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The Big 3 Major Search Engines Google, Yahoo & Microsoft (links are to their separate announcements) have all agreed to Follow “Canonical Tag” in an attempt to reduce duplicate content across the web.

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IE8 ‘In Private’ browser privacy functions have put the cat among the pigeons in the online advertising world. (more…)

Google CEO says he is not planning to delay the search advertising deal with Yahoo Inc any longer. (more…)

In June of this year Google and Yahoo brokered a deal in which Google would provide a portion of the advertising on Yahoo for a slice of the revenue. (more…)

The newest search engine on the block, Cuil, has already been put under fierce scrutiny. Launched as a challenger to Google, Cuil has received criticism regarding its unorthodox approach to displaying search results.

According to Think Eyetracking the layout goes against the habitualised search behaviour of Google users. Their finding suggest that using the current layout, the site is destined to fail.

According to their eye tracking study focussing on the search results page, users were confused as to where to look on the page and showed inconsistency in their visual behaviour. Users described the search engine as ‘too busy’, ‘long-winded’ and ‘wordy’.

Cuil, a search engine set up by ex Google employees, displays results differently and also claims to search 3 times more websites than Google and 10 times more than Microsoft Live. Unlike Google, who use popularity (back-linking etc) and page relevance to judge a page rank, Cuil uses solely the content on a website to calculate its relevance to your search words.

Although it is good to see a serious contender to the well known search giant, it is evident that Cuil will need to step up the game if they intend to poach the traditional Google searchers. Trying to change a tried and tested method at this stage in the game may prove to be a little more tricky than first anticipated.

Knol is Google’s version of Wikipedia, where every hosted article is written by an author who actually knows something about the article’s topic.

What makes it different from Wikipedia? Well Google say the difference with Knol is that it places emphasis on central, named authorship on each article rather than anonymous collaboration as found on Wikipedia. In addition Knol also has opportunities for authors to advertise on their articles, so offering the added bonus of being able to make a few quid off the back of their wise words!

Fancy being an Author?

Similar to Wikipedia, Google’s Knol is attempting to combine the vast amounts of knowledge inside people’s heads and to then make it more widely available via the Web, the main difference between the 2 resources is that Google’s Knol is wanting to pull out that knowledge primarily from one specific authoritative head.

“The key principle behind Knol is authorship,” said Google employees Cedric Dupont and Michael McNally.

“Every Knol will have an author (or group of authors) who put their name behind their content. It’s their Knol, their voice, their opinion. We expect that there will be multiple knols on the same subject, and we think that is good,” they said.

What about Collaboration?

Although Google wants to push the author as expert, they aren’t going to ignore the wisdom of the masses and so with “moderated collaboration,” anyone reading an article can make suggested edits to a Knol, the author can then either choose to accept, reject or modify the suggestions and but always remain in control of the content.

Also Knols are will work like a Blog post where readers can submit comments, rate or write a review of any knol.

“Knol will be a conversation open to everyone, not just the experts,” Paul Saffo, an independent technology forecaster, told TechNewsWorld.

“It’ll be entertaining, I’m sure — there’ll be UFO (unidentified flying object) nuts writing very authoritatively on their chosen subject,” he added.

So what’s in it for Google?

Google have set Knol up so that any author can if they wish sign up to their AdSense programme from which Google can then serve up advertisements specified by the author next to their Knol. This means the author can earn some cash for sharing their knowledge and Google cake some money of the back of Google Adwords.

It would seem authors have begun to take advantage of the financial potential of Knol already, someone has put an article together for for laying laminate flooring complete with photos and in depth descriptions of best practice.

As of press time, the Knol had 0 comments and a 5 star rating on a scale to 5 and 2 ads for shops selling laminate flooring!

To check out the public Google Knol beta, click here and start reading or writing your articles!

Adobe Systems are teaming up with Google & Yahoo to make content that is mixed with Flash easier for search engines to index. This should have a big impact on how Flash pages/content is sorted & ranked buy those search engines. The great news for sites with existing Flash .SWF files is they won’t need to make any changes to the pages or code, all the work will be done by the spider programmes from Google & Yahoo!

Great! But what does it all mean?

For the end users, it means more relevant search results, according to Justin Everett-Church, senior product manager for Flash at Adobe. “The perfect page for you may have been out there, but it was all Flash content, so it had low search ranking. This will mean it will have a high ranking.”

The problem for search engines finding Flash-based pages is due to the dynamic nature of Flash, and pretty much any Web runtime, said Everett-Church. A HTML file is a flat file with links, while a Flash .SWF file has various states. Based on user interaction, you could go to different parts of the Flash file. When a search spider reaches a HTML page, it goes through the tags but discards SWF file references. With this new indexing method, when it finds an SWF file, it passes the job off to an optimised search program to examine the SWF file’s contents.

“Google has been working hard to improve how we can read and discover SWF files,” said Bill Coughran, senior vice president of engineering at Google, in a statement. “Through our recent collaboration with Adobe, we now help website owners that choose to design sites with Adobe Flash software by indexing this content better. Improving how we crawl dynamic content will ultimately enhance the search experience for our users.”

Google will be going live with the new SWF indexing technology this week, while Yahoo plans to release it at an undetermined point in the future, according to Everett-Church. He expects this change will have a big effect on search results. “There is so much content out there that has been indexed but not to the thoroughness that was possible,” he told InternetNews.com. “It will take a while for Google to spider all the SWFs out there, but as it goes you are going to see a big effect. One is that there will be more search results, and the ones higher up will be the ones with the great experience you’d expect with a Flash app.”

In the $1 billion law suit accusing YouTube of copyright infringement, Viacom won’t be told the names of users who watch video clips on the Google owned site.

Viacom, are suing YouTube for $1 billion, saying that Youtube became the size that they are now by allowing TV shows produced by the media giant on their website.

The High Court Judge overseeing the case originally ordered YouTube to hand over their entire database of records which would include usernames, IP addresses and viewing habits.  This would allow Viacom to prove that copyrighted material, such as ‘Spongebob Squarepants’ and ‘The Daily Show with John Stewart’ were more heavily watched than the amature clips that YouTube promotes.

To protect user privacy and preserve the integrity of the website, YouTube argued that the user id’s and IP addresses were unnecessary and that viewing habits could be analysed without this data.

Any data released to Viacom will be under a court enforced confedentiality order and Viacom has said it will not use any of the data to persue individual users.

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Search giant, Google are currently testing one of their newest toys to enter the social networking arena.  Google Friend Connect will allow you to add social features, provided by Google and their OpenSocial developer community, to your own website with a simple cut and paste.

Still in the testing phase at the moment, this promises to be a revolutionary step in the way we use social networking. With absolutely no programming experience necessary to add these features to your site, anyone will be able to create their very own social network website based around their favourite topic.

NetInsight eBusiness Consultancy