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With Mega giants of search and sports content having teamed up, that being Google and ESPN, the result of this handshake directly impacts two groups: on one hand, it’s great for sports enthusiasts, but on the other, it’s really an end-around for what is tantamount to paid placement for ESPN.

For anyone who has not heard about this new ‘arrangement,’ the new micro data deal between Google and ESPN allows for search results that includes scores, as well as team and player results to show up at the very top of Google ‘natural’ search results. These results offer summaries and information on upcoming games.

Currently, this has been applied for all football and baseball results, but will extend this to most other sports in the near future, most notably basketball, hockey and soccer.

But really, when looked at closer, this misdirect play has many negative implications for any search marketers, and brings into question what the true meaning of organic placement is purported to be.

And further, this brings up a couple of other issues. First off, when looking at these results, there will now be only two “true” organic search results above the fold, as the new ESPN results placement dominates the top of the page. And if you expand those results by clicking on the “Show more games” button, it then takes over the entire screen.

Another question that comes up is whether or not Google has some direct financial incentive for having these ESPN results show up in these top positions? Are there some backroom dealings going on between the two companies? I’m not saying…I’m just saying. And how do other groups such as CBS Sports, CNNSI or USA Today feel about this? These companies’ organic results now have been automatically pushed down — no matter what they do.

And how does this now extend to other business verticals? Is CNN next up to complete a deal with Google to show or highlight financial or news information at the same level? Does Oprah Winfrey’s “OWN” network do a deal with Google to highlight video results; therefore, these deals would then supersede any proper organic indexing other competing organizations would normally receive with their own organic results.

So while this seems like an innocuous enough deal, one that many, many sport enthusiasts should rightly smile about, it certainly does open up another can of worms, worms that just might be the bait for new, smelly “paid placement” deals coming down the Google pipeline.

Recently Google released what is being called Google 2.0 or Universal Search. Through this release Google has added some of the other search engine results to the main web search results page. Things like Maps, Image, Video and Books search results are being displayed. While this might be a good thing for those times in which you are actually looking for a map and can’t seem to find the link to the Google Map search engine, however, when you are not looking for a map this feature just gets in the way.

The same thing can be said for the Image and Video results. What if I am just looking for a variety of information on a topic and I am not interested in where the topic is on a map or if some writer has written a book on the subject. Heaven forbid my search query be a popular topic for would be film makers who have posted some home movie on another of Google’s properties, www.youtube.com?

This morning I went to Google and typed in Vancouver Film School as I wanted to see what summer workshops they had available for teenagers. Suspecting that the Vancouver Film School used something other than www.vancouverfilmschool.com as their web address, I knew that Google would be able to point me to the right address within the first few pages.

Under Google’s new Universal Search platform I have to say that I didn’t really like their new search results. First thing that I noticed was a big display for a Google map that pointed out 3 locations. Had I not known where the VFS was located this might have been helpful but seeing as I wasn’t requesting that information, I found it to be wasted space.

The next thing I noticed was that due to the amount of space required for the map layout there was only one website displayed above the fold. For those of you who do not know what above the fold means; this is the term used to describe what a web viewer sees prior to scrolling.

One website displayed above the fold in the organic search seems a little silly to me seeing as most eye tracking studies show that users generally only really view the top 3 results in search engines. With those 3 top results now going to other Google products, I have to wonder what the real point of this Universal Search is.

Remember the term I used earlier “above the fold”? Well with only 1 organic result displayed above the fold we have to take a look at what else is available above the fold. As I said earlier I was doing a search Vancouver Film School and have placed the link so you can take a look at the results.

In the organic results we now see the top links going to 5 references to Google maps and 1 link to the www.vfs.com site which is also fortunate enough to carry site links. For those of you who do not know what site links are; site links are generated when a site ranks highly for a search term and that site generates significant traffic to a variety of the pages within the site. Site links are nice things to have but if your site doesn’t get a lot of targeted traffic, I wouldn’t bank on getting them any time soon.

Back to “above the fold” – Not a lot of choices as far as organic results go but luckily for me I knew what I was looking for and my query was answered without having to scroll. Being the curious sort I took a look around the whole page and noticed that while there was only 1 organic listing above the fold, there certainly was no shortage of sponsored listings. One sponsored ad at the top of the page and another five PPC ads on the right hand side of the page.

Now I can’t speak for anybody else but to me it certainly looks as though Google is now placing the emphasis on their own products such as Google Maps, Google Video and the Omni present Google Ads. No one can blame Google for wanting to make more money as they haven’t got all of it yet but, just don’t try to convince us that the reason behind Google 2.0 is to deliver us a better search experience.

Granted, if I was looking for maps and cheesy videos and I didn’t want to waste my time by concentrating on using specialized search tools then this would seem ideal. However, sometimes while doing searches I am looking for a wide variety of sites to see as many different opinions as I can and not just what Google thinks I should be looking for by force feeding me their sponsored ads.

