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SEO by the SEA

Internet Marketing and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Research, Consulting, and Services

Google to Help Content Creators Find Unauthorized Duplicated Text, Images, Audio, and Video?Today

I’ve written in the past about many of the reasons why you might find the same content at different pages on the Web, and some of the problems that duplicate content might present to search engines.

When someone performs a search on the Web, a search engine doesn’t want to show more than one page that contains the same or very similar content to that searcher. A search engine also doesn’t want to spend time and effort in crawling and indexing the same content on different sites.

One of the challenges that a search engine faces when it sees duplicate content is deciding which page (or image or video or audio content) to show to a searcher in search results. If a search engine provided a way for creators of content to find unauthorized uses of their content on the Web, it might take some of that burden off the search engine.

A newly published patent application from Google describes a process that could be provided for people to search for duplicate copies of their content on the Web, even if their content isn’t readily available online.

Duplicate Content Search
Invented by Clarence Christopher Mysen and Johnny Chen
Assigned to Google
US

How Google Might Personalize Search Results Outside of Personalized SearchNovember 19

Not long ago, during a search at Google, a message at the top of the search results told me that my results were,

“Customized based on recent search activity.”

A link next to that message provided more information, telling me that if I signed into my Google Account, I might see “even more relevant, useful results,” based upon my “web history.”

During another recent search, a similar message appeared telling me that my results were based upon my location, with the results biased towards Philadelphia, which isn’t too far away.

I’ve been wondering since what it is that Google is considering when it makes changes to my search results like that. The major commercial search engines act as an index to the Web to many people who rely upon them when looking for information online.

Imagine an index that changes for every searcher.

What might that mean to searchers and to the site owners who hope that search engines will help people find their pages? What information might Google be looking at when it customizes search results based upon “recent search history,” or the location of a searchers?

We may have started receiving some clues…

Last week, Google was granted patents describing how they could change the order of pages in search results based upon the

Google Using Novel Content as a Ranking Signal?November 14

If you search for news at Google News, you’ve probably noticed that you can view news articles by date or by relevance.

Many of the news articles that you find in Google News are from sources like wire services, where the information is shared amongst many newspapers. Reporters have the option of adding additional information, but often wire service articles at different papers contain little more than the original material, and may often contain less than the original.

So it’s possible that there may be many articles that are substantially the same, and if those are the most relevant result for a search at Google News, it’s likely that Google doesn’t want to show all of those article in their results.

How does Google decide which articles on the same subject to show in Google News, and how to rank those news articles?

You may sometimes see a short list of blog posts at the bottom of search results at Google in response to a particular query. If Google comes across a number of blog posts that are about very similar topics, and it wants to rank those based upon the ones that present the most novel information, how does it choose amongst them? How might it decide which to show along with web page results?

A newly granted patent from Google describes a method of finding unique content amongst documents that may play a role in determining what results we see within instances like those:

Changing Google Rankings in Different Countries for Different SearchersNovember 13

While you can search at google.com just about anywhere in the world, you can also access Google at a number of different country specific addresses, such as google.co.uk, www.google.fr, www.google.co.in.

Chances are, if you search at one of the country specific Google address, the results you see may be biased towards pages associated with that country. But, when you search at Google.com, the search engine may also try to send you results that might be appropriate for the country you are located within, or a country that you prefer to see results from.

In an Official Google Blog post from July of this year, Technologies behind Google ranking, we were told that, “The same query typed in multiple countries may deserve completely different results.”

So, for example, a seach for the query [football] should provide different results in the US, the UK, and Australia, because the term refers to completely different sports.

A patent granted to Google this week describes some ways that the search engine might try to associate web pages with country locations, and searchers with preferred countries, as well as a method that could take that information to bias search results based upon the preferred country of a searcher.

A preferred country might include the country of the searcher as well as other countries that searcher might find acceptable, such

Search Pogosticking and Search PreviewsNovember 11

Search pogosticking is when a searcher bounces back and forth between a search results page at a search engine for a particular query and the pages listed in those search results.

A search engine could keep track that kind of pogosticking activity in the data it collects in its log files or through a search toolbar, and use it to rerank the pages that show up in a search for that query.

A recent patent application from Yahoo describes information that a search engine may collect when searchers click on search results, and suggests that pogosticking information could be used with a ranking system like the one Yahoo described in a patent filing on User Sensitive PageRank, which I wrote about in Yahoo Replaces PageRank Assumptions with User Data.

The Yahoo patent filing on pogosticking is:

Search Pogosticking Benchmarks
Invented by Thomas A. Kehl and Jyri M. W. Kidwell
Assigned to Yahoo
US Patent Application 20080275882
Published November 6, 2008
Filed: May 2, 2007

Abstract

Disclosed are apparatus and methods for quantifying how much searchers select other search results, instead of a particular search resul