Meet the Search Engines

After a great lunch that unfortunately ended up more on my shirt than my stomach, we have a quick chat with two leading figures among the Google and Yahoo search teams, Priyank Garg – Director of Product Management for Yahoo Web Search and Greg Grothaus- Senior Software Engineer for the Google Search Quality Team.

The two head honchos go all out upsizing each other with innovation mania!

New innovations at Yahoo

• Yahoo BOSS (Build your own search service)
• Really imposing barriers to entry prevent new entries into the search industry so search is primed for innovation
• BOSS lets you build upon Yahoo’s current search offering and customise it
• You can re-rank results, blend results, use any monetization platform, access unlimited queries and present queries in any way. These are only some of the capabilities of BOSS
• Developers pay based on the volume of queries and type of query or they can display Yahoo search ads in lieu of payment if they meet certain requirements

• Yahoo SearchMonkey
• SearchMonkey is a tool for site owners to increase the quantity and quality of organic search traffic by customizing search results to make them more visually
• appealing and structured
• Designed for publishes and third party developers
• Very simple to implement

[I have only been preaching Search Monkey at every Friday arvo beer, chips and search sessions round at BCA (that’s Bruce Clay Australia) HQ for the past 6 months… *mutter* But no one listens to me… – Kate]

Google Innovations

• Google suggest with local flavour- the search recommendations now have a local slant to them
• Crawl error sources – these errors are now shown in context by providing links to the site and on which side of the link the error is located on
• Vulnerable Site Warnings – Google informs webmaster via webmaster tools if they think that your site is vulnerable to attack
• Google services for websites
• Search Wiki-if you are logged in with your Google account you can change the ranking of sites, comment on the pages etc
• PDF optical character recognition
• Improved flash indexing

Great to see reps from the big search engines here and keeping us updated on their new features and innovations.

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