Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Round Table reports that AOL has come up with new technology:

AOL, for example, is embarking on a strategy of creating a plethora of niche websites through automated methods on which to place ads, partly through its own ad platform. It has called this “leaning into the fragmentation of the Web.

It ignited discussions on the forums and a post from Aaron Wall.

Love.com is a mashup of remixed twitter posts, youtube videos, aggressive 3rd party content snippets, automated cross linking, frame-jacked 3rd party content, pop-ups, automated subdomain spam, all pushed on a purchased domain name that had existing links.

Love.com is owned by AOL and apparently it is the website that uses this new technology.

In the previous article I talked about Eric Schmidt’s quote:

The internet is fast becoming a “cesspool” where false information thrives, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said yesterday. Speaking with an audience of magazine executives visiting the Google campus here as part of their annual industry conference, he said their brands were increasingly important signals that content can be trusted.

Google’s move to trust brand has already backfired in some categories and apparently AOL is taking advantage of the loophole full throttle, rolling out technology, that is designed to make money based solely on duplicate content. In a way they are doing black hat, out in the open, and getting away with the the SH*T.

There’s a lot of money in search and companies are still taking shots at the fortunes. Two upcoming search engines are Blekko and Wolfram Alpha.

According to Danny Sullivan Wolfram Alpha is taking big shots at Google.

Wolfram Alpha Search Engine

Still in the making, Wolfram Alpha promises to revolutionize the way we search and become a habit just as Google:

“It will raise the level of scientific things that the average person can do.  People will find that the world is more predictable than they might have expected.  Just as running Google is like having a reference librarian to help you, running Wolfram|Alpha will be like having a house scientist to consult for you.” – search engine land

The problem with Google killers is that none of them manage to make even the slightest dent in Google’s market share. Cuil was suppose to kill Google, and now I suspect, is strugling to exist. The same fate followed other search engines, which made big claims, but are now buried with no one knowing their names.

Why no one can live up to the claims? The problem with new search engines is – they try to repeat what Google did. Come out of nowhere, gain large mind share based on innovation and word of mouth alone. This does not work anymore simply because people don’t need another search engine. They have Google / Yahoo and they do a good job at finding sites and answering questions. Why bother going else where? When Google came into being, there was no quality search engine and now quality is taken for granted.

Blekko Search Engine

Blekko is another search engine in development and Danny Sullivan (the search engine expert) has some good feedback so far:

I visited Blekko, another “stealth” search engine in development. I can’t go into detail about what I saw, but I was impressed. More important, the red flags aren’t going off. I got to search for whatever I wanted on Blekko. There was no controlled list of queries I had to do. There was no claim to be ready to topple Google. More than anything else, Blekko had good mouthfeel when I used it.

Good Money 

Google has reported relatively strong results for the quarter ending March 31 2009. While revenue was down 3pc over Q4 2008, the company recorded year-on-year growth of 6pc to US$5.51bn. http://businessandleadership.com/news/article/13240/leadership/google-profits-revenues-up-in-q1

Even if a search engine fails to gain market share, it can a potential aqusition target for Google / Microsoft, since the war is here and if you don’t get it first, the competitor will.