Alex Gomes >> Blog

The fight between search engine domination was started by Google. First Google launched Google Toolbar for Firefox. Then they started paying publishers referral fee for downloading Firefox. In return Firefox make money for you searching Google from the browser (search bar on the top left). Then Google started paying Dell 1 billion dollar for installing Google toolbar on Dell machines. In Safari Google is almost impossible to change from default search engine. Google then took 5% ownership on AOL, so that AOL would use Google Search.

Microsoft in return put a search bar on IE 7+ with MSN search as default. Alexa then dropped Google from there search. Alexa’s parent company Amazon, then dropped Google from A9. Its also rumored Ebay is in talks with Yahoo.

All this followed by Marisa Mayer from Google, screaming anti-trust. More fun is yet to come.

The deal about Google MediaBot.

MediaBot (also known as Mediapartners-Google/2.1 ) is the Google crawler for AdSense publishers. What it does, is it indexes the pages which contain Google AdSense ads. Now since AdSense and AdWords are the bloodline of Google, webpages gets indexed more frequently by mediabot than googlebot. So that Google and the Publisher can show the most relevant ads and hence earn more money. This however did not help you in search engine rankings (claimed by Google).

But one thing changed few weeks back, Google search engine started showings web pages fetched by mediabot (which have not been fetched by googlebot).

Then Matt Cutts confirmed that indeed Google search engine will be showing results from mediabot.

Previously the configuration looked like this:

Now the configuration look like this:

What used to happen was that multiple bot would fetch a single webpage multiple time which lead to waste of CPU and bandwidth resources.

Now Google has a giant mirror of the Internet called cache. Your website is synchronized with the cache by the highest priority bot. The rest of the bot gets the content from the cache not from your website.

Matt Cutts from Google claims that your website does not get any advantage by using AdSense.

But I don’t agree with him. If you put AdSense on your website, mediabot will visit your website. So in practice, since mediabot indexes frequently because it’s related to the bloodline of Google, your website will be indexed faster and more frequently if you put AdSense. Now that does not mean you will get better ranking. But lets say you write an article about some rare new xummmmbuuu widget and you have AdSense on the webpage. Your competitor writes about the same widget but does not have AdSense on his webpage. Lets also assume there are not lot of webpages about the rare widget. Who will have better rank? You will. Your website will get indexed faster and hence get authority.

Remember you heard it here first, about this Google Hack. Now make some money.

Yahoo is testing new design for home page. And I don’t like it. I have had Yahoo for 8 years now set as default homepage. Four browsers and dozen search engines could not make me switch. Now this design just sucks. I hate the clutter, too many ads, and most importantly, miss the simplicity. I hope Yahoo sticks to its old design.

Check out for yourself.

Microsoft is in talks with Yahoo to have some kind of merger. This would make no. 1 Yahoo and no. 3 MSN more competitive to the challenge posed by Google

I don’t think its going to happen anytime soon, because the price tag for Yahoo would be more than $45 billion. It would make one the most expensive acquisition in history.

It would not work if Microsoft partially invest in the company(like 20% stake). Since the web is the future, Microsoft has to go all the way or not at all. Microsoft would not be able to keep one leg in MSN and another leg in Yahoo. Two brands would just compete with each other.

Now Microsoft doesn’t have any choice. Microsoft has to take the leadership on the web or cease to exist, in a sector where its not been successful. Make no mistake, Google OS is on its way. If its successful, it would kill the cash cow Windows and Office. $45 billion acquisition in that light for $242 billion company is not that big price to pay for the survival of Microsoft.

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