Important : Before you start slapping me, read the full story.
They say, “Only Work” can be injurious to health. There must be a fun factor at every work place, that really helps you stress out.
I found one that tickled me throughout the day. Gene Marks, wrote on MSNBC here , “Tech. Solutions your small biz cant use“. Let me tell you what tickled me in his article.
Google is leading the way in “horizontal search” which in simple words means “generic search”. It covers a very wide spectrum with no inclination to particular niche. Over the last few years, there has been a rapid evolution of new kind of search engines which specialize in providing you results from a particular niche they are made for. These are “Vertical Search Engines” or “Vortals”. A few i remember right now are : SimplyHired.com(Job), Indeed.com(Job), Kayak.com (Travel) and alot others.
With the kind of money being pumped in the Vortals, the industry experts estimate this to reach over $1bn by 2009. Clearly, it is going to be a big thing in the very near future. Lets take a quick look.
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As most of the industry experts have envisaged search engine’s inclination towards local search. Google has further taken a step in that direction. Google has incorporated a specific tool in the Google Webmaster Central which allows webmasters to specify the geographic location of their website.
This is specifically useful for the sites who want to optimize for local markets. You might have noticed that “page from countryname” option below the search box that lets you choose if you want to search pages from that specific country/region. That’s the local search.
Google traditionally returns country specific results by using :
1. The Top Level Domain (TLD) of website.
Many websites have country specific TLDs like .co.uk for United Kingdom, .in for India, .ca for Canada etc. Google used to and will keep identifying the location by such country specific TLDs.
2. IP Address of host
Another way is knowing the IP of the web host. Location can be easily known with the IP address.
However these methods have certain limitations.
Not all websites have country specific TLDs
Many websites want to rank higher in local market but they have non-country specific TLDs like a .com, .net, .org etc.
Web Host may reside outside the country market
Many of you have experienced this. Your market is abc country and have servers hosted in xyz country. Like, i do not have American specific market for many of my sites, but my servers are mostly in America.
Google needed to find a solution for these problems, and i believe the tool they have come up with, very well addresses the problem.
However, things to note :
1. Google will keep associating a website for geographic location that is associated with the country level TLD, if it has any. Meaning, if you have a .co.uk, Google will consider it for local results for UK only. One cannot change this.
2. You can only specify the location in case you have a non-country specific domain name like a .com. And if you choose not to specify such information, Google will keep associating your site with the geographic location associated with your web host’s IP address.
Jay Westerdal wrote on Domain Tools blog here about how Network Solutions is stealing the domain name ideas with the aid of domain search tool at their website. If you go to their website and check the availability of a domain name, they know what you searched and hold that domain for 4 days or so with them, with a price tag of $34.99. Meaning you cannot buy it from anyone else for another 4 days or so.
If you try to book that domain with some other registrar, it shows that domain is with Network Solutions. After sometime it comes back into the pool of available domain names. But is not this a sort of black marketing. Networks solutions is clearly acting as ‘Front Runner’ and influencing the price of the domain names that are being searched at their website for availability, but not immediately booked. Besides that, they a opening the domain ideas to scammers who can book the domain after the initial hold period of 4 days.
I would have to think twice before I recommend anyone using their service.
Back in 2000, Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineWatch wrote about the growing “invisible web” here. Since then, search engines have made a lot of changes in their algorithms to index as much of the invisible web as possible. With this post we take a look on where the invisible web or dark web stands today. For those who are not familiar with the term, lets take a quick look at the basics.
What is invisible web?
When you want to search for something over the web, you mostly use search engines for that. You type a keyword in the search box and get the relevant results. These results returned to you by the search engine are stored in a database and form the “index” of the search engine. In short, these are the pages that match your query and the search engines knows about them.