I will be discussing only the top 4 factors under each section with a mention of the value score allotted by the SEO professionals . This biennial survey by Rand Fishkin at SEOMoz picks the brains of the top 72 SEO professionals from all over the world and their collective wisdom is presented in this post.

I) Link Building Tactics For SEO:

1)Link Bait And Viral Content Creation: 67% Very High Value
Just as all links are not created equal, all content created on the web is certainly not equal. There are certain pieces of content that are so well researched and presented in an interesting fashion that most readers fancy and take a liking to. They end up distributing it across the cybersphere through social media networks and emails.

The virality aspect is in the nature of the content itself, be it a 400 word ingenious piece titled
“10 ways to [solve a specific problem faced by people world over]” or a catchy video that captures the imagination of users. A recent example that comes to mind is the babies skating around in their nappies in an advertisement for a French water brand.

All this results in a massive surge of backlinks to the site which published this piece of content. There is a huge spike in traffic to the original website. The search engines love the natural scheme in which the backlinks are generated. Users follow links to read/watch the content. It is a win-win situation for all.

2) Blogging And Engagement With The Blogosphere: 66% high value
The influence of blogging cannot be stressed enough in the cyberworld. It is an incredible way for a “domain expert” to share knowledge and get valuable feedback from readers in the form of comments. Blogging is a long term process and it takes time and effort for a blogger to establish a good relationship with her readers and fellow bloggers in her chosen niche.

The popularity of a blog can be ascertained from the number of readers subscribed to the RSS feed and the activity taking place on the blog itself by way of exchange of comments between the blogger and readers. Over time, the blogger earns the reputation of a respected authority in her domain and develops a loyal band of committed followers.

The high quality and originality of her blog posts will result in posts getting tweeted over Twitter and passed around other popular social media networks. Each mention of the post on the web is a vote for the source site as far as search engines are concerned. Atleast, a tweet on Twitter ensures that the post is indexed by Google which scours the Twitter landscape actively even if the traditional blog and ping service is not being used.

Being a guest blogger on other popular blogs in the same niche or participating in blog carnivals can bring lot more exposure and hence traffic to a niche blogger’s site.

3) Classic “Create Valuable Content” Strategies: 58% High Value
Content that is original and written in a polished style stands out amongst the fluff that floats around in the cyberworld. Most times, it is borne out of practical knowledge of the author in a particular niche. As the saying goes – “Knowledge borne out of experience is wisdom”, the same goes for content that is written based on experiences gleaned by the domain expert through day to day application of the techniques described therein.

4) Public Relations: 56% High Value
Press Release (PR) is the first thing that comes to mind when public relations is mentioned. This is a powerful tool that can generate great backlinks and mentions if executed correctly. Traditionally, press releases that are interesting and absorbing catch the eye of journalists covering that niche who in turn refer to it in the news column they author. The higher the status enjoyed by the newspaper, the wider the exposure gained by the press release.

Sadly, this powerful tool has not been wielded well as a many press releases end up being pretty much self hype harping on the virtues of the company and the owners rather than dwell on the important part – the uniqueness of the product or service offered.

Beyond press releases, Jessica Bowman states that public relation departments and agencies are not up to speed when it comes to maximising the opportunities for search engine rankings.

II) Factors Affecting Value Of An External Link:

1) Trust Of The Source Domain: 70% Very High Value
The trustrank concept is based on the fact that good and trusted sites are linked together at the core of the web and that spam pervades outside this central area of good neighborhood. It is based on a Stanford University research paper titled Combating Webspam With Trustrank

The search engines caluclate Trustrank as an iterative Pagerank type of metric that flows link juice from a bunch of trusted seed sites to determine if a domain is trustworthy or not.

Another way of looking at it is the number of hops the domain in question is away from the trusted seed site. If it is within a limited number of hops from the seed site, then it can be considered to be high in trust. My earlier post titled Relationship Between Trust and Link Building talks about this aspect at length.

If this cannot be determined algorithmically, there is a possibility that human reviewers could confirm this aspect by looking at the percentage of links to and from a domain that link to good neighborhoods and bad neighborhoods.

