Wasiq Ansari’s World

By now, anyone who has dabbled in internet marketing or SEO for their website knows the best way to rank in the search engines is to link build for the keywords they wish to target.  While the search engines use many different factors to determine site rankings, most experts agree that link building is one of the biggest.  However, not all link building techniques are created equal.

As any true link building expert can tell you, there is a big difference between amateur link building and quality link building.  True experts know that any link building campaign should be a balance of several different techniques which can include targeting less authoritative links through article marketing and forum participation as well as going after the big links, which typically include contextual and one way link building from high authority sites.

The goal of the search engines is relevant results – the number one result for a search should be a website that has the best chance of fulfilling the need of the searcher.  If the search engines had their way, nobody would be actively seeking links – it would happen naturally based on relevance, usefulness and popularity of a site.  Luckily, that’s not the case.

Thanks to search engine optimization, we now know that we can engage in certain link building services and activities and actively help our sites to rank for our popular keyword phrases.  Since the search engines call for ethical link building, the most powerful form of link building tends to be one way contextual links on relevant, high authority sites for keyword phrases you’re targeting.  Not only are they powerful links, but they look more natural to the search engines.

Contextual link building is one of the toughest, most time intensive link building techniques you can engage in – but the results are worth it.   Not only do the links help your rankings, but you should also receive traffic from people clicking on those links.  Contextual link building is finding sites that use your target keywords in their content, and persuading them to link to your site using those keywords as anchor text.  To the search engines, this looks like an authority site is actually recommending you as a resource for that keyword topic – the more of these you can get, the faster you’ll climb in the search engine results pages, or SERPs.

Here are a few link building tips on how to find highly relevant and trusted sites to request contextual or one way links from:

1. Search your target keyword on Google and look at the top 100 sites.  You want to get as many links from these sites as possible.  To find the page on a site that is most relevant to your keyword, search Google with “site:domain.com keyword”.
2. Use a tool like Hub Finder (from Aaron Wall’s SEOBook) or similar software to run an analysis of these top 100 sites and find additional sites that link back to two or more of your top 100 – then get links from as many of these sites as well, preferably right within content.
3. If you can’t get links from some of the top 100 (and it’s tough, since many will be your competitors) examine their backlinks and try and get links from those sites.  You can utilize Yahoo’s “link:domain.com” search for this.  Use the Google search mentioned above to find the page on the site that is most relevant to your keyword.

These three link building techniques are some of the most powerful tactics you can employ when link building for your site.  By mixing these highly relevant and authoritative links with lower level links from article marketing, blog writing and forum/blog participation, you can create a long term link building campaign that is sure to boost your rankings.

Keep in mind that link building is a long term process – rankings don’t happen overnight (in most cases).  But by engaging in ethical and quality link building, you will eventually see your site ranking for the keywords you’ve targeted.  In the end, until the search engines drastically change their ranking methods, the site with the most links (and most POWERFUL links) will win the rankings race.

Source : articlesbase.com/link-popularity-articles/seo-link-building-tips-101-the-power-of-contextual-link-building-1033893.html

It’s happened to all of us. You wake up one morning feeling like a million bucks, you stretch and if you’re like me, you notice the eye-rolling as once again your significant other catches you with a toothbrush dangling from your mouth and a laptop or iPhone in front of you while you check rankings and emails. And then it happens – you start your browser with a search phrase already set to display and you notice that your site no longer holds it’s previous position and the move is not in the right direction. We’ve all faced it and the longer you’ve been an SEO or website owner the more times you’ve seen it happen. But still … what do you do? To quote the immortal Douglas Adams, “Don’t panic.”

Believe me – I know how hard it is sometimes. It’s easy for me to say this to clients when I see an engine fluctuating or a site has dropped only a position or two and we’re working to react but it’s a completely different thing when it happens to you and (might I add) a good reminder to SEO’s as to what our clients go through. But I still haven’t answered the question have I? What do you do? What … do … you … do?

There are five basic steps one must take when their site drops (I like to keep things simple and a 5 step check-list is a great way to do that). These steps assume that to start with you had a well-optimized website with good SEO practices followed. If you don’t then the reasons you dropped are pretty clear but if you’ve got a well-optimized site and your site has fallen – then this is for you. You should:

1. Build Links:
   It’s very difficult for people to not want to do something proactive when they notice their site drop. I know – I’ve been there. One of the easiest things to do to keep yourself busy while working on the other 4 steps below is to build links. Building good, solid links to your site will never hurt and will only help you out so even if one of the later steps might show you other actions you need to take (or not take) you’ll never go wrong with some solid link building and if nothing else – it’ll make you feel like you’re doing something and stop you from doing other things that might do you more harm than good.

