Inside AdWords: Announcing the Search-based Keyword Tool

Keyword targeting can sometimes feel like a guessing game. Potential customers are performing hundreds of millions of searches on Google, most of which you don't even know about. With so many searches, you have to guess which ones might be relevant for each of your landing pages, and hope you find the right audience for your AdWords campaigns. That's where the Search-based Keyword Tool (beta) comes in. With this new tool you can get a better sense of what your potential customers are searching for and which keywords you should advertise on.

Here's the scoop: you know that the Google search engine starts with searches conducted by users and helps them find relevant pages. But for keyword targeting, what you want is a tool that goes in the opposite direction by starting with your pages and identifying keywords that potential customers are searching on to find your products or services. The Search-based Keyword Tool does exactly this, leveraging search query data relevant to your website's content. In other words, this new tool gives you keywords that are highly relevant to your site but are not part of your AdWords campaigns. This helps you take advantage of missed opportunities.

The tool is also useful if you don't currently advertise on AdWords. For example, a shoe store could discover which footwear styles users are searching for, or a digital camera blog could decide which cameras to review by looking at which camera models attract the most queries.

The Search-based Keyword Tool is now available to all advertisers in the US and UK. We'll be expanding to additional languages and more countries in the near future. We'll also continue to develop the tool based on your feedback. Try it out at http://www.google.com/sktool, and let us know what you think.
Inside AdWords: Announcing the Search-based Keyword Tool

The Break-Up

In June we announced an advertising agreement with Yahoo! that gave Yahoo! the option of using Google to provide ads on its websites (and its publisher partners' sites) in the U.S. and Canada. At the same time, both companies agreed to delay implementation of the agreement to give regulators the chance to review it. While this wasn't legally necessary, we thought it was the right thing to do because Google and Yahoo! have been successful in online advertising and we realized that any cooperation between us would attract attention.

We feel that the agreement would have been good for publishers, advertisers, and users -- as well, of course, for Yahoo! and Google. Why? Because it would have allowed Yahoo! (and its existing publisher partners) to show more relevant ads for queries that currently generate few or no advertisements. Better ads are more useful for users, more efficient for advertisers, and more valuable for publishers.

However, after four months of review, including discussions of various possible changes to the agreement, it's clear that government regulators and some advertisers continue to have concerns about the agreement. Pressing ahead risked not only a protracted legal battle but also damage to relationships with valued partners. That wouldn't have been in the long-term interests of Google or our users, so we have decided to end the agreement.

We're of course disappointed that this deal won't be moving ahead. But we're not going to let the prospect of a lengthy legal battle distract us from our core mission. That would be like trying to drive down the road of innovation with the parking brake on. Google's continued success depends on staying focused on what we do best: creating useful products for our users and partners.
Official Google Blog: Ending our agreement with Yahoo!

Warning: Internet may run out of IP addresses by 2010!

The "father of the internet" has warned that the web is running out of addresses and users need to act now to change to a new system. Vint Cerf, the man who help invented the system and one of the world's leading computer scientists, said that the web does not have enough unique codes that allow computers to communicate with each other.

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The next Internet

Historically, the Internet has been all about connectivity between computers and among people. The World Wide Web opened enormous opportunities and motivations for the injection of content into the Internet, and search engines, such as Google's, provided a way for people to find the right content for their interests. Of course, the Internet continues to develop: new devices will find their way onto the net and new ways to access it will evolve.

In the next decade, around 70% of the human population will have fixed or mobile access to the Internet at increasingly high speeds, up to gigabits per second. We can reliably expect that mobile devices will become a major component of the Internet, as will appliances and sensors of all kinds. Many of the things on the Internet, whether mobile or fixed, will know where they are, both geographically and logically. As you enter a hotel room, your mobile will be told its precise location including room number. When you turn your laptop on, it will learn this information as well--either from the mobile or from the room itself. It will be normal for devices, when activated, to discover what other devices are in the neighborhood, so your mobile will discover that it has a high resolution display available in what was once called a television set. If you wish, your mobile will remember where you have been and will keep track of RFID-labeled objects such as your briefcase, car keys and glasses. "Where are my glasses?" you will ask. "You were last within RFID reach of them while in the living room," your mobile or laptop will say.

