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In a move that seems destined to invite tension with major American search engines, a European Commission advisory body has suggested that those companies delete data collected about their users after six months--a far cry from what most companies currently do.

The recommendation arrived in a 29-page "opinion" (PDF) published Friday by a European Commission body known as the Article 29 Working Party. Backed by privacy groups, it has been pressuring Internet companies on the search data front for months. The report focused on advertising-supported search engines, as opposed to search functions embedded in Web sites.

The Working Party's suggestions don't officially have the force of law yet, but they are expected to be adopted by the EC. The EC already adopted a broader set of data protection laws a decade ago, but this report was meant to address specifically how search engines, including those headquartered outside its borders, fit into that setup.

Privacy in search engines is critical because "an individual's search history contains a footprint of that person's interests, relations, and intentions," which can then be mined by businesses and national security operatives alike, the working party wrote.

The Working Party covered a broad swath of issues, saying it expects search engines, among other things, to:

•  Use personal data--ranging from search query histories to IP addresses and unique cookie identifiers--only for "legitimate purposes"
•  Destroy and anonymize that data when it's no longer legitimately useful
•  Inform users about data collection and storage practices
•  Set cookies to have a lifetime "no longer than demonstrably necessary"
•  Dissociate a user's IP address or other identifier from his or her stored search queries
•  Allow users to see whatever "personal data" is being stored about them, whether it be their past search queries or other data "revealing their behavior or origin"
•  Respect Web site operators' desires to opt out of having their properties crawled, indexed, and cached through use of mechanisms like the robots.txt file or the Noindex/NoArchive tags
•  Do more to prevent personally identifiable information--such as Social Security numbers, credit card numbers, telephone numbers, and e-mail addresses--from creeping into search results

Search engines, for their part, have said they need to keep logs of a certain amount of user information in order to improve the quality of search results, keep their services secure from attacks, tailor advertising to their audiences, and help law enforcement officials investigate crimes. But the Working Party cast doubt on several of those reasons, saying they aren't well-defined enough to justify vast data collection.

Electronic Privacy Information Center Director Marc Rotenberg deemed the working party's findings "a big deal." They're potentially significant for widely used American search engines with European presences on at least a couple of levels.

First, the data retention period suggested by the European group is far shorter than that adopted in privacy policy updates by the big five American search engines--Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, and Ask.com--last summer. To be sure, the six-month limit isn't set in stone, as the Working Party says it is willing to entertain pleas that a longer period "is strictly necessary for the service." Still, the recommendations may put some search engine providers in a tough spot.

After all, a CNET News.com survey last year suggested Ask.com made the most privacy-protective changes, deleting data about its users within hours. AOL said it deleted data after 13 months, Microsoft said it deleted data after 18 months. In an arguably less privacy-protective step, Yahoo and Google said they "partially anonymized" data after 13 and 18 months, respectively. Many of those providers said they held onto search queries indefinitely.

Second, the EC report declared that IP addresses should be considered personally identifiable information whose storage must be curbed. That proclamation clashes with what Google has long argued--that because the IP addresses Internet subscribers are assigned can change frequently, they can't necessarily be matched up to a particular person, especially by a service like Google that doesn't hand them out (an Internet service provider, the company admits, may present a different situation).

Google, for its part, responded to the Working Party's report with a defense of its existing practices. Without directly referencing the working party, Global Privacy Counsel Peter Fleischer lamented that the value of personal data in improving consumers' Web surfing experiences "is unfortunately sometimes lacking in discussions about online privacy."

Yahoo and Microsoft representatives said they were committed to promoting user privacy and still reviewing the European Commission's report.

I was all ready to highlight what seemed like a very insightful comment on this blog by a co-founder of the advertising company CultureFish Media on the merits of Baidu, China's leading search engine. But then I remembered Rick at CNET Asia had asked readers for reasons to love Baidu. Lo and behold, the same comment appeared there under the name of a different CultureFish exec (and prominent blogger).

This wouldn't bother me at all, except that the comment includes personal reflection, such as this passage that appears verbatim in both posts: "Maybe I will get more bullish on Google when they get around to assigning someone to answer my phone calls or when their operator tells me that their marketing department does not have a phone number." A quick Google search didn't turn up any more copies of the same comment, but what's the deal guys?

The comment first appeared under Lonnie B. Hodge's name on Rick's Little Red Blog. Hodge is CEO of CultureFish and The Professor at Onemanbandwidth, a long-running China media blog. There, Hodge has criticized an article that painted Baidu inaccurately as an "upstart" engine and may have been inaccurate in its portrayal of Baidu's music search. (Mea culpa: By reporting on articles with similar material, I may have perpetuated inaccurate numbers, if they are indeed inaccurate.)

