It’s been a long time coming. Teaching Sells is finally reopening it’s doors and will once again be sharing how to make money online.

The fall semester will officially begin in early September, but today Brian, Tony, and Sonia have released a video showing you what the program is all about. Watch the video and then get the freebies listed below.

• A Free report (22 page PDF and audio)
• 20 Step Process Map to build an online training business
• Instructional video on building traffic
• 3 case studies that demonstrate how 3 online entrepreneurs have used online training to build successful businesses online

Why I Recommend Teaching Sells

You don’t see me promoting many training courses. Teaching Sells is one I have and will continue to promote, because it’s taught me so much about running a business. While the basic idea behind the course is to teach you how to successfully create and run a membership site, I’ve learned things like:

• How to create more effective content
• What makes for a profitable business model
• How to effectively market ideas
• How to persuade instead of sell
• How to be an “entreproducer”

An additional benefit to the course is that after going through it, Brian Clark himself can serve as an ongoing case study. The course gives you a look into how Brian runs his very successful business and you can see how he profits with sites like CopyBlogger.

I’ve mentioned in the past how for me Teaching Sells was the final piece of the puzzle. I can’t promise it will be for you, but for me it filled in those last few gaps in my understanding about business online.

Shortly after entering the course my business improved dramatically and while some of that was due to things I had put in place prior to the course, I don’t see it as coincidence that I’ve been making much more money since taking the course than I did before taking it.

If you’re unsure if the course is for you watch the video and then sign up to receive the free report and case studies and other freebies. They should give you a great idea what the course is about and whether or not it’s right for you.

It certainly was right for me.

Google says Dogpile is the best search engine

Yahoo says Yahoo is the best search engine

MSN says Search.com is the best search engine

Ask says Ask is the best search engine

Dogpile was the only site listed in the top 10 at all four engines ranking 1st, 3rd, 4th, and 10th, at Google, Yahoo, Ask, and Live Search respectively. Oddly neither Google nor MSN lists their own search engine in the results. Are they simply being modest? Are Yahoo and Ask being vain listing themselves at the top? Yahoo was the only engine listing one of the other four giving the #2 spot to Google.

What does the above prove? Nothing of course, but it’s still fun. And since all four major search engines agree on Dogpile which engine does Dogpile think is the best search engine? Well Dogpile of course. Maybe the major search engines knew something after all.

Sergey Brin And Larry Page With Jim Fallows At Zeitgeist ‘07

Neither reveals the algorithm, but Sergey and Larry share some views on health care, online privacy, green technology, and reduction of power consumption in servers. You’ll also learn what kind of car Sergey drives if you don’t already know. The video is a little more than 30 minutes. The first half has questions from Jim Fallows and the second half has questions from the audience.

Ask Commercial

This is one of the variations of Ask’s TV advertising campaign, which you might have seen. The 30 second commercial is a simple comparison of using Ask’s version of blended search as opposed to a plain listing of search results.

I’m curious what you think of this latest Ask advertising campaign and whether or not you think it can convince people outside the search industry to use Ask more? Will making people aware of Ask’s 3D interface and the extras beyond simple search results be enough to take marketshare aware from Google?

News On Some Promised Posts

There are a couple of posts I promised that haven’t yet appeared and I wanted to give you an update on them.

First was an update on BlogRush after using the system for a week or two. As you probably know Blog Rush had some issues shortly after launching and is still sorting through those issues. I’ve been waiting for them to finish phase 2 of their launch before writing something, though so far I’ve been mostly unimpressed at the lack of traffic and the lack of information BlogRush has been giving. They did complete a manual quality audit this weekend and removed 10,000 sites from the system. The quality audit has angered quite a few people who would hardly be associated with spam, yet find themselves no longer allowed in the system.

I think enough of the phase 2 changes will be in place later this week to enable me to write what I want. Look for the post sometime next week. If the changes still aren’t in place I’ll post anyway as I’m not expecting any of the changes to alter my opinion.

I also promised a post on using social media as a source for branding a couple of weeks ago. I have no one to blame, but myself for this one. My bad as I let first a busy week and second a faulty graphics card get in the way of my finishing that post. Part of the reason you’re seeing a quickie video post today is to allow me a little more time to work on the social media branding post. I’m doing my best to get it to you later this week. My apologies for the wait.

