Mobile Search

The mobile search industry has been primed to take-off every year for the past couple of years – without doing so. Many commentators have written articles about how 2008 is going to be the year that mobile search technology finally reaches out to the masses.

Big players in the search and telecoms industries are forming strategic alliances to try and attain first mover advantage and gather market share in consumer mobile search. The quest for delivering search results for people on the move is gathering pace with every passing week.

At the forefront of mobile search is Google Mobile which utilises the unrivalled knowledge and experience of Google in the Search field. Both Microsoft and Yahoo! are also proactively developing and marketing their own mobile search technologies in a bid to attract early adopters.

Glossary of Search Marketing Terms – Alexa

Alexa – The web information company

Founded in April 1996, Alexa Internet grew out of a vision of Web navigation that is intelligent and constantly improving with the participation of its users.  The business is now owned by Amazon.com.

Alexa has developed an installed base of millions of toolbars, one of the largest Web crawls and an infrastructure to process and serve massive amounts of data. For users of Alexa’s Toolbar and web site this has resulted in products that have revolutionised Web navigation and intelligence.

Wikipedia Launch Search Engine

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has launched a new Wikia Search Engine based on trusted feedback from a community of users.

An alpha version of Wikia Search aims to provide a viable alternative to the likes of Google by allowing signed-up users to submit ratings on search results.

“Search is a fundamental part of the infrastructure of the internet, and should be done in an open, objective and accountable way,” said Wales. “Wikia Search, which we have been working on for a long time, represents the first draft of the future of search.”

Wales admitted that the very nature of the site means that it will take time for the effect to be noticeable, as its community-driven remit will take a while to build up entries. “Of course, before we start, we have no user feedback data. So the results are pretty bad. But we expect them to improve rapidly in the coming weeks,” he said.

Wales believes that the new search engine adheres to the Four Organising Principles on which the future of internet search must be based. These are:

1. Transparency
   Openness in how the systems and algorithms operate in the form of open source licences and open content APIs.
2. Community
   Everyone is able to contribute in some way (as individuals or entire organisations) to a strong social and community focus.
3. Quality
   Significantly improve the relevancy and accuracy of search results and the searching experience.
4. Privacy
   Privacy must be protected. Do not store or transmit any identifying data.

Glossary of Search Marketing Terms – Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing

Definitions…

Affiliate marketing is the use by a Web site that sells products of other Web sites, called affiliates, to help market the products. Amazon.com, the book seller, created the first large-scale affiliate program and hundreds of other companies have followed since.

Alternatively…

A system of advertising in which site A agrees to feature buttons from site B, and site A gets a percentage of any sales generated for site B.

Affiliate marketing programs allows merchants to expand their market reach and mindshare by paying independent agents on a cost per action (CPA) basis. Affiliates only get paid if visitors complete an action.

Affiliate marketing overlaps with other internet marketing methods to some degree, because affiliates often use regular advertising methods. Those methods include organic search engine optimisation, paid search engine marketing, email marketing and in some sense display advertising.

What is Google Everflux?

In the summer of 2003 Google switched to a “fresh crawl” process to make their results as relevant and as fresh as possible. It runs each day. The purpose of the daily fresh crawl is to update Web pages in the index that change regularly.

This allows Google to provide results that are up-to-date with current events, generating much smaller day-to-day changes that some people called everflux.

We have qualified below various other descriptions of search engine updates. Provided by Matt Cutts, Google:  

Algorithm update: Typically yields changes in the search results on the larger end of the spectrum. Algorithms can change at any time, but noticeable changes tend to be less frequent.

Data refresh: When data is refreshed within an existing algorithm. Changes are typically toward the less-impactful end of the spectrum, and are often so small that people don’t even notice. One of the smallest types of data refreshes is an:

Index update: When new indexing data is pushed out to data centers. From the summer of 2000 to the summer of 2003, index updates tended to happen about once a month. The resulting changes were called the Google Dance. The Google Dance occurred over the course of 6-8 days because each data center in turn had to be taken out of rotation and loaded with an entirely new web index, and that took time.