Archive for the ‘Search Engines’ Category

Apr
21

3 Ways to Help Ensure Your Website is Found by Search Engines

by Jon Crim

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In my last post, Search Engines and SEO, I discussed how search engines crawl, index and serve results to end users as it relates to SEO. With this information you now know that search engines must find and crawl your website in order for your site to rank for specific keywords.

However, how do you ensure search engines find your website if it’s new? As you can imagine it’s awful hard to rank high within search engine results pages if the search engines never find you to begin with. The good news is that there are a number of things you can do to make sure that search engines find your website. Let’s take a look at three of the most common ways to ensure your site is discovered.
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Categories: Search Engine Optimization, Search Engines, Tips

Dec
01

2009 Year-End Google Zeitgeist Released

by Jon Crim

0

Google has just today released their 2009 year-end zeitgeist, but what the heck is a zeitgeist? Here is what Google has to say about it:

“Zeitgeist” means “the spirit of the times”, and Google reveals this spirit through the aggregation of millions of search queries we receive every day.

Click here to view Google’s 2009 year-end zeitgeist for the Unites States. Since 2001 Google has been releasing their annual zeitgeist – you can check out and view past Google Zeitgeist here.
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Categories: Search Engines

Sep
08

The BOSS of Search

by Hieu Bui

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In the past, a common feature request for our website has been for us to implement some kind of search functionality.  We have actually tried to implement a good search system a few times in the past and for one reason or another, it just didn’t work out. A few years back, our site was written in ASP and we used Microsoft’s built in index server. That was OK but it was a bear to configure and maintain. When we switched to PHP, we looked at a bunch of PHP based solutions out there but they had similar issues. We realized that the only real way to get good, meaningful search results on our site was to use the market leading technology out there – that meant either Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft search solutions.

Yahoo! BOSS

Yahoo! BOSS

After much deliberation and testing, we picked Yahoo! BOSS to power our search. Why you ask? Well three reasons: 1) you can’t beat the price (currently free); 2) it is very easy to customize; 3)it is extremely flexible.  Why re-invent the wheel when a powerhouse like Yahoo! has spent hundreds of millions on developing the technology for you.  That being said, I hope Microsoft’s recent deal with Yahoo! doesn’t kill this product as it is way cool.  Check out our search at http://www.webassist.com/search and let us know what you think.

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Categories: Search Engines, Tech, WebAssist Announcements

Jul
02

To Bing or Not to Bing

by Hieu Bui

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Many of you have probably heard about Microsoft’s new search engine Bing and their $100 million campaign to promote it. Initial reviews about the search quality have generally been good and more importantly for Microsoft, it looks like the traffic volume to Bing has been pretty good – at least according to this Techcrunch report.  I’ve tried out Bing a few times myself and the biggest difference I have noted is that Bing seems to be re-indexing much more frequently than Google.  Only time will tell if Bing helps Microsoft in the search engine wars (not quite as cool as the Clone Wars). Either way, competition in search is only good for us both as consumers and advertisers.

My real question is this – will Microsoft be able to turn Bing into a verb like Google has been able to?  One year from now, will folks be saying “Bing It” or “I just Binged it” (or is it “I just Bung it”?). I can only imagine the interesting dialog in the marketing meetings that led up to the launch of this service.

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Categories: Search Engines