The Studio 119 Degrees Blog

Some of you may have noticed some new buttons / features to your Google search results pages last week. It seems the development team over at Google have decided to allow their users the ability to customize their search pages. This feature is only available when you are logged into Google. Google is calling this their ‘SeachWiki’ feature.

This newly released feature also has the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) world waiting on pins and needles to see where things are headed with the way Google will use this data to craft it’s algorithm to de-emphasize ranking within search result pages when searching with Google. Some are saying that ‘Ranking is Dead’! Follow this previous link to view an interesting interview and article with Bruce Clay and his take on the future of ranking within Google and the importance of traffic. SEOs will now have to rely heavily upon looking at analytics, bounce rate, and traffic.

But I wanted to show everyone the new feature so that everyone can start using this to better cater their search results to themselves. It really does help find that site that used to be on the second or third results page and throwing it to the first page at the top! You can even delete certain listings that you don’t want to see. Obviously, creating a more customized search.

So at first, we’ll do a search for ‘Yellow Pages’ (as I work for one of the local internet yellow page web sites… ).

At first glance, you’ll notice the ‘Up Arrow’ & ‘X’ to the right of the listing. Under that there’s also a ‘Comment Balloon’ icon.

 

Allow me to go briefly over each item here:

Above, you will see how the ‘Promote’ button appears once you mouse-over it.

 

Once you click on this ‘Promote’ button it will not only move the listing to the top of the page, but it will also add another field below the listing where data is revealed as to how many people promoted or removed the listing and their Google Account names.

 

The ‘Remove’ button functions pretty much in the same way, except that when you click on it the listing disappears from your search results.

 

Not only can you promote or remove a listing, but you can also add a comment to remind yourself what you enjoyed about this site, etc. Or you can also allow other Google members to view your comments, which I will describe below.

 

What’s really interesting is what appears at the very bottom of the page:

 

 

There’s a line appearing with ‘Add a result’, ‘See all my SearchWiki notes’, ‘See all notes for this SearchWiki’ & ‘Learn more’ links.

When clicking on the ‘Add a result’ this appears:

This allows you to customize your search results page even more by adding a site or page that you feel should be included within these results.

 

Clicking on ‘See all my SearchWiki notes’ reveals:

Clicking on ‘See all notes for this SearchWiki’ also shows your comment, if you left one, or all the comments left by Google users for the ‘Yellow Pages’ search.

 

And finally, clicking on ‘Learn more’ goes to Google’s description of this new feature.

 

At YouTube, there is a SearchWiki video which better illustrates the new features in action.

 

As I mentioned the SEO world is anxiously awaiting to see how this new feature will affect rankings within the search results. Until then, we can enjoy customizing our search result pages.

 

Chris J. Politzki
Studio 119 Degrees

 

So Google Knol is out. For those of you not yet in the ‘Knol’ here’s a short run-down of what it’s all about.

- similar to Wikipedia (Encyclopedia-like). Could be called ‘Googlepedia’. Might be Google’s way of pushing Wikipedia search result listings down further on the page as they have the tendency to appear very high in the SERPs.

- only one author contributing unless collaboration is selected (3 options on this: Open, Moderated & Closed). This allows writers/contributors to gain better control of their content as compared to Wikipedia where it is a ‘free-for-all’ system.

- ‘Share What You Know’ is the goal of the Knol team. They do seem to be open to changing the Knol site according to user suggestions to improve. There are many issues, such as a search within Google produces results quicker than within the Knol site. Indexing within Google search seems to happen quicker and has been pointed out as a possible bug.

- ‘Knol’ is also defined as being a ‘knowledge unit’ or ‘authoritive unit of knowledge’.

- A Knol should be an introductory article about a specific subject.

- Initial popular Knols seem to be health-related.

- Contributors have the capability to monetize their Knols with Google Ads. Something Wikipedia has not been able to do as it is a non-profit organization.

- Some opinions point out that this may be Google’s attempt to ‘provide’ the information rather than just ‘point’ to the information.

- It also appears that Knols could become a haven for spammers. Programs have already popped up to easily submit Knols.

- Competition sites other than Wikipedia include Hubpages.com and Squidoo.com.

- Copyright issues have been discussed. Content scraping, in particular, has been brought into the conversations popping up.

- Knol team requests that you do:

1. Voice your opinion.

2. Think about how to get readers involved.

3. Provide References, Ask for Reviews, Display Credentials.

4. Focus on communicating clearly.

5. Follow the Rules

- Knol team requests that you do not:

1. Write a blog.

2. Post Advertisements.

For Google’s description and introduction of Knol, take a look at this entry in their blog:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/12/encouraging-people-to-contribute.html

Chris J. Politzki
Studio 119 Degrees

So I’m making progress on the new design of the site, but it’s just taking some time as it’s hard to find just that, TIME!

In the meantime, I thought I’d share a little something. Recently, Google announced that they had improved their Flash file indexing. Google Flash indexing, may be something most of you are not familiar with. And perhaps you also don’t wish to make yourself familiar with it, which is perfectly fine. For those of us who are aware of the difficulties we Flash Designers had with site content which contained almost exclusively flash. The search engines were not able to crawl and index the content within the flash file. Therefore, webmasters and designers were frantically duplicating content into meta tags and such. Well, no need for that anymore!

I have an example of how Google indexed my flash content. First, let’s look at the Search Results page. I first typed in site:www.studio119.com to see which pages have been indexed by Google. Then I clicked through the pages of results to find the flash content.

After I found the flash file that had been indexed I looked a little closer:

The first portion looks like it took the first few lines of text, or copy and put it to the Title of the page. The second, description portion looks like it repeats the Title and then adds on the URL of where the flash file points to after it is through, which is broken now as this is an older file, but I’ll use it for demonstration purposes for now.

Interesting I thought, so thought I’d share it with those of you that might be worried about how Google handles flash currently.

More to come soon! Stay tuned!

Chris J. Politzki
Studio 119 Degrees