   I’m not going to go into all the different types of links you could build or what the anatomy of a good link is. Many articles, forums and blog posts have been written in the past and are easily found online. I’m sure if you monitor a few good SEO forums you’ll find more being written every day. If you can – find articles by Eric Enge. While he doesn’t give it all away (who does?) – you won’t go wrong taking his advice and even seasoned SEO’s are likely to learn a thing or two from reading his work.

2. Relax For A Couple Days:
   Before you rush to your favorite site editing tool – relax. Slight tweaks in content are unlikely to make much of a difference (if any) to your rankings. If you’ve got solid, well-optimized content and suddenly your site’s fluctuating – cramming in a few more instances of your targeted phrase will likely do more harm than good.

   Now – when I say relax I basically mean, don’t touch your site. There are steps (such as link building) that you can work on including the analytical work noted below. Just don’t go editing all your copy to try to chase some tweak in Google’s algorithm. Relax.

3. And
4. Analyze The Sites That Have Out-Ranked You (Onsite And Offsite):
   One of the best things you can do is to take a look at the sites that are out-ranking you to find out what they’ve done. This will tell you two things: One – are there some good tactics that you’re missing, and Two – are these rankings likely to hold or are they flawed? There are two areas you’ll want to look at and those are the onsite optimization and the backlinks.

   When you’re looking at the onsite optimization you need to only briefly look at their keyword densities, H1 and title tags, internal linking structure, number of indexed pages and the amount of content on the page. Remember: I’m assuming that (as you were ranking previously) you have a solidly optimized website with some good SEO practices and content guidelines followed. If you look at these and compare the newly ranking sites with your site and with other sites that have held their positions and dropped you’ll get a feel for whether there are trends. If there are common traits among the sites that have moved up then you may be on to something. Remember the common trends among the sites that have climbed and held and also remember what they have that the sites that have dropped do not. Remember: there may be no common trends or nothing you can find out with this small a sample. Once this step is complete it’s time to move on to backlink analysis.

   Backlink analysis is a good practice to undertake every few months regardless of updates but definitely necessary now that you’re dropping. What you need to do now is to analyze the backlinks of the sites that are out-ranking you. Depending on the competition level this can be a brutal task in that it’s not just about numbers. You should use Yahoo!’s link:www.domain.com command and visit many of the sites in your comeptitors backlinks. What you’re trying to do is get a full view of what their links look like. You’ll also want to download SEO Link Analysis (A Firefox extension you’ll find at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7505/). When you’re doing a backlink check it automatically displays the PageRank and anchor text of the backlinks though I’d still HIGHLY recommend visiting a good many of the sites to see what kind of links they are.

   Once again you’re going to be looking for the architecture of the backlinks of the sites that are moving up. What tactics they’re using, what their links look like on the page, what anchor text distribution they’ve got. Once again you’re going to compare that with other sites on the rise, your site and other stable sites to see what is common between those that are climbing and holding their grown vs those that have fallen.

   Once we’ve collected this data it’s time to act. Collect all the common traits that the climbing and holding sites have and …

5. Take Action:
   You’re done waiting around preforming the tedious task of link building. You’ve got your data and you’re ready to launch into action and get some stuff done. But wait (oh no – did he say wait again?) is action really the best thing?

   When you’ve pooled your data you need to decide what it means. Let’s take for example a situation where the newly ranking sites have very low word counts and tons of footer links (looks paid to me). Do you REALLY want to follow their lead? The question you need to ask yourself in this case is do the factors that are apparently working RIGHT NOW overall going to provide better or worse results? Is less content more or less likely to results in a satisfied visitor? Do paid footer links help Google deliver quality results over the whole of the Internet? In these cases the answer is easily “no” but your findings might be more subtle such as an extremely disproportionate use of targeted anchor text among the ranking sites or sp@mmy copy with keyword densities at 8 or 10%.

What you’re in a position to do now is figure out a moving-forward strategy. If the common trends among the top and improving sites are bad or sp@mmy then you know the algorithm will correct itself eventually and you shouldn’t chase it. If you need to do something – build some additional links and look for new phrases to rank for on other pages to help stabilize your traffic when individual phrases decline.

