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August 29, 2008

Google Search Suggestions Is Just Dumb

As many of you may already know, Google has officially launched its keyword suggestion tool as of yesterday. The keyword phrase suggestion tool acts very similar to what people are accustomed to seeing for over 13 months at Yahoo! where as you type in phrases in the search box, down drops keyword phrase suggestions that allow you as a user to select a targeted phrase from the list as opposed to typing in all the phrases for the search. Pretty cool, right?

Well, I think Google is just dumb with the deployment of this new feature. Why you ask? The keyword phrase suggestion tool ONLY WORKS ONCE at the homepage of Google. In other words, once you have pulled up a set of results from your initial search @ Google's homepage, you never see the suggestions box again if you conduct another search from the resulting search results page. To me, that doesn't make any sense especially taking into account the fact this search feature has been in Beta/testing mode for over 3 years. You would think Google would have figured out this 'bug" prior to taking the feature out of Beta and in to the mainstream.

Perhaps Google is just "testing" the new feature at the homepage level to see how people are using it before they roll it out entirely? Time will tell I suppose.

Posted by sean at 09:07 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

August 23, 2008

Intrapromote Welcomes Angela Moore as Director of Link Development

I wanted to let everyone know how happy we are with a new addition to our staff. Angela Moore has joined us as Director of Link Development, a position that we built around her significant experience and skills. She'll be managing a team and will really broaden the scope of our link building services. We have already seen great things and expect that to continue.

Here's the release. Angela is also a mod at SEW Forums and is already a veteran blogger, so keep an eye on our link-building category (& feed). Welcome, Angela.

Posted by erik at 08:26 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 18, 2008

Twitter and the "Black Box" of Reputation Management

I keep reading stories about social media sites like Twitter and how they're revolutionizing customer service. Comcast. H&R Block. Southwest Airlines. On and on. (The organic tie-in here is that for many companies, pages like Twitter profiles -- as well as the news stories that discuss them -- are already showing up on SERPs for company names, and that's going to continue for a while.)

All this is great, of course. But at the same time, it reminds me of an old joke I'm sure you've heard. If an airplane's "black box" is the single, indestructible element of the plane that is nearly always recoverable after a crash, why don't they just make the whole plane out of black box?

Silly, I know. But similarly, if using something like Twitter is the perfect, efficacious form of customer service we've all been waiting for, why is it the exception instead of the rule? Why do companies frequently use social media to apologize for more traditional forms of customer service that garner complaints, instead of propagating these rapid-response techniques across their traditional customer service and support environments? It's a cynical perspective, but I think one reason that Twitter users get quick reaction and kid-glove treatment is that their complaints "have legs." In other words, they're being broadcast to the world, not just to the company. If a company doesn't respond to your forum post or answer your email, yet they respond to your Tweet in 12 minutes, part of you should be happy, and part of you should be angry. You're being addressed because your method of complaint has the most potential to harm them.

If a company had a queue set up so that any 800 call or support forum post that languished unanswered for 24 hours was re-broadcast as a press release, now THAT would be some accountability.

Posted by erik at 03:12 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 08, 2008

The Difference Between Crawling and Indexing

I talk a lot about crawling and indexing (to the point that we have a dedicated category), but I think it's worthwhile to back up and describe some of what's going on.

The terms crawling and indexing (and indexing's cousin, caching) are frequently used together, but you should not consider them synonyms.

Exact definitions probably differ from person to person, but following is how I explain the processes:

Crawling is the process of an engine requesting -- and successfully downloading -- a unique URL. Obstacles to crawling include no links to a URL, server downtime, robots exclusion, or using links (such as some JavaScript links) from which bots cannot find a valid URL.

Indexing is the result of successful crawling. I consider a URL to be indexed (by Google) when an info: or cache: query produces a result, signifying the URL's presence in the Google index. Obstacles to indexing can include duplication (the engine might decide to index only one version of content for which it finds many nearly identical URLs), unreliable server delivery (the engine may decide to not index a page that it can access during only one-third of its attempts), and so on.

What's the difference between crawling and indexing, in terms of time? Here's a recent example. I recently watched a newly introduced URL to see when it would be indexed. I monitored the text cache query of the URL every four hours starting when the URL went live on July 2. (This URL was one of a number of URLs linked to on a new site map.)

On July 17, the text cache showed results and finally stopped saying "Your search - cache:[URL] - did not match any documents." But what was interesting is that the cached file showed the results of the URL "as retrieved on 8 Jul 08." So make special note that the URL was crawled and cached over a week before it appeared in the index.

A better, more comprehensive test would be to watch server logs and see how many times the file was requested, and with what frequency, between the original request date and date at which the cache query showed results. Additional testing would try to detect ways to shorten that time by increasing the number (and prominence) of incoming links and so on.

Posted by erik at 12:04 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack