After a few more queries, it became clear that there are a lot of facts which the system does not yet know about. However, we believe that it will quickly change.

Stephen Wolfram, the mastermind behind Mathematica and A New Kind of Science which proved to big a huge success and brought world recognition to the author, is now challenging the concept of search engine. Wolfram Alpha is targeted to put the rules of mathematical data and linguistics together to compile the worlds first computational knowledge engine. At the base of this quite ambitious project, is the belief in the power of mathematical knowledge in generating effective solutions to a wide range of problems.

For years search engines have been trying to improve the relevance of the search results. When Google first appeared, it became an online sensation by providing the closest match to all search queries. In relatively short time, Yahoo, MSN and others were left behind as Google established its reputation of the industry leader with the market share close to 70%.

Wolfram Alpha offers a refreshing approach to improving the search results. It eliminates the guesswork and the hassle of going through a variety of webpages to find the best answer to your question. Wolfram Alpha uses a special algorithm to pull the information from different sources and combine them into a complete logical answer.
People tend to be righteously skeptical about the release of new search engines. We have seen the appearance and quick decay of many of them which failed to deliver their far-going promises. Is Wolfram Alpha one of the many destined to be buried under Google dominance or if incredibly successful, is it going to become the next “Googlekiller”?

We lean towards the opinion that Google and Wolfram Alpha are not necessarily fierce rivals since people will go to each of them for different reasons. Google is very effective when you need to find various information sources and go actual webpages, whereas Wolfram Alpha will be most useful when you look for simple factual answers to your questions. The latter can definitely divert some of Google’s traffic yet it won’t be sufficient to change the entire search engine hierarchy.

An interesting note is that fact oriented processing engines like WolframAlpha effectively eliminate the previous search engine optimization rules.

Truth to be said, at this early stage we can only make up theories and now that we’ve had time to play with it, Google has nothing to worry about in the near future. History has proven multiple times that a true success is rarely about having a great idea but more so about its execution.

However, if Wolfram Alpha meets even a portion of its high expectations in the future, it could be a new intriguing web destination. In any case, building a huge computational cluster, with billions of factoids, and mathematical logic seems like the perfect precursor for the future Skynet.

1. Submit your url to Copyscape to see who is stealing your website or blog content.

2. If content thieves don’t show up immediately in the search results, try to repeat your search a few times with omitted results.

3. Set up Google  Alerts for key phrases related to your content.

4. Set the feeds to “summary” which will give the scrapers only an extract from the entire content as opposed to the entire post.

5. Add legal disclaimer in the header or the footer of the post.

6. Use tools such as Numly WordPress Plugin,  RSS Footer, and TagRight to restrict the access to your content and establish your authorship.

7. Force blog scrapers to link back to your site by

a) including links which point to specific pages on your website in the blog copy

b) linking to your blog post from within the feed content.Read tips from Matt Cutt on how to do it.

c) using the free tool called Tynt Tracer (it inserts a short piece of code on your blog to prevent scraping without backlinks)

Now the bad news. There is little protection against the manual scraping. Combating this is a time consuming process which doesn’t always lead to the desirable outcome. If the entire text is copied without referencing to you, it is still legally enforceable under the copyright laws, however, if only parts of the content are stolen, your actions are very limited. The common suggestion is to put your craving for justice aside for a moment and assess the damage as to whether it is worth your time to go after the thieves. If the damage is tangible, you can

• send them an e-mail and request to take the content down
• flag them on the website
• modify RSS feed for the offenders or even block your IP address
• inform search engines through DCMA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) letters
• seek legal action ( in extreme cases)

Due to the efforts of our SEO team, the blog entry was back into the search results and the copycats were pushed far down. It was a good learning experience but it also made me think that blog scraping is a small drop in the ocean of plagiarism. Let’s face it. Individuals as well as companies bluntly rip off entire websites and business ideas every day. The least Google and other search engines can do is develop better ways of detecting and combating content theft.
P.S. If this blog gets scraped, wouldn’t that be awesomely ironic?

Earlier last week Google released a statement announcing that effective April, 6th local search results will be included by default on all queries. How does this change anything? Here is why we believe it will have a huge impact on the way many SEO companies build their strategies.
Let’s start with the benefits for the immediate consumer. Before this change occurred, users had to request local search results by typing their geographic location in the search box. With the new technology they won’t have to do it any more. Google will identify where users are by using their IP-address thus people can get to the most useful and relevant results a lot faster. This is also great news for mobile phone holders whose devices have a trackable GPS module. No more tedious I-phone typing in the cold! Mobile search is about to get a lot easier.

Now, what this means to small and medium local businesses is they will be able to compete more effectively on Google. Local search is growing very fast. Instead of going after a big highly-competitive nation-wide market, it allows to target a more specific audience for a fraction of a cost. Targeting translates into better conversions and increased ROI. Also keep in mind that local search results are ranked more prominently on mobile devices which contributes to the growing importance of mobile marketing.
With local search being mixed with general search results, SEO can get you to the first page in search results faster and cheaper.  With so much valuable traffic coming in from Local search results, things are going to get a lot more competitive.  Now, is the time to establish a strong foothold on your local online search presence.  By being the first to take advantage of this, you’ll have the opportunity to secure your spot on the first page of Google for highly competitive keywords targeted to your geography.

WebPosition Gold and Google- The SAGA:

Penalize you for using web position gold: (April 2003) http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/12118.htm
Google and position checking software: (Jan 2003) http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/8573.htm
Whats the status of Google vs WPG Users? (July 2002) http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum5/1231.htm
What exactly gets banned using WebPositionGold; (June 2004) http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum5/4799.htm
Web Position Gold & Google IP bans (May 2009) http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum39/3337.htm

By the way, it isn’t just web position gold.  It seems that every rank checking tool out there has been affected by this.  There’s a number of people who think it’s silly for Google to be blocking access to rank checkers.  But I’m pretty sure I know why they are doing it now.  Rank Checkers have a huge impact on “impressions” and skew the search data significantly.  As Google uses this data more and more, they have a strong motivation to make sure their impression data is more accurate for search results.

Now I didn’t realize the extent to how serious Google was about this until I started coding up a tool to do better rank checking and was very confused because code I wrote a few months ago started to break.  I thought Google changed the web page and they changed the web page.  But it wasn’t for everyone.  They changed it ONLY for wget.  Specifically, they removed the rank data from the link just for my wget requests.  EVIL.  I mimiced a real request and sure enough, the rank data came back in.  Pretty crazy stuff.