Jeff Random

MSN Bot Crawl Visual Animation

right click and choose zoom in to use timeline control

Used in reference to a post about Animated Search Engine Bot Crawl Visualizations by drunkmenworkhere

These Animated Search Engine Bot Crawl Visualizations are the result of a one year experiment on the behaviour of Yahoo, MSN & Google search engine bots.

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.

Google Analytics launches. Lot’s of features including “Funnel Visualization” that have been lacking from easy to use free stats packages.

One of my friends takes great joy in tormenting Google cheerleaders. He likes to say things like “I’m going to use Yahoo, it’s the best search engine”, or “I’m going to Yahoo for it, that way I will actually find it”. When he wants to find something Y! is the first place that he goes.

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

via i-mode Business Strategy: Yahoo to launch it’s own billing solution for mobile content in Japan. It means they can now provide full access, content and billing to end users independently from carriers

SEOmoz | Search Engine Ranking Factors

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

“Evolution has a nearly infinite multiplier on its search power and it just happens to invest its search effort in the mathematically optimal most efficient search allocation” link

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?