2) Global Authority/Importance of Source Domain: 68% Very High Value
The authority of the source domain is an important criterion that adds more value to the quality of the link emanating from it. The domain authority is a hybrid combination of the quality of links coming into it, domain trust and age of the domain.

The quality of links is influenced by the links coming into a site from other powerful well trusted domains. The strengthening of the good neighborhood aspect is vital to the good ranking of the site in question on the SERPs.

3) Keyword Anchor Text Of The Link: 67% Very High Value
The words that form part of the clickable link is generally referred to as the anchor text. Typically, the anchor text confirms to the search engines the nature of a page with respect to its content and whether the link that describes the page in question really is representative of it.

Internal linking within a site gives a good idea of the nature of the content to search engines. But it is the anchor text in external links that really reinforces the initial confrimation of the search engines. If you have a great article on blue widgets, then the inbound links from external unbiased sources that have blue widgets as part of their anchor text provides a lot of value to the recipient site and goes a long way to help it get ranked well in the SERPs.

The context in which the link appears on a page is also vital. If it is an editorial link from an external site where the author writes about a certain topic and contextually links to an article on your site, it clearly shows Google that your article is a great benchmark in that particular niche and one that often gets referred to in other posts and articles on the web. Such natural links have the highest value in Google’s eyes and these links are equally hard to obtain.

4) Quantity of Pagerank Passed By The Link: 59% High Value
If a page has a Pagerank of 5 points and if there are 5 links going out from that page, then each link ideally gets 1 pagerank point (Pagerank of a page / number of links on that page), provided none of the links going out of that page are nofollowed.

If your site gets an editorial link on a highly trusted strong domain page with high Pagerank, the amount of link juice passed by that link to your site is quite high and your site gets the ultimate benefit from such a link. Such a high quality link can be considered equivalent to a few hundred links from mediocre sites.

From the observations of many seo gurus in the past, it is ideal to have 100 or less links typically on any given page in order to distribute the pagerank as fairly as possible from the home page to the category and sub-category pages.

Search engines nowadays tend to ignore the navbar and footer links to a large extent. It is clear that the position of the link on a given page is important to be considered in the link graph calculations of the site by the search engines.

Instead of using nofollow links, a site owner can design her site in such a way that the important parts of her site are given prominence in the site architecture hierarchy and page consolidation is done for less important areas of the site.

For a detailed account of all the link factors that influence search engine rankings, Rand’s post titled
Effectiveness of ilink building tactics for SEO is an illuminating read and can whet your appetite for more knowledge on the ubiquitous links that form the basis of the world wide web.

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior SEO consultant at Netconcepts, an Auckland search engine marketing company that provides both seo services and pay per click services to its clients New Zealand and Australia wide.

A recent survey by Hitwise in February 2009 shows Google Image Search as part of the troika of top web properties owned by Google in terms of traffic and revenue.

Peter’s responses to Eric’s questions are summarised as follows:

1) On Page Factors in Optimising Images:
In web search, the bots crawl structured data, have enough signals like title, headings and sub-headings, the body content, the backlinks and anchor text from external sources etc to size up the intent of the page.

An image search does not have such signals to rely upon. The bot can access the image source tag in the html and the alt text describing what the image both of which are the key determinants. The more clarity the alt tag content has, the better the intent conveyed to the crawlers.

Peter affirms that it is a very good practice to have a clear description of what the image is about in the alt text. For users who are vision impaired or who have images turned off, the alt text clearly conveys the message when the mouse is hovered over the image. It is a bonus if the same alt text is found elsewhere on the page content in the form of the title of the image or part of a caption.

From the crawler’s point of view, it can see the image tag and the alt text but these do not say much about the image itself. Naming parts of the image as in Flickr photos also does not help the crawlers as it is not machine readable.

If the title, description and caption of the image is obvious to the user, Peter says this is a huge help in helping his team figure out the text associated with that image and rank it appropriately.

File name is an important attribute that is analysed as it tags on to the image even if it is embedded many times on a page or if it is linked to by other sites. A meaningful file name helps though it is not a very strong signal in the ranking process.