SEO Related Observations About Search Assist

In using search assist the last couple of days a couple of things have become clear to me. The first is that whether they realize it or not people will be performing more long tail searches. The second is that when search assist is open one less organic search result is visible above the fold.

In the above image you can see search assist in action for the single word ‘cavern.’ The phrases on the left are search suggestions and one of the nice features is that cavern doesn’t need to be at the beginning of the suggested phrases. The two columns of phrases to the right are concepts around the word cavern you can explore.

As an aside you might notice the Beatles as one of the concepts and it might seem strange for it to be there, but the Beatles got their start playing at The Cavern club in Liverpool. Just a little trivia for you non Beatles folks.

Getting back to the cavern search I selected Howe Caverns from the suggestions on the left and then selected ‘adventure tour’ in the concepts that showed up.

You can see that Yahoo is now showing results containing adventure tour. While it doesn’t show in the search box the actual search now being performed is

howe caverns + “adventure tour”

Notice that adventure tour is being searched in quotes as an exact match while the howe caverns part of the search isn’t. The query above is somewhat more complex than a user will typically type on their own. It’s not overly complicated, but now thanks to search assist we’ll be seeing more advanced searches that will go deeper into the search tail.

Combined with the observation that one less result will be in front of people (at 1024 x 768 resolution one organic result is visible) I think it becomes more important to optimize for long tail queries for Yahoo traffic. It may not be enough to simply have all the words on the page either as the second half of the query is an exact match.

As you start to use search assist more your attentions naturally ends up more focused more at the top of the page on search assist itself. If you don’t see a good result quickly you may decide to further refine the search as opposed to digging deeper into the results and clicking beyond the first page. It wouldn’t surprise me to see less results being clicked, but more clicks leading to good results. That would likely lead to more satisfied Yahoo users.

Long tail optimization has been good advice for awhile now. Search Assist makes the advice better and should also require more focused long tail optimization. Additionally with one less organic result showing the paid listings take on a greater percentage of the space. It’s very possible Yahoo will start seeing more clicks on their ads.

Suggestions For Search Assist

I’d like to see Yahoo display the actual search being performed when using search assistant. In the above howe caverns + “adventure tour” search why not show the entire search in the search box? Showing the actual search would help users better understand what is happening and it would educate them about advanced search operators. If Yahoo tested the idea and found users were more confused by seeing the search change I could understand, but otherwise I think it would be a nice touch.

Exploring concepts is a great addition and I wonder if it could be expanded one more level. Instead of only exploring concepts around the original search why not allow exploration around the more advanced modified search. It would add one more level of refinement and for Yahoo it would keep more people on Yahoo’s search results page

If possible I wouldn’t mind seeing more advanced search operators gain inclusion in search assist. Right now search assist will include an exact match phrase on top of your initial search. Perhaps they could add a way to exclude certain words or phrases as well.

Resources

These are some of the posts I had been collecting for tomorrow’s This Week In SEO post. If you haven’t yet spent any time with Yahoo’s search assist the posts below will fill you in more about how it works and the general changes Yahoo made. Eric Lander’s Search Optimization Guide will walk you through a variety of the changes and how they relate to seo.

• Yahoo Search Launches Google Killer : Search Assist, Videos, Flickr Integration
• Search Optimization Guide for The New Yahoo! Search
• Yahoo Upgrades Search Experience, Launches ‘Search Assist’ & Multimedia Content In Results
• Yahoo Search Launches Search Assist & Blended Search Results
• Yahoo Search Gets Blended, Helpful
• Yahoo Launches New Search Interface
• Yahoo’s Showcased Homepage Content Driving Search Results
• Yahoo’s Search Assist and tracking keywords
• Yahoo! Leveraging “Content” for Queries
• Blended Search, it’s everywhere I look

If you haven’t yet tried it, give Yahoo’s Search Assist a spin and let me know what you think. I’ve been a Google user primarily for years, but I’ve noticed over the last couple of days I’ve been using Yahoo a little more than I have been and I have a hunch that’s going to increase.

