SEO references
This section of our site is dedicated to a collection of SEO related references which I have found to interesting and or useful in the understanding and practice of SEO. It is by no means an exhaustive collection and readers are invited to suggest additional sources which they feel may be useful.
SEO Research and White Papers
Research into better, faster and more accurate ways of providing information from search engines is almost a continual process and is conducted by the search enigne's staff, researchers in the information retrieval field and by colleges and universities. While most of these papers expose topics that may never actually be used in a search engine they are interesting in and of themselves and on occassion do make the grade into real search applications. A good example of such a paper is the "
The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine" which was the genesis of Google now one of the largest and most valuable search engines.
US Patent Office references
One important source of information regarding search engines is the patents and applications taken out by search engines, Not all of these are actually used in the search engines (although some obviously are) they individual papers do give us a detailed insight into what the brains behind search engines may be thinking about a particular topic and an overview of all the patents by a particular company may give us an overall idea of the corporate thinking.
My own rough analysis of the various patents and patent applications which I have included on this site indicates to me that:
- Google is primarily into search in every form
- Yahoo seems to be more interested in the commecialization of search portals
- MSN seems to be trying to catch up with Google technically and at the same time trying to integrate external and local search into one.
