When stockbrokers who spend their day searching for financial information about different businesses type the word “Starbucks” into Google’s search box, chances are that they are more likely to be looking for stock price information than the closest place that they can get a mint mocha chip frappuccino. When a city-dwelling college student, who likes [...]

I thought that she was trying to hack my computer the first time I visited her website, and it asked me if I wanted to have files ftp’ed to my computer… I went shopping for a ring this week… We both fell in love, with drunken noodles, on our first date in a little Thai restaurant, and [...]

As a webmaster, when you put a page up on the web, there may be parts of that page that you may not want to have indexed by a search engine. Many web pages contain information that isn’t unique to each page, such as the navigation for a site, copyright notices, advertising, links to [...]

Yahoo was granted a patent this week which describes how anchor text in links may be used to increase the relevancy ranking of a page pointed to by that anchor text. The patent was originally filed in 2002, and it discusses how anchor text might work while naming the Altavista search engine as a [...]

Search engine optimization is an ever growing and ever changing field, and as search engines and the Web change, so does SEO. There are no classrooms, nor college courses, no single one site or conference series or book that can help you keep up with those changes. Paying attention to a lot of blogs, news reports, [...]

Have you ever searched at a search engine and received results that weren’t very good matches? You may have searched again after changing the query terms that you used, or you may have given up on the search. For example, you perform a search, such as “pizza in Elkton, Maryland,” and you don’t receive any actual matches [...]

How well would a food search engine work on the Web? One that let you search for meals available at local restaurants, or through recipes, or at local markets where you could find the ingredients to make your meal? What if it provided information about each dish based upon flavors such as saltiness or bitterness, [...]

My original title for this post was, “The Yahoo Site Explorer Patent Application,” because the post is about a new patent application from Yahoo that describes some of the information that they would like to receive from webmasters to make their efforts towards indexing the web easier. The majority of this post does describe what is [...]