Posts on State of Search about ‘Search Engines’

5 Google alternatives in Europe

logos-alternatives-searchengines

This article was originally written and published for Searchengineland and has been slightly re-written to post here.

Google is the dominant force in Europe—there is no other search engine which even comes close to Google’s market share. I think everybody will agree when I say that Europe could use some competition for Google. Bing should be the designated search engine to become that big competitor, but for now that is not the case. Even the recent launch of the “new” Bing in France and the years of Bing in the UK haven’t made most people switch away from Google.

But despite its dominance, there are alternative search engines in Europe, and they can be worth looking at. With Europe’s more than 800 million people, of whom about 60% spends time online, even a small percentage using alternatives to Google offer attractively large numbers, and targeting users of those search engines could be very profitable. Lets take a look at some of the alternatives. (more…)

Solving Duplicate Content Issues

duplicate-content-twins

Yesterday I read an extremely useful and practical walk-thru on Page Level Search Engine Indexation, by Richard Baxter at SEO Gadget. In the post Baxter looks at a variety of data sources from the simplest, such as Webmaster Tools, which will tell you how many URLs are in your sitemap and how many of those are indexed – (the difference therefore being of interest;) to more robust methods of actually identifying which of the total site pages are errant, in this case by building a Mozenda agent scraper. Definitely worth a read for anyone working on large websites (particularly ecommerce sites) with multiple instances of similar page- type e.g. product- level.

Setting aside issues of information architecture, internal and external linking; one of the most common issues we see at theMediaFlow when presented with sites that have page-level indexation issues, is one of duplicate content. Cross domain duplicate content carries related and additional challenges, however in this case I wanted to share some experiences of solving page indexation issues when duplicated content is present on product level pages. (more…)

We’re tired of Google, it’s time for a change

Google-toilet-paper

Let’s face it: Google rules search. With a market share in most European countries of well over 90%, Google is as close to a search engine monopoly as you can get.

When it comes to potential threats of Google’s dominance, everyone seems to be looking towards Bing. This seems perfectly logical, as Bing is a product of one of the world’s biggest and most experienced technology companies. If anyone can threaten the dominance of Google, surely it’s the financial and technological might of Microsoft?

Maybe so. But I don’t agree with that. Sure, Bing has some great search properties. Their image search is very solid, their maps are great, and I quite fancy their Visual Search system. (more…)

Russia , the new frontier : Yandex – International Search Summit

Andy Atkins-Kruger presented on Yandex which is the number 1 in Russia. They acheived this by solving the problem with dealing with the Russian language and being first to market.

Russian Internet Audience:
142M people, 2% of the Earth’s population. 83 federal states, 11 cities with more than a 180 different ethnic groups. Internet usage is growing, 43 million people accessing the web daily. Internet penetration differs by age group. In Moscow With 97% in age groups 18-24 whereas over 55 it drops to 20%. In other areas these figures drop substantially.
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Could information accessibility be the biggest threat for Google?

What’s the biggest threat for Google? Bing? Wolfram|Alpha? Facebook? Twitter? Or is it something completely different? It could be the accessibility of information on the internet. While Google is trying to index more existing (offline) information with programs where they digitize information from libraries all over the world, more new information that is created isn’t created within the ‘open’ world wide web. A new threat is forming for Google.

The internet consists of several resources of information, the world wide web is just one of them. Search engines basically try to crawl and index the world wide web, which mainly consists of a collection of HTML documents. And that’s exactly where Google reigns. But since 2000 the web is in decline, as the chart below shows. Other parts of the internet are becoming increasingly important sources for information. At the same time within the web there are always old and new obstacles that obstruct search engines form either crawling or indexing the published information. (more…)

Jon Myers appointed as Head of Account Management Yahoo! UK & Ireland

So, I’ve got a bit of an “exclusive” for you, ok well so it’s not actually an exclusive as NMA has already written about it this morning, but not many in the Search industry knows this news yet. Obviously I’m in a favourable position for this news, since I’m married to Jon and about to have his baby (ehm).  In fact I’ve of course known for quite a while and it’s been painful not being able to say anything. (more…)

How search engines might define quality

There are a lot factors playing a role in SEO. From a single line of code in your website to major changes in the way you run your business. One of the most important factors however is ‘high quality content’. Often referred to as linkworthy content, fresh content or whatever other term you can make up. But how would you define quality content? It’s not easy to describe. For search engines it’s even harder. Search engines can’t tell if certain content is high or low quality by reading it. They have to use signals to identify the quality of content. In this article I will explain the signals search engines use to define quality.

First of all you have to keep in mind that search engines score documents as a whole. They can’t score the quality of parts of documents. Documents are the results shown in the search engine so those have to be scored. (more…)

The Definitive Guide to Image Search Optimisation

Last week Jeroen van Eck and Bill Slawski lamented the lack of a solid guide to image search optimisation. Bill threw down the gauntlet, and I picked it up. Here’s my Definitive Guide to Image Search Optimisation.

Image SearchFirst, what do we mean with image search? Simply put it’s the vertical search option that allows you to search for images on the web. Google has an image search, and so does Bing, and there are several other specialised image search engines around.

For the purpose of this blog post we’ll focus on Google’s image search, though I reckon most of what follows can also be applied to other image search engines.
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Google universal ranking factors: an overview of resources

Google is much more than a search engine that searches for the best webpage to fit your request. Over the years they launched many different vertical search engines like Google News, Google Books and Google Places. More and more results from those vertical search engines tend to appear in the regular search results, creating universal (or blended) search results pages.

Because these universal results can replace regular results and ofter are placed above the regular results SEO doesn’t focus on organice results alone anymore. You need to optimise for the vertical search engines as well. All those different search engines require different approaches for ranking in their SERPs, in this article I try to make an overview of the most valuable information for ranking in Google’s universal search engines. (more…)

Understanding Search Engines

What we commonly refer to as Search Engine Optimisation is something which I relate to treatment of a disease. The various treatments of SEO, from title tags and headers to information architecture and linkbuilding, are all focused on the symptoms of a disease.

Truly understanding the disease – i.e. going beyond the symptoms and superficial treatment – requires a deeper understanding of SEO. It requires that you understand how search engines work.

This aspect of SEO is, in the opinion of many including me, thoroughly neglected in our industry. Too many search engine optimisers focus exclusively on the symptoms and are entirely oblivious to the underlying causes.

Understanding how search engines work and how search engineers at these search engines tackle problems is a vital aspect of becoming a truly well-rounded SEO specialist.

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