Just When You Have Finally Mastered Google Search, Along Comes New Search Tools to Wow You or Not: Part 1 of 2

Google Search has changed the way most of us do research. We put in a word or phrase and instantaneously receive a response that can contain 100s to millions of references with those words. What a challenge this has proven to be for the traditional search technologies of the past, the library, encyclopedias, and newspaper and newswire services. Even the online search subscription services from West Publishing and Lexis-Nexis have felt the impact of Google's ubiquitous research application. Other search engines like Yahoo and Ask Jeeves have found themselves playing second fiddle to Google.

As powerful a tool as Google Search is, it is also a source of great confusion and an eater of time. Unless you use the Advanced Search capability, simple search results may require you to wade through hundreds of documents of little value to your query. There is also no way to know whether the quality of the information you find represents facts or fancy. Hence the evolution of new search utilities is inevitable.

This article is part one of a two part discussion on the most recent newcomers to the Internet search scene. In this article we take a quick look at Wolfram|Alpha. In part two we will explore Microsoft Bing.

Stephen Wolfram is the mind behind Wolfram|Alpha. A scientist and mathematician, Wolfram has made the long-term goal of this venture to make knowledge accessible to anyone using state-of-the-art and science, computing models, methods and algorithms. With Wolfram|Alpha you enter a question in natural language and receive an answer.

You can try it out to see the results. I give you some examples of queries I have made:

I asked Wolfram|Alpha to "compare Canada and Australia population." It came back with results in report format that compared total population, history, value comparisons and demographics.



























You can ask Wolfram|Alpha to give you information about a historical event. I asked "fall of Constantinople," (If you want to know why I picked that subject, I studied Medieval History, Islamic and Byzantine Studies in university). Here was the result:

It was nice to see that it knew what I knew and even gave me other phrases or words to look up to obtain even more background information.

This is pretty powerful stuff. But what Wolfram|Alpha appears to be very good at is solving mathematical equations and problems. Its algorithms and computing methods lend themselves to that type of query.



Here is another example. I asked Wolfram|Alpha to give answer the following problem "1283 times 56." It came back with the following:
















Wolfram|Alpha describes itself as a work in progress. On its site it claims to contain 10+ trillion pieces of data, 50,000+ algorithms and models, and linguistic capabilities for over 1,000 domains.

As Wolfram|Alpha develops it is attempting to systematically cover the content available from the world's reference libraries. Future plans involve expanding coverage in science, technology, economics and popular culture.

Wolfram|Alpha has attempted to create a way to enter questions in a more natural language than Google Search or other search engines. I found, however, that it was easy to confuse Wolfram|Alpha when stating a query in natural language and often had it come back with an answer that required me to rethink the way I posed the question. This left me a bit frustrated. But the more I play with this tool the more impressed I am by its potential to provide a new means of doing meaningful online research.

There's lots of online help at the Wolfram|Alpha site and I encourage you to see how you can utilize this new research tool in your businness and lives. If anything it should help your children with their math homework.

SEO: How Your Small Business Can Attract Potential Customers On The Web

There has been a lot written about search engine optimization (SEO), that process of improving your website’s visibility when someone enters a search engine query on Google or Yahoo or MSN. SEO ensures that your website pages produce higher search result listings, getting you onto the first page ideally, if not within the first few pages. To optimize your website for queries it is important to know how search engines work and how people use them.

Crawling the Web

Have you ever used Google Alerts? This free application from Google allows you to create a web crawler based on you entering a phrase or descriptor on a subject of interest to you. Based on the search frequency you choose your Google Alert goes out and finds suitable information and reports back to you in your email.

The crawlers that web search engines use are very similar. They are robot collectors that examine websites, finding information and storing it. Crawlers look at HTML pages. They look at PDFs. They look at file names and the names of URL links. They have more trouble with images, video, Flash and Javascripts.

When a crawler looks at a page it extracts word information from the page header. it looks a key word tags. When it is finished it creates a data index which the search engine stores in a database. Every search engine query accesses that information database.

Searching Results

A query in Google or another search engine creates an online report listing relevant pages. Every search engine has different criteria for determining what results should appear. Google, for example, uses over 200 criteria in its search engine. Search engines rank results based on what is considered most relevant first and less relevant last. The positioning of search results is what SEO is designed to assist.

Some Tips for Improving Search Ranking Results There is so much written about SEO on the web and so many companies providing SEO services that for small businesses the whole subject can become very confusing. What to do? What to do? Well here are some very simple rules for you to follow to improve rankings.

1. Create clear and accurately named page titles. This helps web crawlers immensely and makes it easy to display relevant search query results. Make sure that your homepage contains the name of your business in the title. Make sure that you put the name of your products and services on relevant pages in the title position.

2. Use URLs that describe page content. Here are two URL names: http://rosen.len.googlepages.com/services and http://rosen.len.googlepages.com/page112 A crawler can do very little with the latter. There is no relevant word in the URL to indicate the nature of the page content.

3. Create headers that reflect what's on the web page. If you do tradeshows like I do then you may understand this analogy. Unstructured content is like the booth you walk by that has lots of information but you cannot tell what the exhibitor does. Structured content is the booth that features clear, intuitive messages. When you construct a website you have to make sure that each page has a clear message that starts with the header and goes on from there.

4. Use relevant words and phrases when creating page links. Take a look at the following example:

(Click on image to enlarge)

The links specifically describe the content of the pages they link to. If at all possible avoid ambiguous expressions for links such as "click here."

5. Give image files names that describe image content. As we stated before search engines have trouble indexing image content. A description of the image in the file name, however, is easy to index. So instead of calling an image file "image1," give it a descriptor "NewJerseyshorefall08."

Remember that this blog is dedicated to finding you resources that are free or very reasonably priced so that your small business can succeed. For free SEO tools and resources I recommend you visit SEO Tool Land.

As always please feel free to send me your comments and questions.