With Google’s amazing success, you can bet there are many competitors wanting a piece of that pie. Well here are a few beta and upstart search engines working to change the face of search.

Hakia

Today’s search engines bring popular results via statistical ranking methods, but a popular website may not always be credible, and a credible website may not always be popular. As a result, searchers suffer in many ways ranging from wasted search time to using misleading information.

Twine

People use Twine to keep track of their interests. Twine is a new way for you to collect online content – videos, photos, articles, web pages, products – and bring it all together by topic, so you can have it in one place and share it with anyone you want.

Wolfram|Alpha

Wolfram|Alpha’s long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything.

Scoopler

Scoopler is a real-time search engine. Scoopler aggregates and organizes content being shared on the Internet as it happens, like eye-witness reports of breaking news, photos and videos from big events, and links to the hottest memes of the day. It does this by constantly indexing live updates from services including Twitter, Flickr, Digg, Delicious and more.

TweetMeme

TweetMeme is a service, which aggregates all the popular links on Twitter to determine which links are popular. TweetMeme is able to categorize these links into categories and subcategories, making it easy to filter out the noise to find what your interested in.

OneRiot

Increasingly, the web’s most interesting content is what our friends and other people are talking about, sharing and looking at right now. However, when people search for that content, traditional search engines struggle to surface these fresh, socially relevant results. That’s the hole – and it’s a big one – that OneRiot is filling.

SearchMe

SearchMe, the first multimedia search engine: Search for information, videos, music, images, news and more, and find the most relevant results displayed in a comprehensive blend of multimedia and non-multimedia web pages.

Cuil

The Internet has grown exponentially in the last fifteen years, but search engines have not kept up—until now. Cuil searches more pages on the web than anyone else—three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft.

Kosmix

Kosmix is a guide to the Web. The website lets users explore the web by topic, presenting a dashboard of relevant videos, photos, news, commentary, opinion, communities and links to related topics. Kosmix’s categorization engine organizes the Internet into magazine-style topic pages, enabling people to navigate the web.

FriendFeed

FriendFeed is a service that makes it easy to share with friends online. It offers a fun and interactive way to discover and discuss information among friends. It’s fast and easy to start a conversation around shared items, or to show that you like something a friend has shared.

At PubCon (November 2009), Matt Cutts from Google said there is a strong push at Google to introduce Website Speed as new ranking factor into the algorithm. Matt described this as one of his ‘what to expect in 2010? bullet points in his presentation at Pubcon in Las Vegas.

Google’s co-founders want search to be real fast, really fast!  And one way they can influence the overall speed of the internet is to make sure faster web pages rank better than slower ones in the Google search results forcing webmasters to improve site speed or lose rankings!

Before we get too excited, keep in mind that there are over 200 ranking factors in the algorithm and each are weighted differently.  So, it is unclear how important this algorithm change might be…..however, we feel that when Google provides us a ‘hint’ to improving rankings, we should pay attention.

Here are some initial techniques & best practices to improve your Website Speed:

Compress Images & Text
Image compression is minimizing the size in bytes of a graphics file without degrading the quality of the image to an unacceptable level. The reduction in file size reduces the time required for images to be sent over the Internet or downloaded from Web page thus improving the performance of the site.  In image compression, a small loss in quality is usually not noticeable.

There is no “critical point” up to which compression works perfectly, but beyond which it becomes impossible.  Every image that has not gone through image compression should do so.  Here is a link to quite a few free online tools that allow you to compress images for free. http://www.dailyseoblog.com/2009/07/10-image-optimization-tools-to-help-reduce-image-file-sizes-page-load-time/

Limit Requests
Make as few requests as possible (consolidate JS & CSS) – Every time you call a .js file or a .css file from your web page you are making a request from the server.  Every time you have to wait for the server to respond and provide you will the information you requested.

Combine Script Calls
It would be must more efficient if we combined all of our calls for .js into one file and only called the server once for this information and it would also keep this extra load off of the server.  So the takeaway is to combine all of your .js files into one file include so that you only make 1 call to the server and speed up performance.  Same goes for .css files also.

Use Caching
Use Caching when possible for pages and images – Caching is the temporary storage of frequently accessed pages/images in higher speed media (typically SRAM or RAM) for more efficient retrieval. Web caching stores frequently used objects closer to the client through browser, proxy, or server caches. By storing “fresh” objects closer to your users, you avoid round trips to the origin server, reducing bandwidth consumption, server load, and most importantly, latency.

Caching is not just for static sites, even dynamic sites can benefit from caching. Graphics and multimedia typically don’t change as frequently as (X)HTML files. Graphics that seldom change like logos, headers, and navigation can be given longer expiration. Depending on the server type the setting are different but all servers have the ability to set up caching for the most frequent pages and images.

