On 8th September 2010', Google introduced Google Instant, a change to make search fast and interactive by showing you results instantly as you type. With Instant we’ve turned search from a static HTML page into an AJAX application, just as Google did with Google Maps and Gmail. You can learn more about Google Instant in  google blog post, but Google also wanted to share a peek behind the scenes into some of the engineering challenges they faced in design and infrastructure.

The design challenge: relevant, not distracting
Google key design challenge was to make sure people would notice relevant results without being distracted. Google knew it would take extensive testing to find the right design, so Google ran through a sequence of prototypes, usability studies (testing with people from the community), dogfooding (testing with Google employees) and search experiments (testing with a small percentage of Google users). Some of google early prototypes weren’t perfect. For example, google tried a prototype where we waited for someone to stop typing before showing results, which did not work. Google realized the experience needed to be fast to work well. Google also considered other interfaces which essentially clustered results for a variety of queries based on probability. Here are a couple examples:

In the end, Google grouped and blended interfaces seemed too difficult to scan while typing, so Google pursued a model based on a single search. Google hit upon two features that worked well together: first, a query prediction in the search box in gray text and second, results for the top prediction that update continuously while the user types. In user studies, people quickly found a new way to interact with Google: type until the gray text matches your intention and then move your eyes to the results. Google team were actually surprised at how well this worked—most people in our studies didn’t even notice that anything had changed. Google was just faster.

The infrastructure challenge: 5-7X more results pages for typical searches
Google team has been optimizing performance and speed for more than 10 years, and we’ve found that every second counts. When they came to the infrastructure team and said, “we’re going to be serving five to seven times as many results pages for each query performed in Google Instant,” first they threw a fit, then they figured out how to get us there! Even before Instant, Google was serving more than a billion searches per day, and our systems were optimized to ensure those searches happen as quickly as possible (usually less than a quarter second). How could we serve so many more searches without breaking or slowing down our systems?

One solution would have been to simply invest in a tremendous increase in server capacity, but we wanted to find smarter ways to solve the problem. We did increase our back-end capacity, but we also pursued a variety of strategies to efficiently address the incredible demand from Google Instant. Some of these are quite technical, but here are some examples:

• We deployed new caches that can handle high request rates while keeping results fresh as we continuously crawl and re-index the web.
• We introduced user-state data into our back-ends to keep track of the results pages already shown to a given user—this way we don’t re-fetch the same results repeatedly.
• We optimized page-rendering JavaScript code to help ensure web browsers could keep up with the rest of the system.

In total, these efforts enabled us to release Google Instant while maintaining the speed people have come to expect from Google.

The engineering team at work
As Google Instant neared completion, we packed the core teams into two large rooms on our main campus. Google began having daily stand stand-up meetings (more than 50 people). With all that hard work behind us, we’re thrilled to see Google Instant out in the wild! But, in some ways, this is just the beginning of a new kind of “conversational” search interaction. We will continue to experiment, as we always have—and with the help of your feedback, we hope to make Instant even better over time! While it’s a big change, I personally believe that we’ll look back and wonder how search was ever any other way.

Back links aren’t what they used to be. Back in the olden days (3-4 years ago that is) search engines cared more about the quantity of links rather than the quality. In today SE landscape though, all links are certainly not created equal. Below is a link types to avoid and the ones to go after.

Good Links, Spend Your Time Getting These:

Press releases: Google loves crawling PR sites, so getting your links on a well written press release can drive both search traffic and click-throughs.

Blogs: Again, SE’s love blogs because of their ever changing fresh content. A keyword rich link in a relevant blog post is a gold mine.

Articles: A well written article can be a great source of both traffic and natural search ranking. Because these links are within the context of an article, they are considered highly relevant.

Bad Links, Don’t Even Bother with These:

Reciprocal links: Reciprocal links are overused and look very spammy. Although it is possible to setup a mutually beneficial link exchange with a similar website, randomly link trading with unrelated sites is a really bad idea, and can tarnish the rep of your site.

Directory Links: Directories are a dime a dozen, and most of them completely useless. When was the last time you went to directory to look for something? The search engines feel the same way.

Site wide Links: Having a link in the navigation on the header or footer of every page in a site may generate a lot of traffic, but it won’t do much to help your organic rankings. When a link is everywhere, it is probably not as relevant as a text link within the body of a paragraph.

Spend Your SEO Time Wisely

With all the ways to acquire links, it pays to focus on only the strategies that produce results. The above tips should keep you heading in the right direction.

