John Battelle's Search Blog

Thanks Scott!

For those of you who don’t follow the vagaries of search engine index updates, the past few weeks may have been pretty uneventful. But for the businesses and marketers who make their living by ranking well in Google’s listings, it’s been a pretty tumultuous month. That’s because once again the Google Dance has swept through the search engine markets, and this last one was unique.

“Google Dance” refers to the process by which Google updates its index – the master code that determines which listings you see as a result of your queries. Because it is a massive index, and because Google often wants or needs to incorporate various tweaks and refinements to its site-ranking secret sauce (in particular to fight spam), it can take days or even weeks for a new index to settle across the web. The folks over at WebmasterWorld track this stuff quite closely, and have taken to naming each update alphabetically, following the nomenclature usually reserved for hurricanes. This past one happens to be F, and has been dubbed (dub-ya’d?) Florida.

A couple of things come to mind when reviewing the slides (there were more than 300,covering the entire business, both US and int’l). First, eBay knows that the faster and more relevant they can make their internal search, the better their margins. They understand that they have a marketplace of people with very specific intents, looking for very specific things. The easier eBay can make it for folks to find what they want (whether it’s a bid, an item, or a comparison), the better their bottom line looks. Toward this end, eBay has built its own internal search engine called Voyager, which is optimized for eBay users. One of the slides in the analyst presentation boasts: “We are world class at analyzing our user base.”

Second and possibly more important is the role of search in customer acquisition. eBay has a world class IT solution in place to monitor tens of thousands of paid keywords across the web, each with its own P&L and analytics. I can’t confirm this, but I would not be surprised if eBay is Google’s largest customer, something that probably makes both companies uncomfortable, because each can analyze the other’s data and mine it for competitive edge. In the presentation eBay also notes the power of natural or algorithmic search (the “pure” results) – the company says it is revamping its entire site to optimize for natural search. Now that’s quite a statement. Again, major thanks to my source for this information.

I’m offline most of today, but enough folks have passed me these two sites as interesting cultural outgrowths of search that I’ll post them here for your review. The first, GoogleRace, plugs into the Google API and ranks each candidate by keyword searches. Some of the tops searches are “large penis” and “George Bush is going to lose”. (Thanks Kenny..)

Googlehouse, on the other hand, is more understated. This is an attempt to make a cultural commentary through images – the site polls the Google Image search database and pulls up images that fit various parts of an imaginary house. Click around a bit, if you’ve got the time. This kind of stuff usually pushes my MEGO button, but…give it a looksee. (Thanks Tim…)