Tech News

Ready to Quit Facebook? Mark Your Calendar for May 31.

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I just read Mike Melanson’s post about the surge building to get people to quit Facebook. Mike did a great job shedding light on how the distrust of Facebook’s privacy policy (haters would say the lack of a policy) is so prevalent that there’s an official movement with a website – QuitFacebookDay.com.

Wow.

I’m not surprised that a site like this exists. It’s simple to put up a site to support a cause. I guess that I am struck with the mounting hatred for the world’s most popular social network. It’s getting more serious. People are putting their money where their mouth is.

Read moreReady to Quit Facebook? Mark Your Calendar for May 31.

Google to Increase Caffeine Level After Holidays

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Back in August, I wrote about the launch of Google Caffeine – the search leader’s next generation architecture aimed at improving their indexing infrastructure.The less fancy version: to keep up with the growth of content, Google’s trying to improve the speed-of-delivery, depth, and relevance of what you see when you do a search with them.

It turns out that Google has decided to move forward with this. They are going to take Caffeine from the sandbox and roll it out to one of their data centers. Then they will continue to watch results and feedback while they consider wider implementation.

Read moreGoogle to Increase Caffeine Level After Holidays

Google’s Next Gen Search–What SEOs Are Talking About

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There’s been some really interesting stuff happening in search over the last 24 hours. Here’s a quick recap:

First, Facebook’s acquisition of Friendfeed and subsequent immediate launch of live search has led to lots of speculation that, together, the two might make a formidable team that will challenge Google in real-time search.

Second, what Google is calling their Caffeine Update was unveiled. This is the news SEOs are talking about today. According to Google’s search wizard Matt Cutts, Google Caffeine is not going to be obvious when you test it out.

“This update is primarily under the hood: we’re rewriting the foundation of some of our infrastructure,” said Cutts on his blog. “But some of the search results do change, so we wanted to open up a preview so that power searchers and web developers could give us feedback.”

You can test Google’s new search index yourself by going to http://www2.sandbox.google.com and doing some searches. You can even leave feedback for Google by clicking the “Dissatisfied” link at the bottom of the results page. Just be sure to include “Caffeine” in your message.

Here’s the key point to remember about Google’s update: no one knows what’s new. Google has said they’ve made changes and has given you a way to try and find those changes, but has not said what exactly is different. Let the speculation begin!

Anytime Google even hints about tweaking their algorithm or the way search results are displayed, SEOs everywhere take notice. Caffeine will, undoubtedly, have SEOs trying to find the difference (subtle or otherwise) between current search results and what they see on caffeine. I’m sure over the next few weeks the blogosphere will be buzzing with theories and findings about what’s different.

I’ve tried caffeine a few times, but only for searches we manage for clients. Other than seemingly faster results, I didn’t see any obvious differences.

Search is BIG Business. It’s cool to see that competition seems to be alive and that Google is trying to get better.

Yahoo, Microsoft Deal

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The oft-talked about deal is done. Pending federal approval, Yahoo and Microsoft did what they needed to do – combine forces to become a better foe for Google. It’s not a true merger, mind you, but it’s a pretty interesting partnership.

Here are the basics of the deal between Yahoo and Microsoft:

  • Bing will exclusively serve as the search and paid search algorithm for Yahoo’s sites
  • Yahoo will sell search ads for both companies
  • Self-serve ads (the kind that business owners are familiar with, think Adwords) will be done in a unified platform, Microsoft’s adCenter
  • The length of the deal is 10 years

Is Google quaking in their boots? Probably not. But this deal is good for advertisers (that means all of you business owners out there). It combines the best of the two self-serve technologies (from Microsoft) and adds the volume (from Yahoo!) necessary to try and make a dent in the big dog of search’s marketshare.

Here’s hoping they can get the deal to go through quickly and get up-and-running faster than a couple of years. I like competition and look forward to see what Google does, if anything, to react to this deal.