Two Search Engine Improvements Worth Noting

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Friday, 26 of October , 2007 at 5:22 pm

From time to time I like to talk about what’s going on at the search engines. Especially when they make changes or update their business practices and if it leads to an improvement of some kind I’m really excited about that.

Recently, both Google and Yahoo! have rolled out some new policies that I think are quite exciting. I’ll talk about Yahoo!’s first:

According to TechCrunch,

Starting today, visitors to Yahoo’s homepage will start to see links going to blogs and media sites that don’t have a syndication deal with Yahoo.

I think this is a good move. It shows good faith on the part of Yahoo! Will I likely be one of those linked to by the search portal? Probably not. But this is a good deal for those who will be and it will be a good deal for Yahoo! users who will benefit from those links. They are likely to be more loyal to Yahoo! That’s good for Yahoo!

Google, on the other hand is experimenting. This time, they want you to experiment with them. Among some of the experimenting Google wants users to help with are:

• Alternate views for search results
• Keyboard shortcuts
• Left hand navigation
• Right hand contextual search navigation

You can only sign up to participate in one experiment, but the fact that you can sign up to help Google experiment is itself a good sign. You can learn more about each experiment at Google’s experimental lab and sign up for the one you want to participate in over there as well. If you do sign up to experiment with Google, please report back and let us know what you think.

Category: Search Engines

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