I found my way to San Jose this morning to attend Search Engine Strategies. My flight departed early so I had to get up at 4:30am…so yeah, I’m kind of in a bad mood.

So far I’ve only attended one session. It was regarding Universal/Blended Search.
Moderator:

• Chris Sherman, Co-Chair, SES San Jose

Speakers:
• Greg Jarboe, President and Co-Founder, SEO-PR
• Sherwood Stranieri, Search Marketing Director, Catalyst online
• Bill Slawski, Director of Search Marketing, Commerce360

Q&A Speakers:

• Erik Collier, Director of Product Management, Ask.com
• David Bailey, Engineer, Google
• Tim Mayer, Vice President of Product Management, Yahoo! Search

Mostly, the various search engines discussed how they see the future of blended search evolving. Obviously the engines want to include more and more content (video, images, etc) to keep users in front of their ads.

Some stuff to look for:
• Google News currently only provides text and images. Video should be available soon.
• Google Universal search will begin to shuffle features in the SERPs. For example, (as of 8/20/2007) a search for “Alex McArthur” returns 3 pictures of the actor and 10 standard web results. If a video or blog post about Alex McArthur became popular in the future, then a Google Onebox result may be added to the first SERP page.
• Third party videos showing up in blended search results.

Erik Collier, from Ask.com, reported a 30% drop of searchers going to second page as a result of blended search. Also, a 15% drop on searchers performing more than 1 query. According to Erik this means that people are finding what they want quicker.
*2nd page just won’t cut it any more. ;-)

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Check out Google’s Valentine’s day logo.

If my wife had a pet name for me I definitely wouldn’t tell millions of people. Way to let it slip Big G.

Is this a misspelling or an attempt to be cute with a pet name?
I’m not sure if the strawberry stem is meant to represent the “L” or not.

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Does anyone else remember Google’s April Fool’s joke back in 2002? I remember reading it years back and not finding it funny.

You can view it here:
Google’s Pigeonrank, April Fool’s Day Joke

I just spent some time reviewing some things on G’s site. I periodically do this to look for new tools and came across this joke. After reading it years later I decided it still isn’t funny. Now don’t get me wrong…I use google daily, but this attempt at humor doesn’t get better with age.

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Google now has a sneak peak available for their new web-based spreadsheet solution. The screenshots to dive too far into the feature set, but it does appear to be somewhat comprehensive. Take a look for yourself.

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Great news for those of you following my attempts to surpass Alex McArthur the actor in SERPs (search engine result pages). About 2 months ago this domain was floating around the 10th page for search results on “Alex McArthur”. At the time AlexMcArthur.com consisted of one static page with very limited content. I’ve since turned this site into a blog with SEO friendly pages and it quickly jumped to number 2 on most search engines. Also, I took some time to submit to numerous directories and acquire a handful of linkbacks. It will be interesting to see what this sites PR (page rank) is after the next update. I expect a small jump to 2, maybe 3 if I’m lucky.

As far as the Alex McArthur (me) vs Alex McArthur (actor) challenge goes it appears a long road lays ahead. I’m sure there will be ups and downs along the way, but hopefully before I die he will feel the pain of being #2. The actor’s fan site has numerous linkbacks that will take me some time to outdo. Why do people have to be so obsessed with movie actors? Quit linking to the schmuk! Desperado wasn’t that good!

This site is optimized fairly well. I’m sure I could do some tweaking and include a few more keywords, but my first priority is to get as many linkbacks as possible. Too bad I have a job and a family or I could spend all day getting links. This site isn’t very high on my to-do list so be patient. However, it will be interesting to see what happens over time.

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