On Sinobyte the comment appeared under the name of David DeGeest, one of Hodge's coworkers. The comment was different only in that it fixed a few typos and was prefaced with a good rebuke of a xenophobic comment that had appeared above and managed to misspell "develop" while saying "men from the east" aren't that smart.

Whoever wrote the comment, its laundry list of reasons users and especially advertisers might like Baidu is informative. I just wish credit had been given to whoever was the original author. (Also there's a "next week" below that doesn't work on the second posting since it was more than a week after the first.) Here's the list:

1. They now devote more than 10% of revenue to R&D.
2. They are innovating at a terrific rate: They have instant messaging in the works, the Answer service similar to Naver/Yahoo, a developing financial section similar to Google, some new social media acquisitions coming that will modernize them and likely steal a load of Tencent's traffic.
3. They have advertising solutions that can be tailored--as opposed to Google cookie-cutter stuff- for any biz.
4. They have a 30% no-count rate for click-throughs on ads (Google is 10%) to fight click fraud.
5. They have opened their API to new analytics companies (they will formally announce a partnership with Omniture next week)..
6. Their bulletin board system just surpassed the 200,000,000 post mark.
7. They dominate mp3 download searches and are leveraging that into BRANDED deals with music companies and artists. IF you took away ALL their mp3 searches that everyone ******* about, you'd only take less than 8% of their market share...
8. They are not the Yuppie stuffed shirts running Google. I have access to decision makers at Baidu and don't have to wade through layers of people who think they are too important deal with me....
9. They are open to new ideas: our company now has a strategic partnership with PRNewswire and are co-investigating a tool with Baidu that will change the face of online news releases....

After all, I find this to be a pretty persuasive list, though I won't likely switch to Baidu anytime soon, while they're still censoring large portions of search results, even though I realize that's not a top concern of many Chinese users. I had e-mailed CultureFish's public address hoping to get in touch with DeGeest to clarify some information before I discovered the repetition, by the way. I'd still be curious to find out about some sources, especially for the music downloading issue that I've written about.

Are you looking for that edge online? Something that your competitors don't have? Forget wasting all your energy on a great design and developing superior content--it's not what you know, but who you work with.

Sooner or later, most of us in the industry get an e-mail, either passed on by someone we know, through our own e-mail, or possibly through one of our own sites that offers to help us achieve success online. Most of these are fairly nondescript and rather generic.

Then the other day, I had one passed on to me that was more than just a couple of lines of loose promises. This one proclaimed: "I specialize in getting sites listed at the top of Google in organic listings."

And it went on, even specifying that, "After the first month, it is only $300 month." And apparently, "That's all there is to it."

OK, so this one actually perked my curiosity. I couldn't help but go check out the site.

I looked around for a bit and was almost ready to just mosey on by when, midway down on one page, it caught my eye, the claim of all claims, the one that I had heard rumors about, but until this day, had never actually come across in the wild: special relationships.

Could my eyes have deceived me? No, there it was, in the fine HTML print: "We have special relationships with the search engines."

OK, by now you must be on edge as to the power that these special relationships could possibly muster. And there, like a beacon in the night, "...indexed within 2 weeks..."

Wow. So 1990s.

For those of us in the industry, this brings both a chuckle and a sad realization that there are still people out there who will play into the desires and fears of Web site owners, offering some magical potion that will be their ticket to success.

OK, this one was particularly sad and amusing because of the two-week window. I mean, talk about working some miracles! Let's face it--it's 2008--in this day, you would almost have to work to not have a site (or even a fair amount of a site) be indexed within two weeks.

Sadly, this is one of those things that gives search engine optimization a bad name. Just because someone claims to perform SEO, doesn't mean that they can, nor should that then be a negative reflection on the industry.

Certainly there are those who, after working so long in the industry, have established connections with those at the search engines, as peers do in nearly every industry. This does not equate to special powers to get the engines to overlook offenses or to serve up rankings based on these relationships. And if it did, I have to imagine that it would cost a bit more than $300 a month.

For anyone who doubts this, Google itself has stated its view on the matter.

As for the provider of the services that I found so amusing, well, with several pages with identical title tags, I have to question their expertise in SEO. As for their relationship with Google, it appears that only their home page has any PageRank, and seeing that it is a PR1, they might want to renegotiate their special relationship as they are clearly getting the short end of the stick.