If you find that the factors that have created the new results are legitimate and will lead to better results overall you know you need to make some changes to what you’re doing and fortunately – with the research you’ve just done you’ve got a great starting spot in that you can probably get some great resources and tactics from the lists of backlinks and onsite optimization you’ve just collected.

It may take hours or even days to properly perform this research but then – you needed something to do while your rankings are down. It might as well be productive.

Source: webpronews.com/expertarticles/2009/07/10/what-to-do-when-your-site-drops

Please be warned: While there is talk of Yahoo and Microsoft getting close to coming to terms on a search ad deal this is not done. People in the Internet space love to see some information then make assumptions and turn it into a reality. Over at All Things Digital, Kara Swisher is reporting on the this deal and there is plenty of cautionary talk about the deal despite it being close to done.

The most recent talks have been unusually close to the vest at both companies, and spokespeople for both Yahoo (YHOO) and Microsoft (MSFT) declined to comment on the issue.

And, of course, they should not, since there is no certainty any deal will be struck at all, especially since the pair have been down this road before, unsuccessfully.

In those cases, both sides have thought they were close, too, with fingers quickly pointing at each other for the failure of the discussions.

Apparently there are plenty of variations on the same theme for this deal but the consistent note struck is that Microsoft will take over the search ad business of Yahoo with an upfront payment in the billions of dollars and some ongoing pay arrangements.

There is no doubt that something needs to happen to further shake up the search industry. Microsofts bing has created some buzz for sure but the impact early on is not huge and the long term success in the search space will need some, well, time to tell.

So how does this deal help each side?

• The possible pluses are clear: Huge technology cost-savings and cash for Yahoo and another weapon to fight archrival Google for Microsoft.
• It needs as much firepower as it can get. A recent comScore (SCOR) report for June showed Google with a 65 percent share, Yahoo at 19.5 percent and Microsoft at just 8.4 percent.
• The deal, if struck, could give a big boost to shares of both companies, which have been up a lot since the beginning of the year.

So since the details are thin at this point well leave the speculation to those who like that. If this deal were to happen it certainly would be a change. If it ends up denting Googles search dominance will only show in performance and not conjecture. Honestly, while it may be interesting to have Microsoft and Yahoo working their search ad business in some form of a union it will only matter if advertisers believe that their money would be better spent there or with Google. Thats a tough hurdle to overcome no matter how you approach it.

Source:  searchnewz.com/topstory/news/sn-2-20090717MicrosoftYahooDealClosingIn.html

Large Internet companies spend millions on consultants and technology trying to get their sites to rank among the highest results on Google. Everyone else has to rely on the poor man’s search-engine optimization: the link exchange.

If you’ve ever hung up your own shingle on the Web, you’ve probably gotten an e-mail to this effect at some point: “Dear So-and-so, I believe your site and mine could benefit from exchanging links.”

We probably get eight to 10 a week in the CNET News general mailbox, mostly from technology-related companies but occasionally from auto-parts suppliers and watch retailers who either have no idea what we do or few moral qualms about spam.

The idea is that if you can coax a link out of a large site like CNET, Google and other search engines will record that link as a vote of confidence in your site’s worthiness and improve your ranking in searches for certain topics, thereby boosting traffic to your site. The technique is quite old, dating back even before Google and its PageRank system emerged as the Web’s dominant search engine.

But does it still work? And at what point do two or three sites struggling to get off the ground veer off the road from mutual assistance to a full-blown spam operation designed to game the system?

Evan Duffield, for one, thinks it still works. He contacted us trying to get CNET to exchange links with WarpedAI.com, a site he has launched to promote stock-trading tools for day traders, and says he has been able to slowly build up the PageRank of another site he owns using techniques that don’t run afoul of Google’s Webmaster guidelines.

“It’s kind of a vicious circle,” he said. “To start a new business you need PageRank, but to get PageRank you need links to your service. You have to get the ball rolling.”

PageRank is the currency of the Web. Google’s novel approach to site indexing way back when was to evaluate the worthiness of a site based on how many other sites were linking to it, also taking into account the worthiness of the sites passing along the links.

This meant, and still does mean, that a link from a site with a high PageRank counts for way more than a link from a site with low PageRank.

But how do you get a link from one of those sites? Google’s official advice: “The best way to get other sites to create relevant links to yours is to create unique, relevant content that can quickly gain popularity in the Internet community.” That, of course, sounds like something your mother would say.