About the Author
Les Romhanyi, Port Coquitlam, BC. Canada
les@bigjuicemedia.com

Les Romhanyi is an SEO specialist with many years experience placing websites at the top of all major search engines. Big Juice Media is a Sports Betting Marketing company based in Canada.

Over the past few years we have been hearing more and more regarding Semantic search. As more and more companies try to break this barrier we will undoubtedly see a lot of new beta testing site pop up. For example one of the most recent ones I have heard of, and tried out, is http://www.hakia.com/.

Hakia has released their beta version of “Meaning Based” search engine that is based upon proprietary semantic software. “Meaning based” search, an interesting concept and one that needed checking out so I went over to their site and performed some gambling industry related searches like sportsbook, sports betting and casino. What I received didn’t exactly thrill me.

The things I noticed right off of the bat were the results tended to be based upon having the search queries within the domain name and within the page titles. Also, I noticed a lot of low quality affiliate sites pop up which in my opinion is a step backwards in search.

Using single search phrases or queries was giving fairly standard results so I thought I would type my query in the form of a question so I asked, minus the quotation marks of course, “Which is the best sportsbook?” and again, the results were less than stellar. I received a whole host of sportsbook directory listings and gambling portal sportsbook pages. Seems to me that offering me a bunch of portal site’s opinions on what they think are the best sportsbooks falls a little short of offering me any kind of meaning. Granted, the same search on Google gives me similar results but at least I could find the occasional actual sportsbook within their results.

Bottom line here is that semantic search has a long way to go before it will threaten Google’s share of the search market. I am a firm believer in that the next evolution of search will be in the form of Semantic Search and that when this type of search is perfected it will be closely followed by a break through in true artificial intelligence.

When Google’s purchase of DoubleClick is finalized will Google do the right thing and close down or sell off the DoubleClick division of Performics? Myself I highly doubt it.

Will Google pass on insider information to their newly acquired SEO firm and give their client base an unfair advantage? Perhaps but I doubt it simply because it would be too easy for the new employees to distribute those secrets.

Does becoming a part of the Google family of services mean that Performics will be getting more opportunities with the larger SEO contracts? Probably… from a salesman’s perspective I would think this would be a great selling feature.

So does the purchase of an SEO company by a search engine constitute evil? Does anybody else smell brimstone?

Billionaire investor Sam Zell recently bought Tribune Corp. for 8.2 billion. Sorry – let’s give that number the respect it deserves – 8.2 Billion dollars. Seems like a lot of money to be spending on a medium that seems to allegedly lose money with every edition. Mr. Zell claims that the newspaper business is hemorrhaging money, in part, due to the bad deals newspapers negotiated with search engines.

At a speech at Stanford Law School Mr. Zell suggested that if Google wasn’t allowed to “steal” the newspaper’s content for nothing, Google wouldn’t be nearly as profitable. Now I can’t say anything about how much money Google makes off of freely distributed news content but from my perspective, I don’t go to Google to find my news and I suspect that might be the case for others too.

Google does offer a News Alert service that emails snippets of stories to people and those snippets contain links to the full stories. Most webmasters I know go out of their way to get included in the Google Alert system as it can be profitable in terms of traffic. Does this mean that Mr. Sam Zell wants to remove their websites from the Google Alert system? If he does then I can’t see how that would be helpful to the newspaper’s website’s bottom line. Further to that point I guess it is true… you can’t teach an old dog new tricks Mr. Zell and I hope that the 8.2 Billion you dropped on this venture wasn’t your last 8.2 Billion!

by Les Romhanyi

The other day I was looking for good quality sites to get links from by doing the tried and true method of, “see who links to my competitors.” This resulted in the usual suspects, such as link directories like Yahoo.com and JoeAnt.com. I did, however, come up with a few surprises, like getting a link from the W3 Consortium. Curious’r and curious’r, naturally I took a deeper look.

One of the first things any decent link builder would examine would be whether the link carried any kind of link condom. I quickly saw that all of the external links did. This led me to see what it took to get a link from this high-authority site and I found that all it took was to give a donation to the W3 Consortium. Seems reasonable to me that to get a link from the W3 sponsor page, one should need to make a donation.

This led me to think however: does sponsoring something as relevant to the Internet as the W3 is, constitute a paid link? And seeing as the page details that they are all sponsored links, do they need to have a link condom applied? I mean, if Google can’t tell that all of these links are here because they sponsored the W3, well then, Google wouldn’t be all that reliable for filtering searches, eh?

Further, the W3 takes donations from these sites and these donations can be in the ten of thousands of dollars, why wouldn’t they be willing to give a little link juice back to them? I mean, if the sites are good enough to take money from, shouldn’t they be good enough to acknowledge as a “vouched-for” site?

