You can click on the pictures to watch the animated visualizations from drunkmenworkhere.

MSN Bot Visual Animation

Yahoo Slurp Visual Animation

Google Bot Visual Animation

Quick Conclusion – For Google shorter URLs help rankings & comment spam does hurt rankings.

For you SEO types wistful for the days of chasing the green fairy, there is even a graphical visualization of pagerank in their test matrix.

The paths are similiar to natural forms. That fits with the idea that evolution is efficent search leading leading to winning forms. Perhaps we will find that the closer advanced visualizations resemble natural forms, that the visualization improves and/or the engines become.

Up until now Zooko‘s Triangle has argued for ‘choose any two’ in the same way that you can generally ‘choose any two’ amongst Good, Fast & Cheap.

Now Marc Steigler suggests a system for making “secure, memorable, and global identifiers to use on the Internet”

The metatheory extrapolates well whether you use the example of preventing paypal phishing, or apply the theory to purchase recommendations.

“About This Site” is a plugin for Firefox that makes it easy to check:

* Alexa traffic detail and related sites
* Del.icio.us linkbacks
* Google related pages, cache and link information
* Kinja site readers
* Netcraft reports
* Open Directory site listing
* Popdex search for citations
* Technorati link cosmos
* Wayback Machine archive
* Whois query
* Yahoo linkdomain

This plugin to show metadata is very useful for SEO as well as SEM.

What makes this funy is that he makes a good part of his living through “creative search engine marketing” and is generally much more able to game Yahoo than Google.

But now it looks like a lot more people may be thinking his way. Yahoo has launched personalized social search.

Save to My Web is a simple, sociable button you can add to any and every page of your blog or website. Users click to save your content and add it directly to their stored pages on My Web 2.0. From there, the page is easy to retrieve, and easy to share with others. …

By distributing the tagging/microchunking of content to it’s users, Yahoo goes from search & communities (Y! groups) to search + communities + reconstructor. This could be the missing piece for the Yahoo triple play, a la Media 2.0 Strategic Maxims.

via John Battelle’s Searchblog

Here is a list of factors in SERPs, aggregated & weighted by a very respectable group of SEOs. Excellent reference for SEO.

Targeting Documents and Terms Through Co-Occurrence Datais a paper written by Dr. Garcia. In which he explains in detail how to choose which keyword in a two term phrase to focus on for SEO.

By way of example the phrase “car insurance” is analyzed, with the end result showing that it is better to target “insurance” as opposed to “car”.

Thus by focusing your efforts on the less competitive term, you can maximize your optimization for the two term keyphrase.

Looking at revenues & users for Ebay, Yahoo & Google is where new media economics really begins to come into it’s own. This is web 2.0 theory being proven in the market today.

Times of great change mean times of great opportunity.

Web 2.0 is a shift to from tight, hierarchical architectures which realize exponential network FX, to loosely structured architecture which realize combinatorial network FX.

More simply, Web 2.0 is about the shift from network search economies, which realize mild exponential gains – your utility is bounded by the number of things (people, etc) you can find on the network – to network coordination economies, which realize combinatorial gains: your utility is bounded by the number of things (transactions, etc) you can do on the network.

via bubblegeneration - strategy, business models, and innovation

– Link

Trust in network environments
The need for a cognitive model of trust
The socio-cognitive model of trust
The beliefs of trust: what X thinks about Y
The “Motivation belief” of trust
Yin-yang trust
Internal and external trust
The sources of trust
Trust and irrationality
Degrees of trust
Trust and risk
Trust and delegation
Trust and control
Trust and adjustable autonomy
The dynamics of trust
Trust and experiences
Trust elicits trust
Trust atmosphere
Trust as a three parties relationship: contracts and authorities
Trust as a communicative act
Trust as a fuzzy network
Trust in contract nets
Trust, security and technology
Trust and technical knowledge
Trust and knowledge management

Sometimes closing your eyes gets you exactly where you want to go. Evolution is blind, in that mutations occur without design. Yet even so, evolution produces the most optimal adaptation for any given environment over time.

“Evolution is an information processing system building vast database of information and synthesizing complex measurements of that information and doing an incredibly powerful search and mining of that information database to discover and refine improvements.” link

Sounds a lot like what some of the Big Boys and others are up to, as well as some of other players.

One of the obvious models that Search can learn from Evolution is consequences.

In nature, adaptations/mutations have consequences. Constant feedback is provided by the environment using signals ranging from prosperity to death.

The adult entertainment industry has been doing this for years via Toplists, TGPs (self sorting based on productivity), and partner accounts (symbiotic relationships).

Google is on the track with the toolbar voting buttons, and others like del.icio.us are even further along.

More accurate/efficient feedback means shorter cycles/generations which means less time to optimization.

Not many people bother to give feedback unless it is automatic, or they see immediate benefit from doing so. Personalization or Customization is terrific incentive for people to give feedback.

Maybe what Search needs is to introduce Death into the equation?