In a Web as vast as this one, getting attention for a new site, even one with superb content, is a very difficult undertaking. Bloggers can discuss each other’s work and help each other build up a following, but if you’re selling a product or service it can be much more difficult to climb the ranks of search results for things like “day-trading software” when you’re starting from scratch.

So Webmasters like Duffield turn to solicitations for links. Danny Sullivan, who writes about search-engine optimization for Search Engine Land, says “if you’re a new site, absolutely you want to be doing link building. But you need to be doing that in a smart fashion.”

Duffield says he’s very careful to only solicit links from sites that are related to his product: his pitch for exchanging links that somehow wound up at our doorstep was addressed to computer-go@computer-go.org, a mailing list for hobbyists trying to tackle the difficult chore of building a computer AI system for the ancient game of go.

That was a mistake, he said; the result of prematurely hitting send on an e-mail template. Duffield compiles his targets by searching for sites that are related to finance and stock trading, and attempts to contact a general e-mail address to pass along his site’s information and offer a link exchange.

“It’s not about the actual links so much as it is optimizing search queries,” Duffield said. “When I figure out a query I want from Google, I can see the top three positions have this much page rank and this many positions, and try to beat that out.”

As long as people like Duffield are exchanging links without offering payment, or crossing obvious lines such as breaking captchas and posting spam links in guestbooks or comment forums, they’re following the spirit of Google’s Webmaster guidelines.

“Where it tends to get into tricky issues is where people are doing it primarily for payment,” Sullivan said. “Search engines would see links as votes. Google does not like that people would simply be buying links to do better.

While paid links are clearly off-limits, Google appears to ban link exchanges in general, saying it does not allow “excessive link exchanging” but failing to define exactly what constitutes “excessive.”

Other practices that are verboten include links to “bad neighborhoods” on the Web and complicated networks of several Web sites with little content but pages and pages of links amongst themselves that Google can usually identify.

For the most part, however, the practice is rampant enough that only the most egregious violations get snagged. “If you start thinking too much about not getting caught, you’re probably doing things you shouldn’t be doing,” Sullivan said.

In an era where SEO is a budding industry unto itself, link exchanges are perhaps the most basic approach. Far below the realm of those dithering over Google’s search index are those like Duffield trying to make something out of literally nothing.

While he needs to build PageRank equity to get started, Duffield acknowledges that at a certain point that Google is right: a site will live or die on its content. Link exchanges only work to get one’s name out there: the real boost needed to turn a Web site into a business comes when real people start discussing and linking to a service on blogs, message forums, and social-networking sites.

That’s when your search ranking (and therefore traffic) really starts to grow, he said. “If you can make Google see that something is being talked about all over the Internet, what choice do they have?”

Source: cnn.com/2009/TECH/07/14/cnet.google.link.exchange/index.html

In what could be a positive sign for online advertising, Google said on Thursday that its second-quarter revenue rose from a year ago as ad spending in certain areas recovered and the company did well at managing expenses.

In what it termed “a very good quarter,” Google posted revenue of $4.07 billion for the second quarter, excluding commissions paid to advertisers, up from a year ago and a smidge higher than analyst estimates.

In a conference call, Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said he was very pleased with the results the company posted as the economy struggles to recover. “It demonstrates our resilience in what continues to be a very difficult environment,” he said. “Google’s business appears to have stabilized,” as consumers turned to the Web to find the best deals and ad sales were strong.

Schmidt said he couldn’t forecast when the economy would improve.

“It’s too early for us to tell when the recovery will materialize…A quarter ago, we had no idea where the bottom was,” he said. “It became clear starting roughly at Christmas that people were spending more time searching and when they were purchasing products they were purchasing products of less value.”

Ad spending, meanwhile, is returning, particularly in verticals such as shopping and travel, but not for financial companies yet. “We’re not, at the moment, looking at the downward spiral we thought we would see six months ago,” he said.

Revenue for the quarter ended June 30 was $5.52 billion, including traffic acquisition costs, up 3 percent from a year go. Traffic acquisition costs paid to advertisers were $1.45 billion, representing 27 percent of ad revenues. Excluding those commission, net revenue was $4.1 billion.

Net income was $1.48 billion, or earnings per share of $4.66, compared to $1.25 billion and $3.92 a share, a year ago. Excluding certain items, Google’s earnings were $5.36 a share.