If the W3 isn’t willing to spend the time to discern that a site is of a certain level of quality and that they represent themselves properly, what the hell is the W3 taking money from them for in the first place? Kind of reminds me of politicians taking donations from a criminal organization and then distancing themselves for receiving that donation once they get caught.

To me this whole “Paid Link” issue is getting way out of control when quality sites can’t even get “Link Credit” for doing good things that are beneficial to the web community in general. If the W3 Consortium was the only site that was doing this, that would be bad enough. But when you throw in sites like Wikipedia that rely upon user contributions and donations, well then we may have passed the point of no return – thanks Google.

About the Author
Les Romhanyi, Port Coquitlam, BC. Canada
les@bigjuicemedia.com

Les Romhanyi is an SEO specialist with many years experience placing websites at the top of all major search engines. Big Juice Media is a Sports Betting Marketing company based in Canada.

You know how Google always displayed fewer links to your site than say Yahoo or MSN? Well they are now giving us better information but not on the regular search pages for queries like link:mydomain.com. Now if you want to take a look at how many links Google sees (I don’t think they still show us 100% of inbound links) all you need to do is set up a Google Webmaster account, verify the website, and then wait a few days and viola, you get a list of links that Google sees. Very cool.

There has been a lot of talk about latent semantic indexing but that is all there has been – talk. Then along comes Quintura.com. Not only does Quintura.com deal with latent semantic indexing but it also shows us how it works.

Go to the site Quintura.com and enter a single search word for any topic you like and watch how it offers many other topics on that search term. Place your mouse over one of the optional keywords that appear that interests you and then watch how it will further offer more options based upon the relationship between the other words. Once you have your cursor placed over any particular keyword, look at the result listings below to see if it offered the most appropriate website to your topic.

Now this system isn’t perfect but it is an exciting beginning for where search technology is going. The search engines we use today are generally based upon mechanical search whereas Quintura.com is based upon contextual search.

What is Contextual search? In effect, with contextual search, all relevant text and other data is automatically categorized and set in context. With mechanical search names of people, names of places, dates, prices and other related topics to the original keyword query are potentially lost to the searcher unless specifically identified within the original search query; now, they are related facts waiting to be exploited from within contextual search results.

The future of search is changing and I say that change is for the better and it is about time.

Have you ever put your own name into Google to see what comes up? When most people put their name in Google they are lucky to not have anything pop up unless they are in an online business of some kind. The types of things that most people get might be governmental reports if they have ever gone through any bureaucratic red tape. These types of returns are only as bad as the red tape they were involved in.

For some people the results of Googling their own name could be a picture of some drunken indiscretion at a party. Every once in a while I like to type in the names of people from out of my past to see if what kind of results their names turn up. Rarely do I find any pictures but when I do, they are usually pretty good and potentially profitable but I won’t go into that here.

When I Google my own name I am pretty lucky for the most part as most of the results returned are for articles I have written, sites I am credited for and various other things that I have developed over the year son the Internet. Sometimes, however, my name gets used a keyword that leads to a site that is of a questionable nature. Nothing I can do about that so I don’t even worry about those unless I have to.

The only time I would be concerned about what my name turns up in a Google search is when a prospective contract or employer finds something he/she doesn’t like. Naturally, I can explain everything I have done online over the years and can back it up with copies of the work I have done so for me, I don’t really worry to much. For others though this could present a more significant problem, especially when looking for that new job.

So go ahead – Google yourself to see what comes up before someone else Googles you that could bring you down. Forewarned is forearmed.

Well Google rolled out yet another free product that you can’t sign up for. What is it with this company and their free services offers that you have to join a waiting list to sign up for? I mean they have to know that given the level of exposure that their service receives that they are going to have overwhelming responses immediately. Is it just me or does these tactics seem a little lame?

I never bothered with Gmail or Picasa seeing as I already had these types of services by other vendors. Yes, I use Blogger but I can’t recall how long ago I got it. I got the Site Map system without too much hassle and the Google Analytics set up on 3 sites prior to them shutting that one down due to overwhelming volume.

The latest service they have is called Writely. Writely is a browser based word processor that offers the ability to share documents instantly & collaborate in real-time. Seems like a good idea and worth checking out but hey guess what… you can’t because the system is overwhelmed again and won’t allow for any new sign ups.

You would have thought that the good and smart people at Google would have known ahead of time that this was going to happen – again and prepared for this eventuality. So once again I have asked to be notified when the service will be taking sign ups again so I can try this new novel idea out.

Hold it a second… come to think of it this new service kind of reminds me of an old Net Meeting feature called Whiteboard that has been integrated with Program Sharing. I suppose I won’t know for sure until Writely moves to a server that can handle the volume of users that Google brings or is it because Google is trying to figure out a way to stuff the program with Google ads?