The Internet will transform the video medium as well. From its largely programmed, scheduled and streamed delivery today, video will become an interactive medium in which the choice of content and advertising will be under consumer control. Product placement will become an opportunity for viewers to click on items of interest in the field of view to learn more about them including but not limited to commercial information. Hyperlinks will associate the racing scene in Star Wars I with the chariot race in Ben Hur. Conventional videoconferencing will be augmented by remotely controlled robots with an ability to move around, focus cameras and microphones, and perhaps even directly interact with the local environment under user control.

The Internet will also become more closely integrated with other parts of our daily lives, and it will change them accordingly. Power distribution grids, for example, will become a part of the Internet's information universe. We will be able to track and manage electrical power demand and our automobiles will participate in the generation as well as the consumption of electricity. By sharing information through the Internet about energy-consuming and energy-producing devices and systems, we will be able to make them more efficient.

A box of washing machine soap will become part of a service as Internet-enabled washing machines are managed by Web-based services that can configure and activate your washing machine. Scientific measurements and experimental results will be blogged and automatically entered into common data archives to facilitate the distribution, sharing and reproduction of experimental results. One might even imagine that scientific instruments could generate their own data blogs.

These are but a few examples of the way in which the Internet will continue to surround and serve us in the future. The flexibility we have seen in the Internet is a consequence of one simple observation: the Internet is essentially a software artifact. As we have learned in the past several decades, software is an endless frontier. There is no limit to what can be programmed. If we can imagine it, there's a good chance it can be programmed. The Internet of the future will be suffused with software, information, data archives, and populated with devices, appliances, and people who are interacting with and through this rich fabric.

And Google will be there, helping to make sense of it all, helping to organize and make everything accessible and useful.

Official Google Blog: The next Internet

The first Android-powered phone

Today, T-Mobile announced the world's first Android-powered phone. This marks an important milestone in the young history of Android. It was less than a year ago, on November 5, that the Open Handset Alliance, a group of more than 30 technology and mobile companies, announced plans to create a complete mobile platform that would facilitate the development of advanced mobile applications and give users the best the web has to offer on a mobile device.

Software developers are key to driving innovation on the web, and also for mobile. That's why, over the past year, we've released several early versions of the Software Developer Kit (SDK) and worked with developers from around the world to make it better and more complete. This has culminated in today's release of the Android 1.0 SDK R1. Through the SDK, developers have unprecedented access to the hardware and software capabilities of the device, enabling them to innovate freely. More than 1,700 applications were developed as part of the Android Developer Challenge. Google engineers have also been busy developing Android applications. Many of our products (Search, Gmail, and Maps, among others) are available on a wide range of phones such as the iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile devices, and many more. Today, they're also available on Android, and you can check out the Google Mobile blog for more details.

But there's more to the Android story. Not only does it allow all applications open access to the phone's functionality; the platform itself will also be open. The Open Handset Alliance has announced its intention to open source the entire Android platform by the end of the year. Along with the other members of the Alliance, we hope that Android can provide a meaningful contribution to all players in the mobile ecosystem: the developers, the wireless carriers, the handset manufacturers, etc. Everyone will be free to adopt and adapt the technology as they see fit. By doing so, we hope that users will get better, more capable phones with powerful web browsers and access to a rich catalogue of innovative mobile applications.

Developers will soon be able to distribute their applications to real handsets through the beta version of Android Market. Handset manufacturers and wireless carriers will be able to incorporate Android innovations into their own new handsets and service offerings. And users will get better handsets and more choice. We think it's another step towards realizing the full potential of the mobile phone.


Official Google Blog: The first Android-powered phone

The democratization of data

Information technology has enabled the "democratization of data:" information that once was available to only a select few is now available to everyone. This is particularly true for small businesses.

Fifteen years ago, only the big retailers could afford intelligent cash registers that tracked inventory and produced detailed daily reports. Nowadays cash registers are just PCs with a different user interface, and the smallest mom and pop retailer can track sales and inventory on a daily basis.

A decade ago, only the big multinational corporations could afford systems to allow for international calling, videoconferencing, and document sharing. Now startups with a handful of people can use voice over IP, video, wikis and Google Docs to share information. These technological advances have led to the rise of "micro multinationals" which can leverage creativity and talent across the globe. Even tiny companies can now have a worldwide reach.