On average, analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters had expected revenue excluding commissions to be $4.06 billion and earnings per share of $5.09.

“It demonstrates our resilience in what continues to be a very difficult environment…Google’s business appears to have stabilized,”
–Eric Schmidt, Google CEO

The second quarter is typically a slower quarter because of reduced business activity during the summer, said Chief Financial Officer Patrick Pichette.

Aggregate paid clicks on ads served by Google rose 15 percent from a year ago, but were down 2 percent from the first quarter, while the average cost-per-click dropped 13 percent from a year ago and rose 5 percent from the first quarter. Traffic acquisition costs, or advertiser commissions, were down from a year ago.

The company has 65 percent of the search market, according to ComScore, followed by Yahoo with 19.6 percent, and Microsoft with 8.4 percent.

YouTube is starting to pay off, according to Nikesh Arora, president of global sales operations and business development. Google is making money off billions of videos every month, with monetizable views tripling from a year ago, he said.

“We’re really pleased with the trajectory” and revenue growth (for YouTube), he said. “And in the (near) future, we see profitable business.”

Google has about 20,000 full-time employees, down 375 from the end of the first quarter, mostly from a reduction in sales and marketing positions that was announced last quarter, Pichette said.

Google’s revenue figures apparently didn’t please Wall Street–Google’s shares were down nearly 3 percent in after-hours trade, to $429.65.

Source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10288808-93.html

Yahoo will launch a new tool on Tuesday to help people organize research they do on the Yahoo search engine. The Yahoo Search Pad will automatically save search results when it notices the user is doing research, which should make it easier for people to come back to a project on subsequent days to do more work.

Other Web notebook projects have notably failed, or at least failed to become important. Tools like Google Notebook and JetEye are (or were) all very strong tools for saving Web search results, but they require intent on the part of the user. They save nothing without the user asking for it to be saved. Search Pad, in contrast, watches what the user does (as long as they’re doing it on Yahoo), and, according to Yahoo VP of Consumer Experience Larry Cornett, “uses deep science to recognize when someone is doing research.”

In other words, if you’re scanning for a funny video of a cat to occupy yourself during a conference call, it won’t kick in. But if you’re searching on a medical condition or researching a car or other major purchase, it will notice that you’re clicking a lot of links, create a dossier for you in the background, and start to catalog your search results.

In my testing, it didn’t work quite as advertised. While the service, which sits innocuously in the corner of Yahoo search result pages, collected Web site titles, pictures, and URLs in a little notebook, it never popped up to help me organize them despite me clicking dozens of times on sites during a test on a medical condition. However, the product is still a day from launch and the on-screen demo I got on it earlier was compelling.

Yahoo Search Pad: An online notebook that watches you

The service collects pages and links for you, although in my testing it just saved everything without categorizing it.
(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

The entries that Search Pad saves can be added to with text, or deleted, moved, printed, or e-mailed, making a well-stocked “pad” a potentially very useful reference even when a user is not on the Yahoo search site. And as I said, the idea of a notebook that automatically stocks itself is sound, especially if it proves to be accurate in noticing when you’re doing research and if it makes it easy to remove entries you don’t want to follow up on (that, at least, I can confirm it does).

The service separates Yahoo from Google and Microsoft search engines. Were it working, and were I doing research on a complex topic, I would strongly consider using Yahoo search instead of an engine that gives only results, and then leaves it to you to sort and save them. Search Pad adds real value to search.

For the last 15 years, Microsoft’s master business plan seems to have been, “Wait until somebody else has a hit. Then copy it.”

I know that sounds mean, but come on — the list of commercial hits/Microsoft knockoffs is as long as your arm. PalmPilot/PocketPC. Netscape Navigator/Internet Explorer. Mac OS X/Windows Vista. Apple iPod/Microsoft Zune.

You’d think Microsoft would feel a little sheepish after a while.

And now we have yet another me-too effort. It’s something called Bing, and it’s the latest iteration of Microsoft’s multiyear attempt to imitate Google.

The name, presumably, is supposed to evoke the sound of a winning game-show bell. The cynics online, however, joke that Bing is an acronym for “But It’s Not Google.”

Here’s the shocker, though: in many ways, Bing is better.

That’s quite a statement, of course — almost heresy. But check it out yourself. It’s easy to compare the two, thanks to sites like bing-vs-google.com. Here, you’re shown search results from both Bing and Google, side by side, on a split screen.