A few issues related to file names are:

• A lot of operating systems and web servers do not allow file names in other languages that cannot be represented in ASCII. People cannot use certain types of text when naming the file for the same reason.
• Another problem from the human perspecitve is that users cannot do justice when naming the file in their respective language. So the search engines cannot assume that the filename is the best description of the image.

2) The Alt Text:
Peter says that if the image cannot be seen but one can perceive what it looks like, then the alt text should reflect that perception in words. The alt text becomes a replacement for the unseen image.

There is no hard and fast rule on the length of the alt text. It all boils down to how the user would feel about it. The alt text can be as detailed as describing all the details of the image. Peter mentions that having a title, caption and description for the image somewhere on the web page enables the crawlers to treat the image title with the same importance as the equivalent of the HTML page title for that page.

Eric poses a question about the association of caption text with the image by the crawler with an example of Charlie Chaplin dancing in the moonlight with the page content including title tag focused on the same topic. Peter confirms by saying that the association is important to the extent to which the image itself is very important to the page.

The close contextual matching of content to this image is a very strong signal. If the image was removed from that focused page, then it would lose a lot of its value in ranking terms. The key here is to think of it from the user’s perspective. If a user lands on the page on Chaplin and sees a large image of Charlie above the fold, the user can see the relevance straightaway.

If the page has six different sub topics and matching images for each sub topic as in the case of a blog about San Francisco with different posts about the place, Peter says the crawlers are pretty good at figuring out the different topics and the images relevant to each sub topic.

Having a permalink for each of the sub-topics is a big help. A canonical tag on each of the inner pages that contains the detailed post and relevant images also helps the crawlers know the canonical url for the image.

3) Matching An Image And Its Content:
There are a number of ways in which a crawler tries to figure out what an image is about, the content and how it matches the intent of a user search. Machines find it a problem to read what an image is and decipher what it represents.

Peter cites an example of an image showing a shark jumping over the Golden Gate bridge. To humans, the scenario is very obvious. The caption of the image says – Check this out. This does not make any sense to a crawler in figuring out what the image is about unless the pixels of the image are analysed. All the other factors discussed above do add to the confidence level of the image aiding the image search team in trying to figure out the image correctly.

4) Signals In Two Dimensional HTML World Vs Three Dimensional Image World:
Eric mentions the two dimensions of relevance and importance (in the form of backlinks) in the HTML world that are important signals on the page. But in image search, apart from the relevance and importance, the third factor of confidence comes into play.

Peter agrees wholeheartedly and says that unlike external links to a page that are counted as votes in web search, images are seldom linked that way. The search team has to consider the other signals to see if they are talking about the image and appropriately factor them into the algorithm.

5) Web Page Influencing the Ranking of Images:
Peter admits that a web page is certainly a signal in the ranking of images. In a nutshell, from the SEO perspective for image search, all the rules that apply to web serach apply equally in image search also. Being an authority on a certain topic and embellishing the page with unique content all provide signals that help the image as well.

So a page with great content and links from other sites to it and other positivbe external signals associated with it inherently passes on the benefits to images that reside on the page.

For images being above the fold or scattered on a page, Peter says that the user experience is a very important factor. If images add to the relevancy and usefulness of the user experience, then it is a vital factor in conjunction with other signals to return this page in the results. This relevance also proves to users that the results for an image search are very relevant to the user’s query and approved by Google to direct the user to the site.

The image search team try to return the best possible images for queries. It must be remembered that there are lots of sites with competing images that are relevant to the user queries.

6) Difference in Results Between Universal Search and Image Search:
Peter and his team realise that there is a subtle difference in intent of a search query made on web search and specifically on images.google.com for an image search. Users doing a specific image search are definitely looking for image results. It is not the case with universal search though relevant results from different verticals are presented on the SERPs. The intent may differ based on the web property the users perform a search.

7) Combating Spam in Image Search:
The image search inherits all the benefits of the work done by the Google web spam team. All the good practices that apply to web search pretty much apply to image search also.

8.Growth of Image Search and Related Technology:
Peter agrees that image search is a really hot and developing web property with incredible scope for the future. It could end up amassing trillions of images in time to come. It is a huge task indexing and organizing the unique images in the explosively growing image world. Each person’s view of the world is unique and it is reflected in the creation of images.

