MediaVision Blog : Search Engine Marketing

A couple of weeks ago it looked very much as if Google would acquire Digg (at the not insignificant price tag of $200 million). Many people in the search/social marketing world thought that the deal was pretty much done and dusted, people such as Gyutae Park, from Winning The Web, who went so far as to compose a list enumerating the ways in which the Google-Digg deal would affect the internet. Even though the deal fell through or was called off, or whatever (who knows what’s going on the world of virtual acquisitions?), Park still believes that a Google-Digg is on the cards, and he is not alone.

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On the 24th of June, the Wall Street Journal published a piece claiming that Google would be releasing a new and free internet usage statistics product, due for release within a matter of days.

In the article, author Emily Steel considers that the product would rival the services offered by existing internet usage data providers, namely the prominent ones: Comscore and Hitwise. She muses that, given the sheer size of Google’s data infrastructure, they could significantly shake the web measurement market place, especially if they offered that data up for free.

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When I first came across this subject, I was really in the dark as this was the first time I had heard of it. As it turns out, I have been exposed to this area of search engine optimisation (SEO), but under another alias, namely image- or video optimisation.

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Visiting a website for the first time is an exciting experience, what with all the naïve expectations about what it might look like and what it might offer you as a consumer or potential client. Sadly, many sites do not live up to these expectations, by offering below standard front-ends and not investing enough time or effort in making the site more user-friendly.

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The future is an unpredictable element of everyday life, attempting to predict it is nearly impossible. The same goes for trying to predict the future of an industry such as SEO. There are, however, ways in which to gauge the direction in which it is headed by observing where it started, its current position, and the expectations it has for the near future. SEO is still a relatively new industry (considering that it has been in the public eye for less than 10 years), and it’s more than likely that there are still some undiscovered areas of search engine marketing that exist.

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Considering this week Firefox went for broke with its download day (and they really broke it at first too, oops…), I think it’s apt to look at what software will be available to us when Web 2.0 arrives. To me, downloading and starting up the new Firefox 3 was like eating sweeties, with the brand new buttons and the pre-emptive search bar and the Most Visited icon, sigh…

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Nicholas Carr wrote a very long, very interesting article in which he posed the question: Is Google making us stupid? In it he alleges that the way in which Google structures its information encourages us to skim over data rather than absorbing it. He says that after years of chasing down information on the Net in this way, his attention span is such that he can no longer read long bits of text, that his mind starts to wander after 2 or 3 pages, and that deep reading has become a chore, not a pleasure.

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Wikia Search, an open-sourced search engine, was released in January 2008 and made public by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, even though it has no association with the collective knowledge leaders. The recent update, alpha version 2, now allows users to add, remove, or change organic search rankings. Ratings, highlighting, and annotation are also available for users to edit results.

Wales says the project is a year in the making and that the ethos behind Wikia Search is to ”…build a freely licensed, completely open and transparent, community-driven search engine.” In Wales’ estimation, Wikia Search will take a minimum of 2 years to reach industry standard quality. He admitted that there will still be some “glitches and bugs” that will need to be addressed along the way.

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Recently, my significant other landed an opportunity to work in a retail company. Due to my past experience within the retail sector, she asked for my advice. My response was simple, “Keep your clients happy, regardless”. My reasoning was that word of mouth spreads faster than wildfire, and wildfire is bad for any company trying to make a few bills. Also, my father recently had a vehicular issue and subsequently called the insurance company to get it sorted out, but he was shunned to the extent that he is considering publicly stating his unhappiness at the manner in which the situation was dealt.

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Yahoo has discovered that outsourcing data storage and management has become expensive and inadequate in capacity to meet their demand, and is consequently developing a multi petabyte SQL database. The system will, like Google’s BigTable, use a system of distributed columns rather than the typical tables system, which is organised by rows and columns. The difference from Google’s BigTable is that Yahoo’s database is designed for a SQL interface.

Google’s BigTable method of using distributed columns employs a plurality of storage servers, one with a database engine that partitions database tables into column chunks.

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