So we’re only half way through the second month of the year, and already things are heating up in the search engine battle between Bing and Google.

Firstly, Danny Sullivan broke the story that Google was accusing Bing of copying their search results.

For a full, detailed explanation I suggest you read the story here at Search Engine Land, but the basics are this – Google became suspicious that Bing was copying when the top results for some searches were the same even for misspellings and unusual search terms. So they sprang a trap…(!)

Yes, like something out of a Robert Ludlum novel*, Google manipulated their results for nonsense words such as ‘mbzrxpgjys’ and ‘hiybbprqag’, so that a particular honey pot page would show at the top of the search results. When these exact same pages showed up #1 on Bing too, Google had their confirmation.

(*If instead of writing books about kick-ass spies who look like Matt Damon, Ludlum actually wrote about the rather more dull topic of search engine positioning. Which seems unlikely, frankly.)

Once the story broke, Bing explained their side. Yes, the results were the same, they admitted, but because they were watching their users who have the IE toolbar turned on, and that influences the results people see. They were not copying Google.

Instead Bing turned the tables on Google, claiming the whole thing was an attempt to throw up a smokescreen* to avoid the fact that their search results are plagued with spam.

(*See? That’s totally something Jason Bourne would do.)

Which brings us to the second part of this month’s search engine news – Google’s latest attempt to find a way to block spam, particularly from content farms, such as those of Demand Media.

The plan is for a Chrome plugin which will allow users to block certain sites, while sending Google data about those sites so that they can analyze them and use that information to adjust the rankings accordingly.

Will it work? I’m skeptical. The amount of spam out there is tremendous, dwarfing the number of users who will a) use Chrome, b) also have the extension installed and c) use it regularly. However, I couldn’t be happier that at least Google is trying to do something about this mess.

Finally, the latest search engine stats were just released for January and show a 2% point swing from Google to Bing. A blip or a trend? What do you think?

I’m sure by now you’ve seen Google Instant, the latest change to the Google search page, which actually updates results as you type in the query, as it has been live for around a month now.

After the initial announcement came the usual flurry of excitement that accompanies every new Google launch. There were the predictable naysayers (from those not involved in SEO) that it meant the death of SEO. Which, by my calculations means SEO has about 42 times as many lives as a cat. The usual suspects, Matt Cutts (of Google) and Danny Sullivan (of Search Engine Land) explain why this is not the case. SEO is still alive and well, much to the chagrin of many a new media expert.

But for me, the bigger change is not so much in the way the search is delivered – Instant is really just an extention of the Search Suggest function – but the increasingly important role of personalization in results.

What this means is that Google is trying to give you more and more the kind of thing they think you will like to see. For instance, John Smith searches for ‘new york hotels’ and clicks on the websites for the Marriott, the Chelsea Hotel, the Hudson Hotel, etc, while Jane Brown searches for ‘new york hotels’ and clicks on the websites for Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz. So Google learns about what each of them prefers, and tries to tailor the results in future to more closely match what John or Jane like.

Similarly, if you search for ‘zoo’ in San Diego, and you may see San Diego zoo as #1, but travel to Jacksonville and you’ll see it change to Jacksonville zoo. Do a lot of gourmet/food searches, and then search for java and you’ll see coffee sites, but if you search for coding and programming things and search for java you’ll see sites about the Java programming language.

We’ve talked before on here about the incredible wealth of data that Google has. And if you think of Google keeping a record of every search you’ve ever made, and multiply that by the billions of other searches done each month, you can see how the picture they build up of the best search results becomes much clearer.

Of course personalization didn’t begin last month, it’s been an ongoing process for a couple of years now, but it is more and more a factor which needs to be taken in to account. There is no longer a top 10 of search results which should really be considered authorative or definititive. Everyone’s search results will be different, and growing more different as Google tweaks and improves, so we can no longer say you are #3 for this phrase or #1 for for that one.

Instead, we suggest measuring the success of the search engine campaigns by looking more closely at the amount and quality of the search engine traffic. How many visitors came from the search engines? How many pages did they look at? How long did they stay on the site? What was the bounce rate? Did they buy/sign up for the newsletter/request more information? And so on, and so on.

One month in, I have to say we’re very happy comparing the results for our clients against the quality of traffic they were receiving this time last year. In almost every case, the important benchmarks have shown an improvement, which is what we would have thought – because of course the flipside of Google improving the relevancy of their search results is better, more qualified people arriving at the websites.

We have always said that in theory SEO should be win-win-win. If you are looking for a Charleston hotel, Google helps you find that hotel and the hotel gets the business. Everyone is happy. Hopefully this latest update to the process proves to be just another step along that same path.

