There’s been a lot of activity in the world of search engines lately. We thought we’d take the opportunity to bring you up to speed on what’s been going on and where they might be headed.

• Ask In March, Ask announced that they are going to shift the focus of their business to better serve their core audience: women over 30, particularly in the Midwest and South East parts of the US. Ask argues that this shift will better serve this core demographic, which is more likely to use natural language queries in the form of questions than keywords. Their searchers are looking for answers, not just information, they say, and particularly in the health and entertainment areas. This brings to mind a return of their original form: Ask Jeeves. Some in the SEO world have declared that Ask has effectively “killed” the search engine and removed their brand from direct competition with Google and Yahoo!. With only a 4.5% stake of the search market, they were the 5th most popular search engine in the US. This shift in focus does not affect the multi-billion dollar advertising agreement with Google, which has provided much of their revenue recently. In May they announced the acquisition of Lexico Publishing Group and its Dictionary.com and related websites.

By shifting back to an Ask Jeeves style of search again, Ask may be trying to build a smarter or more natural way of searching. It’s too soon to tell how this new plan will affect Ask’s performance. If you monitor your site’s keyword rankings in Ask, don’t discount them yet, but don’t put all your eggs in one basket, either.

• Yahoo! The rumblings between Yahoo! and Microsoft still haven’t ended. They appear to have reached a stalemate over the software giant’s attempted takeover of Yahoo! The investor Carl Icahn has recently written an open letter to Yahoo!’s shareholders stating that Microsoft is still open to acquiring the search engine, but only if the current Yahoo! board, headed by Jerry Yang, is replaced. Yang’s board is staunchly against a takeover, but Microsoft seems determined to acquire the company, or at the very least, the search properties.

As of yet there hasn’t been a change in Yahoo!’s search functions, and it can be assumed that nothing will happen until this takeover drama has come to a conclusion. A recent interview with their director of product management for Search Technology indicates that Yahoo! is still actively working on improving search functionalities and web spam detection. Also, Yahoo! just announced Search Monkey, a developer application that creates search result listings with expanded content, like pictures, deep links, and consumer reviews. It’s an interesting concept and worth keeping an eye on to see if it’ll be useful or popular.

• Microsoft Away from the Yahoo! takeover attempts, Microsoft is still working on developing its search aspect. Last week it announced the acquisition of Powerset for its Search Relevancy Team. Powerset is a search engine that uses natural language processing (a la ‘Where is my cat?’) to find relevant information. The engine is limited to searching Wikipedia for the time being, but its development has many academics excited because of the demonstration that linguistic technology has made advances in retrieving relevant results from the billions of bits of information on the Web

Powerset obviously isn’t anywhere near a major player, but the fact that both Microsoft and Ask may be looking at the use of natural language in searching indicates that this type of searching could be applied to the web as a whole in the future. There’s much more work to do, and Microsoft has a long way to go still in the search engine market.

• Google Most of the latest news on Google hasn’t been concerning its search engine. It seems the company is experiencing growing pains associated with any large corporation (it currently has over 19,000 employees). A recent New York Times article highlighted some dissatisfaction employees have had with on-site daycare costs. Monday’s brief outage of Google Docs, its web-based office productivity tools, also attracted a lot of attention. Google stressed that no user data was lost.

In other Google bits, the AdWords Keyword Tool now features numerical data in its keyword suggestions. You can now get real numbers for search volumes instead of colored bars. Also, the Search Quality Team recently blogged about the “philosophies” they follow in their rankings:

1) Best locally relevant results served globally.
2) Keep it simple.
3) No manual intervention.

Perhaps number three is the most noteworthy, as the team says that Google avoids manually editing search results. Instead, it believes the development of the algorithm and its ability to discern content on the web is better than any human editor’s “subjective” opinion would be.

That’s the latest in the search engine world. Keeping up on the latest on what the engines are up to is just as useful an SEO tool. The Web is a dynamic world and as technology develops, you and your site will want to keep an eye out for new ideas and techniques that will benefit your traffic.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 10th, 2008 at 10:20 am and is filed under General, Google & Other Search Engines. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.