Transcendigital blog

Five years ago, Google introduced a “supplemental index” as a way of showing more documents to users. The supplemental index served an important purpose: it stored unusual documents that we would search in more depth for harder or more esoteric queries. For quite some time, the alternative was to simply not show those documents at all, but this was always unsatisfying—ideally, google would search all of the documents all of the time, to give users the experience they expect.

It was this challenge that led to a major effort to rethink the entire supplemental index. Google improved the crawl frequency and decoupled it from which index a document was stored in, and once these “supplementalization effects” were gone, the “supplemental result” tag itself—which only served to suggest that otherwise good documents were somehow suspect—was eliminated a few months ago. Now we’re coming to the next major milestone in the elimination of the artificial difference between indices: rather than searching some part of our index in more depth for obscure queries, we’re now searching the whole index for every query.

From a user’s point of view, this means that you’ll be seeing more relevant documents and a much deeper slice of the web, particularly for non-English queries. As for webmasters, this means that good-quality pages that were less visible in our index are more likely to come up for queries.

Hidden behind this are some truly amazing technical feats; serving this much larger of an index doesn’t happen easily, and it took several fundamental innovations to make it possible. At this point it’s safe to say that the Google search engine works like nothing else in the world.

Article Link:searchengineland.com/071219-122926.php

Webmasters may have some concerns about their RSS/Atom feeds crowding out their associated HTML pages in Google’s search results. By serving feeds, Google caused a poor user experience:

1. Feeds increased the likelihood that users see duplicate search results.

2. Users clicking on a feed were missing valuable content available only in the HTML page.

To address these concerns, Google now prevents feeds from being returned in their search results, with the exception of podcasts (feeds with multimedia enclosures). They’ve continued to allow podcasts, because they noticed a significant number of them are standalone documents (i.e. no HTML page has the same content) or they have more complete item descriptions than the associated HTML page. However, if, as a webmaster, you’d like your podcasts to be excluded from Google’s search results (e.g. if you have a vlog, its feed is probably a podcast), you can use Yahoo’s spec for noindex feeds. If you use FeedBurner, making your podcast noindex is as simple as checking a box (”Noindex” under the “Publicize” tab).

Google has a way to search for feeds. Google Reader and iGoogle allow searching for feeds to subscribe to.

Google has also said they are aware that there are a few non-podcast feeds out there with no associated HTML pages, and thus removing these feeds for now from the search results might be less than ideal. Google remains open to other feedback on how to improve the handling of feeds, and especially welcome to comments and questions in the Crawling, Indexing and Ranking subtopic of their Webmaster Help Group.

Article Resource:googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/12/taking-feeds-out-of-our-web-search.html

Creating or writing a good blog post is a little more than just putting words on paper. It’s also about complimenting ideas, opinions and thoughts with content that supports your statements — be it maps, pictures or links. Digging up that supporting content can be the most painful part. So, to help bloggers address these pain points, Yahoo built Yahoo! Shortcuts for Wordpress — a technology that sits in the background and finds and offers content to help build out your post in real-time. Shortcuts lift the burden of finding additional content and integrating it into your posts so that you can focus on the meat — the writing.

Download the Yahoo! Shortcuts for WordPress plug-in here: wordpress.org/extend/plugins/yahoo-shortcuts/

Additional Information can be found here:www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000512.html

Microsoft Corp. has recently acquired Multimap, one of the UK’s top 100 technology companies and one of the premier online mapping services in the world. This transaction gives Microsoft a powerful new location and mapping technology to complement existing offerings such as Virtual Earth, Live Search, Windows Live services, MSN and the aQuantive advertising platform, with upcoming integration potential for a range of other Microsoft products and platforms. Terms of the deal were not revealed.

“The addition of Multimap enhances Microsoft’s position as a leading provider of mapping and location platform services,” said Sharon Baylay, general manager of the Online Services Group at Microsoft. “This acquisition will play a significant role in the future growth of our search business and presents a huge opportunity to expand our platform business beyond the U.K. and globally. We are thrilled to welcome Multimap onboard.”
One of the best-known online mapping companies worldwide, Multimap provides a publicly available personal mapping service at http://www.multimap.com as well as a range of integrated business services.

Original Source for this article can be found here: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2007/dec07/12-12MultimapPR.mspx

Digg has incorporated some new image and category features on their site. Below is an overview of these new features.

New Universal Taxonomy
On Digg you can now submit news, images, or videos to any category on Digg! Categories will be consistent the throughout the site, which means you can view all media types in a given topic, or view one media type at a time (e.g., only images under the “sports” category). Digg is also excited to support the launch with new categories. “Offbeat” will be its own category, with new topics, and they’re adding a whole new “Lifestyle” category with topics like Autos, Food & Drink, and Travel. Digg still allows customization of categories and media, if you don’t want to see a particular topic or media type on Digg, you can click the customize button in the navigation to filter your view.

New Images Crawler
There are a few notable differences when submitting images to Digg compared to submitting news and videos. When you submit a link to a web page containing multiple images, Digg will crawl the page and present up to ten image thumbnails from that page for you to choose the one you want. Digg has also added this technology to news submissions.

Sorting and Duplicate Image Detection
Another new feature Digg is presenting is a new sort to the images section called “mosaic” view – it’s great for browsing image thumbnails. To help prevent people from submitting duplicate images an image recognition technology has been added from Idée Inc.

Article Link:http://searchengineland.com/071204.php