• botching part of a sitewide 301 redirect that they had followed for months – now both sites rank, but each ranks well for some portion of the queries
• a bit more weight on domain names

I haven’t really been tracking keywords at Yahoo recently so I can’t say with certainty if I’m getting a boost, but Yahoo traffic seems up for me today overall. Nothing statistically significant and not far out of line with other Yahoo spikes I’ve seen. I do seem to be ranking much better for a few phrases I’ve tracked in the past, but since it’s been awhile since I checked last I can’t say if the improved ranking is from any changes today.

Loren Baker has noticed

some sites with high authority domains, in the perception of Yahoo, such as TheFreeDictionary.com, and all of its keyword heavy definition pages, rising in Yahoo rankings. Could such domain be what Aaron is talking about? Or is it keyword heavy domains?

I’m observing a few searches at Yahoo are bringing back a high percentage of keyword rich domains, but again nothing definitive on my part. Just observing some results without anything for comparison.

Barry Schwartz found a few forum threads that started discussing the possible update. The thread at Digital Point is interesting for the screen shots of some rather odd results.

After these early reports Yahoo offered a Weather Report on the Yahoo Search Blog confirming that changes are going on.

We’ve rolled out some changes to our index with fresh web data and updates to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the last few days. We expect the update will be completed very soon. Throughout this process you may see some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages in the index.

It looks like Aaron was on to something as the Weather Report also mention

This is the first update after the launch of Dynamic URL Rewriting in Site Explorer. We’ve had millions of URLs rewritten based on your submissions and your sites should have seen smarter crawling from Yahoo! Slurp as a result.

Again I’m not seeing any major changes with Yahoo traffic here. Is anyone else seeing a noticeable increase in traffic from Yahoo? This might just be the usual up and down that comes with a Weather Report so things may be clearer when the update is complete in a few days. The last Yahoo update was good to me and I’ll be keeping my fingers crossed this one is too.

• Part I
• Part II
• Part III

The first two parts are about 15 minutes each and the last is 6 minutes so be prepared to invest a little time watching. The only thing I learned from them is that Robert Scoble has little to no understanding of search engines, search users, and search marketers. That and he’s heavily biased against anyone who claims to be an SEO.

Rand’s written up a great counter post dissecting the videos point for point and where Scoble goes astray.

The main premise I get from Robert is that human powered search is less spammable than algorithmic search and thus provides more relevant results. This has to be one of the most naive points of view I’ve ever heard. Any hacker or security expert will tell you that the weak link in the chain is always human beings. Real people are much easier to manipulate than machines.

Mahalo is using 100 editors to build pages on the most searched queries. I don’t know what those 100 people are getting paid, but I doubt it’s very much. Is it really that unimaginable to think you couldn’t pay them more to skew pages in your favor?

From Mahalo’s blog here’s how they identified one site that was trying to spam them.

First, and most simply, it felt spammy. After a little research, we discovered it had a very low Alexa ranking.

Hmm? So a handful of people felt the site was spammy. Not enough Alexa? I guess low tech sites are out and we’ve finally discovered a use for Alexa data. Oh, and they linked to the site in the blog post. Their response to the manipulation attempt was to link to the site trying to manipulate them.

Human beings can be manipulated. Why do you think you get all those spam emails every day. You get them because human beings are falling for them.

Human beings also carry bias in what they think is relevant. What’s relevant to me isn’t necessarily relevant to you. We can both type the same words into a search engine and be looking for completely different things. 100 people at Mahalo can only present results they think are relevant to the majority. An algorithmic search engine makes guesses too, but at least there we can refine our queries. A site like Mahalo doesn’t provide that option. Your search will always be limited to what a small group of people think you should see.

Human Powered Search Does Not Scale

Robert seems to think that you can build a scalable trusted algorithm based on human interaction (This is all in part III). His idea is that if you have 100 friends you trust through a site like Facebook they can provide good sources of information for you. They can tell you what pages are the best ones for your query. Sounds ok in theory except that friends you connect with on a social networking site aren’t granted the same level of trust as friends in the real world. We make much looser connections online than offline. Trust is more than accepting an invite on a social networking site.