At first, Bing is pretty much Google. Oh, there’s a big National Geographic-y photo on the home page instead of plain white, but otherwise it’s the same deal: a search box; a menu that offers to complete what you’re typing; and inconspicuous links to Images, Videos, News, Shopping and Maps.

Once you hit Enter, however, you can’t help noticing Bing’s more concerted effort to get you answers faster. To minimize the clicking, the hunting, the dead ends.

For starters, how’s this for a dream feature? Point to any search result without clicking; a pop-up balloon shows you the first few paragraphs of text on it. Without leaving the results list, you know if it’s going to be helpful. Simple and irresistible.

Here’s another example. On Google, search results usually appear as a long list of blue text links. Occasionally, a photo appears, too. Or, if there’s only one possible answer for your query (weather, stock price, sports scores, street address), you get that answer right at the top: a five-day weather forecast, a stock chart, game scores, a street map. In those cases, you don’t have to click through to anything on the search results list.

Bing does all that, too. But it also expands those “let me make sense of this for you” results — in a big, beautiful, very successful way — by introducing a new panel to the left of the search results.

For example, if you search for a celebrity’s name, that space offers an attractive table of common-sense links: News, Movies, Quotes, Biography and Images. When you search for a sports team, you see Schedule, Tickets, Stadium, History and Wallpaper. When you search for a medical condition, that table offers Causes, Remedies, Treatment, Prognosis and News.

Aren’t those almost always the answers you’re really looking for?

That panel also lists Related Searches, which require one click and zero thinking. If you searched for “barbecue,” it offers Barbecue Grills, Barbecue Recipes, Barbecue Ribs and so on.

Finally, the same panel maintains your search history, to save you the trouble of reformulating your quests. (It also offers Turn Off and Clear All buttons, for the benefit of — well, you know who you are.)

Yes, that left-side panel creates more clutter; Google’s appeal has always been its sparse, streamlined look. But it’s well worth the space.

Both Bing and Google offer an Image Search page, where you can find photos from the Web of anyone or anything. On Bing, however, the results page scrolls forever — you don’t have to keep clicking Next, Next, Next. More photos fit in less space, too, since all the cluttery text details (pixel size, file name, originating Web site) are hidden until you point at a thumbnail. And you can adjust the thumbnail size.

Options on the left-side panel let you limit the image results in various ways: by size, by graphic type, even “just faces” or “head & shoulders” shots. Amazing.

As on Google, you can search for videos. But on Bing, you can preview the results far more efficiently. Just point to a thumbnail (without clicking) in the search results, and the video begins to play back sample segments, seven seconds at a time, right there on the thumbnail.

The rest of Bing’s advantages are supposed to stem from four huge search categories: travel, shopping, health and local business information. These sorts of searches produce special displays that trounce Google’s eye-glazing text lists — sometimes.

When you’re shopping for a particular product — “Canon SD870,” for example — the top result is a tidy chart, summarizing everything you’d want to know: a photo, price, average rating, and even a Photo Quality graph.

(Bing’s Shopping results also make it clear when you’ll get 1 to 5 percent cash back, courtesy of Microsoft’s Cashback program. In essence, Microsoft passes on to you some of the bounty that it receives from 540 online advertisers, such as J&R, Hewlett-Packard, Gap and others. Paying you to use Bing for shopping feels desperate and even a little sleazy on Microsoft’s part, but it’s real money, and you may as well exploit it while it lasts.)

When you search for a flight, a similar table offers the cheapest fare (“$259 JFK>LAX”) and links to other deals. An icon tells you whether prices are about to go up, down or stay the same. That detail is brought to you by Farecast.com, which Microsoft bought last year for $115 million.

Unfortunately, these features don’t always work. You get the shopping info summary with “Canon SD870,” but not “Nikon D5000,” let alone “Palm Pre,” “TiVo HD” or “iPod Nano.” (Microsoft points out that the summary table appears more often if you click the Shopping link before you search. But come on, who has time for that?)

Similarly, it’s hard to predict when those fare-prediction icons will appear. Last week, they were showing up when you searched for “Chicago to Atlanta,” but not when you use the corresponding airport codes (“ORD to ATL”); Microsoft fixed that this week. But fare predictions aren’t available for smaller airports (Cleveland, New Orleans, Washington National).

In short, these much-vaunted Bing specialty searches feel a little flaky.

Google is still way ahead on other kinds of searches, like movie showtimes: You get a complete table of nearby movies, complete with trailers, reviews and even links to IMDB.com (the Internet movie database).

