UK Judge: Search is Theft
paidContent UK’s NLA Ruling Summary: How PRs Break Copyright Law Online offers the highlights of a 148-paragraph ruling by the British High Court “that PRs who subscribe to paid news monitors are breaking UK law by effectively copying a substantial part of online news articles.”
Help us make the web better: An update on Rich Snippets
Webmaster Level: All
In May this year we announced Rich Snippets which makes it possible to show structured data from your pages on Google’s search results.
We’re convinced that structured data makes the web better, and we’ve worked hard to expand Rich Snippets to more search results and collect your feedback along the way. If you have review or people/social networking content on your site, it’s easier than ever to mark up your content using microformats or RDFa so that Google can better understand it to generate useful Rich Snippets. Here are a few helpful improvements on our end to enable you to mark up your content:
Testing tool. See what Google is able to extract, and preview how microformats or RDFa marked-up pages would look on Google search results. Test your URLs on the Rich Snippets Testing Tool.
Google Custom Search users can also use the Rich Snippets Testing Tool to test markup usable in their Custom Search engine.
Better documentation. We’ve extended our documentation to include a new section containing Tips & Tricks and Frequently Asked Questions. Here we have responded to common points of confusion and provided instructions on how to maximize the chances of getting Rich Snippets for your site.
Extended RDFa support. In addition to the Person RDFa format, we have added support for the corresponding fields from the FOAF and vCard vocabularies for all those of you who asked for it.
Videos. If you have videos on your page, you can now mark up your content to help Google find those videos.
As before, marking up your content does not guarantee that Rich Snippets will be shown for your site. We will continue to expand this feature gradually to ensure a great user experience whenever Rich Snippets are shown in search results.
Written by Kavi Goel, Pravir Gupta, and Othar Hansson
Read more on Help us make the web better: An update on Rich Snippets…
A proposal for making AJAX crawlable
Webmaster level: Advanced
Today we’re excited to propose a new standard for making AJAX-based websites crawlable. This will benefit webmasters and users by making content from rich and interactive AJAX-based websites universally accessible through search results on any search engine that chooses to take part. We believe that making this content available for crawling and indexing could significantly improve the web.
While AJAX-based websites are popular with users, search engines traditionally are not able to access any of the content on them. The last time we checked, almost 70% of the websites we know about use JavaScript in some form or another. Of course, most of that JavaScript is not AJAX, but the better that search engines could crawl and index AJAX, the more that developers could add richer features to their websites and still show up in search engines.
Some of the goals that we wanted to achieve with this proposal were:
Help test some next-generation infrastructure
Webmaster Level: All
To build a great web search engine, you need to:
- Crawl a large chunk of the web.
- Index the resulting pages and compute how reputable those pages are.
- Rank and return the most relevant pages for users’ queries as quickly as possible.
For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits “under the hood” of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we’re opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback.
Some parts of this system aren’t completely finished yet, so we’d welcome feedback on any issues you see. We invite you to visit the web developer preview of Google’s new infrastructure at http://www2.sandbox.google.com/ and try searches there.
Right now, we only want feedback on the differences between Google’s current search results and our new system. We’re also interested in higher-level feedback (“These types of sites seem to rank better or worse in the new system”) in addition to “This specific site should or shouldn’t rank for this query.” Engineers will be reading the feedback, but we won’t have the cycles to send replies.
Here’s how to give us feedback: Do a search at http://www2.sandbox.google.com/ and look on the search results page for a link at the bottom of the page that says “Dissatisfied? Help us improve.” Click on that link, type your feedback in the text box and then include the word caffeine somewhere in the text box. Thanks in advance for your feedback!
Posted by Sitaram Iyer, Staff Software Engineer, and Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer
Yahoo! Search BOSS – YDN
BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) is Yahoo!'s open search web services platform. The goal of BOSS is simple: to foster innovation in the search industry. Developers, start-ups, and large Internet companies can use BOSS to build and launch web-scale search products that utilize the entire Yahoo! Search index. BOSS gives you access to Yahoo!'s investments in crawling and indexing, ranking and relevancy algorithms, and powerful infrastructure. By combining your unique assets and ideas with our search technology assets, BOSS is a platform for the next generation of search innovation, serving hundreds of millions of users across the Web.
uberVU – Track conversations across the Web
Track conversations wherever they go on the Web and reply to them from one place
Google Says: Yes, You Can Still Sculpt PageRank. No You Can’t Do It With Nofollow
Posted by randfish
The blog post – PageRank Sculpting – from the head Google's Web Spam team is a critical read for SEOs worldwide:
So what happens when you have a page with “ten PageRank points” and ten outgoing links, and five of those links are nofollowed? Let’s leave aside the decay factor to focus on the core part of the question. Originally, the five links without nofollow would have flowed two points of PageRank each (in essence, the nofollowed links didn’t count toward the denominator when dividing PageRank by the outdegree of the page). More than a year ago, Google changed how the PageRank flows so that the five links without nofollow would flow one point of PageRank each.
Read more on Google Says: Yes, You Can Still Sculpt PageRank. No You Can’t Do It With Nofollow…
PageRank sculpting
People think about PageRank in lots of different ways. People have compared PageRank to a “random surfer” model in which PageRank is the probability that a random surfer clicking on links lands on a page. Other people think of the web as an link matrix in which the value at position (i,j) indicates the presence of links from page i to page j. In that case, PageRank corresponds to the principal eigenvector of that normalized link matrix.