Google Instant Search

Poor old Microsoft Bing.
They spend a fortune marketing, improving and building up their search engine.
They try to convince mr and mrs public that their search is quick, clean and more importantly relevant when returning results the number of users begins to slowly rise again and then BANG! Mr Google from across the street releases Google Instant Search.

I pride myself on not being a geeky developer or blogger (perhaps thats a contradiction of terms though!) but when I saw Google instant search in action yesterday for the first time, I found myself saying to my wife "Look at this it's really damn impressive".

She looked at me and said "What? It's just searching for stuff, isn't it supposed to do that?"

It was at that stage I realised how for granted we take technology these days.

When I heard about instant search I was scepticle about how instant it would actually be, expecting a fair bit of lag but I have to admit Instant search is. . . . . well it's pretty instant.

For those of you that have not tried it yet, it returns and amends results as you type.

So if for example I start typing my name and from the very first letter I get a list of results, it updates pretty much as quickly as I can type until I find the correct results.

This could save up to 350 million hours annually based on googles weekly users of approx 1 billion!

To protect children and other sensitive people google instant search will also block any sites the are deemed violent, hateful or porngraphic.

Google at present handle about two thirds of all internet search results, microsoft and yahoo handle a majority of the rest and with this huge jump google are likely to mop up more of that in coming months.

How will Bing and Yahoo respond? I really don't know. But respond they must and to save their own skins it best be quick in fact in better be instant!

Google Geeks

The guys over at google have released some pretty amazing tools and applications over the last couple of years.
But have you noticed that when you sign up for a google account and complete your google profile there's a question there saying "What superpower would you want the most?"

Apparantly this started as a discussion between some google engineers an developers who decided to open the question up to find out an answer.

What was the winning answer?
Well surprisingly to me it was the power of teleportation.
The obvious such as flight and invisibility were up there too but teleportation won the day.
I then got to thinking . . . . is there actually a superhero tat does teleport? Apart from DR Who who more timetravels than teleports, I can;t think of any but then again superheroes aren't really my thing!

Why your archive may be worth a small fortune.

If you are a blogger or run a website that carries plenty of editorial content, such as reviews, articles and news and you have a good history of content the chances are you have something quite valuable.

SEO agencies are these days snapping up publishers, trying to use their sites as SEO hubs for clients.

How does this work?
Well if you have an article on a niche subject such as holidays abroad, that article gets indexed by the main search engines and ranked well, other companies for example a Travel agents may wish to use your well ranked page to get a link back to its own site. You could contact local travel agents saying the page gets x thousand of hits a month and see if they would like to pay you for a link added in to the article.
By having their url on the article their SEO is improved because it features on a page with an already good ranking.
It's a very simple and effective way to improve their own ranking by piggy backing your content.


The older the better
The other interesting thing about this kind of link is that your older content is therefore probably more valuable than your new content as it has a longer index. I.E. has been trawled by more search engines and achieved a greater ranking.

Your not going to get paid thousands per article but if you have thousands of articles you can quickly see why it could be a big money spiner to have these all available to sell.

Expect to see more SEO agencies popping up on the web in the coming months as people identify the prospects in comparison to traditional advertising mediums such as banners and mpu's etc.

It's been a while

Hi all,
Well it's been WAY too long since I added any posts to this blog.
Both work and family life have been hectic and although that is not a great excuse, it's as much of an expanation as I can give!

So I'm going to try and keep it more updated from now on.

Nathan