A recently granted Google patent from the founders of Applied Semantics discusses a search interface that could help searchers find web pages based upon the meanings of their queries rather than just pages that include those keywords.

In the late 90s, Adam Weissman and Gilad Elbaz decided to start a search engine that would search on [...]…

There are a lot of pages on the Web that conventional search engines can’t find, crawl, index, and show to searchers. The University of California (UC), funded partially by the US Government, has been working to change that.

When you search the Web at Google or Yahoo or Bing, you really aren’t searching the Web, [...]…

Paul Boag wrote a post at his site Boagworld asking a number of questions about SEO. I started writing a comment at his blog, but it quickly grew to become longer than his post and the questions and comments that he had about SEO, so I decided to post my response here.

In [...]…

Would Twitter have the success it has now if it wasn’t at Twitter.com? What about Digg, or Facebook, or MySpace, or Yelp? Before social networks appeared at those domains, there were other pages at those locations.

I took a time trip to the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive to see what [...]…

When someone types “George Washington” into a search box, they are probably more interested in the Revolutionary War general and President than some random George in Washington. A search for “Washington Hotels” is more likely looking for lodging in Washington than hotels named Washington. Searches for places with signs that say “Washington Slept [...]…

Three patents granted today to Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo all describe how each of the search engines might take a close look at page addresses, or URLs on dynamic web sites.

I wrote about the patent from Microsoft back when it had just been published as a pending patent application, in Microsoft Creating Rules for Canonical [...]…

I’ve been asking myself how local governments could use their websites to help them govern more effectively and save money. The question led to this post.

Building Bridges in Communities

Reading through one of the local weekly papers in my area I noticed a large public notice announcing a public hearing for the replacement of [...]…

There’s been some recent news about the possibility of Google working with the Dish Network to bring searches for television programming and YouTube videos to TVs, reported at places like the Wall Street Journal. The WSJ article tells us that besides actual tests of a Google settop box that allows searching for TV programming, [...]…

With more than 3 billion search queries a month, a search engine like Yahoo might be tempted to take a close look at, and analyze the data it receives in its search logs. That data might tell it what people tend to search for at different times of the day, and different days of [...]…

A misconception about web pages that lingered for a long time on the Web was that most people who visit your web site will enter your site on your home page. Another one is that the meta description you choose for a page will usually be what a search engines shows as the snippet, [...]…

Sometimes when you search at one of the major search engines, you’ll see an extra set of links showing up under one of the listings in those search results. Referred to as either quicklinks or site links, most often those will show up for the listing at the top of the search results like in [...]…

A new patent filing from Apple may be a sign of changes to the way Apple presents music recommendations at the iTunes store. That change was hinted at last December when Apple acquired the streaming music site, Lala.

The patent application lists Ryan Dixon, Digital Album Content Manager at iTunes, as the inventor, and provides [...]…

One of the words that often appears when someone describes how search engines work is relevance. A search engine attempts to show searchers web pages and other results that might be relevant to the words that they used when they perform a search. Yet, there are a number of different ways that you can [...]…

Charles Knight, who is now the Search Editor at Nextweb pointed me to a Bloomberg report at BusinessWeek, Google, Yahoo Sued by Xerox Over Search Query Patents.

The patent infringement complaint (PDF – 308k) contains claims that specifically name the following programs as infringing Xerox’s patented technology: Google’s Adsense and Adwords programs, Google Maps, [...]…

It may be possible that governmental web sites are at least as important, and in some cases more important that most of the other web sites online. They can provide information on when and where to vote, when and where laws are being made, when and where you can access elected and appointed officials, and information about possibly a large number of services that goverment may provide, from trash pickup and some utility services to police and fire and rescue information…

When you perform a search at a search engine, you usually see a list of links to web pages in response to your search.

Over the past few years, search engine have started showing a mix of other types of results, including images, links to related news stories or blog posts, videos, book and music search [...]…

Geographic and political boundaries are challenged by the Web, where laws of one state or province or country may differ from another.

Web sites intended for an audience in one country can often be viewed by visitors from most other countries as well. Sites offering services for a global audience may try to [...]…

When a search engine indexes an image on the Web, it often has to rely upon the words that it finds associated with that picture. Those words could include the file name, alt text for the image, a caption, as well as other text on the same page.

Those words can be misleading, however, and [...]…

Sometimes when you perform a search at Google, you may notice that search results shown from some forums might include additional information, such as how many posts are in a thread, how many authors participated, and when the last post was made, like in the following search snippet:

If you’ve seen those types of results and [...]…

You’re writing a page about a new stadium in your City, soon to enjoy the sounds of crowds in the bleachers watching duels between batters and pitchers, hoping to watch balls batted over the centerfield fence, or shutouts pitched, or the perfect doubleplay.

Your page could simply contain a picture, a street address, and maybe a [...]…

In my last post, I wrote about a patent application describing how Yahoo might come out with a widget that could be used with blogs, to recommend old posts on those blogs based upon your lifestreaming activities.

It appears that Yahoo may have even grander and more financially motivated intentions behind collecting information about [...]…

Many blogs display a list of “recent” blog posts or “most popular” blog posts in their sidebars, using a plugin widget. But those lists of blogs stay the same regardless of who is visiting the blog.

Imagine a sidebar widget for a blog that can consider the online activities of visitors at sites like Facebook, [...]…

Search for “cheap cars” at Yahoo in the future, and you might see web search results and paid search results for terms like “job searches” or “bicycles” in the future, according to a recently published Yahoo patent application.

If you’ve been keeping a close eye on Google search results lately, you’ve possibly noticed that sometimes when [...]…

In its very earliest of days, SEO by the Sea began as an idea to have a gathering of people interested in internet marketing and search engine optimization away from the big cities, the expensive hotels, costly conferences, and crowded conference centers.

The idea of returning to those roots is something I’ve been considering [...]…

The last time I wrote about Facebook’s intellectual property was in a post from August of 2007 titled Facebook Timeline and Patent Application. At that time, Facebook only had one patent filing published at the US Patent and Trademark Office, Systems and methods for social mapping, which focused upon how members of the social [...]…

I usually help site owners with increasing traffic to their web sites, and keep an eye on patent filings from companies that are involved in delivering information to people on the Web. But there seems to be another kind of traffic on the minds of companies like Apple, Yahoo, and Google.

The intersection between [...]…

Over at the Official Google Blog, Google’s Steven Baker just announced a major change in the way that Google handles search results by including synonyms for some words that may be used in queries, in the post
Helping computers understand language.

I wrote about the change on December 22, 2009, in my blog post How Google May [...]…

While in his Late 20s, Benjamin Franklin came up with a list of 13 virtues, which he thought were areas in his life where he could improve. He wrote these virtues down in a book and kept notes on how he was addressing them in his life. He chose a different virtue to [...]…

I originally wrote the following article a couple of years ago for publication at Website Magazine. It presents one way of thinking about the evolution of search and search engines, and I thought it might be a good idea to share it here as well. I’ve added a few very minor updates to the [...]…

At some point in the not distant future, Yahoo search will be replaced with Microsoft’s search service Bing.

Exactly how that might impact the other services that Yahoo offers isn’t really clear at this point, but it’s likely that Yahoo will still offer many of the portal services that it provides to its visitors now.

Will [...]…