I'd meant to note this earlier, but SEO Hong Kong posted a summary of some findings when Chinese Internet users were tested comparing China's leading search engine, Baidu, with the newer Google.cn.

In a test conducted with Chinese subjects, eye scanning on Google.cn was more focused in the upper left hand corner compared to Baidu despite the fact that both search engines have nearly identical page layouts. Baidu users also scrolled down the page more than the Google users, but clicked on less sponsored listings--less than 1 percent compared to 3 percent for Google. ...

On Baidu, less than 45 percent of all clicks took place in the first 3 organic listings. This was much less focused than Google.cn where over 70 percent of all clicks took place on the top 2 organic results alone. Baidu pages also had significantly longer reading times--an average of 55 seconds--compared to 30 seconds on Google.cn.

The blog says the test was conducted by Enquiro. This result would seem to suggest that Google, like when it's compared to other English search engines such as Yahoo, seems to get users to what they want more quickly. I'd caution, however, that there may be a complication in that the test subjects may have been more familiar with the Baidu layout and were thus more interested in culling more information from familiar locations on the page. Both sites have exceedingly clean front pages.

(Credit: Google/Sinobyte)

I thought I'd give the two a comparative whirl with a simple search for something a Chinese user wouldn't necessarily need to search for: what is the exact date of the Spring Festival/Chinese New Year in the Gregorian calendar. The result? Google wins, giving me the date, as well as an icon indicating this is the coming year of the rat. It also links to a board for Spring Festival greetings...

(Credit: Baidu/Sinobyte)

Baidu also links to its festival page, which gives us a history of the holiday, but it's significantly harder to find the most simple fact you might be looking for: the exact date. On the other hand, Baidu's page gives you a nice history (translated) of the holiday.

Google is also rumored to be experimenting with a more, say, cluttered home page for the Chinese market, along the lines of the leading Chinese search engine Sohu.com. I'd love to see comparisons of user experience including Sohu's Yahoo-esque portal. Yahoo itself, so far, is something of an also-ran, with a live beta online. Why it advertises that it's a beta and doesn't just launch with continual improvements the way Google has is beyond me.

With the recent admission by Matt Cutts to Stephan Spencer that Google is using Adobe Systems' Search Engine SDK technology, a new set of optimization opportunities opened up.

That fairly definite confirmation of how Google reads text within Flash files makes it possible to create Flash .swf files with some level of search engine optimization.

"It used to be the case that we had our own, home-brew code to pull the text out of Flash, but I think that we have moved to the Search Engine SDK tool that Adobe Macromedia offers," Cutts said. "So my hunch is that most of the search engines will standardize on using that Search Engine SDK tool to pull out the text."

This has long been the suspicion of Flash developers and SEO professionals concerned with .swf files, but to my knowledge, this is the most direct and clear confirmation to date. The implication is simple but important: if Web developers--and specifically Flash developers--have the ability to test .swf files during development for textual SEO parameters, then Flash files can be designed to offer specific text to search engines.

While the concept is simple, the practice may not be. Flash is a complicated multimedia program with tremendous flexibility and many layers of content. Also, parent Flash .swf files can load secondary, child .swf files ad nuaseum, and this is a very popular, load time-friendly technique. The path between viable textual content and the "front" of a given Flash presentation can be very intricate.

There have been tests measuring what sort of text can be discovered by the Search Engine SDK program, much of it dealing with where in a Flash movie it resides, when the text crosses the stage, and what sort of text is most likely to be read. While there may never be absolute rules for optimizing text within a Flash file, now that it is known with fair certainty how Google reads Flash text, more testing is in order.

Well-designed Flash content can be a fantastic user experience. Google may not be pursuing this content, but it certainly has opened the door to the possibility. The ball is in Adobe's court to continue to develop and improve the SDK tool, but this is a great opportunity for Flash designers interested in SEO or for search engine optimizers interested in Flash.

Despite the shortcomings of the current Search Engine SDK software, (it would be nice to see an update, Adobe!), it is quite likely that SEO standards can be developed for dealing with Flash text so that Flash files can "tell" search engines about their content with more clarity.

Link building is one of those challenging subjects that carries a lot of technical undertones. It's a subject that often requires some explanation, depending on the audience, as to why it is so important to begin with.

The importance of building links to a site is something that SEO (search engine optimization) practitioners understand all too well. It's not just a quantity thing, but a qualitative measure. Links aren't just a conduit for traffic; they serve as an important signal to search engines. Of course, it is the significance and understanding of this signaling that often steers the explanation of link building into a much more technical discussion.

