What’s new with search engines
The beginning of the year is always full of changes as far as search engines are concerned. Usually, algorithm tweaks and other spam filters are being tested, then implemented in February and this has been a consistent practice for Google for the past few years.
The following is a list of recent and upcoming changes for Google, Yahoo and MSN:
Google
Big Daddy! Also nicknamed BD is Google’ s new index size which was uncovered last month in a previous article. The Mountain View based company, still currently testing its huge index, reported up to 25.5 billion pages. SEO and internet marketing experts could monitor SERP fluctuations on the following IP’s:
64.233.171.99
64.233.171.104
64.233.185.99
64.233.185.104
66.249.93.99
66.249.93.104
216.239.37.99
216.239.37.104
And
64.233.179.99
64.233.179.104
Note that the two different datasets are rotating. Big Daddy is not only a much larger index but also it is supposed to (finally) fix the URL hijacking / canonical / supplemental issues and suppress more spam type of results. Some of the datacenters mentioned above do not feature specific filters, which will be added later on, therefore if your website seems to be getting out of the sandbox, wait a few more weeks before celebrating – trust me.
Yahoo
Only two days after their CFO announced that they were not aiming to compete with Google for the leading position on the Search market, Yahoo finally reaffirmed their commitment to Search and would not finally give up the fight for #1 position.
Technically, the algorithm in use by the Sunnyvale Company, Yahoo, was slightly modified last week, but Yahoo decided not to share this info for some reason.
For as long as one can remember now, in addition to the contradictive ranking process including paid directory submission results, Yahoo does not seem to get certain websites right even though their spider is eating tons of bandwidth.
Yahoo will very likely re-update its algorithm in the coming weeks, probably in February, and we will keep a close eye on any upcoming changes. It will be interesting to analyze the direction they want to take, since they might not be able to keep it up with Google and even MSN for long. Obviously, one can only wish them to make the right decisions.
MSN
It came a bit as a surprise when MSN reported testing the DMOZ (Open directory project) description in their ranking calculations as a valuable factor. Microsoft could have used its own directory for this.
MSN search has been in testing mode for about 10 days now but the fastest indexing engine (MSN) turned out to be missing a few pages in this transition. In their attempt to not only provide higher quality SERP a few perfectly legitimate websites seem to have lost their rankings. Moreover, quite a few homepages appear to be missing while the MSNbot continues to crawl them.
The testing period on MSN will come to an end in a matter of days.
Overall major search engines have been actively working on their own recurring issues in January and will go public with their new SERP in February which promises to be very exciting news from the SEO marketing prospective.
