Google's Cutts Asking for Feedback on March/April '08 Update (The "Dewey" Update)
On the last day of March, I reported on a major Google search index update which seemed to have impacted tons and tons of SEOs, as opposed to just a ton of SEOs (if you know what I mean). Yes, I even noticed changes in the search results and I really don't even look that carefully.Based on all the feedback at WebmasterWorld, Google's Matt Cutts (yes, he is still at Google) added a post to that thread, asking for feedback. The post number is 3616809.
The way to submit your feedback is to use this form and make sure to mention the word "dewey" in the "Additional details" text area. Matt said you can also point out specific issues with the new index via "blog post, leave specifics on the Google webmaster help group, or whatever way you want to point out specific searches that look different to you." He also added that even if you don't get a reply, it is very likely your details will be reviewed by an engineer. Here is Matt's post:
Hey all, I asked a few people to look into this and they weren't seeing many large differences in rankings between these datacenters. The issue with discussing on this thread is that specific urls/queries aren't allowed. If anyone wants to mention a search where they see large-scale differences, feel free to send feedback to Google in the usual way. I'm going to pick a random-but-pretty-unique keyword so that I can look up reports. Let's use "dewey" as the word. So if you want to mention a search where you think the results are very different at one data center compared to other data centers, use the spam report form at http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html and make sure to include the word "dewey" in the "Additional details" text area. Or feel free to point out differences in other ways: do a blog post, leave specifics on the Google webmaster help group, or whatever way you want to point out specific searches that look different to you. The usual rules of thumb apply: you probably won't get a personal reply, but I'll try to get someone to check out reports that get sent in. There shouldn't be much difference between data centers, so I'm curious to find out what queries people seem to be seeing different results on.So maybe this Google update should be named the "Dewey" update? Why not?
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
Source: http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/016754.html
Google.com Finally Gets Google Suggest Feature
Aug 25, 2008 at 8:11pm ET by Danny Sullivan
After being in testing for literally years, Google Suggest is finally coming to Google.com. This is the feature where as you start to type in the search box, related searches automatically appear below where you are typing.
For example, start typing [olympics] into the search box at Google Suggest, and below the box, you start seeing suggestions such as:
- olympics 2008
- olympics schedule
- olympics tv schedule
- olympics 2012
Google Suggest was rolled out as a Google Labs project back in December 2004. At the time, several other search engines had already been offering drop-down suggestions similar to Google Suggest, so Google was hardly a pioneer in offering them.
Since then, Google has offered Google Suggest selectively, such as through:
- The Google Toolbar
- The Firefox search box
- Google Maps
- Google News
- The iPhone and BlackBerry
- YouTube
Quality is very important to us, and since so many people visit the Google.com homepage, we wanted to make sure to evaluate and refine our algorithms to provide a good experience using Google Suggest.Well, it’s finally here. More and more people should see it appear, with a full rollout expected by this Friday.
The suggestions, by the way, come from looking in aggregate at searches that happen on Google and listing popular ones that contain the word you appear to be entering into Google. Next to each suggestion, Google shows you the number of Google results that match the suggestion. I’ve always found that odd — I’d rather Google show some metric related to how popular that suggested query is, since that’s the basis of why you’re being shown these words.
If you like the idea behind Google Suggest, be sure to also check out Yahoo. It offers a more sophisticated query suggestion tool. Search Suggestions On Steroids: Yahoo Search Assist has more about that. Over at Live Search, you don’t get query suggestions when typing in the search box. But they will show "Related Searches" links in the top right hand corner of search results, in some cases.
Related Topics: Google: User Interface | Google: Web Search | Search Features: Query Refinement | Top News
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