Search engines and PDFs

People are always excited to know how would search engines treat various factors of a website. People have their own myths whereas few people experiment and derive conclusions. There are millions of websites that use PDFs for genuine reasons. There might me companies who want to upload their magazines on their websites in the PDF versions. People have queries how would Google treat PDFs and would they be ranked in search results?

Google Webmaster Central Help Forum has been a one stop source for the resolution of such queries. Following is a useful link which provides a lot of information on how would Google treat PDF files on a website:-

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=4472512a5515686b&hl=en

One of the Google employee John Mueller has provided his valuable inputs also which helps the cause of resolving this query. We could conclude from this forum post that Google can read the PDFs if the content is available in a textual form within the PDF file and that it is in the proper character-sets (a simple test is to select some of the text and to try to copy it into a text-editor). But it is always recommended to create HTML versions of those PDFs.Web-users may prefer to be able to read the content before opting to download and view a PDF file. Many visitors don't appreciate PDFs. There isn't a concern over duplicate content if you mirror the content of PDFs on HTML pages as search engines would show only one of them in the results (most probably the HTML versions would rank above the PDF versions).

Follow Google Webmaster Central Help forum for such queries.

Russian Internet Web Search Engine Enters Turkish Market

Yandex is a Russian internet web search engine and it is planning to enter the Turkish market. The plan includes a launch of Turkish version of search engine including widgets and services related to Turkish web users.


Yandex's chief executive, Arkady Volozh said that Turkey has a dynamic population and a promising market. So it was their obvious choice for being the 5th country where Yandex would start their operations.


Google is already one of the leading international search engines in Turkey and Yandex plans to have an approximate 10 to 20% of the market in Turkey in next few years.

Google Removes .co.cc domains from natural listings

Few weeks back Google reported that it has deleted around 11 million .co.cc sub domains from the search listing. The issue with these sites was regarding spamming which led this giant to consider their listing against authentic and genuine domains.

Various companies offered these .co.cc domains for free or at cheaper prices compared to other domains. Because of these reasons there were many spamy websites which were ranking higher against other genuine domains. Many companies also offered .co.cc domains and are classed as 'freehost' by Google and therefore, exercised their right to block these domains. These .co.cc domains were been registered in 1000s with Korean company offering 15000 sub domains for about $1000. That accounts roughly to about 5,741,810 different accounts, with a total of 11,403,223 domains registered to date.

The Anti-Phishing Working Group also reported some 5000 phishing attacks from .co.cc domains in last six months of 2010 alone. You can check this at Google Online Security Blogpost This search engine news is all over the internet and many .co.cc domains are been affected. It has also been advised to contact the bulk sub-domain provider if Google Safe Browsing shows a warning for the website you own.

Google to remove I'm Feeling Lucky Button?

Google is testing few new changes in its new interface for the search engine. Inspired by Bing, Google is now removing "I'm feeling Lucky" button from the home page. Many users these days do not use "I'm feeling lucky" button. Considering that this is no longer used by many users, Google is considering removing the button. Another change according to various search engine news is that Google is making is to making prominent its search button, however most users might not find it useful in Instant mode.

The cached and similar buttons are also not used by many users. Therefore Google is planning to put these buttons in the Instant Preview box, so they are more difficult to find. These changes are been tested on Google Finland and if Google find interesting results from this test, Google might roll it out on global scale.

Schema.org - Google, Bing & Yahoo Joins for Content Markup

Schema.org is a joint effort taken by search engine giants Google, Bing and Yahoo! to improve search results. Many sites about search engine news and updates are talking about this hot topic trending in. The main reason for the rivals joining hands is to create a common set of HTML tags so that search engines can identify, crawl and index websites in same way.
Schema.org provides set of collection from different streams so that webmasters can use to mark their pages in such a way that it can be understood by these search engines. The complete hierarchy for various Schema items contains different categories in which you can add different tags of the website according to relevance (like book, movie, author, person, place etc.)
Marking up the content of the website as much as possible can help search engines to use your information and to present your page to users in most useful way. It is stated in Schema FAQs that one should markup the content which is visible to visitors of the website.

You can learn more about Schema by checking Schema Getting Started Guide or check the FAQs for more information.

Google Architecture

Google Search Engine works upon its own algorithm to present the results for every search query. The algorithms are kept secret but there are certain rules which are followed and need to be understood keeping the website optimization in view. Following is a generalized working of Google’s search engine.


Google Architecture: Web crawling is carried out by several distributed crawlers.

Indexing is done in three fundamental steps.

