Google Determining Search Authority Pages and Propagating Authority to Related Pages

Google has unveiled an approach to determining search authority pages for query terms and business locations and categories on a site and making other pages on the same site more relevant for that information, even if it isn’t mentioned on those other pages. Are there authority pages on the Web for some search terms or … Read more

Would You Rent Your Rooftop to Google To Show Ads Upon?

Painters from the Googleplex wouldn’t show up at your door with ladders and paintbrushes. These wouldn’t be physical ads. They would instead show up in Google Maps, like the following which points out “Bob’s Sporting Goods” and displays ads for Bob’s local competitors. Ads in services like Google Earth and Microsoft Virtual Earth presently appear … Read more

Smaller Screens Means Smarter Image Processing by Search Engines

Image processing patent

Questions About Image Propcessing A recent commentator asked if image search from the search engines would soon involve indexing text found within images using optical character recognition (OCR) software, which tries to read words that are parts of images. My answer was that it would be computationally expensive for a search engine to try to … Read more

Erik Selberg Leaves Microsoft Live, Joins Amazon

Along with news of Microsoft’s Updated Live Search Engine, discussed at Microsoft’s Searchification Day, comes some other news from the Live.com camp. One of the founders of the Microsoft Search Labs (a research and development group within the Windows Live Search team), Erik Selberg, is leaving Microsoft to join Amazon.com. With my last post on … Read more