Official Google Blog: The democratization of data

The future of online video

Ten years ago the world of online video was little more than an idea. It was used mostly by professionals like doctors or lawyers in limited and closed settings. Connections were slow, bandwidth was limited, and video gear was expensive and bulky. There were many false starts and outlandish promises over the years about the emergence of online video. It was really the dynamic growth of the Internet (in terms of adoption, speed and ubiquity) that helped to spur the idea that online video - millions of people around the world shooting it, uploading it, viewing it via broadband - was even possible.

Today, there are thousands of different video sites and services. In fact it's getting to be unusual not to find a video component on a news, entertainment or information website. And in less than three years, YouTube has united hundreds of millions of people who create, share, and watch video online. What used to be a gap between "professional" entertainment companies and home movie buffs has disappeared. Everyone from major broadcasters and networks to vloggers and grandmas are taking to video to capture events, memories, stories, and much more in real time.

Official Google Blog: The future of online video

Search evaluation at Google

Let me introduce myself. I'm Scott Huffman, an engineering director responsible for leading search evaluation, working with a talented team of statisticians and software engineers. I've been here since 2005, and have been working on search in one form or another for the past fourteen years or so.

When I'm interviewing folks interested in joining the search evaluation team, I often use this scenario to describe what we do: Imagine a Google ranking engineer bursts into your office. "I have a great idea for improving our search results!" she exclaims. "It's simple: Whenever a page's title starts with the letter T, move it up in the results three slots." This engineer comes armed with several example search queries where, lo and behold, this idea actually improves the results significantly.

Official Google Blog: Search evaluation at Google

The social web: All about the small stuff

What makes two friends feel "close" to one another? I'd argue that a big part of it is the small details that you know about each other. The funny comment your friend made about a billboard they saw while driving down the road, what they had for dinner, a person they ran into on the street, their comments about the movie they saw two nights before. Closeness often comes from knowing the small things, not just the big things. Distance makes knowing those small things harder. When you live together, either with your family or your friends, knowing the small things is easy. They get conveyed when passing in the hall, sitting down to a meal or just hanging out. It's effortless.


Official Google Blog: The social web: All about the small stuff

Follow your favorite blogs

Some people dream of being a rock star, while others just want a few discerning souls to become avid readers of their blogs. Both are noble pursuits, but with some good pictures, and a witty turn of phrase or two, building a Blogger fan-base may be a more attainable dream.

At Blogger we're passionate about helping communities form around blogs. To further that goal, we've introduced a new feature that lets you easily follow your favorite blogs and tell the world that you’re a fan. To follow a blog with the Followers' Gadget, simply click the “Follow This Blog” link. You can show your support for the blog by following it right from your Blogger Dashboard or in Google Reader.

Official Google Blog: Follow your favorite blogs

The future of search

"I am a search addict. I’m naturally inquisitive – I’ve always liked finding things out. Plus, I’ve worked at Google on search for the past 9 years and 3 months. Of course I search - a lot. Yet I would guess that on any given day, I only do about 20% of the searches that I could. This past Saturday, I kept track of the things that came up in conversation that I wanted to search for right then but couldn’t ...."

Official Google Blog: The future of search

More eye candy for iGoogle

In case you're looking for some more personality to add to your iGoogle page, we've just launched a fresh collection of iGoogle artist themes -- an ongoing project we launched in April for which we invited world-class artists to design dynamic themes for your iGoogle homepage.

The new collection features designs from 28 leading artists from the worlds of fashion and music. This group is amazing, spanning a wide range of styles and genres: Radiohead and Gnarls Barkley used radiant colors; Gucci, Burberry, and Vera Wang illustrated beautiful patterns; and Bob Dylan and Celine Dion created an iconic look (of course). So depending on what you're interested in, there's lots of great art to choose from to suit your personality, taste or mood.

Why did we focus on musicians and fashion designers this round? It's often the clothes we wear and the music we listen to that help express our personality and style. And when we first unveiled iGoogle artist themes, we heard that many of you wanted even more themes in these areas. We hope this new collection gives you more choices so that your iGoogle page reflects your personal style.