1. Parsing
2. Indexing documents into Barrels
3. Sorting

Then the ranking system comes into play. Google maintains much more information than any other typical search engines like Yahoo & Bing. Every hit list contains position, font and capitalization info. Google’s ranking system is designed such that no particular factor is given too much focus. For a single word query google will look at the hit list for that keyword. The hits are considered as different types (title, anchor, URL, plain text large font, plain text small font….) where each has its own type-weight.

Google is successful in giving the most relevant results for different search queries because of such control measures and filter processes. So according to Google search engine news, keep it simple and original to rank better in their search results.

Google Buys Sparkbuy

Google has recently made an acquisition recently with a shopping website Sparkbuy. Sparkbuy is a product comparison and shopping search engine. Even though there is no such official announcements from Google, Sparkbuy have updated this acquisition on their website. They have also twitted about this.

It is said that Google will use the expertise and technology to make Google shopping results more efficient and user friendly. The Sparkbuy team will be joining Google’s Kirkland, WA office.
Sparkbuy was founded by Dan Shapiro in 2010 and the company successfully raised about 1 million USD for their development and comparison software. Any search engine news has not yet disclosed the amount of this deal still now.

The service of Sparkbuy is now closed, as a result of acquisition.

Google's New Page Design - Google Test

Google always try to give newer and better ways to search for users. There is a new test that is been carried out by Google. This Google test is available only to selected people. The test they are running is to improve the user interface and to improve the user experience.

The above screenshot shows the new look of the search result 'Twitter'. Each search results are separated and more distinguished. Google is also trying to refine your search results as much as possible to give you a better experience.

If you are looking for a job in certain area, you can refine your search for a particular location as well as for a function.
One more addition to this new interface will be addition of 'Remove Result'. If you like to omit a particular result from the list, you can choose 'Remove Result' so that you don’t need to see that result again in search result. This feature is already available if you are signed in, but Google is trying to make it better.

There are mixed views about this new change in the world of search engine news. One of the drawbacks of this new look is that it gives less information on the screen and this might bring in a need of more scrolling. These new changes in Google are only under test phase and hence there is no scheduled date when they'll be rolling out these changes globally.

Bing vs Google: Anticipation for 2012

Bing has seen a tremendous growth rate in its market share as compared to the giant Google, at least in US. This is seen as emerging of new search engine giant in coming years. The projection done by Mashable suggests that Bing might take over Google in 2012, at least in United States.

Google is still leading the market with more than 60% of market share. Bing, has however seen a rapid growth in these few months. Bing has captured about 30% of market share. In September, Google had controlled about 72% of US market and Bing represented about 10% of market share. In March 2011, Bing’s share rose to 14.3%.

Google has seen a drop in market share of about 3% each month, while Bing has seen a rise in market share of 5% each month. If the constant trajectory is plotted, it is assumed that in January 2012, Bing will overtake Google.

If this happens, there will be all new era in search engine news and updates because users, experts and companies will be looking out for Bing as a benchmark in terms of rankings and advertisings. This can be seen happening since Bing has a real momentum in gain in market share and people will soon see a new search engine giant!

Google Introduces +1 Button

Well we all know about what the like option means. This like option can be viewed from various sites like twitter, youtube videos, blogs etc. Whichever post or any kind of stuff if you like it then you can go the like option. So now all search engines news have emphasized in their blogs about his latest news of +1 button.

Google has updates its Google Social Search so that you can get the most relevant answers to your search queries. You can also get even more information from the people that matter to you more, whether they’re publishing on YouTube, Flickr or their own blog or website. You will get all mixed results based on their relevance. So that is why Google introduced +1 button so you can get to know the recommendations from your friends and from other contacts related to your search.

But this +1 option can be used only if you have a Google profile. You can view all your +1's at one particular place when you use your profile, and delete some which you no longer want to recommend. To see +1’s in your Google search results you’ll need to be logged into your Google Account.

This +1 option has increased the traffic to a particular website both quality and quantity wise. But Google hasn't stopped only on this. They are working on the button so that you can recommend a particular page. We just hope that Google very soon makes search results more personal, interesting and relevant using such +1 option.

A Google A Day : Google Search Engine Puzzle

Imagine coming across a question and finding it difficult to answer. If we don’t know the perfect answer, the first thought which will cross our mind is to log on to Google and try to find the possible answer. Traditional trivia games might have brought in similar situations before us, where copying was not allowed and asking Google was not on the cards either. So, now Google has itself launched a new trivia game where you will be served a question and then the most difficult part follows: the path towards the answer!!

