I’ve been looking at another of what seems to be an endless flow of new search engines. The newer ones seems to be taking more of an aim at the Ask market - encouraging direct questions rather than the traditional search that link off to other websites.

Hunch seems to be an interesting one that claims to learn from your searches and asks a few questions up front to get to know you. As it’s supposed to help you make decisions I thought I’d test it out on a highly important subject - what type of beer should I drink? Hunch asked me a few questions to refine my search and returned exactly the right result for my taste Stout (or to be more precise Guinness). Not a new technology maybe but quite a nice implementation.

When am I ever going to use this? Probably never again I just don’t use this type of engine, same opinion I had for Wolfram Alpha. Another touted “Google-killer” which wasn’t quite on the right lines. I just don’t seem to search for a question I need a direct answer for - is it just my search style?

No this isn’t in reference to my recent lack of posts for which I can only apologise - most of my spare time (of which there isn’t enough of) is spent with my 12 week old son. A pretty good excuse I think you’ll agree so don’t be too hard on me.

An article in Wired says Blogs are so 2004 says blogs are overcome with a “tsunami of paid bilge” so “Thinking about launching your own blog? Here’s some friendly advice: Don’t. And if you’ve already got one, pull the plug.”

Hmm a little overreaction methinks. The Internet as a whole is full of paid and unpaid bilge so maybe that should be shut down?

Really it’s all a case of quality control which is also going to be the case of the other technologies mentioned in the article such as Twitter.

How do I find blogs? Well it isn’t a conscious decision on my part; I simply find them on my travels around the web. If I happen to surf onto a post of interest I will look at other posts in the blog and if they’re really lucky and I like what I see I’ll subscribe to the RSS feed. I’m the quality control and my quality control is tight - I subscribe to about 50 feeds in total which I don’t consider a lot as I’m a pretty heavy Internet user. This list is constantly reviewed if I don’t like the way a blog is going I hit the delete button - not really that difficult. Recommendations I like too as that web is a rather large place.

It’s just the age old web spam issue which the search engines are constantly fighting anyway - blog or webpages alike it makes no difference.

It seems Microsoft have come up with an idea that they hope might help them close some ground on Google on search share.

Obviously this isn’t going to happen overnight but if they can implement a system that returns better quality or is less corrupable than Google PageRank then at least they stand a better chance at attracting new users. We do of course have to bare in mind that the lead is currently huge and Google doesn’t stand still so I’d definitely stop short of saying this was a Google killer.

So what’s this fuss about then? Well Google’s success is built on PageRank- essentially a measure of website popularity by incoming links to a website. This popularity when coupled with relevancy can give a good indication of the importance of a website and therefore help rank it accurately. Now it isn’t quite that simple anymore - Google have added much to their algorithm to avoid easy interference by people trying to manipulate the index e.g. using link farms.

Microsoft are touting a system called BrowseRank which effectively takes a user’s browsing habits into account when working out importance. In other words the websites you visit regularly, the time you send on the site etc.

This is great from the perspective of search results and a hell of a lot more difficult to manipulate than current algorithms. Perhaps search engine optimisation would be come just that “optimisation” or maybe some companies would spend money on overall online marketing rather than just spending huge amounts of their budget just on SEO.

Who knows where we will be in a few years time but it’s the first real search idea I’ve seen come out from Microsoft that I’ve thought has real potential. I’m uneasy at Google’s current dominance in the search market and hope that the market becomes more open in the future (Microsoft or any other company).

Had to write a quick post about a post saying Branding is Dead; Long live SEO. The argument behind it is that people are now searching for the product/service they want and then follow the search results. Therefore it is assumed branding isn’t such an issue any more as people will follow the links listed highest on the search engine even if this isn’t for the actual branded company.

To me this is totally back to front. SEO is only a tool in my opinion. A very powerful tool especially when it come to that of brand awareness but a tool none the less. Branding is important online and offline but you can’t have one without the other.

So no branding is not dead, it’s fit and alive. I can’t deny that SEO however is increasingly important to protect a brand online.