Search Engines and Webmasters Super Session with Ask, Google, Yahoo and MSN
The final session for me at my first Web Master World will always hold a special place in my heart. It was the "Search Engines and Webmasters" super session with Rahul Lahiri of Ask, Matt Cutts of Google, Tim Mayer of Yahoo and Ramez Naam of MSN.

Ask Jeeves
Rahul went first going over the SEO basics and only once mentioned that they should optimize for users rather than engines.

I would have liked to see that as the primary message rather than drowning it in all of the technical things webmasters tend to cling to as defining SEO and telling us not to spam. An interesting point is that he was still talking about titles and descriptions and how they help with content and authorship.

Other notes are that misspellings are over 10% of searches and not all people click on "did you mean" so a good *contextual* use of misspellings could be helpful.

Google
Matt Cuts then spoke about some of the new products like analytics and sitemaps. Moving next to the notable events that have occurred since the last PubCon.

He informed us that bigdaddy is done and the changes that are happening now will just be ongoing maintenance. He also did a nice thing to reach out to the attendees and make them feel special which no one will blog the details of for at least a week lest they be known as the one to cross Matt Cutts.

Matt also endorsed the use of Gzip to compress your site and that Google can handle the parsing of those files with no problem.

Yahoo
Tim Mayer was next and started with Yahoo's mission to help people find, use, share and expand human knowledge.

(Insert blanket message here about crawlable sites good content and spam)

Notably, yahoo also mentioned the importance of titles and descriptions. He talked about the ways to use Yahoo's api and that they pull no punches when it comes to displaying site data like backlinks even going so far as to point out the availability of a .tsv file download on such a query.

He then discussed how Yahoo Plus search is integrating with Yahoo 360 and Yahoo My web with "save to my web" and "blog on 360" links on the results. He closed with a plug for ysearchblog.com and next.yahoo.com to help us all keep our eyes on the yahoo pipeline.

MSN
Ramez Naam came out of the gate talking about MSN live which I am still not sold on.

Its just so ajaxy and clearly built by focus groups. Don't get me wrong, there is some cool stuff there, they are just very behind and I'm not sure this is the leap frog they were looking for. But I digress.

What I do like is the ability to scroll results forever without paging and that combined with some some advanced image search features will promptly increase MSNs share of the porn search market. They are also improving their local search but apparently that didn't include having The Boston Sheraton in the index. (I love it when MS does that).

He ended up using the Space Needle and then started showing off the new local.live.com. In the immortal words of Garrett French, "Holy Crap". Local.live.com, at the last minute, stole the show. Granted it is only working in Seattle and we have heard about this thing for a while with the vans in the streets and pictures and whatnot, but this thing was impressive.
Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive | permalink | +marktd |