I’m a little behind in my reading on Blekko, but I did manage to catch a little of the news. It does seem like they want to be more transparent about how they rank results, and share more about how their system works. I’m wondering if that is a good idea or not. I guess we will see.

It’s hard to tell if Yahoo might consider sharing this kind of information, but we do seem to be seeing more of that kind of sharing from the search engines, such as Google showing us Google Trends and Google Insights for Search. Interesting thing about those is that they aren’t selling the information, but rather providing it for free.

The hard part of using all that data is knowing which of the data is useful, and which isn’t. I know that the search engines collect an incredible amount of information about visits to web pages, queries that people use, sites that toolbar users browse, and more. Picking the right data to use could be very helpful. Knowing which data is the right data is the real challenge.

The first thought that popped in my head was how this could directly benefit me as an advertiser. It makes complete sense how analyzing the mountains and mountains of data available to Yahoo would enhance the usability for both the searcher and advertiser.

Thanks Bill, I’m loving your stuff here!

Jason

I think that the kind of analysis described in the patent can help the search engine’s decide when to show certain kinds of advertising or content, but I don’t know how they would feel about presenting that data itself directly to advertisers. As a potential advertiser, I would love to see that kind of information directly, but I don’t know how feasible or likely that would be.

We get most of our information about how much traffic or business a search engine might get through things like Comscore estimates from a small percentage of self-selected internet users who agree to have their traffic monitored in exchange for things such as free anti-virus software or the chance to win a sweepstakes. So, when we see numbers straight from someone working at one of the search engines about how busy they are, it’s worth noting.

Analytics can be helpful in deciding upon actions to take, and possible changes to incorporate on a web site, but they can also be intimidating if you don’t have an idea of what to do with the numbers that you are seeing. I’m not sure that any tool can replace by itself the ability to apply thoughtful independent analysis on the data you see before you. Rather than a specific program, I’d definitely recommend spending some time over at Avinash Kaushik’s blog, Occam’s Razor.