Thursday, August 25, 2005

AOL News Joins the Big League of News Search Engines
"When America Online launched of its new AOL.com portal back on June 21, the relaunch of AOL News went largely unnoticed. However, Nielsen//NetRatings has just disclosed its monthly data for July 2005 and it turns out that AOL News has a unique audience of 16.5 million.
While the unique audience of AOL News is about 29% smaller than Yahoo News, AOL News is more than 2.4 times larger than Google News and almost 6.8 times larger than Topix.net. This catapults AOL News into the big league of news search engines.

Brand / Domain Unique Audience (000)
Yahoo! News 23,210
AOL News 16,516
Google News 6,752
Topix.net 2,432"
Nielsen//NetRatings: Searches Up 3 Percent In July - 08/25/2005: "INDUSTRY WATCHERS EXPECTED THAT SEARCH growth would moderate in the summer, on the theory that consumers spend less time at their computers during the warm weather. But new figures from Nielsen//NetRatings show that U.S. Internet users actually performed more searches last month than in June.

Still, the growth rate was less impressive than earlier in the year; in the second quarter, users conducted 12.8 billion searches--5 percent more than in the first quarter.
Google once again captured the largest proportion of searches, accounting for 46.2 percent last month--down slightly from 47 percent in June. Yahoo! Search was responsible for 22.5 percent of July searches--up slightly from 22.3 percent in June--while MSN Search accounted for 12.6 percent of searches last month, up marginally from 12.5 percent in June. "

Tuesday, August 16, 2005

Feedster To Start Ranking Blogs - 08/16/2005

FEEDSTER, INC., AN INTERNET SEARCH engine and advertising network for blogs and RSS feeds, today launches a ranking of what it deems the top 500 blogs in the United States, as determined by factors such as the number of inbound links and frequency of updates. "

Friday, August 12, 2005

New dynamic URL info from Google!
Matt suggests you need to stay below 3 strings (2 or less) and not use "id=" or more than 4 numeric characters.

Session Four: Day Three: Search Engine Q&A On Links:
"Q: Query strings at the end or URLs, when does that make it a problem for engines?
A: Matt said 3 or more, its not great, but GoogleBot sometime is smart. Don't use id= in it, and if you have numeric parameters, don't go above 4 numbers.
Kaushal agrees with Matt, but a limited set of parameters are ok.
Tim adds that if you have inbound links to those dynamic URLs, they will more likely crawl it. Yahoo! is less considered with duplicate issues."
MediaPost Publications - Google Search Share Continues To Grow - 08/12/2005

"GOOGLE, YAHOO! SEARCH, AND MSN Search were responsible for more than 93 percent of U.S. searches on the major engines last month, according to new data from Hitwise. Google accounted for 59 percent of searches across the major search engines last month--14 percent more than July of 2004. Yahoo! captured 29 percent of searches--about half as many as Google--while MSN trailed with 5.5 percent. "