Official Google Blog: More eye candy for iGoogle

At the Republican Convention: Politics in the cloud and on the ground

After Hurricane Gustav blew through and Americans started searching for Sarah Palin, the Google and YouTube teams got down to business at the Republican Convention.

A large part of Google's work with the convention lived in the clouds. Delegates registered and stayed informed through a cloud-based system that combined SalesForce and Google technology. The new system means simpler, faster communication with delegates when it mattered most - as the convention had to quickly inform large delegations about the latest updates on Hurricane Gustav.

Members of the media were able to search schedules, speeches, releases, bios and video put out by the Convention on their News and Media Portal System powered by Google. The site put a range of Google tools to use - from Picasa to Calendar to Site Search - to give reporters fast access to information coming out of the Xcel Center.

Official Google Blog: At the Republican Convention: Politics in the cloud and on the ground

Google Suggest and privacy: Do they go hand in hand??

In a recent post “Official Google Blog: Update to Google Suggest“, Google has clarified that it does not store log data for all users. Further, they added that all the search term being typed in the search box needs to be sent back to one of its data center, to decipher what is being written and thus provide suitable suggestions.............

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Serious Potential in Google’s Browser

Google's minimalist Chrome browser is built for a future that blurs the lines of Web and desktop. Google argues that current Web browsers were designed before so many of the developments that characterize today's Web.

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Google Chrome Faces Long Road To Enterprise Adoption

IT admins want to be aware of Chrome because it could infiltrate companies the way instant messaging did, through users determined to use the software they like, without IT approval.

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BREAKING: Google Chrome Just Launched

Google Chrome is a browser that combines a minimal design with sophisticated technology to make the web faster, safer, and easier.

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9 Ideas How Google Suggest Could Change Search Marketing

The Google Suggest feature, long a part of Google labs has behavior that will feel familiar to most readers of my blog. But for the remaining millions of casual users, which Michael Jensen refers to as the “Grandma Factor“, we may see some changes in search behavior. Now, a rumor once again has emerged that we’ll soon see it on the default Google search page in the USA.As PPC marketers we will want to remain aware of the phrases that are suggested for our “money terms” and bid accordingly. Phrase match and Exact Match will start to become more important in many cases as Suggest “structures” the queries.

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Official Google Blog: At a loss for words?

Official Google Blog: At a loss for words?

Google.com Finally Gets Google Suggest Feature

After being in testing for literally years, Google Suggest is finally coming to Google.com. This is the feature where as you start to type in the search box, related searches automatically appear below where you are typing.

For example, start typing [olympics] into the search box at Google Suggest, and below the box, you start seeing suggestions such as:

• olympics 2008
• olympics schedule
• olympics tv schedule
• olympics 2012

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Is content still the king???

You carefully choose an ideal topic for your target audience who are desperate to know more about it. You toil hard and pour every ounce of your creativity, insight and knowledge to give it an interesting angle. The content radiates authority and strikes a chord with your readers. In short you have written a killer post with all the ingredients necessary to make it an instant hit. You submit your post to various social media and bookmarking websites i.e Digg, StumbleUpon, Sphinn, etc. Then you wait in the hope of making the headlines and nothing happens. Somewhere, something went terribly wrong. But what could have possibly gone awry, when everything was executed with perfection – a question many of us would have faced in the past. Read more .....

Get your Marketing $ to deliver

With the marketing budgets shrinking, the need to stretch the marketing $ gets magnified. This can be achieved by close monitoring of the Online Marketing campaign and a regular analysis of the Online Marketing efforts. However, this would require significant time and effort and yet leave a lot to chance. This would also not give you adequate control to check profligate use of your Online Marketing budget.

Would it not be great, if you could hold on to that precious marketing $, up until you get measurable results in return. Most Online marketing agencies do not give you such freedom, and follow payment practices that are largely effort based.

In this newsletter we would discuss the various payment practices that are followed by Online Marketing agencies, and how a post-performance payment model outscores the existing payment models. We would also discuss the challenges associated with establishing a successful pay for performance payment model. Read more ...

