Archive for March, 2009
Microsoft Kumo in Testing
Microsoft is currently testing “Kumo“, the internal project name used by Microsoft employees for it’s new search function which is said to not only provide an improved search feature, but also help users “accomplish tasks”.
Microsoft report that around 40% of all search queries go unanswered, and Satya Nadella, VP of Microsoft’s Online Service group claims that 46% of search queries last longer than 20 minutes, suggesting that the user has difficulty finding what it is they’re looking for, and 50% of queries are users returning to previous tasks.
One has to wonder if this is a flaw common amongst all search engines, or if perhaps Microsoft’s existing search engine isn’t delivering qualitative data, or grading it and ranking it in the SERPs accordingly.
In comparison to Google, it is said by most Search Engine Marketers, that you need to be at the top spot in the Search Engine Results Pages, or at least on the first pages. Google seems to present instant gratification, and their strategy is to keep users on the page for as little time as possible and get on with doing or viewing what it is they were searching for.
Perhaps a change in Microsoft’s algorithms delivered by Kumo may present a new way for searching and finding information on the web, and we can only watch and wait to see if they’re able to acheive that goal and re-gain some market share against the leading search giant, Google.
SEO Experiment
Today, Search Engine News is Embarking on an SEO experiment to see how long it takes for a brand new domain name and website to be indexed in Google, Yahoo! and MSN.
Traditionally Yahoo! and Google have been the fastest sites to index a page, and we’ve had reports that MSN is very slow at listing sites that aren’t highly popular, so this experiment’s primary goal is to see how long it takes for the three search engines to index the site and rank it for certain key terms.
Our methods used in the experiment:
- newly registered domain with no content
- create wordpress blog, and configure relevant SEO-Related plugins
- Add unique content
- Submit to Yahoo, Google and MSN
- Link to the page from a page rank 1 website and one other free index
- Authenticate site in Google Webmasters, MSN Webmasters, and Yahoo Site Explorer
- Add a sitemap
- Setup Google Analytics
- Sit and wait for the results, and report back.
Our expected outcomes and measures of success
- Time taken to be listed in SERPS of three major search engines
- Time taken to attain pagerank
- Value of registering a domain and performing SEO for highly competitive key-terms (with 44 million results).
We will report back in the coming weeks and months the outcome of our SEO Experiment