Google also wins with maps and driving directions; it offers features like Street View (actual photos along your route) and the ability to drag the colored route line to alternative roadways with your mouse (to avoid a traffic jam or take a favorite shortcut).

On the other hand, Bing wins on traffic searches (such as “traffic nyc”), where you get a color-coded map of current traffic speeds without having to dig. It also excels with company name searches; the 800 number for customer service appears right in the results list.

But search services are constantly in flux. They’re online, so their creators can keep refining them without making you install anything. Bing will keep getting better — but so, inevitably, will Google. If Google doesn’t eventually respond by making its own results more manageable in Bingish ways, I’ll eat my hat.

Furthermore, beyond the basics, Bing is still just a baby. It lacks some of Google’s mature additional services like book searches and Google News (built-it-yourself online newspaper).

People won’t start dumping Google en masse; Google is a habit. Everyone already knows how to work it, and it may be built right into your Web browser. But if you value your time, you should give Bing a fling.

Put another way, even if Bing really did stand for “But it’s not Google,” that is not necessarily an insult.

Source: nytimes.com/2009/07/09/technology/personaltech/09pogue.html

Microsoft heralded its travel search as one of the key ways that its revamped search engine Bing bested Google by helping users make decisions, rather than just finding information.

Its search results for an itinerary presents users with sliders and check boxes on the left that let searchers change times and specify airlines. Search results reload instantly as boxes are clicked and sliders slid.

There’s no question Bing feels like Kayak. When Microsoft showed us the search engine under embargo, this reporter’s first comment upon seeing the travel page demo’d was “This looks like Kayak.” Our Bing review described its interface as “uncomfortably close to Kayak’s,” an observation that others made as well.

Kayak noticed too.

“We have contacted them through official channels about concerns about the similarities between Bing and Kayak,” Kayak’s chief marketing officer Robert Birge told Wired.com “From the look and feel of their travel product, they seem to agree with our approach to the market.”

That’s careful language for “Microsoft copied our stuff wholesale.”

Microsoft’s Whitney Burk denies that there’s any copying going on.

“We are discussing the matter with Kayak,” Burk said in emailed statement. “Bing Travel is based on independent development by Microsoft and Farecast.com, which Microsoft acquired in 2008. Any contrary allegations are without merit.”

Copyright law offers some protection for a website’s look-and-feel, but it’s not easy to prove.

Others noticed as well.

For instance, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s David Radin reviewed Bing, noting that the travel site “feels so much like Kayak that without asking, I assumed Microsoft licensed the technology from Kayak. Can you say ‘eerily similar’?”

Douglas Sims, the president of an IT consulting firm in Tennessee, noted the similarity too, inspiring him to write a short essay on his website:

Bing Travel is like Kayak in more ways than just the layout and visual design. The navigation, the automatic loading of results from different airlines (using ajax), even the results themselves are almost identical.

In an interview, Sims said he had no connection to Kayak but was moved to write about the comparison because he was a longtime admirer of Kayak’s interface. In early June, he had friends writing to tell him how cool Microsoft’s search was.

“I felt offended,” Sims said. “I thought Kayak did an awesome job, and now my friends are giving credit to someone else.”

He noted that Microsoft’s travel search engine includes the same shading on the gray sliding bars as Kayak’s site does.

“I design stuff like this sometimes,” Sims said. “I’ve always said I can’t just copy other people’s work, you can’t just rip it off, but in hindsight, is it fair game? Maybe I should do that.”

Readers at TechCrunch also had a healthy debate about whether Microsoft ripped Kayak off, or was just using the technology it bought when it purchased Farecast.

For its part, Kayak seems caught between indignation at seeing a giant company copy their hard work and flattery that their work at designing a user interface work is so good that someone would ape it.

They are also a company with fewer than 100 employees, while Microsoft employs far more lawyers than that.

Source: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/06/kayak-bing/

• In the TCP/IP model of the Internet, protocols are deliberately not as rigidly designed into strict layers as the OSI model.
• Compare reference models, not the protocol stacks.
• Differentiate Services, Interfaces, Protocols.
• Attachment to protocols.
• Number of layers.
• Connectionless vs. connection oriented

TCP is typically used by applications that require guaranteed delivery. It is a sliding window protocol that provides handling for both timeouts and retransmissions.
TCP establishes a full duplex virtual connection between two endpoints. Each endpoint is defined by an IP address and a TCP port number and is implemented as a finite state machine.

