Interesting piece of speculation in this Time article that appeared in the last hour:

“ To maintain its lead over Yahoo, Ask.com, Microsoft and others, Google will soon have to start harvesting the fruits of its sizable investment in search research. Search engines aren’t yet equipped to furnish anything other than simple facts or links to relevant pages, but searchers will soon expect engines to answer complex questions that will require Google and others­ to gather data from multiple sites.“

Probably just conjecture, rather than insider info, however Google, and others, are integrating a lot more data into search results. At present, we get the occasional factoid, but who is to say there won’t be more and more direct answering of questions within the serps?

And how will that affect the delicate search engine/publisher relationship?

Another “well spotted sir!” award to Andrew Goodman. Andrew spots a little shopping cart logo on Yahoo ad listings. This logo appears beside an Ebay advertisment.

And another to Bill, who finds this patent from MSN:

“Should the file type of a document on the web be something that search engines should consider when ranking documents in response a to search? How about the number of clicks it takes to reach a document from the home page of a site?“

Click distance? A little light just switched on…

Danny will also be keynoting at the WMW conference in November.

Interview.

Interesting points:

• What would you say are the top two trends in Search for 2006? Probably understanding the social aspect that’s coming into search along with the greater verticalization of it.
• Do you ever stress about optimizing searchenginewatch at all? Or do you build it good – and forget it for good? In the early days, like anyone else, I’d focus on how we were ranking for various terms. But once the site became a leading resource, it effectively generated its own weather.

They start off with good intentions. Well, we’re sure they start off with good intentions.

Then they preach the philosophy that it’s all wide-open, anyone can join in, a true democratic utopia with few rules, no hierarchy, and no masters.

It’s nonsense, of course.

It doesn’t work in the real world, and it doesn’t work online. Soon enough, people take advantage. Then controls are introduced. With controls come controllers. Before you know it, wide-open becomes narrow-shut. Ego-mania runs rampant. The little guy is shut out, and the masters stand at the battlements. And laugh.

Well, that’s a bit overly-dramatic. There are good people at DMOZ, and Digg, I’m sure.

Graywolf riffs on the corruption of Digg, and how top Diggers may have a lot more influence than the system would suggest.

If you’re interested in any of the above, then SEOBlackhat has the post for you.

There are so many issues here. While it may be a public good to limit gambling, or at least, be able to manage any downside, how does this translate to the internet? If one country houses a gambling site, another country processes the credit card transaction,  a guy in another country does the marketing, placing material on servers based in still further countries, while the gambler exists in yet a different country, how the hell do you have a hope of legislating/stopping it, or knowing if what you’re doing is legit or has crossed some line?

Complicated stuff, but I guess it comes down to local law. Or the WTO.

“The story is a fascinating read – well worth dealing with the fact that it is annoying split up into 3 pages. In a nutshell, Antigua filed a World Trade Organization suit against the United States for trade treaty violations following the 2004 prosecution and conviction of an Antigua Internet Sports Book owner.Antigua won the suit but the U.S. has thus far ignored the ruling”.

The Search Industry is relatively free of earth-moving shake-ups of epic proportions, which gives industry hacks like me very little to write about, except meta tags, and such.

But when a guy who defined the industry for so long leaves his post and writes a travel blog, that’s big.

Danny’s not really writing a travel blog. Well, he is, but he’s just filling in time while he courts an avalanche of offers.

So, bets are on. Will Danny Sullivan:

• make-up with Incisive: 10-1
• start his own conference series and site: 2-1
• hook up with an existing conference series and site: 4-1
• become a travel writer: 1-1 or 100-1, depending on your measurement criteria
• wrestle crocs downunder, now that job also appears to be vacant – 57-1
• become a moderator at ihelpyouservices: 9456734567-1
• start spamming search engines: 20-1
• join Google runnin’ herd with Matt Cutts: 10 -1
• enjoy courting lucrative offers: 1-1

Your turn…

You’ve got Google, Yahoo and MSN, but you can’t be ‘arsed using any of them. What do you do?

You could turn to ChaCha, an entirely new search engine that employs human guides to search for you – an idea so insane it’s either going to make the founders millions, or it’s going to go absolutely nowhere.

My first impression on hearing this wild new strategy was that speed may be an issue. And I was right. I typed in the query “is there anybody out there”. I got the answer “please wait until search results are retrieved…”. I waited a few seconds. Then a few minutes. I’m still waiting, actually.

However, this is an alpha release, so there are bound to be teething problems. Perhaps the “Esoteric Questions Guide” is asleep.

I’m trying to figure out if this is a joke, but SEW reported it, so I assume it is for real. Or perhaps SEW need to get Danny Sullivan back really, really quickly to reassert editorial control.

Anyway, ChaCha has an interesting business model – guides can work up to a level where they get paid – wait for it – $10 per hour. Guides will be scrambling up the hierarchy, presumably because there’s some ego-trip status in doing so, to reach that payment level. Sounds a lot like the DMOZ model, but with an extra $10! Please form an orderly queue.

It remains to be seen where this will go, but I’m damn interested to find out. Are people going to wait minutes for their search results? Are they going to ask for dodgy porn? How about researching that embarassing rash they’ve just developed?

The jury remains out…

Here’s quite a good (short) paper on the past, present and future trends in research on search engines. It is entitled, helpfully enough, as “Shifts in Search Engine Development: A Review of Past, Present and Future Trends in Research on Search Engines“.

This paper was written in 2004, and provides an easy-to-follow overview of search engine technology. Of interest to search marketers is the development, and methodology, of document sorting. Nothing too deep here, but as I say, a good overview on the topic.

Bill spots another patent, this time from MSN.

The summary:

“Take a search query, and grab 100.000 relevant pages in response to it. Take those 100,000 results, and rerank and sort them looking at some other factors. Then pull the top 1000 of those, and shuffle their order based upon other features from them. Take the top 500 and rerank them using other criteria. Then show the top ten to a searcher“

I’m just wondering how they could manage to do such a thing so quickly? It could, of course, be just an idea, as opposed to a functioning system.

This is pretty damn funny.

The sharp fellows over at Threadwatch discovered a curious Google SERP

Google knows best, eh.

There’s a fair bit of discussion about how this came to be. Is it a redirect issue? An inside job? Matt Cutts sheds some light: “It’s not a Google issue at all, billhartzer. Check MSN and Yahoo with [site:trump.com penis], for example. The words were on the site, presumably because someone illegally hacked the site”.

Hopefully you’ll get to see it before any changes are made.