ArticleSnatch Blog

You are browsing the archives of search index.

If you’re seeing a shift in your Yahoo rankings, you’re not alone. Yahoo has announced that it is rolling out updates to its search index.

Writing on the Yahoo Search blog, Priyank Garg and Sharad Verma said, “We’ll be rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the next few days, but expect the update will be completed soon. As you know, throughout this process you may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index.”

Have you noticed a difference? The last time website owners noticed a difference in Yahoo was the middle of April. Let us know what you’re seeing in the comments.

Microsoft has announced that they are closing their Live Search Books and Live Search Academic Projects. While they will still index books and scholarly publications in their primary search index, Microsoft’s digitization initiatives will come to an end.

Libraries and publishers are encouraged to build digital archives utilizing the platform Microsoft built with Kirtas, the Internet Archive, CCS, and others.

Commenting on the future of the search business, Satya Nadella Senior vice president search, portal and advertising, wrote on the Live Search blog, “Given the evolution of the Web and our strategy, we believe the next generation of search is about the development of an underlying, sustainable business model for the search engine, consumer, and content partner.”

What do you think about Microsoft’s move to end their Live Search Books and Academic Projects? Let us know in the comments.

Yahoo announced today the general public availability of their SearchMonkey program. This is a program that has been in beta testing with limited partners. It allows the partner to provide Yahoo with structured data that provides advanced information about a web page. This information is then used by Yahoo to influence the presentation of organic search listing results for that page.

This is a very powerful concept in that a modified search listing can surely influence click through rates. Imagine your search listing with an image and several related links built in. Let’s look at a quick example:

You can see additional examples in my interview with Yahoo Chief Scientist Andrew Tomkins. The interview was published this past Monday and focuses on SearchMonkey.

The basic process for creating SearchMonkey applications is straightforward. SearchMonkey supports multiple formats, including microformats, RDFa, eRDF, XML feeds, and APIs such as OpenSearch, so publishers have many options for exposing the data.

In addition, developers can build sophisticated applications into the search results. An example of this is the notion of an InfoBar. With an InfoBar, you can actually put an active control in your search listing result. When users click on the control, you mini application will run and can present additional data that displays inline right on the Yahoo search results page.

Here is what it looks like:

The InfoBar provides a very powerful mechanism for managing complex interactions with users right on the Yahoo search results screen. This should have significant value from a branding and click through perspective.

Here is a summary of the development process:

Commentary

Note step 2, the one in which your application gets activated. A critical part of the program will be determining when and where you would like your enhanced result to show up.

One key element of the program is that creating an enhanced result, or an InfoBar, does not mean that all users will be exposed to them. Users need to enable the enhanced listings on a publisher by publisher basis. In addition, users can change their minds later and remove your SearchMonkey application from their results.

I spoke to Amit Kumar, Director of Product Management at Yahoo, this past Tuesday, and he indicated that in the future that select SearchMonkey applications may get exposed to all comers. Applications that are adopted by lots of users, and not remove by many at all would be more likely to make this leap to general availability. This however, is not a certainty.

Amit also told me that Yahoo is going to setup a Gallery of such applications for users. This will be a place where the user can go to select an application and enable it. It will be interesting to see how much exposure the Gallery gets. This will play a critical role in the rate of adoption of these types of results. The publisher can, of course, promote their own application, and try to drive people to sign up for it.

Another thing that Amit emphasized during our conversation was that the effort level for developers to engage with SearchMonkey is quite low. The platform makes it really easy for them to engage. This could play a critical role in broadening adoption.

One thing I learned in my interview with Andrew, and also from his presentation at SES New York, is that building SearchMonkey applications will not help you improve your rankings. The program is not intended to be used for that purpose.

Personally, I’d like to see a stronger move towards exposing some of the applications to all users. This maybe a difficult thing to implement at some level, and it makes it far more susceptible to spam. But it would certainly accelerate the exposure of these types of applications to the general public.

