I’ve noticed some wackiness (at least what I consider wacky) with Google search results lately. We’ve been working slowly but surely on improving our rankings for one of our sites. We haven’t been making any sweeping changes, but instead making small tweaks here and there to title tags, meta descriptions, adding some relevant content to our pages, and getting our pages linked to from other relevant sites.

What I’ve noticed over the last week though, is that a couple times a week, we’ll drop off the face of Google search results for one of our top terms. Its not like we’re falling from #3 to #10 or from Page 1 to Page 2, but falling off the results map altogether. What’s even weirder is that a couple of days later, we’re back up to where we were before the “hiccup”.

We’ve also noticed that search results at any given time of the day can vary greatly. We can show up ranked #2 or #3 for a top keyterm, then later on in the day, #9. Or, perform one search and we’re #3 and immediately search again and we’re #6. Sometimes, I can search for a phrase and get one ranking while a co-worker can do the same search and get a completely different ranking. I’ve been trying to figure out why this happens, but I keep coming up empty.

I never expect to keep rankings forever as the web changes almost constantly, but you’d think that you’d get at least some consistency in search results. Especially for a site that is fairly well built and adheres to what Google calls best practices. But what I am really confused by is the wholesale change to our rankings for certain keywords in one fell swoop. I’d expect to see rankings slip and slip, not disappear all together.

It could very well be that all of this is just a lack of a complete understanding on how Google search results and rankings work. I’m not a complete newb to SEO, but I’m not an expert either. If anyone can enlighten and educate me on what I’m seeing in our search results, I’d be certainly grateful.

For the last few years, we’ve used SLI Systems Search for web site search on both Fright Catalog and YumDrop. When we started the Import Costumes project, we decided that we’d try something different because of the increasing cost of using SLI’s service. The cost is based on the number of search queries, so the more popular the site’s become, the more the cost of search increases.

Instead of building out our own search functionality, we decided to purchase a Google Mini on the recommendation of a fellow e-tailer we know. They said the integration was fairly easy and for their searching needs, it fit the bill. So we decided to give it a shot. For the $1,995 that it cost, we’ll definitely save some money on search in the long term. We knew that we’d be giving up some of the features we get with SLI, most notably how SLI’s search algorithm “learns” different searching patterns and improves the results for any given search term as well as “automatic” related and suggested search terms.

The biggest task for the Mini’s integration was the refining of search queries. SLI allows us to refine by category and price, so we wanted to be able to do the same thing with the Mini. Luckily, you can do this by searching meta tags for different values. It took a while to figure out that some of the search parameters like as_q and partialfields weren’t working as I expected so I ended up building the query term much like you’d use on Google, i.e. site:importcostumes.com inmeta:price:$10.00..$20.00 parrot where you’re looking for parrot type products from $10 to $20.

Since product content doesn’t change all that often, we’ve also been able to cache search results as XML files on the file system. We keep them around for a 24 hour period, just in case something does change. This is great because it’ll keep some load off of the Google Mini while speeding up displaying results to our customers for popular search criteria.

We’ll definitely miss out on the learning capabilities of SLI and not being able to automatically have related and suggested search terms is a bummer. That might be something that the Google Search Appliance can do easier since you can upload data feeds to it. Maybe we’ll graduate up to that as we get more of our sites running search from the Mini. Adding them by hand is a pain, though you can batch upload them. Even with that, you still have to manually build your lists.

One other feature that I’d like to see from the Mini (if anyone from Google is reading this) is a way to automate the emailing of search reports on a regular basis. It’d be nice to have a report sent to me monthly with top search terms as well as the results they returned. This is great for deciding what product to buy and what product to sell aggressively.

There is an interesting article over on CNET about Google and Apple outsmarting all of the cell phone companies over the next 5 years. Google is coming out with the “gPhone” (either a phone OS or an actual phone) and Apple has its iPhone. Now, when the iPhone was first coming out Kyle and I talked about how cool it would be to just run Skype on the iPhone over WiFi and just circumvent the cell company. Basically VoIP, but mobile. Super neat!

Well, this now gets more interesting. With Google aimed to bid on the 700MHz spectrum in January, the cell phone landscape could change dramatically. Now we have wide spread WiFi, available at a low cost. You can use your “gPhone” or iPhone to talk to anyone and everyone over this WiFi network. What does this mean? No more traditional cell companies. No more crazy cell phone charges and taxes (granted, there will probably be government WiFi taxes). No more 2 year term agreements that bind you to crappy devices on an even crappier network.

At the end of they day, I think this article has pretty much hit the nail on the head in saying that in the next 5 years, Google and Apple will have snookered the cell business really good. They’ll be the ones left out in the cold.

This link via Reddit to a page on Google’s site for GMail shows why I love Gmail so much. More than 70% of mail to hit the GMail system is SPAM. That’s a lot.

What’s amazing is that less than 1% of it gets through to a user’s Inbox. I can definitely see this in what hits my account. Using GMail for all of my emailing needs (I have 10+ accounts set up in GMail), I definitely get my share of SPAM. Especially to a couple of accounts I designate for use when I think I’ll get spammed. What’s great about this is that all of my email gets filtered and flagged by Google so I don’t have to worry about explicit SPAM messages for stuff I don’t care about. The one downside? Well, Google knows a lot about me. But so does the U.S. Government…

I read in another blog post the other day (I don’t recall where) that most people don’t realize when the bookmark Google applications, they aren’t secure by default.  Even is you go to http://www.gmail.com/, GMail won’t redirect to the secure version.  It will just serve your mail over the unsecure connection.  The article went on to mention if you’re in GMail for instance, and open Google Docs, the Google Docs link won’t be secure either.  This allows the information to be unencrypted as it goes over the wire.  Thinking of this again this morning, I realized my bookmark for GMail was indeed insecure.  So I changed the link from http:// to https://.  The article also said that if you open other apps from GMail even on a secure connection they new window/tab won’t be secure, so you should have secure bookmarks for each app.  I found this to not be the case.  If your Gmail connection is secure via HTTPS and you open Google Docs or Google Calendar, that link will be secure as well.  Just a little tip for all you Google app users out there!