Google Liable for AutoComplete Defamation

More legal news from Italy. An undisclosed plaintiff sued Google for defamation.

People searching via Google ... were apparently presented with autocomplete suggestions including truffatore ("con man") and truffa ("fraud")....

This "caused a lot of trouble to the client, who has a public image both as an entrepreneur and provider of educational services in the field of personal finance".

Google loses autocomplete defamation case in Italy

Since the auto-complete algorithm was created and maintained by Google the court ruled that Google is to be held responsible for the outcomes.

So what is the result of this? Google must make certain that no words like "loser, fool, fraud, dummy" comes up in their auto-complete? Does Google simply remove auto-complete entirely so as not to invite further lawsuits? I never was a big fan of Google's autocomplete but all this will accomplish is to prevent new products from entering the workplace.

This is another horrible court coming from the EU. I fear with the new privacy ruling, going into effect on May 25, whereby websites must get "explicit consent" from web users before being tracked with a cookie that the EU is destroying innovation and intent on "controlling" the internet. As regards the EU privacy law I'm still not certain if this law applies only to client-side cookies or applies to server-side and session variables as well.

Yahoo is Responsible for Illegal Downloads

There was a horrible decision from the Court of Rome. Apparently people could view pirated copies of a movie (About Elly) on line. The Court of Rome ordered Yahoo to remove any link to the unlawful copies of the movie.

The only reason the Court did not include Google and other SEs is because the Italian division of those companies did not have an active role in the management of the search engines and thus were outside the jurisdiction of the court.

If this decision stands then search engines would be responsible for the content found through their site. The court did say that it would be impossible for the SE to police the material themselves but was responsible for promptly acting when a copyrite holder makes a claim about pirated material. The court also took into consideration the fact that the illegal sites were ranked higher than the official site. SEO anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

The fact that a SE is, in anyway, responsible for the material on the web is a horrible precedence. Intentional or not this is the first step to shutting down commercial activity across the web; the first step to eliminated any non-approved site. This is a special concern to anyone who is interested in privacy rights and free speech.

I can't find an English translation of the case but if you can read Italian here it is.

DuckDuckGo

As long-time readers of this blog know, I'm a strong advocate of privacy rights. The problem is two-fold: first people don't understand how much privacy they've given up and second the available privacy technology is too difficult, too complicate for the average person to use.

It looks as if that may be changing. Another privacy based search engine has come on the market. It has a silly name, DuckDuckGo but if it provides good results it may become an important tool in one's "privacy arsenal."

EDIT 9/27/2010:

If you're looking at privacy minded search engines don't forget to look at  Start Page.

Google Includes Site Speed in Search Ranking

Give 3 cheers to Google. They are trying to take account of how fast a page loads when determining their search results. This is a tremendous advancement: advancing properly coded pages over poorly coded ones. The devil is in the details but including page load and rendering speed in their ranking algorithms will only make things better for all of us.

Now, if only they can determine the original content writer and rank the site higher than copycats. I suppose it will become practical in a few years as Google increases their indexing and computer/database speed increases.

Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that's why we've decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites.

While site speed is a new signal, it doesn't carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point.

Using site speed in web search ranking

Print Friendly URLs

Pages with a "print friendly" version usually deliver the same content but with a slightly different URL such as &print=yes. The print friendly version should be blocked from being indexed as users should not arrive at a "print friendly" page directly from the SERP. The most important reason is that the page does not provide the same navigational clues and outlets as do normal pages; secondly the print-friendly pages formatting does not lend itself to be the first glimpse users have of your site.

Apple may build a Search Engine

Data Apple collects about users from its vaunted iPhone is so valuable that the company must build a special search engine just to keep Google from gleaning insight from that data, analysts say.
Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster said there is a 70 percent chance Apple will roll out a mobile search engine tailored for its iPhone within the next five years.

Google is currently the default search engine on the iPhone, which has tens of millions of users. Pairing the leading search engine -- 65 percent in the U.S., more share abroad -- with one of the most popular smartphones on the planet made good business sense.
Apple-May-Build-a-Search-Engine

OK, now this may be an interesting fight. Google needs some serious competition, Microsoft doesn't seem to be bringing the fight to them; maybe Apple will be able to do so.