Scoble mentions his 5,000 Facebook friends. Do you know 5,000 people who you trust? I don’t either. There’s no way Robert actually knows all 5,000 of those people well enough to know if their judgment can be trusted to send him the best search results.

Robert continues by assuming that if you have 100 friends who can recommend you pages and they each have 100 friends who can further recommend pages and so on you can quickly be connected with experts on any subject who can recommend the most relevant pages for you. Again ok in theory, but not in the real world.

First chances are your 100 friends and you share a lot of friends in common so it doesn’t scale quite as fast as Robert thinks. Second and more importantly is the trust evaporates a lot with each level of separation. Just because I trust a friend’s recommendation doesn’t mean I trust the recommendation of a friend of a friend. Go one more friend out and I would view that person as a stranger. We’re connected through mutual friends, but we would know nothing about each other. That’s not a trusted source of information. That’s a stranger.

Algorithms aren’t perfect by any means. I think Google has quite a few problems at the moment such as returning Wikipedia for nearly every query and going overboard in fighting paid links. And let’s not pretend algorithms don’t have bias either. Algorithms carry the bias of the people who create them. Still an algorithm is less likely to carry as much direct bias as a single human being and they are more difficult to manipulate.

There is definitely room for social powered search. You can find great sources of information through real people. Many of the new web pages I encounter daily were recommendations in the form of a link. I read content on a trusted source and followed a link on the page. But I didn’t find those pages on command. I didn’t ask a question and get those pages returned. Social search can work well, especially in verticals where it can remain more focused. But it will always work best as an addition to algorithmic search, not as a replacement.

I have to ask again if Robert Scoble is now on the Mahalo payroll. The arguments in his video are nonsensical and highly biased and show a complete lack of understanding about search. I thought Scoble was smarter than this which is the reason for the question. He can’t be this clueless can he?

Here’s my quick count on the numbers, though please feel free to double check me. Counting isn’t necessarily my strong suit.

• Google (blue dots) – 34
• Yahoo! (red dots) – 28
• Microsoft (green dots) – 27

One of the most obvious things you’ll notice is how the number of acquisitions is greatly increasing over the years from 7 in 2001 to 27 in 2006. Nothing has been recorded as yet for 2007. The 2006 numbers would be higher had Yahoo not taken the first half of the year off. Maybe they were window shopping until year end holiday sales.

It’s also interesting to see what kind of companies each engine is buying. For instance 4 of the 5 companies Yahoo purchased last year are social media related. Seeing trends in the acquisitions might give you some insight into the thought process at the engines and where they might be headed strategically.

Have fun playing with the timeline and seeing how much money the engines are spending. Do you notice any patterns in the mergers and acquisitions that are revealing?

If you need more help in understanding the guidelines have a look at Patrick Sexton’s very useful resource Feed The Bot, which goes into greater detail than you’ll find at Google as well as providing links to additional resources. The only thing I don’t like about Feed The Bot is that I didn’t think of it first.

Yahoo! Weather Report

Late last night/early this morning Yahoo rolled out some changes to their index and algorithm. From the Yahoo! Search Blog

We rolled out some changes to our index and ranking algorithm last night. So, as you know, throughout this process you may see some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages included in the index. This update should be complete very soon.

I think I’ve seen a bump in Yahoo search traffic today. Too soon to know if it’s merely coincidence or anything to do with the latest changes, but I’ll certainly be hoping it continues.

Some of the tools that used to site to the right are now incorporated as icons above the search box. You can click on the Skins drop down just below the search to choose an image which will become the background for the entire page. In time Ask will let you upload your own images to use as a background, if you’re signed in.

Some of the other tools can be found under the Options drop down in the upper right.

Just to the left of the Options is another drop down that’s marked Guest, though it’s meant to be used while you’re signed into Ask. Here’s where you can find things like Recent Searches, Saved Results, Folders. and Tags you’ve given to search results.

The search box comes with a type ahead feature offering search suggestions. Nothing new in search, but nicely done.

The real fun begins after you’ve performed a search and are inside. The 3D in Ask 3D is presumably for the new three column layout, each column having a different purpose in the layout. Here’s a look, albeit a small one, at the page after a search for The Beatles.