Google Instant – the Bob Dylan version

Finally, some big news about Twitter which doesn’t involve the company being bought by Google Microsoft Yahoo Apple whoever this week. Instead, at a Cnet panel last week Santosh Jayaram, Vice President, Business Operations, mentioned that Twitter will begin crawling the links in tweets, and then indexing those pages.

As Techcrunch rightly points out, this isn’t a matter of Twitter trying to beat Google at their main strength, traditional search, it is instead a brand new paradigm, with the promise of human-influenced, real-time search results.

Little is known about the details but there were comments made about weighting links based on influence (a la Google’s Page Rank system), but no word on how that would be done yet.

One thing is certain though, this finally offers Twitter the chance to prove its real worth. All those big companies sniffing around for the past few weeks weren’t doing so as a result of the buzz around Twitter (despite Oprah‘s growing disinterest after an initial flurry of tweets, the number of new users continues to climb), but for the oodles of data Twitter has unprecedented access to. As with Google’s purchase of Urchin a few years ago, seeing how real people behave online is inherently valuable.

How Will It Work?

Short answer: we’ll have to wait and see. Longer answer: I’m not sure, but I’d like to see something like this. A real-time search engine,which would compliment Google rather than replace it, where real people invisibly influence the search results.

For example, a current Twitter search for ‘obama‘ has thousands upon thousands of results with dozens more each few seconds. Great if you want to know what people are saying, not so useful if you want to discover what exactly they are reacting to, as you have to wade through page after page to see all the links.

Or ‘manny ramirez‘ – you’ll see lots of comments about his drug violation, and many of them also have links. The trouble is that with URL shortening, you can see what looks like 10 different links all going to the same article.

Wouldn’t it be great to have this page split into two columns, one with comments and another with the most popular linked-to articles/websites?

Of course, it will also become subject to the scourge of the internet – spammers – but that is where the relative influence of the writer comes in.

It’s easy to forget now, but before Google search engines were filled with spam. Yes, it still appears throughout the search results now,even on Google, but nothing like it was back in 1997/8, and that is largely because of Google’s PageRank system. For a detailed mathematical explanation see here, but basically Google used links to a webpage as a way of measuring its popularity,but with the very important caveat that not all links are equal.

If I run a golf course for example, a link from PGA.com would be far more valuable than a link from your old Geocities page – PGA.com is a popular site, and in a related field. A similar thing could be done for Twitter search, a link from ESPN columnist and professional RedSox fan Bill Simmons to a Manny Ramirez article would be worth more than one from Oprah, even though she has more followers.

And of course, Twitter search wouldn’t have to be limited to websites either. As with Google’s move towards universal search, it could easily incorporate videos, mp3s, photos, and anything else that people are discussing or linking to.

Something like this could be hugely useful, if implemented correctly. Despite Google’s success, the missing piece in their search has always been a human element. In fact they incorporate the Open Directory Project listings into their search algorithm as a way of helping to inject some personal judgment.

A search engine that shows exactly what is happening around the world right now, as discussed by real people? I can’t wait!

So what do you think? Am I missing the point? Is this another potential ‘Google-killer’ that will die on the vine? Please share your thoughts or comments.

This looks to be pretty major -Starting today, Google is adding a wiki function to the search results,

“Have you ever wanted to mark up Google search results? Maybe you’re an avid hiker and the trail map site you always go to is in the 4th or 5th position and you want to move it to the top. Or perhaps it’s not there at all and you’d like to add it. Or maybe you’d like to add some notes about what you found on that site and why you thought it was useful. Starting today you can do all this and tailor Google search results to best meet your needs.”

As with all things Google related, people are pretty quick to jump in with their opinions. Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch is not a fan,

“Google search wasn’t broken. It’s one of the few things on the Internet that isn’t. I love it, as does 62% of everyone on the Internet. This new stuff is a mess of arrows and troll comments and stuff moving around the page.”

While someone (sorry, I couldn’t find a name on the blog) over at I’ve Said Too Much, has responded to that with a post simply titled ‘Arrington is Wrong’,

“Google seeks to build a massive distributed curated search into which we are all adding intelligence without ever being aware of it. It is, I would contend, the Big Thing At Google For 2009.”

Meanwhile, over at eWeek, they’re a lot more enthusiastic, seeing it as a boon for users, advertisers and, of course, Google,

“That’s Google’s genius stroke; we believe SearchWiki is letting us control our search destiny, but Google gets to keep putting up more search ads in front of us. Google wants us to find what we’re looking for, and now it has provided a way to keep us in Google.com to do so.”

