First up was Jon Glick from Yahoo! who gave a quick overview of the new stuff going on at Yahoo!. One thing you can now do is access all your paid inclusions for Inktomi, AV, etc. at one place - Overture. Yahoo! Shopping came out with SmartSort a new and more intuitive way to filter what you really are looking for in Yahoo! Google said that they have no plans to personalize results based on user. They said that will just make things more confusing and is not the best way to go about search.Shopping (pretty neat interface). He also mentioned that if you do an Inktomi feed, you can be included automatically (no extra charge above the feed) in Yahoo! Shopping.
The next question was about personalization and how the search engines will use a person's location and demographic information to enhance the search. Basically, the concept is - since I know who you are and what you searched for in the past, provide different results that are tailored to you versus the guy sitting in the next cubicle. They all said they do track this information if you have the tool bars installed but they would never sell or give this information to a third party. Yahoo! said that we can expect to see this as an OPTION in a year or two but will not be required. Most the others said the same except for Google, Google said that they have no plans to personalize results based on user. They said that will just make things more confusing and is not the best way to go about search.
How many people and resources does each search engine put towards spam reports? All but Yahoo! said they did not have any specific team or individuals responsible for spam. Yahoo! said they have 3 full time engineers who handle spam and send your spam reports to either spamreport@inktomi.com or spamd@av.com. Google said they will rarely (almost never) block or ban a specific page or site, they said they will look at the spam and build into their algorithm to filter out those types of sites. Teoma basically came out and said that they do not have spam based on their unique method of ranking site. That was a bold statement and I liked it, I am starting to like Teoma.
Tracking:
Desired keyword phrases and ranking in each search engine (we only choose the top five);
Traffic as noted from each search engine in WebTrends/Urchin/NetTracker/Hitbox/other;
Adwords click-thru & cost;
Overture click-thru & cost;
Internal administrative data;
Manual checking of search engine listings to identify other factors which many affect search engine rankings, traffic, conversion rates which could in time lower rankings if people do not stay on your site;
Monthly leads, sales, other;
posted by Jen @ 11:03 AM
<< Home