Cut Down Connections
Make as few connections to other domains as possible – Calling 3rd party domains from your pages can slow down your load time dramatically.  It is very hard to control the speed at which the information is being set back to you and can slow down your sites response rate.  Make as few calls to other sites as possible and make sure you want the speed at which they are delivering your information back to you.

Remove Bad Connections
Any time a connection hangs, does not respond or throws a 3xx error search engines see this as poor website design and could see this as a negative against your site.  Just like 400 or 300 errors that are not handled properly we need to make sure our connections are just as clean.

Following the pace of change relating to search engine optimization — or SEO as it’s often called — can be dizzying. Here are 6 important SEO trends you should know about as we close out 2009.

1.) Increased SEO Awareness

SEO used to be something akin to voodoo; the only people who understood it were the ones doing it. But now it seems everyone knows about SEO. As more small business owners become aware of what SEO is and why you should be doing it, competition should increase and put a premium on smart decision-making when it comes to doing SEO in-house or hiring a consultant.

2.) Moving SEO In-House

In-House SEO has never been more popular than it is now, and that trend should continue into 2009. Companies big and small are recognizing the need for and value of having dedicated staff to recommend and implement SEO strategies.

3.) SEO Consultants and Firms Booked Up

Many of us who don’t work in-house have never been busier than we are now. Because of trend number one above, small business owners are hunting far and wide for SEO help. Purely anecdotal evidence, but something that many fellow SEO friends are experiencing. There’s big demand and a lot of SEOs will be booked up.

4.) It’s Google’s World

Google has dominated the SEO landscape for years, and their lead over Yahoo and Live Search is only getting bigger. There are several companies that try to track market share, and their numbers differ. But they all agree that between 60-70% of searches happen at Google. That doesn’t mean you should put all your SEO eggs in Google’s basket, but it does mean if you’re not being found on Google, you’re not being found.

5.) SEO Tools and Automation

Hoping to take advantage of the growing interest in SEO, and the difficulty in finding the right consultant, more companies and individuals are creating online tools that automate portions of an SEO analysis. While some of these tools offer helpful data at a basic level, what matters most is how you use the data they provide.

6.) SEO Scams

The downside of increased interest in SEO is that many small business owners will continue to spend money making unethical scam artists rich. $99/month for 500 directory links? $200 for search engine submission services? Don’t do it. Read what several search industry leaders had to say about SEO scams, and make sure this is one trend you avoid in 2009.

Making efforts to optimize a site is great but what counts is how search engines see your efforts. While even the most careful optimization does not guarantee tops position in search results, if your site does not follow basic SEO truths, then it is more than certain that this site will not score well with search engines. One way to check in advance how your SEO efforts are seen by search engines is to use a search engine simulator.

Spiders Explained

Basically all search engine spiders function on the same principle – they crawl the Web and index pages, which are stored in a database and later use various algorithms to determine page ranking, relevancy, etc of the collected pages. While the algorithms of calculating ranking and relevancy widely differ among search engines, the way they index sites is more or less uniform and it is very important that you know what spiders are interested in and what they neglect.

Search engine spiders are robots and they do not read your pages the way a human does. Instead, they tend to see only particular stuff and are blind for many extras (Flash, JavaScript) that are intended for humans. Since spiders determine if humans will find your site, it is worth to consider what spiders like and what don’t.

Flash, JavaScript, Image Text or Frames?!

Flash, JavaScript and image text are NOT visible to search engines. Frames are a real disaster in terms of SEO ranking. All of them might be great in terms of design and usability but for search engines they are absolutely wrong. An incredible mistake one can make is to have a Flash intro page (frames or no frames, this will hardly make the situation worse) with the keywords buried in the animation. Check with the Search Engine Spider Simulator tool a page with Flash and images (and preferably no text or inbound or outbound hyperlinks) and you will see that to search engines this page appears almost blank.

Running your site through this simulator will show you more than the fact that Flash and JavaScript are not SEO favorites. In a way, spiders are like text browsers and they don’t see anything that is not a piece of text. So having an image with text in it means nothing to a spider and it will ignore it. A workaround (recommended as a SEO best practice) is to include meaningful description of the image in the ALT attribute of the <IMG> tag but be careful not to use too many keywords in it because you risk penalties for keyword stuffing. ALT attribute is especially essential, when you use links rather than text for links. You can use ALT text for describing what a Flash movie is about but again, be careful not to trespass the line between optimization and over-optimization.

Are Your Hyperlinks Spiderable?

The search engine spider simulator can be of great help when trying to figure out if the hyperlinks lead to the right place. For instance, link exchange websites often put fake links to your site with _javascript (using mouse over events and stuff to make the link look genuine) but actually this is not a link that search engines will see and follow. Since the spider simulator would not display such links, you’ll know that something with the link is wrong.

