Sometimes when you search at Google, you might not find any results that you find interesting and may search again using a somewhat similar query. Chances are that you don’t want to see the same sites or pages all over again. A newly granted patent from Google describes how the search engine might demote [...]…

You go to a site that you’ve enjoyed and bookmarked sometime in the past but haven’t visited in a while, and it’s changed. The topics it discusses are different, or the writing style isn’t quite the same, or it suddenly has links within its content to commercial pages that it probably wouldn’t have linked [...]…

One question that I’m sometimes asked by people is about whether or not they should choose a domain name that includes the name of their business or brand, or if they should use keywords within a domain name to make it easier for them to rank for those keywords in Google and the other [...]…

When search engines return web pages in search results in response to a query, most people assume that the pages being show are the ones that a search engine has decided are the “best” pages in response to their search terms. But what does the word “best” mean in that context? The search engines [...]…

Can patents be said to have family histories? If so, this post is going to introduce a barely known ancestor to one of the most written about search related patents on the Web, as well as a brand new grandchild to the patent.

The patent is Google’s Information retrieval based on historical data, which [...]…

How much does feedback from searchers impact the search results that we see at Bing or Google? How do those search engines process and respond to that feedback?

The links that Google and Bing present for searchers to provide feedback on search results are listed at the bottoms of the search results pages for [...]…

I hadn’t heard the term “Bounce Pad” being referred to websites before, but it’s useful knowing the language of search engines, and the things they might look for when crawling and indexing webpages, and serving results to searchers. Determining whether a site is a bounce pad involves an analysis about redirects appearing on the [...]…

Earlier this year, Google acquired the patents of a real time search engine started in 2009, Wowd (a play on the word “crowd.”) Wowd had no web crawlers, but rather relied upon users downloading a browser application, so that every page they visited was nominated to be included in search results. A Press Release [...]…

A new patent filing from Yahoo raises the question, “How much has social media influenced the expectations of searchers, and forced search engines to change?”

Before I can begin to even think about that, I have to ask if looking at Yahoo patents even a good idea after their 2009 deal with Microsoft to [...]…

I love local search. It follows many practices similar to Web search, though different often in ways that do reflect an attempt to map the real world. Google’s Streetview cars are a little like Google’s webcrawler Googlebot, and instead of collecting URLs for Websites, Google Maps collects addresses to associate with businesses, nonprofits, government [...]…

Might Google start providing more link options in Google Instant Previews as a result of this acquistion?

A company that filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Google in 2007,on the day that their last patent was granted, has now assigned all of their patents to Google. The flowchart below is from one of their [...]…

Google seems to be making a regular habit of acquiring patents from IBM, with a new acquisition of 39 granted patents and two pending patent applications on September 30th, recorded at the USPTO today. Like the earlier transactions this year of 1,030 patents tranferred in May, and 1,023 patents assigned in August, there’s a [...]…

One of the things that’s clear about how search engines work is that when they find a link pointing to a page using certain anchor text, that page might be seen to be a little more relevant for the text found in that link. Google pointed that out in one of the earliest white [...]…

In July, Google launched a beta version of their Page Speed Service, which collects content from your pages on the fly, and republishes it on a proxy, rewritten in a manner that should provide faster pages. Search Engine Watch wrote about this proxy service on July 29, 2011, and Adam Hopkinson in the comments [...]…

It’s a tangled web when it comes to patent acqusitions and infringement lawsuits, and a scorecard isn’t enough to keep track of the all of the businesses involved and the nature of their relationships with one another, as a recent acquisition of patents by Google from Mosaid Technologies illustrates.

In mid-September it was reported [...]…

Is Facebook targeting conventional and social ads to the social network’s users and their connections, based upon visits to pages outside of Facebook that show Facebook widgets or use Facebook tracking pixels, while the Facebook users are logged out of Facebook?

On Sunday, Australian tech developer Nik Cubrilovic wrote a post titled, Logging [...]…

I read a novel not long ago, Rainbow’s End by Vernor Vinge, that suggested that in the future one of the most popular technology positions would be that of software archeologist, with development and programming skills capable of digging through many lines of code to decipher where they originated and how they might work [...]…

When you try to gauge how effective your website is, you may decide upon certain metrics to measure its impact. Those may differ based upon the objectives of your pages, but could include things like how many orders you receive for products you might offer, how many phone calls you receive inquiring about your [...]…

In what feels like a case of deja vu, Google has recorded the acquisition of at least 1,022 patents from International Business Machines in August of this month (there’s a 1,023rd patent listed in the USTPO assignment database as well, but the patent number appears to be wrong). The USPTO recording date for the [...]…

I may have been a little unusual as an English major in my college days. I remember one professor asking me what I found interesting about a particular author we were studying, and my answer was about patterns involving the language that he used, and how he tended to frequently use certain words that [...]…

My little town of Warrenton, Virginia, started off life not as a destination, but rather as a convenient stopping point between other destinations. In the late 1700s, it had a road running through it between Falmouth, a port town on the Rappahanock River, and Winchester, an early European settlement and frontier town where once [...]…

A new patent application from Apple describes how they might incorporate user information data into ranking locations in their map application searches. This probably has some implications for businesses that rely upon services like Google Maps and Google Place pages to bring visitors to their shops and offices, and I thought it was worth [...]…

I recently participated in the creation of a book about SEO named Critical Thinking for the Discerning SEO, where Sheldon Campbell, also known as Doc Sheldon, asked 31 internet marketers a series of questions about internet work focusing upon how critical thinking plays a role in what they do. One of the questions that [...]…

Google was recently assigned a number of unusual and interesting patents from Outland Research, LLC, from inventor Louis B. Rosenberg, a Stanford PhD, Cal Polytech Professor on leave, and most recently professional film maker. A number of Rosenberg’s inventions have been developed into commercial products found in BMW automobiles, surgical similators and medical imaging [...]…

When you look at web page search results for a Web search, there are usually three important elements displayed for each page. One is the page title, which also acts as a link to the page. Another is the URL of the page, which sometimes gives you a hint of what you might find [...]…

It’s not related to search, or to SEO, but it’s one of the more unusual and interesting patents that I’ve seen come out of Google in a while, and Google Founder Sergey Brin is listed as one of the co-inventors. Google was granted a patent today on a device that could allow someone to [...]…

Google’s web search results have gone through a number of transformations over the years, from the additions of images and maps and videos and other kinds of results from Google’s vertical search respositories, to an autocomplete dropdown of query refinement suggestions and automatically updating results based upon those suggestions in Google Instant. Google has [...]…

Might Google lower the rankings of a page in search results if it detects unusual patterns related to clicks on advertisements on that page, or might Google use a ranking algorithm that can be tested against such unusual click patterns to lower the rankings of pages in search results? A Google patent granted today [...]…

Many sites on the Web contain elements that change on a regular basis, from advertisements that differ everytime a page shows, to widgets that contain constantly updated information, to blog and news homepages that show new posts and articles hourly or daily or weekly. Ecommerce sites add and remove products regularly, and display updated [...]…

My Google toolbar updated on me earlier today, and a notification window popped up, telling me about one of Google’s newest features, Google Related, which has some interesting implications. Ran Ben-Yair, a Product Manager from the Google Related team located at the Israel R&D Center introduced the feature in a blog post titled [...]…