A report by Search Engine Land discusses how Yahoo and Microsoft saw a decrease and stabilisation in search market share last year, however, I do not believe decreases in market share can entirely be attributed to more people using Google.

People are becoming savvy browsers and utilities such as Last.fm, Flickr and LinkedIn are, in many respects, social search platforms that provide more than just search results.

Flickr, Last.Fm and LinkedIn all provide extra associative information in addition to search results and I believe people find this information really useful.

If you do an image search on Google or Yahoo you get delivered standard image search results, however, if you carry out the same searches in Flickr you receive lots of images in various sizes, all with exif data.

I think there is real value in improving specialist search functionality, I would love to see another search engine crack this before Google.

Yahoo wake up and export Flickr technology into your image search results.

I’ve been trying to see which of the two provide me with the most accurate search results, across a variety of search terms.

Google launching Search Wiki is a sign that they might, in the future, incorporate reoccurring trends from self-organised SERPs to influence their overall ranking algorithm.

There are quite a few self organised search engines on the web such as Wikia Search, and of course Delicious, which isn’t a search engine as such, but does provide folksonomy driven search results.

So here are some of my recent search queries (extracted from my Google Account):

“gap liberty shirt”
“fabric live 44”
“Chase and status”
“5D mkII equivalent”
“free enterprise wiki”
“volvo v70 diesel”
“SRAW”
“italian chef gennaro”

I queried all three of the terms above and compared results between Wikia Search, Google and Delicious. To keep things fair I only analysed the first 10 results I was delivered and I compared the positions at which I was delivered the most accurate information.

In my Daytum account I started to give a point to each service which gave me the best search results:

So as my little test shows, Google is still the search daddy and we’re still some way off people powered search catching up. Will it ever catch up? I’m not quite sure, what am I sure about is that when I have found information through Delicious it has been very accurate indeed.

What am I getting at?

The small sets of search results, which have been organised by groups of people deliver real value. If the information is valuable to me, it must be valuable to the all mighty search powers. I strongly believe that in the near future we will see algorithm based search engines use this information in some way to improve the information users get delivered.

Whilst results are relative according to what information an individual may or may not find useful, it would be good to see more extensive (and accurate) tests and results.

Search Wiki at the moment serves a purpose for Google account holders, who want to annotate, customize and improve the quality of their own search results pages.

I personally think Google might have bigger plans for Search Wiki as they may; over time use Search Wiki annotations and amendments collectively, as a means to improve the quality of their overall search results.

Google already have a very firm stance on aggressive link building activity, especially towards paid-for back links. Search Wiki along with other sources of internal data may, in the near future reduce Google’s dependance on analysing back link portfolios in order to judge website authority and relevancy.

The natural search results of Google are often just as manipulated as the sponsored search listings that advertisers use, It’s about time Google did some thing to clean up their search results. I’m sure Search Wiki will be warmly received by Google account holders, who in time will become self-motivated, vigilantly search Police.

It’s a real early warning for old school SEO practitioners that need to wake up and smell the coffee! Delivering good website structure, amazing content and excellent user experience will stop the public from deleting you from their search results.

Friendly Friends

In addition to Search Wiki, Google has also launched Friend Connect. With a quick copy and paste of code any website can now have “social” features. The ease of use makes Friend Connect a great quick win for any webmaster that wants social features on their website at minimum cost.

In addition to the simplicity of the installation, Friend Connect also allows people to join website groups using non-Google ID systems, such as Open ID and Yahoo ID. This is not only handy for users, it is also handy for Google as it increases the amount of people using their products and services.

Further to the points I raised above about Search Wiki annotations and amendments effecting natural search results, will the most socially active websites gain greater authority or improved rankings in the future? It does make sense to some degree as there are newer, UGC heavy websites on the web, which are more useful than top ranking websites that rank well because of their link equity.

Microblogging has so many versatile marketing uses, however, clients question why they should use microblogs and what are the real benefits?

I could probably sit here and write 10 or more obvious reasons, however, one of the most important reasons has to be search engine visibility…I will lend you my real world example:

I bought a lovely pair of Nike Vomero 3 running shoes two weeks ago and ever since I have been busy putting them through their paces. As I have been so happy with them I decided to do a few searches in order to see what other people had to say about them.

