Author Archives: Nadir Garouche

SEO 2.0

Again Todd comes up with a thoughtful post about SEO. He describes how SEO must be now, and has to switch to a “2.0 era“. He sees SEO as an Internet Marketing technique with a comprehensive understanding of usability, design, traffic, trend, economics, conversion, risks, budget and other detailed principles.

I think this post should be read by all the SEO consultants who are still doing approximate work for their clients, and who are willing to still be there by the end of the year or even earlier.

With the growing number of businesses allocating a budget to SEO, and with search engines trying to use other factors to evaluate the quality of a website, those who still apply shallow techniques will have a hard time achieving succesful SEO campaigns.

MyBlog3D: Welcome to the house!

Would you like to be able to have your own virtual house on the web, invite friends to have a talk, share your last pictures from your trip to Thailand or even play paintball with them?

A french company called I-maginer, based in Nantes, has developed a revolutionary application called MyBlog3D that allows you to create a 3D blog in order to create your own environment online and personalize it, and share things or discuss with your friends.

With MyBlog3D, you can:

– Create your own online world and personalize it (colors, images, etc)

– Create your own 3D character and personalize it with your own picture so that it looks just like you!

– Talk with your friends through Voip or even chat

– Share pictures, videos, songs

– Organize multi-player games such as paintball

MyBlog3D is not available yet but you can now subscribe on their site to receive an invitation to create your own 3D blog after the 26th of April. I signed up with the French version of the site, however it seems that there’s no link in the English version. I’ll check back later and also try to get in touch with them to see if they’re planning to fix that.

I really like the concept, the graphics aren’t quite perfect but I’m sure they’ll improve that very soon.

IBM: Google’s rival for Business Search Technology?

Thanks to Bill Slawski’s posts, I’ve been aware of a few search engine technology related patents published by IBM and also about some really good articles on SEO published on their official website.

The intent of these patents and of these articles aren’t really clear. We know that IBM has been involved in search engine technology, this page gathers all kind of articles regarding IBM and its relation with search engine technology.

More recently, IBM announced that they have been chosen by The International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations (IFPMA) to develop and online clinical trials portal, that allows patients and physicians to easily find “medical information from more than 88,000 pages of ongoing and completed clinical trial studies worldwide, allowing users to search in German, French, Japanese and Spanish, as well as English.”

The search technology developed by IBM seems very advanced, and uses techniques that no other traditional Internet based search engine is currently using:

The portal uses IBM’s advanced text analytics and content discovery capabilities, extending beyond conventional Internet-based search to help interpret and understand the medical information an individual wants and needs — even if their query contains misspelled words or jargon. For example, patients are sometimes unfamiliar with medical terminology, so the system suggests synonyms for medical conditions and medicines, which helps to correct misspelled words.

IBM’s vision could be to develop search technology for companies that have specific goals and unique requirements. Google also developed products to help businesses search their information, but it doesn’t seem to be something revolutionary.

From what I understand, if a company’s using Google Mini or any other Enterprise products, it’s just a search engine with shallow functions.

On the other side, IBM’s example with their technology that allows multi-criteria search, text analysis, vertical search etc, seems to be able to provide advanced search technology to businesses that need to be very efficient and find the right information.

Yahoo! Answers: real knowledge, entertainment or misleading information?

I was aware of Google Answers where people can go and post any question they want and get an answer for a fee (from $2.00 to $200.00). Their answers are usually pretty smart, being given by people who are usually specialist or well aware of the field the person is asking a question about. Plus if the answer doesn’t satisfy you, the person who replies doesn’t get paid, so he or she’s better off providing a good answer.

Today I heard that Yahoo! provides something similar, called Yahoo! Answers but the system is currently free. That’s probably the reason why there’s a lot of poor quality posts, and it seems that many people go there just for fun, or to make a mock of other people.

I’ve read a few posts and I don’t think it’s the best place to get an answer to your question if it’s something very important to you. I’m not saying that you cannot find good information, I’ve found a very good anwser about SEO but many people seem to post just for fun or to get more points.

A nice list of Firefox extensions

Stephan Spencer published a nice list of his favorite plugins and extensions that he uses with Firefox. If you are a SEO, Webmaster, or just a regular Internet user, you’re just missing out if you’re not using Firefox yet. It’s still by far the most robust browser out there and the number of extensions that make your life easier is just awesome.

There’s just one extension that I would add to Stephan’s list: SEOpen, a tool which allows you to get any SEO related information with just one click, ie. Yahoo! Backlinks, number of pages indexed in Google, and more.

Is Google preparing a new interface?

A few people have seen a slightly different interface while they were using Google this week.
I found this information via Ars Technica. If you want to see what the “new” interface looks like, at least the one Google’s trying right now, you can do this as explained in the article:

– 1: Go to www.google.com

– 2: In your address bar, just paste this string:

javascript:alert(document.cookie=”PREF=ID=fb7740f107311e46:TM=1142683332:

LM=1142683332:S=fNSw6ljXTzvL3dWu;path=/;domain=.google.com”)

and press enter, that will set a cookie in your computer.

– 3: Do a search and check out the links on the left.

Apparently Google would like to relocate to shortcuts to images, news and results categories to the left. The green bar seems to give an idea of the number of results available in each category. They are probably willing to entice users to use other categories to ease their search.
I did a test for “country music”:

Well, not bad, but we’re still waiting for Google to show us something more Web 2.0…