From Florida to Austin, Redmond Wa to Sunnyvale Ca :: What a long, strange trip it's been...
Ask any expectant parent how long they feel nine months is. Nine months is approximately 270 days which makes 3/4 of a year. That's a fairly long time in our lives. Fortunes have been made in shorter times. As survivors of the tech-meltdown of 2000 remember, fortunes have also been lost in less time. The past nine months have been extremely frustrating for many webmasters and businesses dependent on search engine advertising. Since the beginning of 2003 the search engine world has been redrawn with mergers, new technologies, new fee structures and, most impactfully, new ranking algorithms. Many of the changes in the industry have come without any warning, the most relevant example being Google's November Florida Update. The impact on the sector and those relying on the sector has been enormous but, aside from news we know is coming, it looks like we've seen the bulk of changes for the next few months! Before a collective sigh of relief can be heard from professionals in the SEO industry, we need to remember, this time is more like the eye of a hurricane than a beautiful sunny day. In other words, we may be on the plateau but there's still an ever changing mountain to climb. A topic we've been tackling over the past week involves how to plan for future changes today in order to best position our clients. While we maintain a fairly well polished crystal ball, there's no way to really know how change will effect the business of SEO. The best way to insulate clients from a tidal wave of change is to provide a buffer of information. Here's what we know is coming in the future...

MSN to introduce its own search engine in July 2004!
It's big. It's powerful. It has been one of the prime focuses of the world's most powerful corporation. As of July, it will be in your office, school and living room. Microsoft has announced that as of July 2004, it will be using its own search engine to power results found at MSN.Com/. Claiming to be "much further along in relevancy", MSN product manager, Karen Redetzki told Forbes magazine last week, "MSN was making steady progress and that July's launch will reflect results driven by a revamped search engine with better algorithms." We know that Bill Gates dislikes anything that presents a challenge to Microsoft supremacy in any field, especially those fields covering gold mines. He was quoted at the World Economic Forum in Davos Switzerland saying "Google kicked our butts". We know that MSN has a highly active spider known as MSN-bot that has been visibly compiling information by visiting websites multiple times per month. We also know that the new search tool was supposed to be introduced in conjunction with the new operating system code-named "Longhorn". Longhorn's release date was originally scheduled for late 2004 but was pushed to June of 2005. Most recent rumours say Longhorn will not be ready until mid-2006! Clearly a decision was made in Redmond to push the development of MSN-Search forward over the development of the new O/S. In their competition with Google and Yahoo, MSN is about to show us what an 800lb gorilla looks like.

Google improves search relevancy and starts to challenge Yahoo on Local Search
Google has appeared stable for over four weeks now! Since July 2003, Google had been presenting somewhat questionable results, a problem that seemed to cascade on them until November's Florida Update when the entire index turned itself upside down. Google has greatly improved the relevancy of its results over the past two months. While there are still thousands of webmasters who might disagree with me, based on the continued poor performance of their sites in Google, for the most part, Google's results are almost as good as they were before the infamous Florida update of November. Google is still making minor tweaks to its ranking algorithm, at least one of which is obviously designed to limit the power of Bloggers to "Google-Bomb", or game Google's results by getting 20,000 of your closest friends to put a common link with common anchor text on their sites. Google also appears to be experimenting with the value of other incoming links but it is still too soon to tell exactly what they are doing here as we have only seen one major update of Google's database this month.

Yahoo shows Yahoo! WebRank
Yahoo has named its algorithm and introduced a toolbar to go with it. Yahoo is calling its algorithm "WebRank", (not to be confused with Google's "PageRank"). WebRank seems similar to PageRank in more ways than the name. Yahoo is said to be measuring the value of incoming links, the time spent on a site by visitors, visitor traffic through a site, and the arrangement and ratio of keywords appearing on a page or site. Exactly how Yahoo measures the value of an incoming link is still an unknown quantity but it is likely safe to assume Yahoo will value site elements in a similar fashion to Google. We know that Yahoo-Slurp will operate much like Google-Bot by following links and recording information found on pages it comes across. It is not known if paid-inclusion through Yahoo Site-Match will have an overt effect on WebRank but the increased frequency of spidering given to a URL that has paid for inclusion should, logically, make a huge difference.

Search Engine Advertising in General
We know that revenue generation is the leading driver of search engine development among the biggest players in the sector. MSN, Yahoo and Google are all trying to position themselves to capture as much of this rapidly growing revenue as they possible can. Google and Yahoo accomplish this primarily through the sale of contextual advertising opportunities such as AdWords and Overture. MSN will continue to display contextual advertising on its search tool as well but it is not known if or when they will develop an in-house contextual advertising program. Currently, MSN is pulling its contextual ads from Overture. Many of the smaller players in the search engine world are also introducing contextual advertising programs including Lycos, Looksmart and Kanoodle. Unless something major happens in the next seven days, we'll look at contextual advertising and the impact on search engine marketing in next week's edition.

The Eye is Quite
As an industry, search is growing up and, like most adolescents, is defining itself through decisions and actions taken during its adolescent phase. Search is the second most used application on the Internet, (after Email), and the only way to make any sort of sense of an environment that now has more unique URLs than the planet has people. The industry will continue to change as time goes on but for now, it looks like we might have a short break in the rapidity of change. Somewhat like the eye of a hurricane.