I’m personally not sure right now.

I think it will be clearly used for Google to start collecting yet more information about what people think of the search results – with the positives and negatives that suggests. People will try and game the system, promoting themselves and so on. If, however, enough people use it, then hopefully the ‘wisdom of crowds’ will help to improve things by adding that human element which is often missing from Google.

That said, I can’t help but agree with Arrington that it looks a mess. Remember how clean Google used to be?

When they first launched it was one of the major things that set them apart. All that lovely white space. The sponsored links were completely separate from the natural SERPs. No nasty banner ads. Just good search results.

But now, between the maps, local search, images, addresses and so on – these additional buttons just seem like yet more clutter.

Will it work? I don’t know. If I search for something, I’m used to Google telling me what I need to know. Using their example from above, I would not use Google to revisit a trail map site time after time, I would bookmark it instead, either on my PC or with Delicious.

I can see times when it would be useful to remove particularly bad results, but how often am I going to suggest a site be added?

And the notes I suspect, will be more trolling than useful unfortunately. I’ve tried a few so far, and there’s nothing that enhances my searching at all. A search for Liverpool FC, for instance, just has 3 right now:

Comment by: Searcher, 9:05am – searching: lfc
“great”

Comment by: Mike, 6:41am – searching: liverpool
“Liverpool FC”

Comment by: 360spin, 8:39am – searching: liverpool
“Wow!”

How do they help me at all?

Perhaps Google is threatened by the growth of social networks and feels that is one area search can be improved. I’m not so sure.

What do you think?

In the latest round of updates at the end of last week, Google announced that they would (finally!) be adding more detail about where your clicks are coming from:

“Previously, these pages divided statistics into two categories: search, which included Google and search partners, and the content network.
Now, we show one set of statistics for Google and another set aggregating search partner performance. Search partners include AOL, Ask.com, and many other search sites around the web. ”

This is a major change, comparable to when Google started showing where exactly your ads where coming from in the Content network.

That was a huge step forward, and one that made sense for Google. Previously advertisers were skeptical about throwing money down a black hole which included some very, um, shady Made For AdSense sites alongside the high quality sites they may have wanted to target.

However, these latest changes don’t go far enough. Yet.

We can now see how Google stacks up against the other search partners, but not how the individual partners (Ask, AOL, etc) are performing individually. Rich, over at Destilled is asking the question, “Have Google Shot Themselves in the Foot?”, and it’s a valid point.

Here’s the data for one of the accounts we manage:

(I removed the campaign names for anonymity for my client)

As you can see, in each case the cost per click for the search partners is higher, up to 25% higher, than it is on Google, but even more importantly, the number of conversions (final column) are way down. So I’m paying more, and getting less. That is why all the Search partner ads are now set to ‘Off’. I’d rather spend where it is working.

So, what happens now?

Well I suspect that that many others will follow suit and shut off the complete search network, for example, see this thread at Webmaster World:

“At first glance it looks like 90% of my conversions are from google search only not the network.”

“Wow, just split stats on an account. Bye bye Search Network!”

“We totally disabled Partners in a few campaigns after seeing 100 to 200% higher conversion costs.
No wonder they didn’t show this data for so long.”

And if that happens, I’d have to assume that Google will be forced to show the search network in greater details, if only due to pressure from their partners. If AOL is performing well, for instance, they’re unlikely to be happy about being cut out due to the deficiencies of other sites.

However, for now we have to deal with what we have, and I’m at least glad that I’ve been able to learn this much.

How about you? How do your stats measure up across the different sites?

Cuil, who have seen their traffic tumble into free fall since their much-hyped (but severely botched) launch, have suffered another blow today, as TechCrunch reports that VP Product, Louis Monier, has quit the company:

“Louis Monier, Cuil’s VP Product, quietly resigned from the newly launched search engine last week, we’ve heard from a reliable source. “

Monier was one of the big draws for the simply stunning amount of PR that Cuil generated – he was hired  away from Google last year in a major coup for the young start up, but is even more well known as the Father of AltaVista, everyone’s favorite search engine before Google came along. His departure is thought to be related to the path Cuil should take.

With a resume which also includes stints at Xerox PARC,  Ebay and Google, Monier is regarded as one of the big names in tech and search, so the blow will be a huge one for Cuil. After all, he left Alta Vista, then the #1 search engine, after a similar disagreement over the move from straight search to becoming a portal (how 1999!)..and look what happened to AV after that.