Search Clinic Blog news stories about online marketing

Last week saw the official launch of a new search engine, sorry a computational knowledge engine, named Wolfram Alpha.

This new engine had no gimmick Search Mistress spokeswoman (think the former msdewey.com), or ex- Google employees at the helm (cuil.com) – just the promise of being:

"the first step in an ambitious, long-term project to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone."

Wow – now that’s some serious geek speak! But remember Google started with a similar vision – so the endless comparisons, whilst not entirely accurate, are understandable.

So with some serious processing power under the Hood, what is Wolfram Alpha and what does it offer the knowledge hungry user?

According to its own FAQ area: Wolfram Alpha is

a computational knowledge engine: it generates output by doing computations from its own internal knowledge base, instead of searching the web and returning links.

And there lies the key reason why it’s not a search engine. It’s potentially much smarter than a conventional search engine (depending on who you ask). It not only presents information, but performs calculations and data manipulations.

The ultimate goal:

WolframAlpha’s long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything.

So it’s quite an ambitious project – and could be the basis for an extremely valuable knowledge base given time and development.

Needless to say the launch has created quite a stir in the industry.

Web page file size probably isn’t something that most of you think about in the day to day running of your website. It is however really important especially if you want the Google spider to crawl your site thoroughly.

So what is the recommended size of a webpage? There isn’t a definitive answer, but try to stick to the idea of “less is better”.

The folks over at Search Engine Journal- webpage files sizes have some myths and facts on page sizes, which I thought were worth sharing…

Myth: With fast Internet connections and “smart” search engine bots, you no longer have to care about the page size.

Fact: Huge pages (over 100 K - which is the standard established long ago) can account for a lot of user challenges and decrease the bot’s crawl rate and depth. Note: the bot works on a budget - if it spends too much time crawling your huge images or PDFs, there will be no time left to visit your other pages.

Myth: Page content should be no more than 1000 words.

Fact: There are no (known) limits to text content. I used to see very huge pages (in terms of word count) and Google seemed to index all of them. The only actionable advice here is to make text easy to read for your readers, crawls will handle as much text as you need.

In pracatice if you have more than about 500 words- why not split them in to two pages? Online readers read senatnces instead of paragarphs.

The same applies to pages. Tow is better than one.

Myth: Google can handle no more than 100 links per page;

Fact: It is still recommended to stick to that standard (in order to ensure search engines will follow all of them), however technically Google bots can handle and treat many more links than that (and it is official).

What standards do you use for your webpage file size? Feel free to share your insights with us at the Search Clinic.