10 Simple Tips to StumbleUpon Success

I’ve been a member of StumbleUpon since November 16th, 2007. I didn’t start using it in earnest until January 9th, 2008 @ 6:02pm EST.That post was the first in a litany of posts that I’ve designated as one of ‘My Favorites’. In little over a month’s time I have nearly 100 fans (maybe today I’ll cross over;) and receive around 25 visitors ...

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Why the world doesn't need SEO?

Web 2.0 – The concept and its controversial name keeps coming back from the past to haunt us, no matter how hard we try to push it to the back of our minds. For some people, even a hint of this term would make their blood boil to the point of evaporation (not literally), while for most of us (including me) it puts a smile on our faces. The reason behind this smile is the fact that this epoch is more flexible and has opened an all new world for us.

The dawn of web 2.0 has heralded a new era, an era of social media websites that come in different guises. The era is witnessing the World Wide Web graduated from being a passive element to being a dynamic component of our lives. This transformation is characterized by user generated media (UGM), more commonly referred to as social media. This multi facet media of content sharing, social bookmarking and collaborative websites is playing a pivotal role in loosening the shackles of search engines.

In the past, businesses and individuals relied heavily on search engines for promoting their business online and to attract visitors. However search engines have some inherent flaws which makes it difficult to achieve these objectives. The major obstacles being that search engine results cannot be updated instantly and the traffic is keyword based, hence sometimes very difficult to compete. Also, search engine crawlers and algorithms are used to rate the content and thus the value given to user content (which might be great) is sometimes inappropriate. To make things worse, the links (votes) pointing to your website do not carry equal weight in the eyes of search engines.

On the contrary, social media is more like an online democracy - every vote counts. The huge online community is actively using this medium to share and vote for content. The more votes you get the more popular you are and it eventually translates into visitors. Building a profile which is recognized as an authentic source of information is the key to unlocking the potential of social media. Your submissions would carry a greater value to that of contributions made by newbies.

The online marketing professionals are gung- ho/exuberant about social media optimizations marketing and they have legitimate reasons to do so. From pushing negative links out of the top results to getting hassle free back links, social media can be leveraged for multi facet benefits, interchangeably. The power of influence required to accomplish these tasks is a ramification of the content that you submit to these sites. A blast from the past – Content is still the king.

The ultimate goal of online marketing is to get visitors and this can be achieved by using the 'linking' power of social media. By being able to suffice this rudimentary goal of online marketing, social media marketing has stolen the 'thunder' of search engine optimization. This does not mean that search engine optimization is obsolete. Social media has just created a new avenue for promoting business and should be used judiciously. Search engine optimization and social media marketing complement each other, and if done in tandem would deliver fantastic results.

Competitive intelligence

This deliberation would be incomplete, without sharing with you a quote which is the essence of this entire discussion. “If you are ignorant of both your enemy and yourself, then you are a fool and certain to be defeated in every battle. In you know yourself, but not your enemy, for every battle won, you will suffer a loss. If you know your enemy a

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Google accused of ad fraud over AdWords on parked domains

After a lawyer spent a hundred bucks on Google ads that appeared on parked domains and error sites (and generated no conversions for him), he decided to sue the company for fraudulent advertising and to seek class-action status.

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Is Google Biased????

Google's double standard........ The two face GIANT............The story is usual until now and had been sung a thousands times. However I witnessed something (only by accident) that contradicted this widely believed notion. “A temporary glitch” I thought. .......

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The Missing Human Touch

Is human intervention essential in every aspect of search technology, or for that matter is it possible? There are plenty of legitimate reasons for editing the search results manually. Out of billions of web pages resident on the World Wide Web, many contain malicious codes and viruses which could potentially harm users who accidentally happen to visit it via search engines. Some content are in gross violation of intellectual property rights and/or are illegal in nature. The list of websites that fit this category is limitless. It is the legal and moral responsibility of search engines to remove such content and thus safeguard the users against potential harm.

Amit Singhal, in his introduction to Google ranking (don't get all that excited as Google is not going to give away its trade secret) said “In our view, the web is built by people. You are the ones creating pages and linking to pages. We are using all this human contribution through our algorithms.” The statement clearly reflects that policing the content available on the web is not the sole responsibility of search engines, it is a collective responsibility. He went on to further say that “The final ordering of the results is decided by our algorithms using the contributions of the greater Internet community, not manually by us. We believe that the subjective judgment of any individual is, well ... subjective, and information distilled by our algorithms from the vast amount of human knowledge encoded in the web pages and their links is better than individual subjectivity.”

