Google Universal Search and your travel industry business. Are you ready?

April 21, 2008 · By Claude

It was around a year ago when Google started going live with universal search .

The goals was to bring all the other specialised search results (from Video, Maps , Images , News , User Reviews, etc.) to the main web search portal.I think it is interesting to analyse some data and live examples, thinking about a strategy and then to give our travel readers some tips to be operational with this “new Google game”.

According to Google:

Google’s vision for universal search is to ultimately search across all its content sources, compare and rank all the information in real time, and deliver a single, integrated set of search results that offers users precisely what they are looking for. Beginning today, the company will incorporate information from a variety of previously separate sources – including videos, images, news, maps, books, and websites – into a single set of results. At first, universal search results may be subtle. Over time users will recognize additional types of content integrated into their search results as the company advances toward delivering a truly comprehensive search experience.

Read full post here: Tourism Internet Marketing [dot com]

15 Tools for Monitoring a Website’s Popularity - Six Revisions

15 Tools for Monitoring a Website’s Popularity

As a web designer or developer building a site, it’s helpful to first scout similar websites (i.e. the competition) to help you make design and development decisions. Knowing what websites work and which ones tank can give you insights and inspiration on what design elements, website features, and website content is effective.

To help you in your analysis, here are 15 top-notch, free, and simple web tools to help you learn more about a particular website.

15 Tools for Monitoring a Website’s Popularity - Six Revisions

Going Green and SEO

Everything seems to be ‘green’ nowadays; it seems that every brand is trying to do something to be ‘green’.
Going green helps a brand’s profile by staying current with what’s hot and top of mind for consumers but it can also be good for SEO.

For example just a couple of days ago WeatherBug.com launched their ‘green’ section where they provide users with green tips from green living, to driving green and buying green products.

If done correctly, this strategy will help your profile and should help drive some traffic to your site.



Four tips to help you select green products from WeatherBug

Live Search Webmaster Center Blog : Big Update to Webmaster Tools

Creating websites and publishing on the web is getting simpler and simpler all the time, but with more content on the web it is becoming harder for webmasters and publishers to ensure that their content can be found. Last fall when we launched the Live Search Webmaster Center in beta, the goal was to establish a long term relationship with webmasters and help them achieve their goals by addressing the most common questions we hear, and help them understand how Live Search sees their site.

In an effort to improve upon those goals, today we have launched a significant update to our Webmaster Center and brought the Center out of Beta! This update includes several new features that provide webmasters more information about how Live Search is crawling and indexing their sites, as well as a few features to make the data more actionable.

When you sign into the Live Search Webmaster Center You be able to:
Discover potential issues affecting your site
A new feature to the webmaster Center, the “Crawl Issues” feature will allow webmasters to be able to find four types of issues we encountered on their sites.

• File Not Found (404)
• Blocked by REP
• Long Dynamic URLs
• Unsupported Content-Types

For each issue, we return the URL and the data we last encountered it.


Get more and better backlink data
In the beta of the Live Search Webmaster Center we offered a limited look into backlink data. We’ve significantly enhanced this tool, giving webmasters access to more data about their referring links. Information about backlinks is useful as they influence the rank of a site. It’s also helpful for web publishers to know what sites link to them since these pages discuss the products/organization and identifying them can be valuable as a means of finding sources of promotion or feedback.

Making the data more actionable
Webmasters are analytical and rarely work alone. They often need to be able to grab as much data as they can, and take it offline into Excel or some type of database for analysis and collaboration with a client, marketing or engineering partner. To enable that, we’ve built a few new features into all our reports, both the new ones and the old ones.

1. Advanced Filtering – This way they can quickly scope the results to zoom into the data they need, without having to sift through all the results.


2. Downloading Data – For times when webmasters want to view a lot of results, we also provide a download option that can give access to the first 1,000 results in a CSV file (comma separated values) that can be easily opened with Microsoft Excel or imported into a custom reporting tool. This can help a webmaster analyze the results and share them with colleagues.


More than just a set of tools
When we launch our Webmaster Center we also launched a few resources to help you engage with us. Now more than ever we encourage you to Participate in the Live Search Webmaster community to get help - Our Forum, feedback tool and Webmaster Center blog provides support for web publishers like you, across a broad range of issues, focused on helping you be successful and we are always listening for your feedback.
So sign in today and let us know what you think!
-Jeremiah Andrick, Program Manager, Live Search Webmaster Center

Live Search Webmaster Center Blog : Big Update to Webmaster Tools

Travelocity Experience Finder

The Travelocity Experience finder is quite hidden as it still in beta mode, but it is very powerful as it gives users the ability to search by experience or theme similar to what Canada Tourism has done.

Besides being able to search by experience, you can also search by Destination and Product Type.
Though the maps under each experience are not great, it does provide users with a sense of location; I think if they could enhance the maps it would really improve the overall user experience.

However the maps found under Tools are fantastic; you are able to overlay the map with Hotels, Activities, Museums and much more.
Another cool feature is the wish list where you can add hotels, activities or vacation packages.

Overall I think Travelocity has done an excellent job with this initiative; from a PMO or DMO perspective there are many ideas that can be taken, such as building a web site that will allow your users to search by experience or incorporating a map that can be overlaid with experiences chosen by the user to having a wish list – the one thing I would add is a viral component where users can share their wish list with family or friends.