It is highly recommended to use the <noscript> tag, as opposed to _javascript based menus. The reason is that _javascript based menus are not spiderable and all the links in them will be ignored as page text. The solution to this problem is to put all menu item links in the <noscript> tag. The <noscript> tag can hold a lot but please avoid using it for link stuffing or any other kind of SEO manipulation.

If you happen to have tons of hyperlinks on your pages (although it is highly recommended to have less than 100 hyperlinks on a page), then you might have hard times checking if they are OK. For instance, if you have pages that display “403 Forbidden”, “404 Page Not Found” or similar errors that prevent the spider from accessing the page, then it is certain that this page will not be indexed. It is necessary to mention that a spider simulator does not deal with 403 and 404 errors because it is checking where links lead to not if the target of the link is in place, so you need to use other tools for checking if the targets of hyperlinks are the intended ones.

Looking for Your Keywords

While there are specific tools, like the Keyword Playground or the Website Keyword Suggestions, which deal with keywords in more detail, search engine spider simulators also help to see with the eyes of a spider where keywords are located among the text of the page. Why is this important? Because keywords in the first paragraphs of a page weigh more than keywords in the middle or at the end. And if keywords visually appear to us to be on the top, this may not be the way spiders see them. Consider a standard Web page with tables. In this case chronologically the code that describes the page layout (like navigation links or separate cells with text that are the same sitewise) might come first and what is worse, can be so long that the actual page-specific content will be screens away from the top of the page. When we look at the page in a browser, to us everything is fine – the page-specific content is on top but since in the HTML code this is just the opposite, the page will not be noticed as keyword-rich.

Are Dynamic Pages Too Dynamic to be Seen At All

Dynamic pages (especially ones with question marks in the URL) are also an extra that spiders do not love, although many search engines do index dynamic pages as well. Running the spider simulator will give you an idea how well your dynamic pages are accepted by search engines. Useful suggestions how to deal with search engines and dynamic URLs can be found in the Dynamic URLs vs. Static URLs article.

Meta Keywords and Meta Description

Meta keywords and meta description, as the name implies, are to be found in the <META> tag of a HTML page. Once meta keywords and meta descriptions were the single most important criterion for determining relevance of a page but now search engines employ alternative mechanisms for determining relevancy, so you can safely skip listing keywords and description in Meta tags (unless you want to add there instructions for the spider what to index and what not but apart from that meta tags are not very useful anymore).

So, if you are a seasoned SEO practitioner and you don’t dream of rivers of gold, you can feel safe with SEO because unlike careers in many other industries SEO careers are relatively recession-proof. Here are some of the reasons why SEO careers are recession-proof:

• The SEO market is an established market. If you remember the previous recession from the beginning of the century, when the IT industry was among the most heavily stricken, you might be skeptical a bit that now it won’t be the same story. No, it is not the same now. SEO is not a new service anymore and the SEO market itself is more established than it was a couple of years ago. This is what makes the present recession different from the previous one – the difference is fundamental and it can’t be neglected.

• SEO is one of the last expenses companies cut. SEO has already become a necessity for companies of any size. Unlike hardware, cars, not to mention entertainment and even business trips, SEO expenses are usually not that big but they help a company to stay aboard. That is why when a company decides to make cuts in the budget, SEO expenses are usually not among the things that get the largest cut (or any cut at all).

• SEO has great ROI. The Return On Investment (ROI) for money spent on SEO is much higher than the ROI for other types of investments. SEO brings companies money and this is what makes it such a great investment. Stop SEO and the money stops coming as well.

• Many clients start aggressive SEO campaigns in an attempt to get better results fast. During a recession SEO is even more important. That is why many clients decide that an aggressive SEO campaign will help them get more clients and as a result these clients double their pre-recession budgets.

• SEO is cheaper than PPC. SEO is just one of the many ways for a site to get traffic. However, it is also one of the most effective ways to drive tons of traffic. For instance, if you consider PPC, the cost advantages of SEO are obvious. PPC is very expensive and as a rule, ranking high in organic search results even for competitive keywords is cheaper than PPC.

• Cheaper than traditional promotion methods. Traditional promotion methods (i.e. offline marketing) are still an option but their costs are higher even than PPC and the other forms of online promotion. Besides many companies have given offline marketing completely and have turned to SEO as their major way to promote their business and attract new clients.

• SEO is an recurring expense. Many businesses build their business model around memberships and other forms of recurring payments. For you memberships and other types of recurring payments are presold campaigns – i.e. more or less you know that if the client is happy with a campaign you did for him, he or she will return. Acquiring recurring clients is very beneficial because you have less expenses in comparison to acquiring clients one by one.

The outlook for SEO careers during times of recession is pretty positive. As we already mentioned, it is possible to experience drops in volumes or some of your clients to go the bankruptcy road but as a whole SEO offers more stability than many other careers. If you manage to take advantage of the above mentioned recession-proof specifics of SEO and you are a real professional, you won’t have the pleasure to feel the recession in all its bitterness.