Peter asks a most interesting question – If someone is interested in seeing only an image, why should the search start with a text query? The solution to this has arrived in the form of the Similar Images launch, a Google Labs project where users can search for images based on existing images. The search is completely visual.

A query like Paris can return results on Paris Hilton, Paris in France, Paris in Texas and the Eiffel Tower in a good search engine. With Similar Images, you can start off with an image and take it as an additional query in your exploration along with the original text query. The image at that point is used as the next query.

With the fall in prices for good quality digital cameras and increasing quality of mobile phone cameras, taking pictures has never been easier and so very affordable. The technological advances in facial recognition software (an aspect of it is used in Google’s Picassa tool) is also helping the image search team in their quest to organize the image world to give it more purpose and a huge reach in the future.

The entire transcript of the interview on Google Image Search that forms the basis of this post makes an interesting read.

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior SEO consultant at Netconcepts, an Auckland search engine optimisation company that offers great SEO services to its clients based in New Zealand and Australia.

Every shopping engine that doesn’t have this local store data will suffer at the hands of those that do. The significance of this and its potential impact on online shopping (and by extension mobile) cannot be overstated.

My initial gut reaction to NearbyNow is along the lines of: “I’ve seen this during the era of dot-bombs, and it didn’t work — why should it work now?”

NearbyNow’s press release and other articles about it mention the iPhone and how that demographic is a great target for their service and that iPhone users are a perfect fit in terms of discretionary income and such. The press release mentions NearbyNow’s new iPhone application that will allow consumers to graphically navigate shopping malls, search the inventory of stores by product, and list available sales in local stores.

The business concept reminds me a lot of StoreRunner, a local product shopping search engine back in the dot-bomb era which offered similar services, and ultimately filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy back in 2001.

So, why wouldn’t NearbyNow be prone to the same sorts of problems that StoreRunner had in making local product shopping search a viable enterprise? On a high level, they both have a number of parallels: they take in local store inventory data; they make that data searchable so that endusers may be able to find products listed at local stores and they can compare prices; they both are distributing the data through other sites; and both are founded on startup capital with the hopes of achieving eventual profitability.

I agree with Greg that the information and services conform closely to what consumers often are seeking, and that this syncs up nicely with existing consumer behavior (consumers have been shown to frequently research products online, find local stores online, and then go and buy the products directly at their local stores — so a service which enables one to find local stores carrying a particular product matches up with this need pretty nicely).

There’s lots of cases where some idea came about before its time, and perhaps local product search is one of those. Consumers are more educated about search these days, and may be more open to being helped by specialty search engines. Also, it could be that some of the fine-tuning of the concept could actually get it into a sufficiently profitable shape.

Some reasons why NearbyNow might perform better than StoreRunner and other predecessors:

• Greg notes that NearbyNow offers a “reserve online, pick up in store” feature;
• While mentioning the iPhone app may seem like they’re opportunistically hopping onto a popular trend of the moment, mobile apps and mobile usage could very well appeal with shopping consumers;
• Broad syndication / free API – open APIs weren’t the flavor of the moment back during StoreRunner’s day, but NearbyNow’s effort to embrace the power of Web 2.0 in this way might help them achieve broader distribution of their content than earlier companies could have hoped for;

If NearbyNow could also now achieve partnership with a major search engine, or at very least, if they could enable natural search optimization for their content, they could grow adoption of their information up past that “critical mass point” where users will wonder how they ever did without such a service. For instance, if Google were to desire to take the next evolutionary step in development of their Product Search vertical, they would provide local product search features like this along with the pure online product search they’ve been offering.

For instance, search for something like “fossil watches” and compare with “Fossil Watches”, and you’ll see that a few of the listings in the SERPs trade ranking positions:

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In the example screen-grab above, you’ll see that the lower-case search for “fossil watches” on the left side, has the site “jomashop.com” in the fifth position while a Wikipedia article is in the fifth position on the righthand example search in upper-case for “Fossil Watches”.

In another example search for “Chicago Hotels”, hotels.com and marriott.com trade out for the fourth position in the natural search results below the local one-box, with uppercase “Chicago Hotels” on the left and lowercase “chicago hotels” on the right:

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Searching for “Chicago hotels” seems to result in the same rankings as the all lower-case query.