According to various search engine news sources commence of “A Google a Day” just a few days back, is a new daily puzzle where your creativity and problem solving skills will be put to test. The question will be posted everyday on agoogleaday.com and the answers to these will be displayed the very next day in the Times and on agoogleaday.com, which will guide you through the techniques to search and features used to find it.   

Kayak Introduces Hotel Booking

Kayak launches a new and interesting feature for the customers to carry out their hotel bookings. They can now book their hotels directly on the website.

Kayak.com is a travel search site. They provide help to the customers all over the world to find the best travel choices easily by searching the information from hundreds of travel sites at once.

Kayak is now partnering with Travelocity to add a new feature of hotel booking on its website. It gives a direct option to book the hotels of your choice. It provides the customers a perfect comparison of various hotels at the destination of their choice with some basic information like check-in and out date along with rooms to be booked and number of people. This new feature saves time and provides all information at one particular site.

Earlier you had to search for particular hotels in required destination and then go through the website of that hotel for your bookings. But now Kayak search engine has made it much easier. Kayak's also adding the feature to its mobile applications for iPhone, iPad, Android, and BlackBerry and thus is getting flashed in search engine news.

Our users value that we give them choices on where to book, though some people would prefer to complete their purchases without leaving Kayak," CEO Steve Hafner said in a statement.

Google Tool to Block Websites

Google has recently added an update in its search results. This search engine update is to target those websites which you don’t like. These can be sites which are offensive, contain pornographic materials, low quality, etc. This search engine news

was posted on Google's Blog recently.

Here it is how it works.

When you search a query, many results appear. Till now, search results used to show cached and similar options. From this update onwards, users can see 'Block all (example.com) results'. This options when turned on gets connected to your Google Account. 

Here you can confirm your site that needs to be blocked. The number of blocked results appear at the bottom of the search results, which you can see when you turn on an option to 'Show blocked results' This new feature will be available for Chrome 9+, IE8+ and Firefox 3.5+ in google.com but will soon be available to all local domains.

In this update from Google, the Google blog says that the main reason for this update is to give control over the results, get more personalized searches and a good search experience.

Blekko Changes Algorithm for its Search Engine Results

The upcoming search engine, Blekko is a better way to search the web by using slashtags. A slashtag is a tool to filter search results, rather than searching the entire web, a slashtag allows you to search just the sites you want searched.

As Google changed its algorithm for Content Farms which was emphasized in search engine news, similarly Blekko is changing its algorithm for low quality sites. Earlier they had banned about 20 websites but now they are banning 1.1 million websites from its search engines. They are blocking those particular websites which have less content and overflooded with ads.

“Google didn’t actually take anyone out, they just reshuffled the deck,” said Rich Skrenta, chief executive of Blekko. “Instead of demoting these sites to No. 5 or No. 7, we’re just throwing them out.”

Search engines have variety of ways to decide which sites are high-quality and which are low-quality. Google does it algorithmically whereas Blekko uses more involvement of peoples. Examples of the sites Blekko now bans: cheap-refrigerators.net, best-weddinggifts and Boston.diningguide.com.

Blekko is trying its best to debar those websites, which comprise keywords often used by the users so that the websites rank higher, in order to gain income when some user clicks on the ads present on the website.

Social Shopping for Bing Search

After many recent updated from Bing, this is a new update from Bing for shoppers. Microsoft said that it is partnering with the Dealmap. This search engine update will offers its US users to get access to more than 200,000 offers in about 14,000 towns and cities across US.

This will help users to find the best bargain related to every possible thing ranging from meals to classes to apperals and many more. This alliance between the companies will let advertisers to reach both desktop and mobile users.

 This new deal will let people to emerge into social shopping and group based shopping. This will allow customers to get benefits from offers and discounts on goods and services.

In the Bing Community Blog titled Bing Launches Deals they said that it was Dealmap made more sense than creating their own program for social shopping. Various updates and search engine news from Bing like Bing Bar, Bing Games, tie up with facebook etc are proving a threat to the giant Google. Both the search engines are trying strategically to improve the experience of users so that they can ive their best to users.

Google Recipe Search Results

Today’s generation has the ability and interest in cooking variety of dishes. But a proper source was not available yet. But now Google has introduced a new feature for all food lovers. Google Recipe View helps you to find various recipes worldwide.

Earlier the various spices and ingredients were added according to their own judgment but it’s difficult for a new learner. But Google recipe view helps to solve this problem out. To get to Recipe View, click on the “Recipes” link on the left hand side of the page when searching for a recipe. You can constrict your search results and can find only recipes instead of other web results. Google recipe view guides you with exact quantity of ingredients, ratings and even displays with delicious recipe pictures. One can modify the search results to show recipes with your ingredients, cooking time and calorie count.