Travel: Airfares, hotels, vacations, cruises, car rentals and more at Travelocity.com

Yahoo! Search Blog: Site Explorer Gets a Makeover

A few years ago, we launched Site Explorer with the goal of providing site owners with better visibility into how we index their websites and what data we use in our search service. Over the years we've moved beyond simply providing information to webmasters to allowing them to tell us what to do with their site, using functions such as submitting feeds, deleting URLs or reporting spam. Our most successful function among all has been Dynamic URL Rewriting. We've had thousands of site owners enter rules for their websites and webmasters auto-rewrite an average of 25,000 URLs per rule, with some sites rewriting millions of URLs in 1 shot.

Today, we launched a new look and feel for Site Explorer (http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/new) that provides a more dynamic interface to accommodate future feature roll-outs. The new interface also includes a new Site Summary page to provide statistics for authenticated sites. On top of this, we're also increasing the number of rules for Dynamic URL Rewriting that you can enter from 3 to 10.

The new site is located at a special URL to give you some time to play around with it and update your tools that use our interface. We will make this the default experience soon, so please use this time to update your tools. And, as always, please give us feedback on your new experience. We want to hear from you!

Priyank Garg
Yahoo! Search

Yahoo! Search Blog: Site Explorer Gets a Makeover

Lonely Planet for iPhone

The iPhone hype continues. With the recent launch of the iPhone 3G Lonely Planet took the opportunity to promote its mobile phrasebook Mandarin version.

If you haven’t tried their phrasebook give it a shot….it’s free for limited time.

Click here to go to the download page.

Lonely Planet | Lonely Planet & iPhone

DMOZ - a.k.a. The Open Directory Project (ODP)

DMOZ

a.k.a. The Open Directory Project (ODP)

Why does it take so long to get listed? Why are some sites rejected? About the DMOZ editors

Getting a website listed in DMOZ can be very frustrating. We know that being listed will probably help our Google rankings, but getting in can take a very long time. In this article I will explain why it often takes so long and why what you do when submitting your site is sometimes the cause of the delay. But first I will explain what DMOZ is and why it is worthwhile for websites to be listed in it.

DMOZ, also known as The Open Directory Project (ODP), is a large, categorized directory of websites and pages, which is staffed by volunteers. Every website and page that is added to the directory has to be manually reviewed before it is included. Being listed in the directory is free.
Not many people actually use DMOZ for searches in the same way that Yahoo! is used, so the directory itself is of little value in generating traffic. However, its data can be freely downloaded, and any website, however small, can use it. One not so small website that downloads and uses DMOZ's data is Google. In fact, Google's directory is nothing less than the downloaded DMOZ directory.

This has some significant effects for websites that are listed in DMOZ. PageRank is an integral part of Google's ranking algorithm, and higher PageRank helps towards higher rankings. The PageRank within a website is increased by pages from other sites linking to it, and the higher the PageRank of the pages that link to it, the better it is for the receiving site.
A listing in DMOZ creates two significant links into a website - one from DMOZ (Google spiders DMOZ just like any other site) and one from the Google directory. Both of these usually have decent PageRank. Then add the links from the thousands of small sites that have downloaded and use the DMOZ directory, and you can see why it is usually quite beneficial for a website to be listed in DMOZ. Simply being listed in DMOZ can take a website from a Toolbar PageRank value of 3 to 4, and even from 4 to 5.

DMOZ - a.k.a. The Open Directory Project (ODP)

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - the basics

( How to improve your Search Engine Rankings )

Most people think of search engine optimization to improve their search engine rankings as being such a skilled task that, without putting a great deal of time and effort into it, it is simply beyond their capabilities. Wrong! Yes, improving search engine rankings in competitive topic areas does require a good deal of knowledge and expertise and search engine optimization experts are needed, but most websites aren't in very competitive areas. Many of them can achieve top rankings by applying just the search engine optimization basics - which can be learned in less than 30 minutes.

This article lays out the basics of search engine optimization. It can be well worthwhile trying them before paying an expert as, oftentimes, the basics are all that's needed.

NOTE: the SEO copywriting method (a.k.a. search engine optimization copywriting) applies these basics to a site's existing pages. It doesn't go into more advanced search engine optimization techniques that require more knowledge and expertise.

Full article here: Search engine optimization basics. Improve your search engine rankings

How does Google collect and rank results?

One of the most common questions we hear from librarians is "How does Google decide what result goes at the top of the list?" Here, from quality engineer Matt Cutts, is a quick primer on how we crawl and index the web and then rank search results. Matt also suggests exercises school librarians can do to help students.

Crawling and Indexing
A lot of things have to happen before you see a web page containing your Google search results. Our first step is to crawl and index the billions of pages of the World Wide Web. This job is performed by Googlebot, our "spider," which connects to web servers around the world to fetch documents. The crawling program doesn't really roam the web; it instead asks a web server to return a specified web page, then scans that web page for hyperlinks, which provide new documents that are fetched the same way. Our spider gives each retrieved page a number so it can refer to the pages it fetched.

Our crawl has produces an enormous set of documents, but these documents aren't searchable yet. Without an index, if you wanted to find a term like civil war, our servers would have to read the complete text of every document every time you searched.

Google Librarian Central