The left column stays put when you scroll the page and contains sections to Narrow Your Search, Expand Your Search, or to choose a Related Search. All seem to function well enough, though there’s room for improvement. The reason for the fixed column is a result of testing Ask did where users felt a sense of stability with this navigation staying in place. It works well in the interface.

At the top of the center column for The Beatles search is Ask’s Smart Answers feature with some quick info and links. Just below is an area for sponsored results. Following the paid listings are the organic listings, complete with Ask’s ‘binoculars’ feature that show a preview of the site on the other end of the link. As you mouseover a result an icon appears allowing you to save the results, add a description, tag it, and give it a folder. All of which you can access late through your profile. Below the organic results are a call to download the Ask toolbar and another sponsored link.

I haven’t compared the organic results for relevancy. I’ll assume they’re much the same as they would have been last week, which would place them somewhere between Google and MSN Live search results.

It’s the right sidebar where the magic really happens. The results all come from vertical search, many of which are the property of Ask’s parent company IAC. The results you’ll see in the right sidebar are query dependent. Have a look at this search for seo and compare it to the search for The Beatles above.

The sidebar for The Beatles search offers Images, Popular Tracks, and Video, where the seo search offers Encyclopedia (a link to the Wikipedia), Video, and Blogs. What appears in the sidebar is controlled by Ask’s new Morph algorithm, which seems to work well based on the searches I’ve tried. So far I’ve seen modules appear for

• news
• shopping
• images
• video
• blog
• politics blog
• encyclopedia
• dictionary
• popular tracks
• current weather
• current time

The video results could certainly stand an improvement in relevancy as the seo search is showing videos for a deadly twister and something about the Dodgers five game winning streak. Not quite seo related. The video search will be provided by Blinkx in time so they should get better.

Another nice touch in the sidebar is the ability to search for more in the module. When your mouse is in one of the modules a magnifying glass icon appears and a click closes the results in the module and brings up a search box all in impressive Ajax form.

Will all the changes be enough to take market share away from Google? That remains to be seen, but the new Ask interface is worth trying out. Ask does design a good interface and I like their approach to Universal Search better than Google’s approach of incorporating vertical search into the main organic results. Ask’s interface never feels crowded to me and it’s simple to figure out where to look for what you want. The algorithm that determines what modules to display in the sidebar works well though the algorithms determining what appears in those modules could be improved.

Ask 3D is worth looking at and now it’s up to Ask to get people to take that first look. I think if they can they will pick up some market share, though that share may come from Yahoo and MSN instead of Google.

There’s plenty being written about the new Ask 3D as you’d imagine. One you should definitely look at is the video demo at Marketing Pilgrim. Andy Beal interviewed Ask’s user experience guru, Michael Ferguson, who walks through some of the new features. The video about a half hour, but it’s worth the walk through from Michael who goes into more detail about the interface including some of the reasons behind the change.

Do give Ask a try. I’ll leave it up to you which is your search engine of choice, but you may find a lot to like with Ask 3D. And for the record it was Jeeves the algorithm killed, though the New Jersey resident did not reveal what it had against the butler.

Yesterday SEO hater Jason Calacanis launched Mahalo (Hawaiian for Thank You), which he claims is the first human-powered search engine. Wait a minute hasn’t ChaCha been providing human-powered search for awhile now? And Mahalo may be a lot of things, but a search engine isn’t one of them.

The basic idea is you perform a search and are taken to an internal page on the site where ‘guides’ have “hand-crafted the best search results possible.” Of course they’re only hand-crafting those results for the most popular queries. At the moment that means 4,000, but the goal is to have results for the top 25,000 queries. What that ultimately means is the vast majority of searches will have no human-powered results.

The majority of results on Mahalo will default to displaying organic results from Google with a few sponsored results thrown in. Apparently AdSense will be the way the site will be monetized for now. Let’s see, a site that scrapes Google results and uses AdSense. Can you say MFA? The non-results pages are kind enough to list related pages. My search for ‘web design’ offered me a highly related page for Jeans and and a page for Chlo© which reads.

There is currently no text in this page, you can search for this page title in other pages.