However Google is not adverse to manually altering the search results in cases were it is legally and morally obliged to do so. “I should add, however, that there are clear written policies for websites recommended by Google, and we do take action on sites that are in violation of our policies or for a small number of other reasons (e.g. legal requirements, child porn, viruses/malware, etc),” a statement that clearly reverberates Google's stand on this issue. Stay tuned to catch the latest from Google.

Customer is king

Having discussed the essentials of client servicing, I though it would be a good idea to take the discussion forward and discuss the importance of client servicing. Considering a hypothetical situation of all things being equal, why is that some organizations flourish while others perish. Numerous researches have shown time and again that customer service is of paramount importance, and should be integral to any business. Business innovation, concepts, strategies and trends are susceptible to fluctuation, but the one thing that always has and will always be constant is customer service. An organization working toward its commitment to meet and exceed customer expectations would emerge as a clear winner.

The visionaries place customers at the core of their organization's business process. Customer service is critical for success in any business. If a business is to outperform competition, it will have to attract and retain customers. It is proven that the greatest profits result from customer retention, loyalty and repurchase rather than new customer acquisition.

Customers are very sensitive about differences in functionals and emotional benefits attached to a product or service. A recent survey showed that 70% of the customers walked out of business alliance, not because of price or quality issues, but because they were not content with the human side of doing business with that vendor. A fact finding attempt at your end would definitely substantiate the findings of the survey.

No organization, whether big or small, is impervious to the effects of poor customer service. The real danger lies in it becoming a habit rather than a rare instance. Competition will be quick to sniff your weakness, improve upon and gain business at your expense. Tom Peters, a renowned author, in his book 'In the Pursuit of Wow' , accentuates the need for continuous use of heuristic techniques to step out and stand out.

Customer service, usually considered a support function, has emerged as a important marketing tool. It has become as much a marketing tool as it is a management approach. Superior quality customer service motivates customers to tell others about you, generating referral sales. This customer sales force is the least expensive way of acquiring new customers.

Organization's constantly tout the importance of imparting high quality customer service, and everyone seems to agree. There is an abundance of books and articles written on this topic so much so that it is has become common knowledge that quality customer service is the door that leads to success.

If customer service is such an extensively read and talked about topic, why is it that you find so many examples of poor customer service? The answer to this questions still eludes me. I fail to understand why organization fizzle to deliver good service. By doing so they not only lose business, but give a bad reputation to themselves. A dissatisfied customer is more likely to tell 10 others of his bad experience than a satisfied customer.

If there is still an iota of doubt left as to the importance of providing good customer services, turn your attention to internet, a tool prevalently used by disgruntled customers to share their less than favorable customer service experience.

I hope this article provides sufficient reasons to necessitate the practice of providing world class customer service. I am sure you can think of many more reasons. So use all of them to justify your expenditure in training staff to provide quality service. Thomas Watson, founder of IBM, once said “ If you want to achieve excellence, you can get there today. As of this second, quit doing less-than-excellent work”, a quote that summarizes client servicing in a nutshell.

Deal or No Deal

The deal between Yahoo and MSN might have died a slow death but this did not deter Yahoo from striking a deal with arch rival Google. In the month of June, Yahoo had announced that Google would supply it with some search advertisements. Industry insiders view this move as an attempt by Yahoo to increase search revenue. As a consequence of this deal (if it materializes), Google would command a wider market share and consolidate its numero uno position.

The ad deal is projected to raise $800 million in revenue in its first year and would also provide operating cash to the tune of $250 million - $450 million in the subsequent years. In order to push the deal through, Yahoo has informed the regulators that the deal was reviewed on the lines of Hart-Scott-Rodino Act , which is used to scrutinize major mergers and acquisitions. Yahoo also apprised the regulators that the deal would be implemented after three and half months, giving regulators sufficient time to review and scrutinize the deal. However, the U.S. Justice department has launched a formal investigation into this deal, an indication that they may have found evidence of malpractice.

