Yesterday, we began the Search Engine Experiment to discover which of the top search engines really offers the most relevant search results. With 5,000+ participants thus far, I thought now a good time to reveal the results as they currently stand:

As of writing Google offered the overall most relevant results for 41% of searches, Yahoo Search for 33%, and MSN Search trailing behind with only a 27% most relevant share. (Note: the image above is updated automatically, so you will probably be seeing newer figures than written).

We plan to run the experiment indefinitely with the test results automatically updated every 15 minutes and available on this page.

If you haven't already, take the blind test to find out which search engines' results you personally prefer.

Lastly, despite best efforts at making the test fair, and prevent cheating, I remind you that we by no means guarantee the accuracy of these test results.

Take the test now and find out.

By participating in the new search engine experiment you'll:

• Discover without prejudice which of the top (Google, Yahoo, or MSN) engine's results you really prefer.
• More importantly, you'll be contributing to the larger sample used in finding out the answer to the defining question question of the search engine wars: who really offers the overall most relevant results? (Spoiler: preliminary tests indicate it's not Google).

A few things about the experiment

The test is totally blind, meaning no amount of prejudice can affect the outcome.

We plan to run the experiment indefinitely with the latest test results always publicly available.

Since search engines are constantly updating their indices and algorithms, we will also be reporting results over time to account for the fact that the search engine with the highest result relevancy could be X one month, and Y the next.

If you'd like more information on the test and the implementation, please feel free to ask via comments.

Finally, we've made best effort but do not make any guarantees concerning accuracy of test results.

Now take the test already.

This morning I received this email from (Google) Urchin support (emphasis by me):

Hello,

Last week, we sent you an email explaining that the Urchin login system would transition to Google Accounts. Because a Google Account already exists for the email address that you use to log in to Urchin, please use that email address and Google Account password to log in to Urchin in the future. If you can't remember the password for your Google Account, please click the 'Forgot your password?' link below the login box.

We're also excited to announce that we've released a new version of Urchin On Demand, with a new name: Google Analytics. Google Analytics continues to expand upon Urchin On Demand's powerful tools, and features new integration with Google AdWords, increased pageview limits, new executive summary dashboards, and a more.

And, perhaps best of all, Google Analytics is free! That's right - you now get powerful web analytics without having to pay a thing. Your credit card will no longer be billed, and your account will continue to function without interruption. To learn more about Google Analytics, or to log in to your account, please visit http://www.google.com/analytics.

We hope that you enjoy the latest in web analytics.

Sincerely,

The Google Analytics Team

The sign-up page is here.

Nick Wilson on his new blog for bloggers summarizes 5 key "hooks" bloggers (and probably anybody else in fact) can use to successfully attract links:

• News hook
• Contrary Hook
• Attack Hook
• Resource Hook
• Humour Hook

In under a year, Nick brought threadwatch.org from nothing to being one of most highly regarded marketing / tech blogs out there, so we can assume he knows what he's talking about.

Although there's evidence to suggest Google have been devaluing reciprocal links for some time (especially unnatural ones), SE Roundtable points to the Search Engine Watch discussion Reciprocal Linking – Dead or Alive? asking how badly reciprocal linking has been affected since the Jagger updates. Google themselves (or at least Google Engineer Matt Cutts) have said Jagger would be targeting aggressive link-schemes.

The rational consensus seems to be that quality, on-topic links are and will likely remain valuable both in relation to SEO and also for direct traffic, and that off-topic and/or low quality links are either dead or very much near-to-extinction.

SEO Book points to Dan Thies's finding of a useful but non-standard robots.txt feature supported by the Google spider:

[...] Google has introduced increased flexibility to the robots.txt file standard through the use asterisks. Disallow patterns may include "*" to match any sequence of characters, and patterns may end in "$" to indicate the end of a name. To remove all files of a specific file type (for example, to include .jpg but not .gif images), you'd use the following robots.txt entry:

User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /*.gif$

Although Google's explanation only mentions the wildcard syntax in context to their image bot, standard Googlebot also seems to understand it as well. For example:

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /*.php$

Would block all files ending with the php extension.

SEO Book gives some good reasons why now is a good time to buy in some old and neglected domains in your vertical.

Older domains can provide a good source of link popularity for you to point around, Google's algorithm also favors matured domains.

Since Google are believed to use WHOIS data, you may want to consider negotiating with the owner to keep their WHOIS details present. In doing this you can prevent any dampening filters that might otherwise be triggered when a domain is switches owner. Please be aware though, that ICANN can confiscate your domain for invalid/out-of-date WHOIS data.

In a NY Times article, Yahoo discuss their plans for social driven search, and impart how they view their large user base from their array of services as giving a "crucial competitive advantage" over their search engine rivals:

But Mr. Nazem and everyone else really wanted to discuss what lay beyond these keyword searches of the entire Web. "You can look at the evolution of search as a play in three acts," said Jeff Weiner, the senior vice president for search and marketing. "The first is the 'public' Web, where if different people type the same query they'll all get the same results." The second, he said, was purely personal search - finding a file or photo, usually on your own machine.

"The third is the one that we are very interested in," Mr. Weiner said. This is "social" or "community" searching, in which each attempt to find the right restaurant listing, medical advice site, vacation tip or other bit of information takes advantage of other people's successes and failures in locating the same information.

Found via Search Engine Blog

Google Engineer Matt Cutts reports that Jagger 3 is visible at the data center accessible from IP 66.102.9.104. We haven't covered the Jagger updates much -- we've been busy behind the scenes on some cool new projects to launch from WebmasterBrain soon -- but we'll be following future algorithm changes at Google more closely.

According to Techcrunch numerous Yahoo employees regularly sneak into the Googleplex to take advantage of its lavish free lunches. Yahoo's headquarters are a short drive from Google's, and unlike Googlers, Yahoo employees have to pay for their meals; so the story is not as far fetched as it sounds.