Yahoo now has a video search tab.

Not to be outdone by anyone in the video search arena, Yahoo has added a video to their search offering. It's different than Google Video that indexes TV show listings. Yahoo indexes video and it could be video of any type that might be on a website. This is much more interesting than TV show listings because you might get someone's personal road trip video which might be fun to watch. It will be something completely different and that's the kind of video search that I might find valuable.

The one problem with this kind of video search is the difficulty of determining relevancy related to what you might have typed in. It's definitely the most interesting wrinkle in online video and might open up a whole new world of information that would extend beyond traditional broadcast channels.

Getting the real deal in online marketing, RealWebMarketing.com

A video indexing service by Google Video.

There is a new beta service from Google called Google Video which indexes information about TV programs. From what I see it functions pretty much like TV Guide does. It gives information about the show, what's in it, a screen capture and a snippet of the hearing impaired text. For a long time video was seen as something hard to index, but they must be indexing according to closed captioning. It sounds like a good idea, but is not complete by any means and I think it will be some time before it is.

Hopefully, other kinds of video will be indexed and not just television. I suppose a small video produced by an amateur will have to be submitted with certain text parameters. Maybe that will open up a whole new world of search marketing, a service for getting video listed well like any other web page. But for now Google is not accepting home video, and thank goodness for that! I could imagine that home video would take over and it might be like blogging has become today.

Real thinking about web marketing, RealWebMarketing.com

MSN now with it's own search results, what's the difference?

It looks as though MSN is now changed over to their own search results and have dropped the Yahoo results. I guess it's no big deal as this has been talked about happening soon and so it has. The 3 major search engines are now like choosing a variant of vanilla ice cream in a store. You can choose the vanilla you want but essentially, it's all just vanilla ice cream. There are only slight differences but they all want you to believe their's is vastly superior. It's the same way with search results. I've noticed that among the major three, the search results are very similar which should tell us all about something in regards to relevancy. In order to get good relevancy for search results, the factors that weigh into that algorithm must be something predictable or common to any search engine. Yes, there are differences, but they are not substantially different. This leads me to believe that either there is too much of the same development training among several companies or it's like producing any product which people from different starting points will come up with a similar end product. It's the end result which will make the algorithm conform to what almost anyone else has done.

Real marketing results for the web, RealWebMarketing.com

Blog comment spam, more information.

I've talked about comment spam recently and here's another article from an EWeek writer about this up and coming problem. It shows the complete picture of the idea spammers have to increase PageRank on Google.

Google Scholar is better for research.

If you're looking for information that is more in-depth or on the educational side, then Google Scholar might be a tool to use. It gives totally different results than the regular Google focusing on technical papers, research and those kinds of approaches to a subject. It steers pretty clear of commercial offerings and makes some types of information available that wasn't found easily before.

It's not really for me and what I do on a daily basis, but many people doing pure research may find it useful. I wonder if the other search engines are going to try to do this too. Google is unique in that there are exploiting many areas of search for the future. They are thinking ahead and have been working on more than just standard search. Take a look at the library scanning they'll be doing and so on. They're positioning themselves to be far more than just a web search tool in the classic sense.

It's real results for the web, RealWebMarketing.com

AOL is not giving up yet.

I find it interesting that AOL is still working at revamping some of it's offerings when it comes to search. They've signed a licensing agreement with Copernic desktop search. This will give them the ability to provide desktop search like almost everyone else these days. I think the Copernic desktop search tool is better than the others because you have more control over it.

Spamming blogs, when will this garbage end?

Here's a good article from EWeek which explains the latest problem in spam, blog spam. This is where an automated bot will post comments in someone's blog containing links to try to trick search engines into increasing their page rank. This is just another symptom of a great problem to which there is no solution in the wild world of the internet. Because it isn't regulated, things like this can go on and on and all anyone can do is respond to it. There is no proactive thing that can be done.

I've seen some of this crap come into my blog and I'm ready to shut down the comments portion completely. Why not? I need to help stem the tide of this really bad spam technique. I kept wondering why I was getting e-mail notifications on comments full of links which were usually something like gambling. What I hate is that it retards the good interactive blogging conversation. When will all this spamming end? I suppose where there is no longer any money to be made on it, and that will never happen.

Real web results, RealWebMarketing.com

Mozilla browser is making gains.

The Firefox browser is making gains on the heavily favored Internet Explorer. It's amazing to me that Microsoft doesn't make an attempt to stem this tide after a few years ago when winning the browser war was everything. Why would they do that and give up ground they so painfully fought for?

MSN to incorporate more beta search results.

Evidently MSN is going to start using more of it's beta test results in regular searches. So far they just use the old results which were drawn from Yahoo for the standard MSn offering. As their beta results improve and they feel comfortable with the offering, look for this gradual transition.

Gigablast goes past the 1 billion page index mark.

Gigablast is a small but good search engine that has crossed into an index of over 1 billion pages. Although it's not as much as the big boys, it's a towering achievement for a small company doing things on a shoestring. Very interesting and impressive. Here's an article about it.