The Justice Department is expected to issue civil investigative demands (CIDs) by next week. The move is aimed at gathering intelligence from third parties. The information sought could range from general requests to specific requests aimed probing the deal. This anti-trust probe could potentially derail the deal and spell disaster for Yahoo. Yahoo has pinned a lot of hope on this deal and is desperate for it to materialize. The probe might end in the favor of Yahoo but the delay caused would inflict a massive blow to its financial condition.

In an attempt to dispel the concerns which are clouding the deal, Jerry Yang (CEO,Yahoo) met senator Herb Kohl who chairs the anti-trust committee. This committee is likely to envision the competitive landscape and the ramifications, after the deal becomes operational. The news was first announced by The Washington Post and has been broad casted over the Internet by various websites. 'Wait and watch' seems to be the name of the game.

A Flash of hope

Flash websites were always a 'tough nut to crack' for SEO professionals due to the fact that major search engines could not cache/index them completely. This fact gave many website owners sleepless nights because a website minus flash decreased its customer appeal. Including flash to make a website more attractive resulted in poor search engine rankings. A 'catch 22' situation for webmasters and businesses alike.

A shimmer of hope is glistening over the horizon for webmasters who always wanted their flash websites to be cached and indexed in totality. A press release made by Adobe on 1^st of July 2008 reads “Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced the company is teaming up with search industry leaders to dramatically improve search results of dynamic Web content and rich Internet applications (RIAs). Adobe is providing optimized Adobe® Flash® Player technology to Google and Yahoo! to enhance search engine indexing of the Flash file format (SWF) and uncover information that is currently undiscoverable by search engines. This will provide more relevant automatic search rankings of the millions of RIAs and other dynamic content that run in Adobe Flash Player. Moving forward, RIA developers and rich Web content producers won’t need to amend existing and future content to make it searchable — they can now be confident it can be found by users around the globe.”

The development would have a significant impact on the SEO industry and is being hailed as the next giant leap towards an optimized world.

Key to the Pandora box

The need for information is infinite and the more you get the more you want. Information is the key to making informed decisions. The more we know the better we get and the better we get the more want to know.

Internet, a powerful source of information has the potential to quench our thirst for information. However, looking for information on this vast database is a daunting task. The Introduction of Search Engines has opened the flood gates and made the already available information more accessible. But can a Search Engine understand a human query like any other human would do. Can the tell the with accuracy, if someone meant 'apple' for a fruit or computer in reference to context. Lets set upon a journey to find out if they can.

Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA),according to Wikipedia, is a techniques employed in natural language processing, for analyzing relationship between a set of documents and the terms they contain, by producing a set of concepts related to the documents and terms. In simple words, it is an umbrella term for a family of techniques used for searching and organizing large digital data collection. The motive is to find symmetry in unstructured data and use these patterns to offer more effective search and categorization. Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) is sometimes also referred as Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI).

Until recently, keyword density ranked high on every Search Engine optimizer's agenda. Most of them agreed that the keyword density per web page, should be in the region of 2%-7%. With the advent of LSI, keyword density has lost some of its importance. The emphasis now lies on semantically related words and phrases and their co-occurrence. Terms, synonyms, buzz words, acronym etc., anything that can be used to establish the topic, context and theme of any given page will have an impact on how it is perceived by Search Engines. The relevance of theme words and phrases would indisputably play a crucial role, as more Search Engines incorporate LSI or part of the concept in their algorithms.

LSI is often misunderstood in its true purpose because of the mathematical complexity involved in making it work. Vector space model, the concept behind LSI involves intricate calculations and understanding. However, this fact should not discourage anyone because, the idea is to understand its impact on Search Engine rankings and not on how it is implemented.

LSI or parts of it is employed at some level in a ranking algorithm, to alleviate issues with ranking pages solely by matching text patterns. Search results purely based on matching text patterns would produce irrelevant results because relevance to context would be absent. For example a person looking for “apple” and “computer” will also be interested in “Mac OS” as they are interlinked and hence relevant. Its all about trying to anticipate and understand more about the nature and intent of the user query. By doing so Search Engines endeavor to return information in context with the user's searched term.