In early 2005, Google implemented a new value, "nofollow", for the rel attribute of HTML link and anchor elements, so that website developers and bloggers can make links that Google will not consider for the purposes of PageRank — they are links that no longer constitute a "vote" in the PageRank system. The nofollow relationship was added in an attempt to help combat spamdexing.

As an example, people could previously create many message-board posts with links to their website to artificially inflate their PageRank. With the nofollow value, message-board administrators can modify their code to automatically insert "rel='nofollow'" to all hyperlinks in posts, thus preventing PageRank from being affected by those particular posts. This method of avoidance, however, also has various drawbacks, such as reducing the link value of legitimate comments.

In an effort to manually control the flow of PageRank among pages within a website, many webmasters practice what is known as PageRank Sculpting - which is the act of strategically placing the nofollow attribute on certain internal links of a website in order to funnel PageRank towards those pages the webmaster deemed most important. This tactic has been used since the inception of the nofollow attribute, but the technique has been thought by many to have lost its effectiveness.

Search engine traffic is important for anybody doing business online. This type of traffic is not only free but is also very highly targeted. One of the easiest ways to optimize your site for traffic from search engines is properly placing keywords within the content.

An internet marketing blog in particular is in a great position to take advantage this optimization method. The reason for this is most blogs update their content frequently therefore they have numerous chances to properly optimize different entries. Every time a new post is published the site is inspected or ‘crawled’ by search engine spiders. If the blog entries are relevant and use keywords properly the site is awarded with a high ranking which means more traffic.

Here are 3 search engine optimization tips that all blogging sites need to be aware of that utilizes the proper place of keywords in each entry.

Use Primary Keyword Title

For very entry you post to your site you want to select a primary keyword, one that is the most descriptive as to what the post is about. When you place a title on your post be sure to include the primary keyword within the title itself. In doing this you are letting the search engines know right away when they scan your post what it is all about. The more relevant the keywords are to the blog entries in the titles the higher the regard search engines will place on the post.

Use Keywords in 1st Paragraph

Within the first paragraph of any post it is recommended to place both your secondary and primary keywords. Try to use the primary keyword within the first sentence since once again you are letting search engines know immediately what the post is all about. Secondary keywords should be ’sprinkled about where they fit in the most appropriately because you do want your content to sound correct for your readers.

Use Keywords in Last Paragraph

The ‘format’ for using keywords in your last paragraph is much the same as for your first paragraph. The key to placing these words is to be sure they ’sound right’ when you proof read your post. First and foremost you are writing for the visitors to your site and remember they are human (for the most part anyway) so make that your primary concern.

Search engine traffic is targeted and free therefore it is something every online business should make an effort to generate. The easiest way to optimize any site for this type traffic is through the proper use of keyword within the content. A distinct advantage is held by an internet marketing blog for this type traffic by virtue of the fact that blogs are commonly updated frequently. Every time new blog entries are posted the site stands to gain an increase in its search engine ranking provided the entry is relevant and uses keywords correctly.

Last month is the critical month for lot of webmasters including me and you. We saw lot of strange results in Google organic search results in May. Google update some of its major elements in May and this time it was the most critical element, “The Search Index”.

On June 9th Google announced the completion of the new indexing system "Caffeine". The latest Google update was named as Caffeine. Believe me, it’s Caffeine which recharge us daily in the form of Tea or Coffee. In the same Google recharged its indexing system with Caffeine.

Well, let’s have a look at the Google's new indexing system Caffeine. Google indexing system is the most complex indexing system by indexing thousands and millions of web pages by segregating the index according to their products or I can say categories for convenience.

Before Caffeine, Google updates its index based on the category, but not all categories at a time. The reason was Google wants to update only those categories which will have the most recent content first. Google used to update web pages indexed under few categories like News, shopping, maps, images, videos and blogs very frequently than the organic search index but in an order.

Google understands the need to crawl and index the web much more frequently than before and now Google going to index updates of web pages much more frequently.

Google’s index update priority starts from the frequently updated categories to the lazily updated categories. That’s why we used to see the news results get indexed in minutes where as the organic results not.

But with the latest indexing system, Google started updating all the categories parallel to serve a fresh search results with newly cooked content. Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index, and it's the largest collection of web content from Google.

Google’s old index had several layers, some of which were refreshed at a faster rate than others; the main layer would update every couple of weeks. To refresh a layer of the old index, the system would analyze the entire web, which meant there was a significant delay between when Google found a page and made it available for us.

