October 2002 Search Engine News

October 31, 2002 :: End of Month Maddness

October 2002 will go down in Internet history as one of the weirdest months in the past decade of mainstream web-use. Still reeling from the past 18 months of economic uncertainty and dislocation from loss of workers and companies, this month, the Internet faced the biggest challenges we've seen in this environment.

On October 29, history was made with a trans-Atlantic virtual handshake! Rating the experiment as near the invention of the telephone and the harnessing of electricity, Scientists from MIT (Boston) and the University College of London performed the first of three demonstrations of a new tactile technology that actually allows users to experience the sensation of touch. For more information, please visit this article.

On Monday October 22, a massive Denial of Service attack slowed online traffic to a near stop, making the web unusable for several hours. DoS attacks have doubled in October leading to speculation that Islamic Terrorist groups are attempting to use the Internet as a tool to attack the economy. It must be noted that no organization has claimed responsibility for these attacks, nor has any Western governmental or non-governmental agency provided evidence of terror attacks. Nevertheless, someone, or a group of someones is trying to make a mess of the Net.

The week before, UU-Net, the backbone network supporting over 70% of worldwide Email was threatened by the financial collapse of WorldCom. Apparently, MCI and A.T.&T. are trying to acquire UU-Net. Who knows where that may lead. Cable companies are positioning themselves to become a cabel of companies. Look for price-fixing, bandwidth caps and extra charges in the coming years as the cabel companies own the only delivery systems capable of handling the masses of data necessary for North American broadband access.

The week before that, Jupiter Media Metrix bought the massive News and Information portal Internet.Com. Both companies have strong reputations in the tech world. Jupiter is best known as the Internet's most reputable and prolific statiticians. Internet.Com is best known as the techie info giant with properties such as Search Engine Watch and the Internet News.

Dominant search engine Google has made MAJOR changes to their standard ranking algorithm in the past month but appears to have seriously degraded the relevancy of search results. Search Engine Optimization professionals are tending to take a wait-and-see attitude to see if Google switches back to their most recent and highly relevant algorithm.

October 8, 2002 :: Google Getting Goofy?

They say it is lonely at the top, but, in the case of Google's most recent algorithm update, some might say it is looney at the top. Google changed their ranking formula last week in an attempt to limit the impact of "Google-Bombing" jokes such as the one that placed Microsoft, AOL and MSN websites in the Top3 under the keyword phrase "Go To Hell". Google-Bombing describes the technique of specifically labeling outgoing links on your pages with a standard phrase such as "go to hell". If enough webmasters use the exact same phrase for a link directed to the exact same URL, Google's rankings can be almost instantly altered. Within 48 hours of Wired Magazine publishing an article showing how Microsoft, AOL, and MSN all appear under the phrase, "go to hell", Google had introduced the new ranking formula.

Unfortunatley, the quality of results has, well, gone to hell. Spam sites, 404 (file not found) errors and irrelevant results are appearing in the Top 20 rankings where, until recently, they were filtered out by Google's algorithm. Experienced Internet workers worry that, while Google will obviously address this situation as quickly as possible, it may take several weeks before we see a return to the highly relevant results Google is famous for. By that time, fickle search engine users may have moved on to other cutting-edge search services such as Teoma, or All the Web.

October 2, 2002 :: Do Keywords Matter?

The keyword meta tag is no longer being used as a ranking factor by AltaVista. Of the major search engines, (or distributed search databases), only Inktomi continues to use the keyword meta as a ranking factor, and a minor factor at that. StepForth will continue to use keyword tags until we hear that Inktomi no longer supports their use. Just a quick tip to clients thinking about their keyword meta tags, don't worry too much. :)

October 2, 2002 :: Google's Got a Bot Who's Nose for News is Pretty Neat

Google recently released a full, working BETA version of a remarkable news service, Google News. The service is the first of its kind to use search-engine ranking algorithms in place of human editors as it spiders over 4000 online media sources every minute of the day.

As the News site opens, viewers are presented with headlines with links directed to the source of the story appearing just above a short paragraph describing the source and content of the article. The text and headlines are pulled directly from the story-source website. A feature that gives Google an edge over other news services is the number of alternative story-source links Google offers with each story. This article was written at 10:22 (pacific). The lead story at that time was posted to the Voice of America website at 9:20 (pacific). Just in case site-users want to read another opinion on the story, Google offers 1370 alternative links ranging from the Toronto Star to the Arabic News.

Google's news-bot chooses articles based on a number of factors including the time of publishing, the reputation of the source and the number of other articles appearing in the International media about the same story. We have noted a very strong bias towards international news-sources as alternatives to mainstream US news outlets.

At the bottom of the News page is the cheeky quote,
"This page was generated entirely by computer algorithms without human editors. No humans were harmed or even used in the creation of this page."

October 2, 2002 :: Problems with People's Perceptions about Paid Placement? C'est AltaVista.

A potentially dangerous phenomina of the new economy is the transiance of employment and the rather low training standards for new (and likely temporary) employees by large corporations. Take AltaVista's latest problems, (.please).

AltaVista is either having trouble with, or is going to make some sort of move, regarding their paid placement program, at least that's the current buzz steming from their massive push to sign up search engine optimizers as resellers of their paid placement services. Problem is, they have hired a couple of newbie sales people to communicate with old-hand Internet technicians. A gung-ho type working in a cubicle for AltaVista made a career altering mistake when he fired off a careless Email to highly respected SEO/Journalist Andrew Goodman of Traffick.com. In the Email, the AltaVista rep states that only websites sumbitted through the Paid Placement program will have any chance of appearing in the Top30 results. Andrew, being a good journalist who knows a good scandal when it falls into his laptop, wrote a long essay posted to his BLOG. It should be noted here that AltaVista has consistantly said that paid-submissions only benefit from more frequent spidering and that it is not possible to actually purchase top listings on their service. (StepForth staff do not necessarily believe this statement and continue to urge our clients to use the paid-submission program if they want to appear at AltaVista.) CNet News journalist Stefanie Olsen wrote a long article on this issue which can be read by following this link.