Eric Enge

Ramez Naam is Group Program Manager of Live Search at Microsoft responsible for overseeing Live Search queries including relevance and the index. Naam joined Microsoft Corp. in 1995 and has worked on teams for Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft Office Outlook and Microsoft Internet Explorer. He is the author of a nonfiction book on biotechnology titled […]

My latest interview is with Ramez Naam of Microsoft. The interview focused on core technology improvements recently made by Microsoft to Live Search. It turned into a great discussion that illustrates many of the complexities involved in a modern-day search engine. Check out the interview for details. Feel free to comment below if you want […]

What’s the difference between “paid links” and “editorial links”? This is a critical thing to understand when you are trying to put together your link building strategy. This post will lay it out in clear terms that reflect my understanding after numerous dialogues with Google luminaries on the topic. A “paid link” is a link […]

Garry Wiseman is the group program manager leading the commerce search team within the Live Search division at Microsoft. His responsibilities include overseeing all of the product and classified search related developments, as well as the MSN Shopping and Windows Live Expo consumer destination websites. Wiseman has held a variety of engineering and management positions […]

I received an e-mail from a reader who was interested in a post talking about bounce rate, and how that might be used by search engines as a possible ranking factor. The concept is that a higher bounce rate would be seen as an indication that a site is of relatively poor quality. For example, […]

Now, this is beginning to look like a complete update. Previously on Search Engine Watch, I reported that many new pages that had been added shortly after the last update had not been updated. Now those pages are beginning to show PageRank. Clearly, this is a general update. The big news remains the apparent punishment […]

Periodically you see articles that talk about what the most important things are for search engine ranking. One of the really good ones is the SEOmoz Search Engine Ranking Factors survey. Nearly every such article identifies anchor text used in links to your page as a major ranking factor. For example, only one factor got […]

Recently I had the opportunity to speak with Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter. It was an engaging conversation about the Twitter phenomena and the future of the site. Interview Transcript Eric Enge: How did you come up with the idea for Twitter? Jack Dorsey: Well, it’s a long story, but for some reason since […]

Today’s post will cover the Local, Maps and Mobile search presentation made by Microsoft at the Searchification event on September 26, 2007. We have also written a post about the Core Improvements in Live Search that you can also read. The presentation was made by Eric Jorgensen, a 13 year veteran of Microsoft: One of […]

Matt Cutts joined Google as a Software Engineer in January 2000. Before Google, he was working on his Ph.D. in computer graphics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has an M.S. from UNC-Chapel Hill and B.S. degrees in both mathematics and computer science from the University of Kentucky. Matt wrote SafeSearch, […]

During my recent trip out to California, I had the opportunity to sit down and speak with Google’s head of the Webspam team, Matt Cutts. It was enjoyable to chat with Matt, and you can see a transcript of the Matt Cutts interview here. The major topics we covered were: Google’s tracking of Javascript encoded […]

This post will provide some more info on September 26, 2007, Searchification event that Microsoft put on. In particular, this post will focus on the core search engine improvements part of the presentation. I will provide some brief comments on each announcement, as well as pictures of the speakers. 1. Introduction by Brad Goldberg. Brad […]