Majority of the enterprise companies would not have heard of Search Engine Optimization and even website optimization; especially optimization in terms of finding the relevant information quickly & representation of branding/products. Enterprise companies are more focused on direct lead generation marketing activities.

I would suggest that instead of Search Engine Optimization, they think of it as building their online credibility. Every enterprise needs to have a strong online credibility, as their potential buying decision makers are all online. Their decision cycle is long and not instantaneous as buying some product through checkout mechanism. Their decision process usually consists of researching the problem/pain point experience, various options available, product comparisons and benefits.

The decision makers’ research process includes a lot of searches on Google & other search engines, reading white papers, attending webinars, reading blogs, consuming analyst reports and others. Having a presence in all these potential research points represents a strong online credibility. Content plays an important role in credibility - regular blogging, publishing whitepapers once in 3 months, conducting at least 2 webinars per year by inviting industry subject experts are all good practices. Having more content on the website also provides good scope for Search Engine Optimization.

One easy test for online presence that I would recommend enterprise companies is to Google search on their own company/product. If you get back 3 pages of content from your website and external sites, which essentially have been created by your company, then time to pat your back and say “Job, well done!”.

Google introduced Google App Engine as a way to simplify the job of creating, running and scaling web applications at Campfire One on April 7th, 2008. Google App Engine lets developers run web applications on Google’s infrastructure. The idea is to simplify the infrastructure needed to build, to maintain (no servers to maintain), and to scale with traffic & data storage needs.

Google App Engine applications are implemented using the Python programming language. The runtime environment includes the full Python language and most of the Python standard library. Although Python is currently the only language supported by Google App Engine, I am sure Google is pulling out all stops to push more languages shortly to increase developer adoption of this new platform.

This was a preview release; it’s not feature complete and there is a quota system, a set of limits in terms of storage, CPU and bandwidth that applications can use during the preview period, right now for free. Once the preview period is over, that quota will remain free, but developers will be able to purchase additional resources as needed. The cost at this moment has not been disclosed.

The quotas in the preview release included: 3 apps per developer, 500MB storage per app, and per day (rolling 24 hour) quotas of 2000 emails, 10 GB bandwidth in, 10 GB bandwidth out, 200M CPU Megacycles, 650k HTTP Requests, 2.5M datastore API calls and 160k URLFetch API calls.

I have been tracking reactions and there are interesting mixed opinions:

• For some the free 500MB worth of storage was attractive.
• Almost everybody wants more languages supported.
• Business owners are contemplating the dependency factor on Google. This means that early adopters would be independent developers and startups.
• Farhan Mashraqi said that this gives the Python language “a big boost”; so also did blist.
• A Digg comment by Fuzzmeister suggests that this could have a strong impact, “this could evolve into something that fundamentally changes the way websites are hosted and run”.
• Wayne Pan believes that the ‘free’ angle is the biggest news, and that App Engine needs other languages and an external service model to really gain traction.
• Few people see some important privacy and security concerns here.
• Few think this as a very clever move by Google for more domination.

I think last is an interesting angle. Also it will be interesting to see how this will play in Google app framework and Google’s enterprise play. Stay tuned, the story in not over yet.

The major search players are trying to use the semantic web angle to improve search. Google had introduced secondary search earlier this month to facilitate users deep searching but looks like retailers do not like users to bypass the website’s search box.

Yahoo is now planning to support semantic web initiatives. Yahoo is reportedly feeling that the benefits of a data web have not reached the mainstream consumer, despite the remarkable progress in understanding the semantics of web content. Yahoo! Search intends to support semantic web standards by supporting a number of microformats including hCard, hCalendar, hReview, hAtom, and XFN. Perhaps Yahoo’s perspective is that semantic web technology can make searches more fruitful if the search results go beyond containing the keywords and actually mean what users are looking for.

Interesting new development is of Sequoia-backed visual search engine SearchMe, which is just starting to send invitations to their private beta launched last week. More players means more innovation and with the growing internet content clutter, semantic web might be the answer for some organizations.

Google has the largest market share and continues to do innovation by bringing new web products to the market but does that signify that searchers are content with Google & search results? Here is one line of thinking- Rich Skrenta, an entrepreneur, programmer and author of the world’s first microcomputer virus says Google is out of date- designed for the web of the 1990s, and not working as well with the modern internet.

Skrenta has invested in a new search engine that he calls Blekko (expected to launch by 2009). Google in the 1990’s astounded people with its accurate search results. Talking of today, how satisfied have you been? Skrenta believes the problem began when Google introduced the PageRank. Prior to PageRank the search engines tried to match users to keywords. Then they designed an algorithm looking for links between sites & based on the quality of the incoming links, the sites’ PageRank just goes higher. Link-building, link-exchanges, link-swapping have turned all so common that it no more is an ideal measure for site quality. Search Engine Optimization techniques to trick the search engine just got more refined. So let’s wait to see if Blekko is one of the new innovations in the search space.

We are getting close to the launch of our first product- BuzzForce1. We feel this is our contribution to take search to the next level in terms of gathering, classifying, attributing buzz and creating actionable data from raw buzz.