Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

According to comScore’s most recent desktop search engine rankings, “Google Sites led the explicit core search market in February with 64 percent of search queries conducted.” In an overall sense, this proves one thing to be true: Google has captured the majority of search traffic.

However, you don’t want to ignore the other 36 percent. Here is a breakdown of the search engines that make up the “best of the rest.”

• Microsoft sites: 21.4 percent
• Yahoo sites: 12.2 percent
• Ask Network: 1.6 percent
• AOL: 0.9 percent.

These numbers are nowhere as extensive as Google’s, but it does show that people are using other search engines....

The implication is that Google measures all of your documents for freshness, then scores each page according to the type of search query.

Singhal describes the types of keyword searches most likely to require fresh content:

Recent events or hot topics: “occupy oakland protest” “nba lockout”
Regularly recurring events: “NFL scores” “dancing with the stars” “exxon earnings”
Frequent updates: “best slr cameras” “subaru impreza reviews”
Google may determine exactly which queries require fresh content by monitoring the web and their own huge warehouse of data, including:

Search volume: Are queries for a particular term spiking (i.e. “Earthquake Los Angeles”)?
News and blog coverage: If a number of news organizations start writing about the same subject, it’s likely a hot topic.
Social media: A spike in mentions of a particular topic may indicate the topic is “trending.”

While some queries need fresh content, other search queries may be better served by older content.

Fresh is often better, but not always. (More on this later.)

Below are ten ways Google may determine the freshness of your content. Images courtesy of my favorite graphic designer, Dawn Shepard....