Personal Blogs and Privacy

How does one make a blog in which NO ONE but you and a selected few can have access to the information? If you're a corporation with sensitive information the only answer is in a password-protected directory in a secure-hosted environment.

How about if you're a smaller entity or private individual and would like a more cost effective solution. For instance you want to have photos of your trips, or your children but you don't want these photos and private moments available to the world at large for this year and next. Blogger, for instance allows you to limit viewers but you must enter each and every accepted email address. This can be a time-consuming and irritating task if names are constantly added.

The best solution would be to have your blog in a password protected directory. Unfortunately some services, such as Blogger, doesn't allow that anymore as they have suspended their FTP service.

Your best solution is limited to finding blogging software that will store the photos and the blog posts on YOUR domain. You will then need to password protect those directories. At that point you will be completely safe from the Search Engines prying eyes.

There is another solution. It's not perfect but it should suffice for all but the most paranoid and that is to add tags telling search engines not to index the pages. The reason this is not perfect is that the tags are merely a suggestion. The search engines can still index and display the pages if they want. Chances are high that they will not index and never display these pages. But, it is not assured.

Why aren't search engines more useful?

I was asked the other day "why aren't search engines more useful?" Why do they come up with so much junk?

For two reasons. One cataloging data is an incredibly difficult task. New data is added daily in an ever increasing amount of new website; and not only does this data have to be found and catalogued but it has to be presented to people in whatever way they happen to think of.

Second developers and SEOs (such as you would hire at GLM Designs) do their best to make their clients sites rank as high as possible in the search engines. Up until recently there was a perpetual battle between the two with the search engines trying to come up with the most relevant site and the site owners trying to become as highly ranked as possible.

For the most part, except for a few people who game the system, the war between SEOs and the search engines is over. There is a series of agreed upon standards and, by following these standards, you can quickly and surely increase the visibility of your site by providing relevant data to the search engine (Google, Yahoo) users.

Who uses Meta Tags in Search Ranking

As far as I know Yahoo is the only major search engine that still supports the META keywords tag. The question that must be asked is: how high in their algorithm to they place the META tags in comparision to words in the title, body, anchor text, etc...?

We know that the META keyword tag is still being indexed and used in Yahoo's site description. For that reason and that alone it would make sense to KEEP the field (as well as META description) if, and only if, your CMS already has it built in; and you have default keywords and descriptions so employees do not have to waste time with them.

All in all, while these META tags don't hurt, they don't particularly help either. If they are automatically entered fine. Don't remove them. I don't see a ROI should you need employees to spend any time deciding on values for either of these tags.

Wolfram Alpha - the Star Trek Computer Coming to Life

There’s a new search engine out, Alpha, which, instead of finding sites discussing the topic, as does Google and other search engines, actually attempts to deliver answers. Stephen Wolfram, the developer of Alpha says that it "makes it easy for the typical person to answer anything quantitatively.” Wolfram does not consider Alpha to be a Google competitor:

“We are not a search engine. No searching is involved here,” he said. “The types of things that people are currently searching for have some overlap [with Google], but it isn’t huge. What’s exciting is that we have a whole new class of things that people can put into a input field and have it tell them what it knows.”

It still has many problems as will be discovered but, whatever its problems it is an interesting first step to developing a computer that will provide answers – and give source material. I wish it well.

If you want to know more:

• Impressive: The Wolfram Alpha “Fact Engine”
• Steven Levy on the Answer Engine, a Radical New Formula for Web Search

Search Engines and Dynamic URLs: Part II

Adding to the previous post there are two additional potential problems when using dynamic URLs.

Search engines have problems indexing URLs that contain session IDs. I would only pass session IDs in the URL in areas of the site which are not to be indexed -- such as password protected areas or shopping cart pages.

Session IDs cause problems with the SE bots. The session variables are different each time the bot lands on a the "page," giving the impression that the page has a new URL every time it is visited. This appearnace of duplicate content causes numerous problems, simply put Session IDs must not be visible to search engine.

A second problem with Dynamic URLs come in parameter ordering. The coders must be careful to order the parameter the same way each time else the search engines will have to juggle which "url" to use to go to the same content.

