July 2003 Archives
July 31, 2003
Advanced Search "Tips & Tricks" page from BBCi Search
At BBCi Search we published a page today outlining some of the advanced search syntax that can be used on both the web search and the site search. With the changes nearly complete at the back-end it has been the first time we have been able to issue anything approaching a guide to how to use advanced search across the site. The previous mix of technologies meant you needed a flow-chart of the site's technical architecture before you could...
July 30, 2003
Explaining what makes BBCi Search unique
Some of the supporting pages around the BBCi Search service have been changed this week, concentrating on what makes BBCi Search unique. There's an overview of the way we do UK weighting, which utilises Inktomi's geotargeting, alongside our own recommendations. There is also an explanation of how we additionally filter results to remove pornography and race hate to provide a family friendly search engine. ...and of more interest to the search engine promotion community, a slightly more detailed list...
July 29, 2003
Why the Premiership on broadband might not be so bad...
I'm a day late looking at this article on European New Media football rights from Monday's Media Guardian supplement, but it made interesting reading. Due to pressure from the EU and from ISPs, the rights for the next Premier League broadband highlights package have been removed from the television rights and offered as a seperate entity. The value of the package is being talked down as despite the growth in broadband in the UK, it is seen as unattractive....
July 25, 2003
The British media publishes photographs of Uday and Qusay Hussein's corpses
This site has been mostly search and very little web :: media :: politics for some time.... But I have to write tonight about the decision of much of the British press, including the BBC, to republish photographs of the corpses of Uday and Qusay Hussein released by the American military. And why I think it is wrong. This is the same British press that objected that footage of British and American soldiers being shown on al-Jazeera television broke...
July 24, 2003
BBC search engine advice
At the BBC we get a lot of feedback from frustrated amateur webmasters who want to know why their site isn't listed in our web search, or why it is listed with the description it has, and why it isn't number one for their choice of keywords. We've therefore published two very basic guides to getting you web site indexed by search engines, and improving the ranking of your site in search engines....
July 8, 2003
Search engine results, advertising and trust
The Register sarcastically reported a study from Consumer Web Watch in the USA which claims that: "Consumers have little understanding of how search engines retrieve Web pages or how they rank or prioritize links on a results page" That isn't a shock to me - it is clear enough from looking at the search logs at the BBC that a large proportion of internet users do not understand the way that search engines interact with either the content they...
July 5, 2003
Google and Weapons of Mass Destruction
There has been a lot of press coverage and web chatter about the funny 'Google' joke about weapons of mass destruction which has gone - dread using words - viral via email in the UK over the last couple of days. I think it has been a really interesting example of how Google has developed what I have heard described as a "brand halo" - the appearance of a halo in a work of art conferred divinity on the...
July 3, 2003
Why Boycott MSN?
Danny Sullivan has noted the Microsoft move into the search crawling business in his article Microsoft's MSN Search To Build Crawler-Based Search Engine And he picks up on one thing that has astonished me, the fact that there is already a campaign to Boycott MSN search using robots.txt to disallow the crawler. Google currently has a massive share of the search market, and nobody has suggested that Googlebot should be banned on the grounds that google is uncompetitive, or...
BBC Training Search Engine course
I will be doing an hour Q&A session on August 8th as part of this BBC Training Search Engine Optimisation course...