Yahoo! has introduced automatic search query suggestions on its home page.
Quite a few search tools have tried to guess what you are searching for while you are writing. Write “search” and the search tool will give you “people search”, “search engine marketing” or whatever the tool thinks is the most relevant or popular search phrase right now. Hit enter and you are done.
We have found such “help” to be very confusing at best, as we get distracted by the many irrelevant suggestions given by the tools.
We do see the point, though. If the search tool manages to encourage you to use more a more targeted search query, the results will be more relevant. More relevant results mean a happy searchers, and happy searchers are more likely to come back for more.
Yahoo! has now introduced search a feature on the yahoo.com home page. And this is a version of the technology we actually like.
As Kevin Lee of Yahoo! Search says over at the Yahoo! Search Blog:
The nice thing about the suggestions is that they’re not obtrusive, so if you already know what you’re searching for, you can overlook the suggestions without them getting in your way.
The suggestions appear in a drop down menu under the search field, and you can safely ignore it if you don’t like it. You can also disable the service by clicking on the relevant link in the menu.
Google: one million servers and counting
Gartner reckons that Google now make use of more than 1 million servers, spitting out search results, images, videos, emails and ads.
Google’s success is the end result of a complex set of innovation processes. There is the science driven pagerank algorithm, of course., which so far has guaranteed pretty good search results — attracting an obscene number of searchers.
The Adsense text ad program, which is clearly an example of market driven innovation, gives Google a solid revenue stream.
The third cause for success
However, there is another essential factor that is not mentioned equally often: the Google server park. How many computers do you need to handle all that search traffic? And now Google is much more than search.
We are talking about video delivery, email, image and document storage here, and lots of it!
1 million servers, 3 million computers
Peter Hidas of the Gartner Group has an interesting article in the latest issue of Norwegian Computerworld. He refers to Gartner Invest’s attempts at calculating the number of Google computers, and his argument goes like this:
Google reports that it spends some 200 to 250 million US dollars a year on IT equipment. We know that Google make use of a large number of cheap off the shelf servers using open source (and free) LINUX.
If we say that Google spends 900 USD on each machine, and the same sum on storage and peripherals, it is a fair guess that Google uses some 1 million servers in its data centers. Hidas adds:
Pandia Weekend Wrap-up (Week 30/2007)
On US presidential candidates flocking to Google and much more.
The Pandia team is back. We had a wonderful holiday in Thailand, spending one hectic week in Bangkok and two more peaceful ones in Koh Samui. And yes, that is Susanne to the left.
But now we are back in Norway, preparing a new search engine season. Stay prepared for more useful articles on how to cope in the world of web searching.
We will also continue our surveillance of the search engine scene.
We have spent some hours catching up with this week’s news and here are some of the headlines that caught our eyes:
Top 10 Web Analytics Blogs
The most popular web analytics blog at the moment (Occam's Razor by Avinash Kaushik July 27 2007 via SE Guide)
Robots Exclusion Protocol: now with even more flexibility
Dan Crow of Google announces that Google now supports a unavailable_after web page expiration metatag (Google Blog July 27 2007)
Three new features in Live Search Images
Three new features that help you find faces, portraits and black and white images (Live Search Blog July 27 2007)
Microsoft Aiming For A Bigger Share Of Online Advertising
Unofficial SEO Blog July 28 2007.
Google Web History and Search Personalization
Google provides a history of the web sites that you visit (Google Tutor July 23 2007)
Internet leader Google prime stop for presidential hopefuls
Internet giant Google is becoming a prime stop on the 2008 presidential campaign as candidates seek to burnish themselves with net-wise credentials (Physorg July 29 2007)
Google Drops Supplemental Results Query Command
Search Engine Roundtable (July 27 2007)
Digg fires Google for online ads
Digg, the reader-powered news site, fires Google as its online advertising partner in favor of Microsoft (Anchorage July 25 2007)
Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Hosting Extremist Sites
David Utter on western companies hosting Islamist/Jihadi websites (webpronews July 23 2007)
Implementing your Search Strategy for the Latino Market
Search engine marketing for the US Hispanic and Latin American search markets (SE Watch July 24 2007)
Search Engine Optimization Tricks for WordPress
Google's Matt Cutts gives some advice to bloggers (Bruce Clay July 24 2007)
Google 'the most improved brand'
Google is the brand that has gained the most in value over the past year, according a survey of global brands. (BBC July 27 2007)
Google Plans YouTube Antipiracy Tool for September
Google is working "very intensely" on a video recognition technology (PC World July 27 2007)
Who’s Reading the Google Blogs?
The Official Google Blog has over 440.000 readers. (ResearchBuzz July 27 2007)
The Internet Has Crashed
Some weekend humor from Maniac World.
