Jen Fitzpatrick from Google first explained the insides and out of PageRank, but it can obviously not be published here. :) They say their main index is composed of three main indexes; the news index, the fresh index, and the main index. She then talks about some basic guidelines for webmasters, you know the dos the don'ts. Some more basics on 301s, header commands, and robot.txt slides. She explains that Google prides themselves on telling the user what is paid versus unpaid results, and she explicitly says they do not do paid inclusion for that reason. Detlev sped her up and she had to run through some of the newer technology.
Michael Palka from Ask Jeeves gets right to the relevancy speech, the link community discussion and the other structured data components. :)
Tim Mayer from Yahoo Search starts off with next.yahoo.com and my.yahoo.com. He announced that they launched a new index Tuesday night, so you might see some changes. He goes over same deal as everyone else, but adds in the redirect information which I posted in that session. He explains that paid inclusion has no impact on the free crawl content.
Ken Moss from MSN Search starts off explaining that they use Inktomi for their current search (the Yahoo guys in front of me commented to each other - who owns Inktomi). He then explained that they have MSN Beta and wants our feedback. In addition they have a new beta tool bar for desktop search. They have a 150kb page size limit. MSN has a feature called "near me", that looks for local content and suggests it to the user.
See my past coverage of these sessions, they are pretty much all the same.
Q & A:
Q: I asked Ask Jeeves why they bury the Teoma results way under the Google AdWords results at Ask Jeeves? A: Michael answered that is was not about not being more relevant, they feel Teoma is more relevant than AdWords. But it is set up that way from a monetization standspoint only. Fair answer.
To be honest, the reason I asked was to some how bring Teoma out. It is way to hidden and I find that to be a shame.
Lots of basic questions being asked, I think I will leave and see how Elisabeth is doing in the Site Clinic.