As Search Engine Roundtable mentions, Google states that their search results are not case-sensitive:

Google searches are NOT case sensitive. All letters, regardless of how you type them, will be understood as lower case. For example, searches for george washington, George Washington, and gEoRgE wAsHiNgToN will all return the same results.

I now get different results in the 8th position for “george washington” vs. “George Washington” vs. “gEoRgE wAsHiNgToN”, when I expand out the number of listings per page in my preferences.

I was inclined to think that this might be an error due to the recent “Update Dewey” algorithm change that Matt Cutt requested feedback upon, so I reported it to Google, but have not heard back from them.

If this continues much longer, I think that SEOs will likely start doing all sorts of case-sensitive keyword research and optimization based off of it.

Under the new functionality, businesses may type in custom business categories, and the interface also provides helpful potential term using the Google Suggestion Tool:

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Free-form categories is a slightly unique way to address the need of businesses. Yellow pages companies have traditionally offered businesses the option of categorization under many thousands of unique categories — on the order of twelve thousand to fifteen thousand categories in some cases. However, YP companies have also carefully considered and turned down requests for additions of completely new categories in some cases, mainly due to how yellow pages are constructed — if there are too few businesses in a category it won’t make monetary sense to add it into a directory. And, if the category name is too esoteric, consumers won’t search for it anyway.

With Google’s local search operating more closely as a straight keyword search tool, businesses could associate categories with themselves that are as specific as they desire without affecting usability or cost.

In other, related news, Google has announced that YouTube videos are now integrated with Google Maps, allowing businesses to add video info to their listings.

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The result is a Google search results page with no listings and the message at the top states:

“Google won’t search for Chuck Norris because it knows you don’t find Chuck Norris, he finds you.”

But wait! This result page is actually a hoax, only pretending to be from Google! It’s actually produced by Arran Scholsberg. Arran is a student at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, and is a web designer and photographer.

This is a really clever piece of linkbait – a trick to get lots of people to link to your site by making particularly compelling or humorous content that people will inevitably want to send to their friends. As you may be aware, there’s a really funny internet phenomenon called “Chuck Norris facts” wherein people will list out all sorts of preposterous, hyperbolic statements about Norris, mainly emphasizing his macho-ness. There’s a large amount of traffic built around Chuck Norris facts, with loads of people vying for top positioning in search results pages for the keyword phrase, and lots of people emailing each other links and quotes to some of the funniest stuff. It’s been a pretty viral phenomenon.

Arran’s seemless integration into this is a really great bit of subtlety, directly hotwiring Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” searches to go directly to his webpage that pretends to be a judgment made by the Google algorithm or by some humorous programmers at Google.

How many other search marketers out there would love to hotwire Google’s search form for a particular keyword to go directly to the webpage of their choice, making users bypass all other competitor pages in the process?!? Arran has accomplished it. Someone should hire this guy as a linkbait designer.

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You can see little icons to the right side of the listings which indicate what type of listing each result represents.

Google’s move to Universal Search in the past year and their recent move to expand out the local one-box results from a few listings to ten would indicate that user-testing is showing blended results to be a very popular item among search engine users. Zvents move to provide blended results makes them a very strong contender as a provider for local search and content technology. As Greg Sterling mentions, Zvents is a provider for syndicated content for third parties like newspapers, and they’re clearly positioning themselves as a potential backend for other local content sites wanting to have functionality similar to Google’s.

From trying out Zvents’ new functionality, I think the overall concept is strong although it may require further refinement on the user-experience end. The dilemma for the site is that users who are requesting a particular type of content will want to be able to easily absorb the specific results they’re looking for. I did a search for “concerts” in San Francisco, and as a user I’d be less impressed when restaurants and venues are returned, if there aren’t concerts happening at them.

It’s true that a user looking for a concert or other event might also then be interested in restaurants in the immediate area or other cool things to see and do, but the perception of relevance for what the user requests must be very high, first and foremost. It may be that Zvents will need to rearrange their results listings in order to improve this perception — have precisely what’s requested be front and center while ancillary content be moved to sidebars or below the main listings. Blended results are dependent upon the context of the search in order to be perceived as relevant.

