By: Greg Sterling | Source: searchenginejournal.com

So-called vertical search is all the rage. Why? Partly because “horizontal” (general) search has limitations and partly because it’s almost impossible to get VCs to fund a general search engine. Given how entrenched the market is it’s also crazy to try and break into general search without a 5 to 7 year time horizon.

So far I spoke with two vertical search sites, Generate and SearchMe. The latter just launched the new Wikiseek, which was favorably reviewed on TechCrunch and critically reviewed on Search Engine Land.

Generate is a sales tool and, for descriptive convenience, an impressive combination of Factiva + Lexis/Nexis and LinkedIn (although they would say this doesn’t do justice to their platform). SearchMe was founded to build a range of vertical search engines, with Wikiseek being just the first one.

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By: Ionut Alex.Chitu | Source: googlesystem.blogspot.com

Unlike Yahoo or MSN Windows Live, Google doesn’t offer feeds for search results and, from December last year, you can’t get new keys to use their API. If you want to monitor a search query, you can use Google Alerts or Google Alert (this is a different service, not from Google). But feeds are easier to manage and consume.

Until Google decides it’s a good idea to provide search feeds or a new API, some "evil" people came up with Evil API, a replacement for Google SOAP API, and Evil RSS, a way to get feeds for search results. Both solutions are open source and use screen scraping (what else?) to get the results from Google. That means the solution is not quite OK if you look at Google TOS:

"You may not send automated queries of any sort to Google’s system without express permission in advance from Google."

If you don’t send too many queries and/or host the code on your server, I’m sure Google doesn’t mind. Many Google Gadgets use screen scraping to get search results (and information from sites that don’t provide feeds), and Google makes it easy to do that.

1. Why do you think Google discontinued support for their SOAP API?
2. How would you convince Google to give us search feeds?

Spread the word: bookmark it/ readit

By: Donald Nelson | Source: seo-news.com

If you have good content and present it in a reasonable way, then you have an excellent chance of achieving good positions in search engine queries for your main keywords and keyword phrases. You don’t have to resort to any trickery to get your site noticed. However, many web designers and web masters fail to take advantage of opportunities to get high search engine rankings by mishandling a few crucial components of their web pages. Here is a list of the seven most frequently missed search engine optimization opportunities:

1. You’ve Got to Display Your Text as Text!

This sounds elementary, but it is not. Many designers want their site to look good and replace headlines with gif images. The headlines (or headers) are one of the most important elements on any printed page. If you want to know what a magazine article is all about, then you just have to glance at the headline and the sub-headings to get a good idea. Similarly, search engines place great importance on headers, which are usually marked with the html codes <H1> <H2> or <H3>. If you are selling blue widgets and want to be found in the search engines by people who make the query "blue widgets" then you should put these words in a text headline, properly marked, at the top of your page.

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