Most recommendations for related pages are of the same high quality. And while ‘iPhone’ does yield results, ‘iPhones’ does not. It does at least tell me the ‘iPhone’ page is related. That’s one fine search algorithm.

Before getting on to the few pages that do have results I’ll mention a little bit of good. I actually like the interface. It’s clean and simple in the tradition of web2.0 and while I’ve seen some criticize the logo it works for me. I also like that the Guides have their own bio pages, which show the pages they’ve written and lets you know a little about them.

The pages with results do offer a Guide Note and Fast Facts in the right sidebar, which I admit is some good quick info. Lower down in the sidebar will be some user submitted and editor approved links. There aren’t many at the moment, but in all fairness it’s only been a day. Each result page will also link to a message board so users can discuss the search. Most boards are empty at the moment, but again it’s only been a day. I did find this gem in the iPhone message board.

Test message, just wanted to explore Mahalo..

I hope all the other messages are as helpful to my search.

So what about those hand-crafted results? Hard to call them hand-crafted. With very few exceptions every search I tried lists the Wikipedia entry as the number two top result. I wonder how long it took to find that link. The page for George Bush showed the Wikipedia page first. The home page for the White House is apparently less relevant. Wouldn’t the George Bush bio page on the White House site be most relevant? I guess not, though it is listed in the biography section along with George Bush’s biography page on IMDB (Internet Movie Data Base).

If you do a few searches you’ll find that the top seven results are mainly to obvious sites like the Wikipedia and IMDB. The kind of sites you would just go to in the first place without needing to search at all. Hand-crafted indeed. At least it will be easy to build the other 21,000 pages as it seems results are being pulled from just a handful of sites.

How do these finely crafted results stack up to the algorithm at Google? Five of the top seven results for iPhone are listed on the first page of results at Google. A sixth ranks #12 at the real search engine. I’m so happy I checked Mahalo first or I would have found the same pages.

You also have to wonder how they’re coming up with their top searches. Frank Thomas has a page. Frank Thomas is a great baseball player, someone who’ll be going to the hall of fame more than likely, but a top search he’s not. And while Frank Thomas does have a page of results, Thomas Jefferson does not.

Could anyone find the site useful? I suppose if you were back in junior high and needed to write a paper it would be nice to have a bunch of links all in one place. If you were new to the internet and had never heard of popular sites like the Wikipedia, Yahoo, or the New York Times you might find it helpful to have links to them all in one place. For everyone else probably not. If you’re going to present me the Wikipedia as a top result for most every search how long should it take me to start my search at the Wikipedia directly. These aren’t particularly good results. They’re simply the most obvious ones. Good to know the Guides are such experts when it comes to research.

As for the man behind the site, the one who has told the world that seo is worthless and that 90% of SEOs are snake oil peddlers, he’s hypocritically enough redirected URLs to search friendly versions and included ‘link to this page’ code you can copy and paste. Meta keyword tags are also included, useless though they may be?

Mahalo offers little in value from what I can see. For a limited number of queries it’ll point you to pages on some sites you already know. It strikes me as a directory of pages from some of the most popular sites online. Most of the time it will graciously present Google results and hope you click on the ads instead of the organic listings. The one truly remarkable thing about Mahalo is that it managed to convince VCs an MFA site was worth funding.

Here are a few more opinions of Mahalo. Most against, but a few lukewarm wait and see posts. My two favorites are Todd Malicoat’s “How Sequoia Venture Capital Will Pop the Bubble of Web 2.0 – Mahalo or MFAhollow?” and Brian Provost’s “Mahalo: That’s Hawaiian for 8 Visitors A Month.” Brian wins for the best post title, though MFAhollow is brilliant.

• Jason Calacanis Launches Mahalo Today: Human Powered Search
• Jason Calacanis Launches Human Powered Search Engine Mahalo.com
• Mahalo: That’s Hawaiian for 8 Visitors A Month
• Calacanis Launches Human-edited Search Engine
• Mahalo Human Edited Search : Past Meets Future
• Lime, Rice, and Matt Cutts: Introducing Mahalo
• How Sequoia Venture Capital Will Pop the Bubble of Web 2.0 – Mahalo or MFAhollow?
• Mahalo Launches With Human-Crafted Search Results