The early action (in terms of users) will likely be driven by early adopters. Then we will need to see how widely it penetrates the market, and how aggressively Yahoo pushes it forward.

That said, this is exciting stuff. I have long been a believer that search engines should get more information from the publishers, in a structured format. Yahoo has taken a big step in that direction with this program.

Recently, Yahoo announced SearchMonkey, which will allow developers access to open source to create applications for search results. Well, today is the day that developers finally get their hands on the tools to make that happen.

There are two types of applications developers can build using SearchMonkey – Enhanced Results and Infobars.

The process for building SearchMonkey applications is very straightforward:

1. Application Type – Decide what type of app you want to build (Enhanced Result or Infobar) and enter basic info such as application name, description, and icon.

2. Trigger URLs – Decide the URL patterns that will trigger your app. For example, for the Enhanced Result above, the pattern would be “acmemovies.com/*â€

3. Data Services – Data Services are the structured data on which SearchMonkey apps are based. They can be created using data available in the Yahoo! Search index (via data feeds or page mark-up such as microformats or RDF) or by using APIs or page extraction.

4. Appearance - Use PHP to configure how structured data should appear in the application.

Need incentive? How does a contest with $10,000 in prizes? Submit your application by June 14th to enter. The contest has four categories: Best Enhanced Result, Best Infobar, Most Innovative Use of Structured Data, Best Data Service, and Grand Prize (best over all categories).

And if you’re in the Bay Area, catch the SearchMonkey Launch Party tonight at Yahoo’s Headquarters in Sunnyvale.

As expected, the Yahoo board of directors has rejected Microsoft’s unsolicited bid to acquire the company. In a statement, the board said that the proposal is not in the best interests of Yahoo or its stockholders:

The board did not mention whether any of the “strategic options” it’s exploring include Google or AOL, both of which are rumored to have been in talks with Yahoo to discuss some form of partnership or merger. In a Google-partnership scenario, Yahoo might outsource some or all of its search and search advertising operations to Google. AOL doesn’t have its own search index, but licenses Google’s, so an AOL tie-up would likely see Yahoo keep its search and search ad operations.

AOL has been investing heavily in advertising technology, adding Tacoda (behavioral targeting), AdTech (ad serving, big in Europe), Lightningcast (video ads), Quigo (contextual ads) and Third Screen Media (mobile ads) to its newly formed Platform A business, built on the base of Advertising.com.

Google has expunged more than 40,000 websites from its search index, removing a ton of sites because they contain malware. These websites were designed to install malicious software on the computers of people who stumbled on them, including spyware, viruses, adware and so-called “trojan horse” software, and by removing it, Google blocks their access to [...]

Google has taken steps to remove malware websites from its search results, according to a ComputerWorld article released Wednesday.

Alex Eckelberry, CEO of Sunbelt Software Distribution Inc released the news Monday that Google had removed more than 40,000 malware sites from its search results. While Google refused to either confirm or deny this, spot checks [...]

CastTV is licensing its video search technology to entertainment and media company, Gemstar-TV Guide.

TV Guide’s Online Video Guide launched in beta in April and will use CastTV’s technology to help run its search index.
TV Guide’s Online Video Guide focuses on professional and independent video on the Internet and gives users targeted search results. CastTV’s video [...]

What is it about the numeric sequence 13123390 that has Finnish security firm F-Secure so curious about Google’s search results for it?

Their first blog post about the number appeared on Monday:

How many results do you get?
Are you sure?
Explain what’s happening. Make a Google search for "13123390".

It looks like F-Secure and some other people [...]

Searchers looking for last minute gifts for the special someone, researching the origins of Valentine’s Day, and music enthusiasts soaking in the coverage from this year’s Grammy awards comprised the majority of Google queries last week.
Senior Airman Michelle Manheart also came in with a strong showing backed by the momentum of her public dispute with [...]