As soon as I queried “Nike Vomero3” a twitter tweet ranked No.2 (Google UK & No.1 Google UK (UK)) providing a good review of the shoe. So there we are, there’s the head smacker…search engine visibility!

Not only are microblogs social media platforms which syndicate information, facilitate conversation and enable community building; they are also capable of providing good search engine visibility over time. This is something that many DR centric brands will value.

Referring back to my earlier post about The Semantic Web, I mentioned that new build projects should utilise things such as Microformats and RDF.

One of the main reasons for this was to provide people with better usability of social networks, enabling them to find existing friends easily on new social platforms and facilitate portable, reusable online profiles, portable social networks and consolidated identities. The Google Social Graph aims to address this by taking note of XFN and FOAF markup within pages indexed by Google Search.

The data is being made available by Google for developers via the The Social Graph API, all interesting stuff and now it seems they are also paying more attention to the hCard Microformat too. Good post on this by Frederic Lardinois on Readwriteweb if you want to dig deeper.

I think the most important thing to note here is that Google are evidently paying more attention to semantic markup and it will not be long before other Microformats in addition to XFN and hCard are noted and effectively used by Google.

Ahem, I smell the possibility of Google Review Search on the horizon

So many people in the SEO field (client side web-masters especially) fail to take note of the UE side of well…UE!

Accessibility always seems to get taken into account as this is something which can be partly remedied by good use of semantic HTML, CSS and things such as skip links, access keys and legends around forms.

Website IA (information architecture) from an NSO perspective is also another factor which gets ticked in the NSO check list. The one trick that many web-masters miss (intentionally most of the time) is thinking about what content users want to see.

If you’re not providing your users with good content then you are essentially delivering a bad  user experience.

I was recently carrying out some searches in Google for a clients research document and I queried “used car kent”. You only have to click on the top three search results in order to see that the quality of information being delivered is quite poor.

Try the search yourself (Google UK).

The top three results contained pages full of links and search forms with accompanying content that was keyword rich and not very informative.

Serving your users with weak content is not innovative use of a good rankings and I guess if we had access to their analytics packages we would see high bounce rates from Google traffic.

So who is doing a good job? Off the top of my head I would say Amazon, I did a search for “brand planning book” and they came up in position one with a landing page which, had the exact item I was looking for and alternative books with user reviews.

All in all a positive UE for Amazon users. Amazon may slip up on other aspects of UE as I am no UE expert, however I believe the basics are in place as the content they serve website visitors is essentially useful! Surprise, Surprise!

The natural search landscape is becoming more competitive YOY as YOY CPC inflation on paid search hits clients harder. Websites who have dominated natural search results for years should now invest in innovative content strategies in order to keep their rankings and better convert/retain the traffic they receive.

How will flash based sites rank within search engines in comparision to semantically optimised websites? With any luck the semantically optimised websites will still take precedence over flash sites as they adhere to best practice coding which takes accessibility and all types of users and browsers in to account.

The inclusion of flash content in Google’s index will also mean that another can of spam worms will get opened as the black hats out there will look at new ways to manipulate flash for better rankings.

Realistically I think flash heavy sites do not cater for universal accessibility and they should sit below websites in the SERP’s which do so. Microsoft’s acquisition of Powerset a semantic search engine is further indication that search engines are starting to pay more attention to semantically optimised websites.

We hope search engines still stay more favorable towards websites who use W3C technologies and semantic coding as opposed to non-W3C formats.

NYT was essentially a “walled garden”, however it appeared to be open in the eyes of the search engines, many people suspected unofficial agreements being made between Google and the NYT.

This may have been true at the time but since then Google launched first click free a service which allows providers of premium news content to have their content indexed and ranked within Google News whilst only providing excerpts of the full articles to surfers, requesting for a subscription fee to continue reading.

This is great news for publishers who rely on advertising/subscription driven business models as having “first click free” traffic will ensure consistent revenue is generated from new content and strategic placement of calls to sale at the end of article excerpts will help to drive paid subscriptions.

Another reason why this is a win for publishers is that publishers have been known to use paid search advertising to drive traffic and increase page impressions and ad impressions through targeting the search “long tail” and buying as much inventory on low CPC’s as possible. As Google tighten their paid search guidelines through the quality score system it will become harder for affiliates and publishers to make revenues via arbitraging traffic.

“First click free” will hopefully counteract the growing stringencies of paid search advertising for publishers at least.