SEO Blog

Metamend presidents Todd Hooge, Glen Convey and I had a coffee meeting yesterday at which we discussed the comScore figures presented in yesterday’s blog post. Looking at the figues which show Google with a 61% hold on worldwide search queries, each of us saw slightly different things.

Todd saw the biggest figure. In August 2007, over 61billion searches were conducted across all search engines in the comCast study. 61billion searches served! That is a staggering figure that points out how important organic SEO is to companies who want their content to be visible on the Internet.

Glenn saw the discrepancy between Google and the nine other brand names on the list. With over 60% of the search market served, Google serves more users than all other search engines combined. He also noted how the Chinese language search engine Baidu and the South Korean portal NHN had broken into the Top10 at positions 3 and 5 respectively.

I saw a few other items in the numbers some of which are inspiring and others somewhat disappointing. I also noted the rise of Baidu and NHN but suggested that their inclusion on the list is due to a new method of measuring comScore announced. The inclusion of these engines does show how important the Asian Pacific market is becoming with almost a third of the 257,952,000 unique search users measured.

The Anita Borg Scholarship program has been extended to Canadian under and post graduate students.  Run by Google and the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology, the scholarship honours the work of the late Dr. Anita Borg (1949 - 2003).

Dr. Borg dedicated her adult life to computing and to improving the position of women in the technical fields. In recognition of her work, Google created the scholarship which is awarded to a number of female university students in the US, Europe, Australia and Canada.

According to the Google 2008 Anita Borg Scholarship page, candidates must:

• be entering their senior year of undergraduate study or be enrolled in a graduate program in 2008-2009 at a university in the United States.
• be Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related technical field majors.
• be enrolled in full-time study in 2008-2009.
• maintain a cumulative GPA of at least 3.5 on a 4.0 scale or 4.5 on a 5.0 scale or equivalent in their current program.

Scholarship recipients and finalists will be invited to Google’s New York offices in April for “… a networking retreate featuring workshops with a series of speakers, panelists, breakout sessions and social activities.”