With Caffeine, Google analyze the web in small portions and update our search index on a continuous basis, globally. As Google find new pages, or new information on existing pages, it can add these straight to the index. That means we can find fresher information than ever before no matter when or where it was published. Please see the below picture for clear understanding

Due to that, we are seeing the results with out cache link in Google search results. Though the page just made live, Google is showing that for the relevant searches and in the background the indexing process will index that page parallel. After few hours or days, the page will get the cache link as well. This means that the indexing of that page completed.

The interesting part is, first Google taught the importance of fresh content and now as web smells with fresh content, Google following the web.

Do you agree with me in my statement “Google recharged its indexing system with Caffeine” to crawl and index to serve fresh content at higher speed??

I hope u already started digging in to Google for Caffeine. But get a Coffee and enjoy the “Caffeine”!!

The Google wonder wheel is a new tools and we find that more and more users are using it to enhance their internet search. We know that there must be a good reason to use it. The Google search great and we all using it for years now, so why go and change the old habits and start using this new Google tool? This is a good question and we went ahead and asked our partners and gathered up three good reasons to use the Google wonder wheel.

1.    It helps you to find the thing you are looking for, even if you are not sure what it is. Not all searches are “straight and to the point”. Many people are searching for general things but looking for specific ones. Google Wonder wheel can help them filter the results and find the most relevant words related to the original searched keywords and find the actual keyword that they were looking for.

2.    Google wonder wheel is easy to use.  Being user friendly is an important factor in presenting a new tool. People who are new to Google search, and yes there are many of them, find the results complicated. Just think about it, you search for something and you get few pictures on top, some results in pink background on the top and some more results in a shorter term on the side. People get confused on where they should click? Where to go? Google wonder wheel is a user friendly tool because of the way it leads the user to the right term and the right results.

3.    Google wonder wheel is cool to use, cool to find and cool to share. This is another good reason to use it in addition to being useful. Not all searches have to be boring and to present “dry” results for the user. This graphics is great.

Since all Google services or at least most of them are translated to foreign languages, we have searched for foreign Google wonder wheel option. We have expected to find the translated version of this tool after all, there are good reasons to use the Google wonder wheel tool as an addition to the basic Google search.

In Italian for example, we couldn’t find the link to the “more options” as  this is the way to use the Google wonder wheel and this is the way for all visitors, even if they are Italian speakers, to find the tool. Even when we have searched for the term: “Google wonder wheel”, the awaited link wasn’t there. The same happened when we have made the same process in Google France and Google Germany. This made us wonder – does Google wonder wheel in foreign languages even available yet?

We have extended our searches for Google wonder wheel in foreign languages. Google in Hebrew, does have the “more options” link on top, this is the Google tool for Israeli’s only 5-6 million users if im correct. The same with Google UK and Google China, they both have the link, but these Google versions are serving millions of users.

To sum this all up, it seems that the Google Wonder Wheel feature is not yet available in all the languages, it may become available in the future but right now, its mainly available in Google.com and some local versions of Google.

Google Wonder Wheel is a new great feature from Google which allows you to see relevant search results to your query in a unique semantically relevant and  graphically design way.

The following is a step by step guide on how to use the GoogleWonderWheel tool:
Enter your key word or phrase and perform a search. For this example we wanted to search for some ecological relevant issues and specifically green energy lamp:

After submitting the key word or phrase you would like to search for, click on the “show more options” link on the top left side. The results will be divided in to two screens:

Among all the options Google has to offer its users in order to optimize their search results the Google Wonder Wheel is the option you should look for in order to display relevant results in a different way. This is one of the great options Google has to offer, remember to check the other new ones as well once you are done exploring this tool.

Clicking on the Wonder wheel link will now create a sun shaped circle of terms, all related to your original  search. Green energy lamp is the main phrase, since it’s the one we looked for and you can find other related keywords to this search on the sun beam. Now your display will show the Google Wonder Wheel tool on the left side and the Google search results on the right side.

Now the fun starts. You can navigate your way around the relevant key words and phrases and find more and more results. It’s easy and the graphical effects make it fun.  In our example:  “Green energy lamp” was the main phrase and than we searched for “solar energy lamps” and so on.

Its just a matter of time until Google will combine its advertising system into the Wonder Wheel and guide the searchers, either by color or “last related searches” to the paid link or paid result.