Some blog posts and articles that I came across in the last week that I thought were interesting.
Jared Spool, over at UIE Brainsparks, writes about collecting penultimate referrers in The right trigger words. Collecting information about what people search for on your site through an online search function can be a good way of finding what people might want to see on your site. But isn’t it also interesting to see what search might have brought them to the page where they conducted that search? Those next-to-last, or penultimate, searches might contain some useful information about what people expect to see on your site but might be missing. Nice idea.
Many people have pointed this one, but it’s a good one to see if you missed it. Matt Cutts posted a Question and Answer post a couple of days ago where he discussed the recent “Big Daddy” infrastructure update to Google, as well as answering questions on a number of other topics.
Greg Linden has been writing some great posts about his days at Amazon lately on Geeking with Greg. But, those Amazon posts only add to the many other excellent posts there, including a recent one on mandatory registration in forums, Removing registration and Topix.net traffic.
Joe Dolson, at Interdigital Strategies, takes a close look at the search macros from Microsoft in Fancy Search from MSN. I hope someone from Microsoft notices because Joe raises some important issues on how the service works and how it might be improved.
Gary Price, from Resource Shelf, points out some of the new search-related patent applications from Microsoft.
Sébastien Billard, on Référencement, Design et Cie, provides an excellent introduction to a new blog statistics tool, mapservice.
Eric Baillargeon posts on SEO & Web Marketing News -> North about the coincidental same-day launch of Rand Fishkin’s Web 2.0 awards, and a similar Top 100 published about Chinese sites. Talk about synchronicity. The SEOmoz Web 2.0 awards is much more impressive in the manner in which it introduces sites, but the Chinese Web 2.0 top 100 list is worth a look (translation link available on Eric’s site.)
Does Andrew Goodman raise some excellent points on Traffick about competition between websites in a Want to Sell Product post? Take Clear Photos.
The Google Analytics folks have officially opened Conversion University, where they presently provide eight articles on increasing conversion rates with strategies for paid advertisements.
Nadir Garouche, from SEO Principle, looked at a couple of posts I had written on IBM, and took a closer look at what IBM is doing in the world of search with IBM: Google’s rival for Business Search Technology? where he points to an exciting announcement from IBM.
Alice Swanberg makes a guest appearance at The Search Lounge and gives us an insider’s look in Guest Obituary for Zeal by Alice Swanberg.
Thanks for the notice, Bill! I’m constantly frustrated by how little consideration basic usability gets from certain major players…
Thanks for the list Bill, that will allow me to update my blog reading list! Regarding IBM, I think we should expect to see a lot of innovation and competition with other players for vertical and “professional” search in the next few months and years.
Hi Joe,
There’s some room for improvement on a lot of offerings from some of the bigger sites. I wonder sometimes if they throw some stuff up online, and then tweak as they go with live participants instead of doing much testing beforehand.
Thank you Nadir. I started poking around the USPTO database for patents and patent applications from IBM related to search. The company is a research dynamo. It would be fun to see some of their ideas come to life, and might change the search landscape considerably.