The following is a list of search engines and significant sites incorporating a search engine, such as ISP portals, which provide site traffic attributable to web search. The list can be used to verify if your Web Analytics system recognizes all the sources of organic search traffic and keywords important in your market – or for other SEO activities.

The last two table columns indicate if a search engine is recognized by Google Analytics and Microsoft adCenter Analytics. See these related articles for more information about search engine and keyword detection in these two Web Analytics systems:

• Improve search engine and keyword reporting in Google Analytics, a SEO best practice
• Microsoft adCenter Analytics search engine recognition & keyword reporting

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Microsoft is the other main player, after Google Analytics, in the area of free Web Analytics tools for the analysis of browser centric web data. Microsoft’s adCenter Analytics is the successor to the former LiveSTATS thanks to Microsoft’s acquisition of DeepMetrix in April 2006¹.

Why search engines offer Web Analytics

Certainly the name Microsoft choose for its Web Analytics tool says a lot: with adCenter Analytics you know the priority is on advertising. Google has taken a softer approach with Google Analytics; sure there is and will be strong integration with AdWords, yet everyone is welcome to take advantage of Google Analytics even if they aren’t (yet) an AdWords client. The official line is that having experienced the power of measuring business results derived from a company’s web presence, marketing professionals will be more inclined to become AdWords clients. One presumes as well that the data collected by Google Analytics is used inside Google to measure the overall state of traffic on the web (including Google’s competitor’s market share – the benchmarking with other sites feature gives an idea of the possibilities). I hope that Microsoft will adopt a more enlightened Internet strategy and aggressively promote adCenter Analytics usage among non-adCenter clients. Google is a great company but could use some competition.

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You’ve done it. You’ve created a successful web site with compelling content. A loyal community of readers keeps coming back for more. SEO efforts have paid off too, with lots of traffic from Google, Yahoo!, MSN and minor search engines. Time to sit back with a fine Real Ale or a glass of Monteregio di Massa Marittima… but didn’t you forget something? Internal Site Search perhaps?

By Internal Site Search we mean a search feature on your website to allow site visitors to find what they’re looking for, using their own words.

Don’t fret, there are good reasons to deploy site search functionality and it’s relatively easy to do.

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An important consideration for Google AdWords advertisers is to understand just where their contextual ads might appear. Google notes that AdWords ads can appear on the:

1. Google search engine
2. Partner search engines (e.g. Aol, Ask.com, Libero / Arianna, Virgilio / Alice)
3. Google owned web content sites (e.g. Gmail, Google Groups)
4. Third party web content sites (practically any site wishing to display Google ads)

The following slide, extracted from my PPC with AdWords Course, provides a visual overview of where AdWords can appear¹.

Figure 1: Where Google AdWords Ads may Appear – Italian market focus (click to enlarge)

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A new search engine, Cuil, has launched, in an attempt to become the next Google. Cuil was founded by people with experience from Google, AltaVista and IBM – sufficient enough to get the mass media’s attention in the dog days of summer.

Rather unfortunately Cuil decided to tout it’s index size as a primary feature. As seasoned search engine professionals know, there are many other issues which also impact quality search results. Are the indexed web documents fresh, up to date? Google is indexing some sites in just minutes:

On it’s home page, Cuil says “Search 121,617,892,992 web pages”. This number hasn’t changed in days; it seems that their index is more static than Google’s.

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Many search engine optimization professionals have long hoped that Ask.com, the scrappy search engine underdog, would give the big three (Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft) a run for their money.

In July 2006, we saluted Ask.com by documenting their little known Ask.com API data interface. Unfortunately, Ask shut off external access to this interface in March 2007.

Ask’s future became doubtful earlier this year as key management and staff were fired. Danny Sullivan even wrote Ask.com’s obituary, a bit in jest – or maybe not.

While analyzing web analytics log files, I noticed that

the Ask.com bot, Ask Jeeves/Teoma, stopped crawling my Antezeta web sites on February 22/23, 2008. Yet I see a post from early May in the Ask.com search results.

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While it may seem paradoxical, there are many occasions where you may want to exclude a website or portion of a site from search engine crawling and indexing. One typical need is to keep duplicate content, such as printer friendly versions, out of a search engine’s index. The same is true for pages available both in HTML and PDF or word processor formats. Other examples include site “service pages” such as user friendly error message and activity confirmation pages. Special considerations apply for ad campaign landing pages.

There are several ways to prevent Google, Yahoo!, Bing or Ask from indexing a site’s pages. In this article, we look at the different search engine blocking methods, considering each method’s pros and cons.

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An Introduction to Real World Search Engine User Behavior

You were just assigned the task to update your website’s keywords. Not yet in the mood to pull out a thesaurus or check out the competition’s keyword meta tags? Then start with a bit of educational fun, reviewing how users really query search engines. Each of the major search engines offers, or has offered, insight into current search trends. In some cases, the engines also report the actual top internet searches. While clearly an indicator of major news events and other social phenomena, top search trends show how users rely on just one or two words to express what they are looking to find.

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