Still, much of search blending and local search results presentation is still in a very experimental stage throughout the industry, and Zvents’ moves are making them strong contenders for the long haul. Their plans to launch an open-source data storage and processing platform named Hypertable on January 31st, is starting to attract a lot of attention from the IT developer demographic. The system appears to be intended to provide Google-like powers to other people, since it’s a very similar concept to Google’s own BigTable, which is currently only used internally by Googlers. Hypertable will allow distributed processing and storage of both structured and unstructured data, apparently at excellent performance rates.

The introduction of the federated search / blended results may make Zvents’ content more attractive to developers who could use the Zvents API to increase their content’s distribution. Developments are well worth watching here.

[BTW - I'll be speaking on the subject of Local Search & Blended Results at the upcoming SMX West conference in Santa Clara.]

Over time, I’ve looked at a lot of small community guides, and many of the people who create them are masters of finding free widgets to provide functionality for things like weather forecasts, news headlines, and local events. But, many of these sites are missing even simple search functionality to help users find the local info on their site as well as elsewhere on the internet.

For instance, check out these small town websites for: Milan, Tennessee; Monterey, California; and Fredericksburg, Texas. Each one of these sites seem to be something less than comprehensive guides for their areas, and each could benefit from having a search engine to provide a route into more info about their areas.

Eurekster is perfect for this sort of thing — check out the search engine portal I whipped-up there for Milan, Tennessee in just about five minutes:

The rectangular widget that the service provides includes a search form box along with a “buzzcloud” of keyword links to top items you select to hot-link right into the search results. The interfaces are easily customizable in look and feel, and you can set up a few different search ads to run in the results pages, if you’ve signed up with those services to do so.

Here’s another cool example local swicki that someone created as a Seattle search engine.

So, if you need a quick, local search engine, Eurekster is definitely the way to go.

Google Engineer David Bailey spoke on the subject – you may remember his post with Johanna Wright about Universal Search back in May. David is a top engineer at Google who’s been working on the blended search results page for the past year, and he previously worked at Amazon.com and Junglee. (As you may recall Junglee created a system which allowed large amounts of websites to be treated as query-able databases, and they created “PALs” which assembled those queryable repositories into unique verticals on various subject matter like employment, real estate, electronics products, etc. — which we can see relates very closely with the concept of Universal Search to some degree.)

David mentioned that the “Google OneBox” term was really intended to refer to the concept that a user could initiate a keyword search from one search box in order to obtain results from all sorts of different verticals including images, local, products, etc. As you may know, many of us have been referring to “OneBox Results” as the description for the little boxed UI layout for that special content delivered onto webpages – like when a local search included a few business listings and map grouped together at the top of the SERP.

One thing he revealed that was particularly interesting to me was how Universal Search actually runs a number of queries across all of their vertical search engines in parallel, and then they choose how to rank the top results returned by each of them when deciding what items to display 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc in the search results. That change in the way that they performed searches was very costly in processing, so it required a lot of power from their computing infrastructure.

One major piece of advice he gave to companies who wish to rank well in the new Universal Search paradigm really stood out to me: he recommended that companies look to diversify the types of content they have out there in promoting their products and sites — to work to have content in each of the major vertical areas now, including Images, local business listings in Google Maps, video, news, etc.  This is something that those of us at Netconcepts have been recommending to clients for quite some time now as well, and it segues nicely into the session I speak at today on Images & Search — this concept that having good, optimized image content can help one get better overall rankings and traffic by being present in one of Google’s top most-popular vertical searches — those top listings in Images are now starting to appear within the first page of the regular web search results. The corellation to ranking well in each of the many verticals is now translating directly into good rankings in the main web search results pages. This same holds true for the other search engines such as Yahoo! and Ask as well, though perhaps to a slightly lesser degree.

Best Practice is to now diversify your web presence and work on having good content to represent you in as many of the various verticals as makes sense for your company.

David went on to say that Google intends to further improve the Universal Search results, and to extend out to including more results types. So, we can perhaps expect to see content blended into the SERPs from Patent Search, Book Search, and much more as time progresses.

