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By: Anne Haynes

Today I watched the Search Marketing Now Blended Search webinar with Chris Sherman, Executive Editor for Search Engine Land. It was a great webinar and cleared up my understanding of the difference between Universal Search and Blended Search; Universal Search is a Google term and Blended Search is everyone else’s term. I prefer Universal Search because it’s all inclusive and has nothing to do with searching for a blender to buy or finding a blended drink recipe.

Sherman goes into the history of search starting with Search 1.0; Boolean logic and keyword matching. During Search 1.0 content was less structured; no video, limited images and no three tier navigation structures. It was the early 90’s when applications like JAWS for the visually impaired were around, but definitely not mainstream or associated to the W3C. This was the time when InfoSeek sold the keyword “Homes” for $100 dollars and Yahoo! founders; David Filo and Jerry Yang interviewed with Dan Fortune; host of Sound Bytes on KSJS. Note: I was the production assistant for the show and it was amazing to meet the masters behind #1 search engine of it’s time. During Search 1.0 days organizations didn’t need Search Engine Optimization firms or specialists; content wasn’t complex. Just add a few keywords and you were #1.

Then the Search 2.0 era started; Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were searching on Yahoo! during their studies at Stanford and started thinking about citing resources in their papers and drew a logical tie to building a search engine based on document citations. Citation analysis is the logic behind Google and the birth of PageRank and TrustRank. During my college days at San Jose State University I remember meeting people in classes, coffee shops, and bars and writing down the word G-O-O-G-L-E. I felt like a bit of a pioneer during those days, but today everyone knows Google, but people are still learning about blogs.

Chris Sherman made 1 or 2 statements on the above, so assume I did the rest. While he never went into a true definition of Search 3.0, the majority of the webinar was around Blended Search.

So let’s dive in – later this week.

by: Anne Haynes
While I’m not a huge reality television fan, I watch one or two episodes of The Bachelor from time-to-time. Last night I tuned into The Bachelor; it’s down to 3 ladies and while watching the segment, I began to get sick of hearing the word “Like” from Amanda. It’s truly sad that someone so pretty could be so “like” clueless of her favorite word. It made me thankful for my father correcting me growing up. When in conversation with my father, he would hear the word “like” and then humorously say, “Like their all and we’re all, like totally ok.” We would smile and laugh, but it helped me remember not to say the word “like” too much in conversations. It’s important for parents to help their children learn how to speak well. Imagine if Amanda’s parents helped her when she was growing up, she might still be in The Bachelor game.

I’m sure after Amanda called Matt a douche bag he knew he did the right thing. Honestly, I can’t believe that Amanda did that on national television. The best was when Matt told Amanda, “Don’t Hate.”

As for the bride-to-be, my vote is for Chelsea, she’s real! Read more about like Amanda’s out on the ABC message board

by: Anne Haynes

Yahoo! plans to socialize its platform by allowing users to create, develop and distribute widgets. Yahoo!’s updated platform is set to be released by the end of 2008. It’s nice to see that Yahoo! is stepping up to the social media plate and diving into the social marketing world. It looks like Yahoo! testing out Google powered ads may be a way to fund this platform update.

by: Queen of Search
I’ve been reading the WebTrends data for one of my clients and I continually find robots everywhere in the hit results. I’m working with the engineer to create filters and custom reports, but it’s insane how much traffic is coming from robots. None of the visits going to the site are real people. In order to tackle this problem – I’ve decided to update my education and conduct some Google research.

Some of these robots are designed to scrape email addresses and harvest them for spamming later. Most of the emails are used when renting email lists. If you’ve ever purchased an email list you know there is a huge variance between prices. Now you know where the cheap list providers get their email address, from the bad bots.

Last month an article came out naming the six web robots responsible for 85% of the email spam.

Some robots are designed to copy entire sites. Simply put, robots are never seen by the user, so they add no value.

There are a few ways to prevent web bots from accessing your website; change your htaccess.txt file and/or architect a high-tech robots.txt file. Web crawlers and bad robots will read the robots.txt file and use this file to know “where to go”. These are the devious web crawlers; web crawlers accessing the “don’t crawl” files using the robots.txt to know where to go.

I’ve heard horror stories about people creating the wrong type of robots.txt file. One person accidentally reversing the meaning of the robots.txt file. In other words, he/she entered in all the directories that he/she wanted the search engine spiders to index.

I found this old, but great resource when searching for solutions: How to keep bad robots, spiders and web crawlers away

If you continue to have problems, just write a letter to the spambots. Think Artificially.org wrote a funny blog post that’s a good read.

When conducting my research, I had to go to the Wikipedia.org and check out their robots.txt commands. Notice how they speak to the bad web crawlers telling them to slow down or they’re out. I also like the comment, “Friendly, low-speed bots are welcome viewing article pages, but not dynamically-generated pages please.”

When everything is said and done, study, learn and test to find out what works for you and your website.

Since I moved from California to Kansas 1.5 years ago, I’ve learned that the KU JayHawk fans are intense! They have every reason to be intense this year! Last night’s Final Four was by far one of the best basketball games I’ve ever watched!

by: Anne M. Haynes

I’ve been on FaceBook tonight and I’m still having a hard time with the busy interface and the 10 thousand applications you can add. There was an article in VisibilityMagazine.com about phishing applications, so be careful in the FaceBook world my friends.

When it comes to music, I live on MySpace and since I love music so much, it’s natural that my preferred social media hang out has been MySapce. My friend Jeff Hinkin from the Jeff Hinkin Band has never been an email kinda-guy. But since MySpace arrived, the guy is available regularly.

Are social media applications going to replace web-based email? Let’s look at the cell phone…. How many people in the U.S. have stopped having a home phone, even with digital phones? Tons, I don’t have the statistic, but 90% of statistics are made up (just kidding). How many people have more than one email account? I don’t know that statistic either, but simply by logic, who wants to configure 4 emails to go to one email box when all their friends are live and available to MySpace or FaceBook? In the social internet space, it just seems easier to connect with people using these social media applications. The alternative seems more painful; filtering through 400 SPAM emails.

I don’t really want email notifications, it’s just more SPAM in my email. For crying-out-loud, my email address is on a black list because people are steeling my email address as their email display! It’s kinda freaky when you get email from yourself and its marked SPAM.

I don’t think that social media applications will replace web-based email, because business is done through the web, but will they all integrate – yes they do now, but will it be easier, God – let’s hope!