With Danny Sullivan, this time.

“SEEEAAARRRCHH CAAASSSSTTT!!” Heh heh. That big, overblown, thunder-of-the-gods radio stuff always sounds funny to me, especially when it preceeds the more gentle, easy listening sound of Danny Sullivan and Matt Cutts’ voices.

A very cool interview, following on from Mike Grehan’s interview last week.

Amusing (out-of-context) Quote: “Danny: People are saying “Oh no, my pages are going away! Oh no!”. That’s not a Big Daddy thing, that’s just because their pages suck!”.

He’s joking Much laughter all round, in fact.

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I don’t use advanced search much, partly because I can never remember the operators, however here’s a useful chart that lists all the search operators by search engine. You can drill down to find examples of how each operator is used. Anyone remember the flink: command in Google?

I didn’t know these existed, for example:

• numrange: Finds a range of numbers. Either 5..11 or numrange:5-11 works.
• pricerange: Finds a range of numbers prefixed by the $ sign. Either $5..11 or :5-11 works

Now I know

Google Notebook is live.

What is it? An online notebook So, aptly named then.

What does it look like? If you can’t get in, here’s a few screen shots.

Google says: “….to give you an online “notebook” where you can organize all your research, add personal notes to it, and share it with others. Google Notebook surfs along quietly with you as you browse, letting you clip and annotate whatever text, images, and links that help answer your question, all without ever leaving the webpage you’re on”.

Reaction? Mixed.

The most well-travelled man in search, Mike Grehan, publishes his full interview with Googles’ Matt Cutts. It’s no surprise Mike used to be a DJ, as he takes to this format like…well, Mike to merlot.

Too many highlights, as this is a l-o-n-g interview in two parts, but a few quotes stand out for me:

“It’s interesting how much of SEO comes back to good, old fashioned marketing….be thinking about things that catch people’s attention…”

Matt’s talking about how old-skool SEO is such a small part of the picture. I agree. Effective SEO today has more to do with marketing than it has to do with code tweaking.

PS: Find out what a grand-slam-spammer is in Part 2.

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I noticed today that Google are pushing their personalized search offering. I didn’t get a screen shot, but you may see an ad with a yellow background appearing when you conduct a search query. The ad encourages users to sign up.

“Personalized Search is part of Google’s ongoing effort to make your search experience more relevant to you. Using Personalized Search, you can:

· Get the results most relevant to you, based on what you’ve searched for in the past
· View and manage your past searches, including the webpages, images, news headlines and Froogle results you’ve clicked on
· Create bookmarks you can access from any computer

Early on, you may not notice a huge impact on your search results, but as you build up your search history, your personalized search results will continue to improve”

So, that may put an end to rank-watchin’, because serps will vary from one person to the next. Actually, they do already, but personalized search will make the differences even more pronounced.

I guess it depends on take-up…

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It has long been speculated that Google may use Whois information to help determine quality, and much of that speculation stems from the following patent:

“Last year’s patent application from Google, Information retrieval based on historical data, also described the potential use of whois information to aid in the rankings of web pages, looking at information like as the length of the registration of a web site, or other aspects of the registration, such as:

• Whether physically correct address information exists over a period of time,
• Whether contact information for the domain changes relatively often,
• Whether there is a relatively high number of changes between different name servers and hosting companies,
• Whether there is known-bad contact information, name servers, and/or IP addresses associated with a domain”

Bill takes a closer look at this patent, compares it with a recent GoDaddy application, and speculates that recent decisions made by ICANN may put a damper on Google’s potential use of whois data.

It’s all about authenticity, really.

Most search punditry doesn’t involve discussion about radical moral relativism, so this article has got to be a first!

“Much has been made of the Google dictum which states: “Our informal corporate motto is ‘Don’t be evil.’” But this Manichean distinction is beside the point. To the founders of Google, more important than being either good or evil is being true–true to oneself and true to one’s principles. Google’s moral code represents the capitalism of authenticity. It’s what makes Google different”.

Good vs evil has always been a trite over-simplification, and it is indeed curious that Google ever talked about their company in those terms. I bet they regret it these days. This article digs a bit deeper beneath the surface, and shines a new light on an old argument.

Provocative article over at the Register on Google, Big Daddy and spam.

I’m not sure choking is the right term. While Google, and all search engines, are full of junk content, doesn’t mean they’re returning it for queries.

A curious aspect is the hardware issue. Modern search is largely an infrastructure issue. i.e. in order to run that many queries, and produce results that quickly, and do everything in between, you need a considerable, complex infrastructure in place.

Potential teething problems with a new infrastructure? What have you noticed about recent “updates”?

Academic paper on Google PageRank.

“We apply the Google PageRank algorithm to assess the relative importance of all publicications in the Physical Review family of journals from 1893-2003. While the Google number and the number of citations for each publication are positively correlated, outliers from this linear identify some exceptional papers or “gems” that are universally familar to physicists”.

Phew, eh.

The conclusion is that Google does a good job of sorting documents, often giving better results than the citation index.

Further interesting UI experiments Google are conducting. This one lists other pages from the site, one after the other.

I’ll bet many site owners who are sitting at No#1 or No#2 would like to see that implemented, Google wide.