The most amazing thing about implementing the essence of LSI, is the way in which it has made Search Engines more human. They can now discern a link between related term, for example a link between a cat and a dog. We as human know they are household pets and hence can categorize them accordingly. It is easy for a human brain to comprehend this but not for Search Engines. LSI technique has taken Search Engines a step further in helping them draw this analogy. They are better equipped to provide users with information in a more contextual term.

LSI featured in rare discussions until it's principles were adopted by Search Engines as a potent tool. The concept of LSI has been around for more than a decade. Parts of it, has been used by Search Engines to refine their search and abused by unethical marketers to mislead people who lack knowledge in this particular field. The author hopes that his article would clear some mystery and myths surrounding LSI. Its application has made Search Engine more effective and efficient, and with advances being made to improve this technique, the author is sure that Search Engines would achieve new milestones.

Of the people, for the people, by the people

I was recently asked what web 2.0 stood for and I found myself groping for a credible explanation. Snippets of information, I had read all along flashed through my mind, but still, I found myself at complete loss of words. “Does web 2.0 mean anything at all”, a thought coupled with the request of my colleagues to find information relating to web 2.0, triggered this inquest. The term has been tossed generously across the world wide web and I decided to start looking for an answer using the same medium.

Wikipedia was my preferred choice and according to them “ Web 2.0 is a term describing the trend in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that aims to enhance creativity, information sharing, and, most notably, collaboration among users. These concepts have led to the development and evolution of web-based communities and hosted services, such as social-networking sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies”. In my opinion (and as described by wiki), web 2.0 is more of a trend than technology, and cannot be used to demarcate web 2.0 from web 1.0. I was thinking about it, more on lines of an ongoing evolution of the world wide web rather than a distinct point in time when a technological transition happened. As always, all things evolve over a period of time and its natural and bound to happen. Describing it as a particular phenomena is unjust. I wanted to have a second opinion, as I always do (to be sure) and found resonance of my thoughts in the words of Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the Internet. According to him “Web 2.0 is a piece of jargon. Nobody really knows what it means”. He went on to further say that “if web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the web was supposed to be all along”. The part relating to people is of particular interest to me, as it signals a shift in the perception on world wide web as a medium. Web 2.0 could be treated more as the next gen world wide web that draws its effectiveness from the ability of users to collaborate and share information.

I wanted to know more about the genesis of the term, to see if the people who invented the term had a different school of thought. According to Tim O' Reilly and Dale Dougherty, accredited for coining the term during a conference brainstorming session in 2004, “Web 2.0 does not have a hard boundary, but rather, a gravitational core. You can visualize Web 2.0 as a set of principles and practices that tie together a veritable solar system of sites that demonstrate some or all of those principles, at a varying distance from that core”. In principle, the world wide web is still the same but has added new dimensions to itself, in a sense evolved. As technology advanced, so did the web and the process is never ending. So was their a need to give this evolution a name or was it just a marketing gimmick? Maybe, it wasn't a deliberate attempt to name this trend but just an attempt to show that the web mattered again, after the dot-com bubble burst. Four years since, and the industry still lacks consensus on what web 2.0 is and what it constitutes off.

In essence, web 2.0 is more of a platform based on the principle that service automatically gets better, the more people use it. This architecture of participation uses web as an intelligent broker connecting the edges (end user). The philosophy being that the users don't just passively imbibe information from the web but actively contribute and supplement information, that is already available. Sites like Youtube, Wikipedia, Facebook, LinkedIn etc derive its effectiveness from this inter human connectivity. Bart Decrem, founder of Flock, calls this the “participatory Web”. This has empowered users in ways, we could have only imagined a decade ago. The web is more democratic than ever before, with big players ready to relinquish the user end control. Those who fail to see the human side of this technological revolution, are or destined to be lost in oblivion. The jury is still out on whether web 2.0 is a new concept or was it always present. All we know for sure is that it is happening now and we can see it happen. No one can predict when it would stop or when it started, and would take its own course.

I am quite amazed that I started my research by using Wikipedia, which now turns out to be a facet of web 2.0. Also, I have not forgotten that I still need to define what web 2.0 stands for, so that next time someone asks me this question, I can save myself from looking like an idiot, by having a ready made answer. Web 2.0 can be described as “world wide web – of the people, for the people, by the people”. It might not be a scientifically correct definitions, but I think this is web 2.0 in a nutshell.