SEO Blog

The National Union of Journalists of the UK and Ireland is boycotting Yahoo and its products, according to this report from America’s Network. This is in response to Yahoo’s actions in China. Yahoo is accused of assisting Chinese authorities by providing them with information about journalists exercising free speech in that country. This has lead to prosecution and jailing of a number of writers.

For those interested in spiders (not the creepy crawly kind), Barry Schwartz from Search Engine Watch posted a link to a list of Google’s current bots, which can be viewed here.

We’re always on the look out for new search engine technologies to report about. This morning I came across one called Optevi Search.

All search engines claim to offer the most relevant results. Optevi is no different. However, I have to say this is a pretty cool system. Optevi works off a personalized approach, allowing you to refine your own results as you see fit by entering a search then selecting the appropriate category, or “bundle,” to search under. This helps cut down on spam by returning information from relevant sites. For instance, I entered ‘Lord of the Rings’ in the search bar, and from the predefined bundle drop down menu I selected SciFi. The results were very relevant. I did the same search under Greenparty and it didn’t come up with anything very relevant. You also have the option of performing a search without selecting any of the bundles.

The predefined ‘Public Bundle’ list currently includes:

LIFESTYLE AND INTERESTS
CatLover
DogLover
Guns and Defense
LatinCulture
Retired and Aging
SciFi
UrbanCulture
Vegan and Vegetarian

POLITICS
Democrat
Environmentalist
FreeMarkets and Business
GreenParty
InternationalPerspective
Libertarian
Republican
Socialist And Communist

GENERAL
GeneralReference

I know this topic was already covered a short time back, but as I was surfing for news this morning I came across this article from Computerworld. Google is continuing its complaint over Microsoft’s latest version of Internet Explorer. This irks me. Google Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt says, “We want to make sure that the use of the power of Windows is done in a correct and legally appropriate way.”

Here’s the skinny. The latest version of IE will default to MSN Search. So what? Isn’t that the way the current IE browser works? I think so. Google doesn’t like it however. It wants IE to give users the option of setting the default from the new drop down menu to whatever they prefer, before start up. Here’s the thing—most Internet users use Google, and will change it to Google anyway. The only people I know that seem to stick with a default MSN Search are those who don’t understand how to change their settings. No offense to MSN, but I worked in tech support long enough to see this trend, and an immediate example would be over at my parents’ house (sorry mom).