses Google, but what is funny in this Maria Bartiromo interview is how George refers to Google. He calls it “The Google.”

Click on the image to view the video on another site.

He mentions using Google to look at satellite images of “The Ranch.” I wouldn’t be surprised if Intelligence uses web maps as well. I remember when I was in the financial industry, brokerage companies were complaining that their employees were using Yahoo Finance instead of their own in-house tools. It serves as a reminder that users will often choose usability over the quality or quantity of data.

After a couple months of pondering, search industry leader Danny Sullivan announced his future plans. Judging from his post, Incisive media is paying Danny to help them transition SES to a new chair. Danny will chair SES New York in April ‘07, co-chair SES San Jose in August and will be a speaker at SES Chicago in Dec. ‘07. For Search Engine Watch, Danny’s last day will be November 30th.

By working together, Incisive will do a better job of keeping the SES business going and Danny bought himself some time to develop a new publication and events. According to his post, Danny will be creating a new search blog and will host events on his own.

As one of many people who begged Danny to continue doing what he is doing, but for himself, I’m glad to see Danny finally announce his plans this morning.

Nielsen//NetRatings just released September ‘06 search data. Here’s the data (I added the ”all others line.”):

Obviously Google is the big winner here. Yahoo, Ask and My Way received healthy growth Y/Y, while MSN, AOL, iWon and Dogpile are suffering. Backing the data out, I estimate a year-over-year increase of 16.9% increase in total # of searches. If I had unique visitor #s to go with this data, then we’d know exactly how much to attribute to increased search activity per user, but my hunch is that much of the 16.9% can be attributed to increased activity.

Here’s an article I wrote on my funds site that seemed relevant:

How Google Almost Became a Mutual Fund
In 2006, Google almost became a mutual fund. To a fund investor, the king of search hardly seems like anything that resembles a mutual fund. And for those who follow Google, getting used to Google being labeled media company is hard enough—but a mutual fund? How can this be?