Spock is one of a new breed of people search engines which pulls data in from a variety of online sources including MySpace, LinkedIn, My Yahoo!, Wikipedia, company websites, blogs, and other sources to compose these composite profiles which include photos, descriptions, links to people related to the person in question, and tag lists of common keywords. Check out this search I did for “Danny Sullivan”:

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And, here’s the profile Spock generated for the search engine marketing “Danny Sullivan”:

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This automatic generation of profiles from other data sources, similar to a meta search engine, is not all that new, of course – ZabaSearch has been touted for doing similar stuff to compose info on people out of various public records, sort of like a poor man’s background search. And, ZoomInfo has worked to build a directory of searchable business profiles of individuals. IceRocket also used to have a metasearch engine that pulled in data from a handful of various singles/personals sites.

What makes Spock a bit different is how they’re actively composing these profiles from sources that really haven’t been associated with one another previously, and making them publicly available, for “free” (eventually paid for by ad revenue, of course). While the general public likely hasn’t been aware of it, the CIA or NSA has actually also been working on a similar sort of search engine system which automatically composes secret dossiers of information on individuals from a multitude of sources including credit card information, criminal databases, as well as many of the same online sources used by these web services like ZabaSearch, ZoomInfo, and Spock.

Spock has already sparked a small amount of concern just as all people search engines have, due to how they remove barriers to easily finding information about individuals – something which always makes people very nervous. A recent Time article on Spock, “Online Snooping Gets Creepy“, states that it’s controversial because while individuals may opt into providing info on many of the sites that Spock gleans information from, those individuals have not opted into participation in Spock, nor have they agreed to having each datum they put in one site associated with all the other data they may have in other websites. An even bigger concern, both with Spock and with the secretive dossiers generated by the American government on individuals, is that these sorts of automatically-generated profiles inevitably will have some amount of mistakes associated with them, and those mistakes can negatively impact people’s lives.

Nearly any of us who have the misfortune of having extremely common surnames like “Smith” or “Jones” and common first names have had the experience of having our identities confused with many other people’s, and the age of information has only accelerated the effect. At my old company, I had my email address assigned to other “Chris Smith”s not once but twice, for instance, and I used to receive confidential email notes intended for the “Chris Smith” who was in our HR office. I know another gentleman who is a retired, conservative, law-abiding citizen who’s very common last name has put him on a watch list, so he looks forward to special treatment any time he goes to an airport.

What if Spock frankensteins-together a profile that contains incorrect, embarrassing information? A prospective employer might not hire you, people might choose not to date you, and people could assume the worst about you based off incorrect info.

White pages directories have long had to manage consumers’ privacy concerns, but at least that industry has had some time to build up some ways of managing those issues. And, giving individuals the power to choose to be unlisted if they desired removes some of the sensitivity. In white pages directories, one can typically choose to be unlisted or “ex-directory”. In Spock, you can apparently register to update/correct your info, but not remove it. This is another case of technology outpacing our understanding of how to deal with it.

I’m personally not terribly concerned with services like Spock, since I’m accustomed to them, and since I have consciously exposed a lot of personal information on the internet. But, I’m sympathetic to people who may’ve wanted to keep their informal MySpace profiles separate from their professional information, and who may now be surprised to find them all smashed together on services like this.

Otherwise, Spock is a really cool idea, and I like a lot of the clever things they’ve done in assembling information and making it searchable. There appear to be a number of useful applications possible in Spock, aside from the fluffier celebrity profile stuff.

Oh, one other aside, too: Spock appears to’ve purposefully built themselves with very search-engine-friendly URLs, likely with the intention of optimizing to get lots of natural search traffic. For instance, my “Danny Sullivan” search query was formed like this: http://www.spock.com/q/Danny-Sullivan. I bet this explains their hyper-focus on celebrity profiles, since searches for those celebs’ names would likely drive a lot of traffic/revenue to them, once their pages are indexed! Spock is already enjoying a PageRank of 5, and Google is showing 666 pages indexed so far.

(VentureBeat’s writeup on Spock is worth reading, and I see that Greg Sterling just mentioned Spock on Search Engine Land a few minutes ago, too.)