NameMon News - Latest Info from around the Domain world

News - Search Engines

Recently, Google has reported making changes to its algorithm for search to include "penalties for bad reviews" and "reduced EMD (Exact Match Domains) rank value. However, some oddities have appeared as a result.

A great example is a recent search for Divorce. The top result has been for about a year Wikipedia's page on Divorce, which has thousands of back-links and boasts traffic of 3k visitors daily. Starting Dec 5th, this top search result was replaced by a page much less referenced, D.I.V.O.R.C.E. the song. And not the beautiful one by Dolly Parton or the original by Tammy Wynette, but a farce by Billy Connoly. Total inbound links? I have more toes.

Well maybe it's a dang fluke. After all, these algo-thingies are rough stuff. Okay, so how does the chart below representing the volume between Hair searches make you feel?

	Stats courtesy of grokse

Notice how on December 6th, 2010, the article for Hair, the biomaterial with thousands of backlinks, dropped from 3k hits to 1k hits, and taking its place was Hair the Musical, with only 100 backlinks.

These are only the anomalies which I have encountered in search. I am sure there must be many more. When will we hear from the big SEO companies about this?

While you may find this information inconclusive its timing seems spot on. Something in the algorithm has changed the nature of basic search to a large detriment.

News - Search Engines

We watched the live announcement today regarding Google Instant and were mostly impressed with the single character results returned from the new engine, a feature as of yet unparalleled in any other internet result. Most unusual is the behavior which typing "w" instantly returns your local weather forecast, or typing 'f' shows Facebook as the number one result. Here now are the results of all the single keystrokes (with an english language keyboard) that you can see using the new interface:

In order to run this simple test we used IE8 and Chrome browsers in New York and Los Angeles, and negated the local results (for instance, NY wanted to show 'lirr' for L whereas LA wanted to display 'lakers'). While we didn't have the time to test across all browsers in all states these results would likely be the most prominent for users with default settings in most US locations.

If your browser does not display the new search features, use this URL to enable Google Instant.

News - Search Engines

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott is reportedly conducting an anti-trust review of Google's search neutrality which began in August 2010.

At heart is the fairness of Google's search engine, it's core business unit. The Texas AG office has inquired about several companies which have lawsuits against Google.

As originally posted on Search Engine Land, These allegations are merely exploratory and it is difficult to determine exactly where the GA's office is headed in this investigation, or how Texas could claim jurisdiction. All the lawsuits in question are being raised by non-Texas corporations and against a California-based company.

Yesterday, Google responded to the investigation, which has not been made public yet by the General Attorney's office. In it's response, Google states that they "listen carefully to people's concerns" and " we strongly believe our business practices reflect our commitment to build great products for the benefit of users everywhere". To some extent this sounds like the usual play from Google, invoking it's "do no evil" mantra.

Does Google manipulate results to thwart competitors and advance its own businesses? Some competitors to Google are concerned that the company lowers search results listings for certain firms and/or charging higher fees ads they place vs those of Google's partners.

As most of our readers know, Google has never revealed its search or ranking methodology for sites in detail, though it has published some papers on optimization and best practices.

Google's reply on a Friday night after business hours on the biggest 3-day summer weekend of the year is sure to draw little attention.

News - Search Engines

Most people are familiar with Google's standard logo and generally consider it a staple of their daily search routine. Google has in the past, replaced this logo with festive logos on Christmas, Thanksgiving, New Year's, Halloween and other US holidays. However, this change used to be simply a change of the logo itself. Over the past few months, this change has included a search result when clicked, sending the user into Google's search results with the top results for the term associated with the logo displayed. Most domainers and webmasters are familiar with this, and perhaps have even attempted to get a piece of the search traffic.

I have noticed that on Wikipedia, if the entry is highly-ranked for that result, it will receive what we call "ip vandalism" which is essentially users not logged in adding their links to the entry for some spillover traffic and revenue. We then request an IP lock on the page and this vandalism stops for the day. However, lately I have noticed a much more disturbing trend.

Bloggers with backends into news organizations have begun taking advantage of this result simply to generate traffic to their site. Since Google automatically shows news results first in a relevant search, any news website that posts about Google's logo is instantly awarded with about one million clicks. This is very enticing and we can see that this trend is creating its own type of unedited blogger.

For instance, last week Google's logo displayed a UFO as a logo with "unexplained phenomenon" as the search click. Harold Nolte at The Examiner clearly got very excited about this and posted "Google logo: is it an unexplained phenomenon?", which instantly drove millions of clicks, and hundreds of snide remarks, to the Examiner. Today, the new logo is also a UFO, over a field, with the search term set as "crop circles". Wikipedia is again the first result but above that we have various news articles. Early this morning, it was a ZDnet community article which has since been purged from ZD which pulled it off the front page in due time. But we still have 18 other articles, proving that everyone has realized that this show-stopper act is worth getting in on.

Who doesn't want a million clicks in one day? But clearly journalism is sinking to a new low - most notably by its lack of good editors. The only thing that is certain is this miniature explosion of fake search result articles at newsrooms is that it is going to explode in popularity and competition.