You can search of specific vegetarian recipes like Pulao, stuffing’s as well as non vegetarian recipes like Chicken Chilly or Chicken Roast and other dishes like Pizza, Pasta, soups etc.

Google Recipe View 

Thus the cooking lovers are very happy with the new features. They are now able to experiment with new recipes. They can invent new dishes and can find new updates on the latest search engine news.

Bing Pops Up On The 2nd Position

In the search engines market all over the world, Microsoft Bing has overtaken Yahoo! for the first time. According to Web Analytics company StatCounter, since the month of January Bing ranks on the 2nd position in the search engines worldwide. Microsoft Bing is striking the headlines in all search engine news. 

 Google's global market share in February was 89.94% -- followed by Bing at 4.37% and Yahoo at 3.93%. There is a decrease in Google’s market share but yet there is a lot difference between Google and its various competitors. Well both yahoo and Bing have to go a long way to compete with Google.

Because of many advancements and initiatives that Bing is taking to give more user friendly results, Bing has started to gain more and more market share. Bing has introduced various features in its toolbar for IE like mail, weather, news updates etc. 

StatCounter tracks the Market Share of Search Engines, Browsers and Operating Systems including Mobile from over 15 billion monthly page views. StatCounter's report is based on aggregate data collected on a sample of over 15 billion page views per month. Hence some kind of contradictory results may appear. Bing is on a rise and hence Google, yahoo and other search engines must be very conscious about their positions. Microsoft Bing is hitting the headlines in all search engine news.

Google Fights Against Content Farms

Google is making drastic changes in its algorithm for search engine results. It has decided to demote the ‘low quality’ or ‘shallow websites’ from the search engine results. After getting to know this action it is been updated in various search engine news.

Google is mainly targeting “content farms”- a company that generates large amount of textual content through various articles, which is created to generate traffic and advertising revenue. The changes, which will affect around 12% of Google search queries in US.

"This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites – sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful," said Amit Singhal, a Google fellow, and Matt Cutts, head of the company's spam-fighting team in the blog post titled - Finding more high-quality sites. This implementation will definitely benefit the high quality sites which have original content and information on various related topics to improve their rankings.

After all this Google is in poor health because of black hat SEO practices and content farms complaints from users. As and when Google implements this new change, the high quality website owners will be very much satisfied and google will also be able to gain more faith from its users all over world.

Bing Bar for Internet Browsers

Recently Bing has introduced its new Bing bar for Internet Explorer 7 and higher versions. Bing bar runs on Windows XP SP3 and higher versions. Because of various options and user friendly interface it offers, Bing Bar is hot topic in search engine news and social media updates. Here are some of the features of this new Bing Bar.

 Bing News: Bing news to keep you updated with all the latest happening across the globe. This includes news from entertainment, business, politics, international and other streams.

Bing Maps: Helps you to get road maps from your location. YOu can also set a default start location for the map.

Bing Weather: Bing weather is a compact weather forecaster for your location. You can get weather map for your nearby locations, hourly weahter forecast for your location and if you want, you can also add multiple locations for Bing weather map.

Bing Mail: You can access multiple mails through this single tab. You can access gmail, hotmail and yahoo mail all through single bar.

  

Bing Search: A search bar helps to search whatever you want. it also keeps a track of your searches to optimise your search.

You can also stay updated with Facbook account. You can post comments, make 'likes', comment and do other various activities right from the Bing Bar.

With all these features, users may find this Bing toolbar very friendly. You can also download Bing bar for free. Bing's navigation through arrow keys, reduced number of clicks, user friendly interface are some of the features users may find useful.

Google Social Search Update

Recently Google announced an update for Google social search. This new update needs the user to get logged on to Google before he/she searches a term. Google has started making and is supposed to appear in the coming week.

When you search a term in Google, search results will also show content that are shared by your friends. For example, if you search the term 'climbing Kilimanjaro' and your friend has a blog about the same, then the search results will show the blogpost results from that friend.

This also includes updated from sites like Twitter and other social sites. Google will include all those updates that are public and are easy to crawl. However, this update excludes the sites like Facebook because status updates and other posts are not public.

This search engine news have however created some concern about publicising some content on these social sites. Many people would not like everybody to know what they have posted publicly. Google has however enabled an option for user. This will help user to control their Google profile and allow them to connect or disconnect the accounts that they want.