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Metadata is structured data that describes the characteristics of content. It is loosely defined as data about data and is primarily read by machines to manage documentation and help search engines identify and index relevant content for search results. The HTML format used to define Web pages allow for the inclusion of a variety of types of metadata, which now include content embedded in Web pages.

Meta Data on New York Times Website:

Changing Scenario
The Semantic Web is an evolving development in which the meaning of information and services on the Web is defined, making it possible for the Web to understand and satisfy the requests of people and machines to use the content on the Web. With Semantic Web taking shape, metadata is evolving rapidly. For example, Google recently introduced rich snippets, which produce small samples of content, such as the following snippet pulled from a search:

What is to all?

While organizations like W3c and Dublin Core setting up the standards, there are plenty of new web applications and Search engines are already adapting to include semantic Web technologies and standards to more effectively deliver relevant and personalized content to end users.

Whether you are a usability professional or designer or web anlayst – it is a great opportunity to explore on doing better personalization, targeting, and new ways of understanding your website visitor.

Former employees of Google have started a new search engine “CUIL” (pronounced as “Cool”). CUIL is making waves in the industry now…not sure the intensity of those waves but, do the users are ready for a new search engine like CUIL Search Engine? or move from their personal Google search engine?

Microsoft has built a search engine over no. of years and still trying to capture the considerable share in the search market.  Yahoo had acquired several companies like Inktomi with Overture and still have problems in having a pretty lower share in the search market.

Search Engine AskJeeves who built Teoma which was making similar waves like CUIL and people were hoping that it would replace google but it got failed.  Whether it is Teoma or Cuil, everyone was focusing on crawling the web extensively and increasing the indexing more documents than their competition and coming up with a innovative way of displaying the results. With the web scrappers sites are poping up extensively, I don’t think it is a valid USP to have “No of pages indexed”.  The question is…

Do the users ready to move from Google?

It is pretty clear that the users need easy to find, fast to access, and finally relevant to what they are looking. I think Google has all of it to a large extent, but does that what CUIL was also looking at.  Unless users get these three benefits I don’t think they would be interested to get something new.

Google has joined Alexa and Compete.com today by introducing a FREE service on Website trends (http://trends.google.com/websites) for competitive benchmarking studies. Find now thru Google, how your website is trending over a period of time and compare with your competition. Not only that, but also we can break-down the trends by region/country and correlate the data with search keywords and the visits to other websites by your website visitors.

Trends are important because trend is everything for the businesses to monitor on a regular basis. In the above screen shot, we would know that it is normal to have a spike on the year-end as it is a holiday season and rest of the months the trends are consistent.

Not only that, it is also important as the market sizes for your products/services are increasing or new markets are created for your products, you would need to know how well you are growing or declaining against your closest competition. In the below graph, facebook in India growing big while myspace is still consistent which may not be a positive indicator for myspace.com considering the businesses want to capture the international market too.

Google       Website Trends also provide top 10 search keywords that drove traffic from the search engines and again a comparative trend with the competition.

Though marketers know which keywords drove traffic to their websites, they may not know how much traffic was sent to the competition for the same keywords. In this example, 30% people searching for bestbuy have also landed at walmart.com

Google says the data is collected from a variety of sources, such as aggregated Google search data, aggregated opt-in anonymous Google Analytics data, opt-in consumer panel data, and other third-party market research. Funny thing is Google itself opted out from this data so we can’t see how Google, Youtube, Orkut doing

Pls. note that we can get actual numbers to the graph by signing into Google.

Another Service from Google on the way for complete Market Research Data, luckily I got a beta login to try it out, here are the screen shots: http://www.google.com/adplanner

In addition to what is provided in Google Website Trends, here we also get Country Reach metric which I had also talked about a quicker solution to calculate country reach last year.  Ad Planner has ways to drill-down the sites by demographics.  This is a great tool to select sites to advertise on and even to know the demographics of our own site.

User Demographics and other metrics from Google Website Trends:

For the last 10 years, the business owners and marketers were quite busy in moving or starting a web channel for their existing off-line businesses. And, even the new business models have come up on web. It was the case that they were paying a huge amount of effort in building web applications with innovative features to reach their prospects and clients in real-time and in fast. It is also true that a majority of web masters invested huge amount of $’s and building really some interesting web experiences but very few web masters are focusing on optimizing or even working on maximizing the return on web investment.

Though there is increasingly more marketers are turning to the web metrics data which has opened a new era in online industry, as the above graph from Google Trends depicts that there are more people started looking at Web Analytics very seriously after Google has rolled-out a FREE Web Analytics Tool to industry.

We have made significant shifts from working with the server administrator for getting the log files to working with the their-party vendors like Omniture (ASP Model) who provide real-time web analytics data.

We have moved from Log File Analyzers to sophisticated analytics systems which operate on page-tagging (cookie-based) technology.

We have moved from counting Hits for the site to behavioral pattern recognition for better optimizing the website investments.

We have moved from standalone KPIs to Integrated Web Analytics.

And, the best part is – Real-time Behavioral Targeting using web analytics data.