How do I change the headlights in a 1984 Ford Escort?

Firstly, we’d like to apologise to anyone who has landed on this page looking for advice on actually changing the headlights in a 1984 Ford Escort. This article does not feature any useful tips on how to swap out your headlights, sorry. It does feature useful advice on how to find that information though – so you may wish to read on.

So, what are we talking about? We’re talking about longtail search and how the different search engines deal with requests such as this. More and more searches on the Internet these days are longtail, with people looking for specific answers to specific problems. The best search engines are the ones that offer answers to these problems, and the ones that don’t are, well, fairly useless.

With that in mind we asked Google, Yahoo and Bing the same question to see how they offered to help. We asked each search engine the following:

How do I change the headlights in a 1984 Ford Escort?

Here is what they had to say for themselves.

Yahoo took our search query, ignored the actual question part of it and just offered up websites about the Ford Escort. Websites such as (more…)

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Filed under: Google, Microsoft, Research, SEO Advice, Yahoo — Written by Carl posted on February 16, 2010 at 6:00 pm

The French want to tax Google and Facebook

In the UK we generally feel that we pay enough tax. Car owners for example have to pay tax when they buy a car, tax when they buy petrol and tax to use the car on the road. We’re all taxed out.

Luckily UK taxes don’t extend to Google and Facebook, but officials in France are looking at taxing revenues earned by these companies online, if that is even possible. The French government wants to tax ad revenues that companies such as Google, Facebook and Yahoo earn online through their advertisements, but only in France.

The government believes that the money they earn from taxing Google and co could be used to provide funds for (more…)

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Filed under: Facebook, Google, Yahoo — Written by Matt posted on January 11, 2010 at 8:30 am

How often do you check your website’s rankings?

How often do you check your website’s rankings, or more importantly, how often should you check your rankings?

Google updates its index frequently throughout the day, so depending on what time you look at your rankings, and depending on where you look from, your rankings could be different at different times of the day. Where you look from is important, because Google uses many data centres to provide its results, so if you perform a search from one computer, at the same time that a colleague on a different IP address performs a search from another, the rankings could very well be different.

Does this mean you should check your rankings several times a day, and from multiple computers? No, definitely not.

Checking your SEO rankings is like cooking. You know it takes time, you know you have to be patient, yet sometimes you (more…)

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Filed under: Google, SEO Advice, Yahoo — Written by Carl posted on December 22, 2009 at 8:49 am

Jermain Defoe claims YouTube is secret to his success

jermain-defoeTonight Tottenham travel to Aston Villa, who must surely have witness Spurs’ awesome display last Sunday when they thrashed lacklustre Wigan 9-1 at White Heart Lane. England striker Jermain Defoe scored five goals against Wigan in that game, including a seven minute hat-trick, which should have Aston Villa trembling with fear for tonight’s game.

Despite his success, Defoe was quick to thank those who helped him become the prolific goal-scorer that he is today; namely Alan Shearer, Andy Cole and Tottenham legend Clive Allen… at least, videos of them on YouTube.

Just like Newcastle United’s Argentine striker Jonas Gutierrez, Defoe has been scouring YouTube, not on a fact finding mission about opponents, but in search of (more…)

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Filed under: Yahoo — Written by Matt posted on November 28, 2009 at 8:12 am

The biggest Internet mistakes of all time

In the short history of the Internet there have been monumental errors from businesses and individuals that have not just cost them money, but have seen new business empires forged and existing business giants crumble. For every Facebook there has been a Friends Reunited, for every Google there has been a Cuil.

Here are some of the biggest mistakes ever made in the history of Internet, though most of them seemed like a good idea at the time.

ITV purchases Friends Reunited for £175 million
connected-graphics_1082226aJust four years ago the TV channel ITV spent an incredulous £175 million buying the social networking website Friends Reunited, just as Facebook launched. Even at the time this seemed a lot of money for a website with a modest audience, limited features and an already ageing userbase.

Unsurprisingly, as Friends Reunited refused to switch from its paid subscription model (losing all but the very computer illiterate of its users to Facebook) the value of the website plummeted to the point where the TV channel sold it earlier this year for (more…)

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Filed under: AOL, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo — Written by Carl posted on October 9, 2009 at 7:45 am

Yahoo people search will be better than Google, claims Yahoo

There’s a reason more people use Google than Yahoo and Bing put together, then doubled a few times, and that’s because it works. Google gives you the results you want for a search without filling its SERPs with spam, junk, paid listings are irrelevant results.

However, Yahoo (fresh from selling their soul to Satan) claim that their new search product (which hasn’t launched yet, so we can’t test its level of failure) will result in better searches for people than those found in Google.

Yahoo claims that when you’re looking for someone of note, presumably Katie Price or Britney Spears, you’ll be presented with such gems as their social networking pages on Twitter and Facebook, official sites, YouTube videos and (more…)

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Filed under: Google, Yahoo — Written by Matt posted on August 26, 2009 at 7:45 am

Facebook is the stickiest website in the US

A ‘sticky’ website is a website that keeps your users entertained so that they view as many pages as possible and spend as long as possible on your website. If visitors hit your site from Google, look at the first page and then leave, then your ‘bounce rate’ will be very high. This means that your visitors weren’t impressed with what they saw and you won’t get any conversions from them, whether that means sales, enquiries or data.

Keeping your bounce rate and making your website sticky so that users are ‘stuck on’ your site is the essence of Internet marketing, and can be done with great content and tools.

But what is the stickiest website? What website do people spend the most amount of time on, the site that has a very low bounce rate? In the US in May it was AOL, but now that mantle has passed to Facebook (unsurprisingly). In the US, Internet users spend on average 4.5 hours per month on Facebook. This may not seem like much, but keep in mind that’s an average based on (more…)

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Filed under: AOL, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo — Written by Matt posted on July 14, 2009 at 9:51 am

Yahoo goes green with hydroelectric energy

It seems everyone is in to saving the planet and saving energy these days, and Yahoo is no exception. The search engine giant is set to go green with a new hydroelectric powered data centre, powered by none other than Niagara Falls.

The new data centre for Yahoo is to be opened in the west of New York, and will receive most of its power from the world famous landmark.

Work is set to begin on the new data centre later this summer, in August, and it should be completed early next year in May. The 170ft high landmark, Niagara Falls, will (more…)

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Filed under: Yahoo — Written by Cheryl posted on July 8, 2009 at 8:29 am
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