Google - Top Searches in 2006

1. Bebo
2. Myspace
3. World cup
4. Metacafe
5. Radioblog
6. Wikipedia
7. Video
8. Rebelde
9. Mininova
10. Wiki

Yahoo - Top Searches in 2006

1. Britney Spears
2. WWE
3. Shakira
4. Jessica Simpson
5. Paris Hilton
6. American Idol
7. Beyonce Knowles
8. Chris Brown
9. Pamela Anderson
10. Lindsay Lohan

MSN - Top Searches in 2006

1. Ronaldinho
2. Shakira
3. Paris Hilton
4. Britney Spears
5. Harry Potter
6. Eminem
7. Pamela Anderson
8. Hilary Duff
9. Rebelde
10. Angelina Jolie

Anyone else find Google’s top 10 searches for 2006 a little strange; or at least different as compared with Yahoo and MSN?

Yahoo and MSN both have Pamela Anderson, Britney Spears, and Paris Hilton in their top 10 searches. Google doesn’t have any of these ladies?!

Can we say that Googles users are a little more highbrow than that of Yahoo and MSN?

And hats off to Pam Anderson. Did she do anything in 2006? Yet, still in the top 10!!

Microsoft’s Virtual Earth now offers a birds eye view when viewing locations. You can still drag the map and zoom in, but also notice you can click on north, south, east or west to pivot your view, very cool.

Here are a few shots around Denver (too bad they are all in the Winter):
- Mile High Stadium
- Coors Field
- Capital Building
- Denver Zoo
- World Trade Center buildings Denver
- City and County Building

“We are in the process of rolling out some changes to our search results. As usual, you may be seeing some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages that are included in the index throughout this process. This update began on Sunday night and should be complete by tomorrow morning.”

From Tim Mayer Yahoo! Search

At the Inside Adwords blog, Josh M., a member of the Google Audio Ads team says this:

“Google Audio Ads brings efficiency, accountability, and enhanced ROI to radio advertising by providing advertisers with an online interface for creating and launching radio campaigns. You’ll be able to target your customers by location, station type, day of the week, and time of day. After the radio ads are run, you will be able to view online reports that tell you exactly when your ad played.”

“Over the last year, we’ve been partnering with both terrestrial and satellite radio stations across the U.S. so that our advertisers have many options for broadcasting their ads — whether it’s a Country station in Tyler, Texas or an Adult Contemporary station in New York City. Currently, there are hundreds of stations to choose from and we hope to grow the list over the coming year. Our broadcast partners are looking forward to making their ad inventories available to thousands of new advertisers, especially since they aren’t easily accessible today.”

Danny Sullivan has spent the last decade as the editor of Search Engine Watch. Danny fueled the fires of the SEO industry from the very beginning and helped to make the industry what it is today. Everyone within the internet marketing community has benefited from his knowledge and willingness to share it. So today, Search-This.com lifts its virtual pint of beer and salutes you Danny.

Best of luck in all you do,
Search-This.com

SEO guru and Google representative, Matt Cutts has put together some short videos in which he answers questions about search engine optimization.

Session 1 - Qualities of a good site
Session 2 - Some SEO Myths
Session 3 - Optimize for search engines or for users?
Session 4 - Static vs. Dynamic URLs
Session 5 - Site Structure
Session 6 - Supplemental Results
Session 7 - Webspam
Session 8 - Google Terminology
Session 9 - Datacenters
Session 10 - Lighting Round
Session 11 - Reinclusion requests
Session 12 - Tips for Search Engine Strategies (SES) 2006
Session 13 - Google Webmaster Tools

What is the PageRank Decoder?
The PageRank Decoder allows you to visually see how Google factors PageRank based off of link structure. Be sure to view the Demo first.

What’s it good for?
You can examine different link topologies and see how PageRank is passed amongst pages. This allows you to see if your websites link structure is as optimized as possible.

How should I start?
I would recommend that you start by adding a bunch of pages to the canvas and then start interlinking them - then hit the calculate button and hover over the toolbars for their PR value. This allows you to see how different link topologies pass PR.

Later, for fun you can start looking up pages by entering in their URL in the textbox.

How does it work?
You should start by reading the article, “Google’s PageRank Explained.” Once you have a firm understanding of the article you will have a better understanding of how the PageRank Decoder is working.

Is this thing really accurate?
Yes and no?

To calculate the PageRank for a page, we use Google’s original formula:

PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + … + PR(tn)/C(tn))

If the above code looks foreign to you and you have never seen this formula before, then start by reading, “Google’s PageRank Explained”.

It’s accurate if all pages start with a PageRank of 0. If you looked up a page or set a page’s PR at something other than 0 it can mess up the formula. This is because that page now starts off with a PR other than 0 and that then gets compounded in the formula.

Google doesn’t do this; they start all pages at 0 (or rather 0.15) and then run their formula for each page factoring all incoming links. Google’s database exceeds a million pages and for each page they look at its incoming links, some pages may have well over 1000 incoming links. It takes Google somewhere around a month to update all pages.

The PageRank Decoder is not working with a database to track incoming links for a page; rather it just looks at what’s on the canvas. So instead the PageRank Decoder allows you to artificially set a page’s PR.

I thought a ranking can’t go beyond 10?
Remember, there’s a difference between PageRank score and the toolbar-shown PageRank. The toolbar has a max score of 10. I don’t know Google’s scale when setting the PageRank in the toolbar so it gets inflated quickly.