The TCP/IP architectural model has four layers that approximately match six of the seven layers in the OSI Reference Model. The TCP/IP model does not address the physical layer, which is where hardware devices reside.
The next three layers—network interface, internet and (host-to-host) transport—correspond to layers 2, 3 and 4 of the OSI model.

The TCP/IP application layer conceptually “blurs” the top three OSI layers. It’s also worth noting that some people consider certain aspects of the OSI session layer to be arguably part of the TCP/IP host-to-host transport layer.

A Critique of the OSI Model and Protocols:
Why OSI did not take over the world

• Bad timing
• Bad technology
• Bad implementations
• Bad politics

Bad Timing:
The apocalypse of the two elephants.

Timings

• Widespread adoption of the TCP/IP protocols preceded the formalization of the OSI model.
• Vendors already begun offering TCP/IP based products.
• OSI emerged about 5 years after industry had adopted TCP/IP.
• Vendors were reticent to add support for a second protocol stack until momentum had gathered behind OSI.
• The combination of these factors meant that OSI was never adopted in practice.

Technology

• Some parts of the OSI model are fundamentally flawed.
• Although there are 7 layers, 2 of these (session, presentation) are almost empty and 2 others (data link, network) are cramped.
• Additionally some functions such as addressing, error control are recurring at each layer.

Implementations:

• Early implementations of OSI were inefficient, contrast withTCP/IP implementations which are easy to use, scalable and robust.

Politics:

• OSI was widely perceived as the product of quasi-government standards processes rather than driven by good design processes.

A Critique of the TCP/IP MODEL:

• Lack of distinction between concepts.
• Doesn’t clearly distinguish between service, interface and protocol.
• Not adaptable – Not a general model and hence poorly adapted to other protocol Stacks.
• Ambiguous layers – Host-to-network is not really a layer, but an interface between network and data link layers.
• Omitted layers – Physical and data link layers are not present.
• Early implementations were fragile.

Models are useful because they help us understand difficult concepts and complicated systems. When it comes to networking, there are several models that are used to explain the roles played by various technologies, and how they interact. Of these, the most popular and commonly used is the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) Reference Model.

Definition:
An abstract description of the digital communications between application processes running in distinct systems.

Layers:
The model employs a hierarchical structure of seven layers. Each layer performs value-added service at the request of the adjacent higher layer and, in turn, requests more basic services from the adjacent lower layer:

1. Physical Layer  (Layer 1)
   The Physical layer performs services requested by the Data Link Layer.
   The major functions and services performed by the physical layer are:
   • Establishment and termination of a connection to a communications medium.
   • Participation in the process whereby the communication resources are effectively shared among multiple users.
   • Conversion between the representation of digital data in user equipment and the corresponding signals transmitted over a communications channel.
2. Data Link Layer (Layer 2)
   This layer responds to service requests from the Network Layer and issues service requests to the Physical Layer. The Data Link Layer provides the functional and procedural means to transfer data between network entities and to detect and possibly correct errors that may occur in the Physical Layer.
3. Network Layer (Layer 3)
   This layer responds to service requests from the Transport Layer and issues service requests to the Data Link Layer. The Network Layer provides the functional and procedural means of transferring variable length data sequences from a source to a destination via one or more networks while maintaining the quality of service requested by the Transport Layer. The Network Layer performs network routing, flow control, segmentation/desegmentation, and error control functions.
4. Transport Layer (Layer 4)
   This layer responds to service requests from the Session Layer and issues service requests to the Network Layer. The purpose of the Transport Layer is to provide transparent transfer of data between end users, thus relieving the upper layers from any concern with providing reliable and cost-effective data transfer.
5. Session Layer (Layer 5)
   This layer responds to service requests from the Presentation Layer and issues service requests to the Transport Layer. The Session Layer provides the mechanism for managing the dialogue between end-user application processes. It provides for either duplex or half-duplex operation and establishes check pointing, adjournment, termination, and restart procedures.
6. Presentation Layer (Layer 6)
   This layer responds to service requests from the Application Layer and issues service requests to the Session Layer. The Presentation Layer relieves the Application Layer of concern regarding syntactical differences in data representation within the end-user systems.
7. Application Layer (Layer 7)
   This layer interfaces directly to and performs common application services for the application processes; it also issues requests to the Presentation Layer. The common application services provide semantic conversion between associated application processes.