All in all dynamic urls are fine as long as no session variables are used in indexed pages and if the coders are consistent with their parameter ordering.

Search Engines and Dynamic URLs

Too many people still think that search engines have trouble indexing dynamic URLs. For the most part this isn’t true. Search engines still have problems indexing URLs with more than three parameters. This happens because there are so many combinations that the bot gets stuck on the site and has to abort. This problem will lessen as computing power increases. In general URLs with one or two parameters provide no problems. They are spidered and indexed just fine.

SERP: user selection of results

Q: How will the users choose among the search results?

Jakob Nielsen: From the user perspective … the top one [result] is going to be the one that ... they ..will judge to be the best and that’s what people will tend to click first, and then the second one and so on. That behavior will stay the same, and the appearance will be the same, but the sorting might be different. That I think is actually very likely to happen.

Interview with Jakob Nielsen: Future of the SERP

A shame, but true. Very few people go through the search engine results scanning for other titles. Look at users browsing through music stores or book stores. They are quite willing to keep looking past the first few titles. There is not the same engagement in web searching. What is the reason for that? Is it the tactile sensation of picking up a CD or book? And how is that going to change when all music is downloaded from the web and book go the way of vinyl?

How do we bring that tactile response, that love to accumulate and touch to the web screen? I wonder how much using a mouse instead of a touch screen changes things? And to what extent are we impeded by the low resolution screens? Higher resolution screens would allow us to put a lot more secondary information on a screen, perhaps enticing users to keep searching – because the search would be much more interesting than simply reading a few characters of text.

SERP: more relevant display

Q: What changes will there be in search results pages over the next 3 years?

Jakob Nielsen: The big thing that has happened in the last 10 years was a change from an information retrieval oriented relevance ranking to being more of a popularity relevance ranking. And I think we can see a change maybe being a more of a usefulness relevance ranking. I think there is a tendency now for a lot of not very useful results to be dredged up that happen to be very popular, like Wikipedia and various blogs. They’re not going to be very useful or substantial to people who are trying to solve problems. So I think that with counting links and all of that, there may be a change and we may go into a more behavioral judgment as to which sites actually solve people’s problems, and they will tend to be more highly ranked.

Interview with Jakob Nielsen: Future of the SERP

This is one place where SE need to make drastic changes. I don't see any indication of things happening quickly but this is one of the current technology's weak spots.

As mentioned in the article columnar presentation of search results may improve the situation. Users will continue to scan results, with the majority of users giving higher relevance to top ranked returns, BUT if paid searches and content aggregated sites such as Wikipedia can be sorted out from other returns it would be a useful incremental change.

Will Google make such a change? Only if they see a ROI. Until a competitor forces them to do so I doubt we will see much of a change in the short run.

SEO A Tutorial Your First Step

I'm often asked about SEO tips and tricks - namely how does one begin: does one need to know HTML? does one need to have a marketing background? What does one need to know to promote ones website?

Ultimately it helps to know some HTML and to have some background in marketing but it is most important to understand what Google - and other search engine companies are trying to do and how they are doing it. To begin with let's look at the ideal scenario. Milliseconds after a webpage is is uploaded the search engine finds and evaluates the content of the page and correctly displays the page in order of relevance to the user searching for the information.

Currently this "ideal" is only partially met with heavily indexed sites such as CNN and other news sites. New files are indexed and evaluated remarkably quickly. And yet the two main points need to be kept in mind:

1. Speed and quality of result are at odds;
2. The relevance of the result is not / cannot be perfectly graded for every person and every query.

Thirdly search engines are still not good at (but will shortly) in determining originality. By originality I don't mean it a creative writing sense but in the search engine "knowing" the originator of the content. This is gaining in importance as a result of increased site scraping.

Once you know what a SE is trying to do you need to start thinking about what you can do to place higher. Knowing that news sites are crawled multiple times a day shows that you need to consistently add more files to your site. Knowing that SEs are quite fallible in determining the relevancy of your pages means that you must do your best in aiding them through the use of keywords, titles, urls, and many other big and little things such as getting in bound links and the proper use of heading tags.

These tips and tricks can be easily picked up over time but nothing counts as much as consistently adding valuable information to your site and being frequently indexed.