Yahoo has updated its search index which of course is relevant to any online business. So I had a quick look to see how SpaceRef did in this update. For our most important keyword/phrase we stayed the same, in the top ten results on page 1. For a couple of secondary keywords we went down a bit and up bit. In other words status quo. Overall I’m happy with this. Of course it’s only recently that I’ve started paying more attention to this and actually working on improving our rankings. It’s all about available time. Of note, our competitors remained pretty much the same as before except for one who fell out of the top 50 for what I consider the top keyword in our business, ouch.
Weather Report: Yahoo! Search Index Update:
We rolled out an index update last night. As usual, you may see some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages that are included in the index. Those who follow these weather updates may have noticed that they are occurring more frequently; this is the result of improvements to the indexing system.
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After the morning break there were four more talks in Session One: Searchers and Search Behaviours. The first up was Tony Gentile of Healthline. His talk dealt with medically guided search. In his own words “Healthline connects consumer and medical vocabulary and provides medically guided search”. The talk focused on this vertical search and how to make the results relevant to them. A couple of the points I found interesting were:
- users don’t know what they don’t know
- there’s a difference between search for something and researching something
- really know your audience, almost 30% of their searches are done on behalf of someone else
- make the user feel confident in your product, if they feel confident about the results they get, they’ll be back
Overall a good talk on vertical search product. Vertical search is something aTerra (my company) has been working on for some time, primarily in the biotech and space sector. The morning sessions have given me some new ideas which I’d like to develop for these and other niches.
The next talk was by Max Copperman of Knova Software. Max talked dealt with WYSISWIG search crafting. His company makes makes call center applications and call service applications. It was a more technical talk dealing with what he calls “tuning”. Tuning, as in tuning all facets of your search engine.
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I’m currently in Boston attending the Search Engine Meeting conference. I’m here to learn what new technologies are emerging, who’s doing what, and make some new contacts.
The first speaker today was Dave Girouard of Google who spoke about Google’s new OneBox. While the OneBox may shake the industry, I found Dave’s talk uninspiring. He spent his 25 minutes leading up to the introduction of OneBox. Some of his key points were:
- The enterprise market is underutilized
- not enough value to end user
- employees are consumers are the same people
Update: I forgot to mention that Dave mentioned that the enterprise search market is about 1/10th smaller than the consumer market and there’s a lot of room for growth and competition.
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