Just last week I was in New York for an on-site training with the Institute for International Research. IIR is a great organization to work with and very interesting from an SEO perspective. IIR puts on large-scale events on a wide array of topics and an even wider array of industries, like the upcoming conference that search engine optimization expert Stephan Spencer will be speaking at called The Conference On Marketing.

So I found myself explaining link building to an audience that was nearly as diverse as their topics...varying responsibilities, positions, and technical expertise. This meant discussing the importance of quality versus quantity--that links from pages and sites that are authoritative within their topical area, with thematically relevant anchor text, hopefully from pages with lower numbers of outbound links, and higher PageRank may carry more value than other links. Of course, all of this is on a relative scale, though the ideal is finding links that score high on all these, and other, signals.

On the flight back, as exhaustion was starting to settle in, I found myself trying to come up with some image that could encapsulate these concepts of link building. One of the great things about being in a state of exhaustion is that simple visuals often come to mind over more complex ones. At some point, my mind settled in on the image of a mobile...as in the sculptures you hang in the air, based on counterbalanced components. Some of these feature pieces that are larger, counterbalanced by a pair of smaller ones, and so on.

I thought this image was appropriate, how the largest piece represented that most ideal, highest-quality link. Every site has a link profile, composed of all the links coming into it. Some are highly relevant, some highly irrelevant. Some come from authoritative domains, others not so much. We really, as do search engines, expect to find a diverse mix of links, many of which we have no control over. But while those ideal links may take more effort to achieve, they often carry considerably more weight, and value, than a handful of low-quality links.

Link quality illustrated as a mobile sculpture.

It's important, when link building, to remember that most links have value and we must find balance--spend too much time just looking for ideal links, and your link profile will remain stunted, but just building links for links' sake will leave you out of balance, with links that convey no real value, off-topic from spammy sites.

Link building, like much of SEO, is about balance.

Ticked off that the United States gave the Dalai Lama the prestigious Congressional Gold Medal this week, China may be taking out its aggression by "hijacking" American search engines.

There's speculation that the Dalai Lama's recent award from President Bush (their meeting, pictured above) has prompted Net users in China to be rerouted from U.S. search sites to Baidu.

(Credit: White House)

Over at Search Engine Land, Danny Sullivan reports that numerous users trying to access Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft search engines from within China or using Chinese Internet service providers are being redirected to Chinese-owned search engine Baidu.

Sullivan says it's not exactly clear how that process is working, but he cites a news report from 2002 that indicates this sort of thing has happened in China before. At the time, a Baidu official denied having any part in the rerouting.

So is the Chinese government to blame? After all, its extensive attempts at censoring what its citizens view on the Internet have been well-documented.

It's worth noting, however, that the reported redirects may not have any direct link to the Dalai Lama events. The Associated Press reported earlier this week that Beijing has been ramping up its filtering of political sites in an attempt to stifle political dissent leading up to the Communist Party Congress, a meeting in which leaders are selected to serve under the president for the next five years.

These days, there are several ways to get a customized or internal search engine free of charge. Google's Custom Search Engine (CSE) and Yahoo's Search Builder lead the way, and their products are fairly easy to implement. After the Big Two, there are several services trying to make their mark, but one that that stands out is the Swicki from Eurekster.

A Swicki is a combination search portal and widget that can be customized on any topic or topics either within a Web site, group of Web sites, or the Web at large. The end product is a custom search experience returning relevant, targeted results as well as revenue opportunity (yes, you can monetize your visitors!) for blog and Web site publishers.

A Swicki is created in a fairly simple, four-step process. And, they can be shared, so if creating one seems like too much of a hassle, there are literally thousands to simply grab for free from Eurekster.com. These neat little customizable search engines look nice on a Web site or blog and they pull information from a combination of sources, including Blinkx's video feed.

But there's more to a Swicki than that, especially from an SEO perspective. First of all, the company has its own search engine, spidering the Web and producing its own results--and, it works very well. Secondly, the social search widget included in the Swicki features a customizable tag cloud that adds popular search terms automatically to the Web page upon which it is embedded, making it easy for the Swicki user to reflect popular keywords or build their brand.

But what's unique is that the Swicki search results ranking is reflective of every previous keyword search, click, vote and user behavior within each customized Swicki, lending a publisher-guided and community-powered slant to the results. While this might not be ideal for general search, it can really improve upon the search experience when used within the context of a niche or topic of interest.

Last year, The New York Times published an article called "This Boring Headline Is Written for Google," which focused on the effect search engines are having on journalistic writing. The primary focus was on the negative impact of "writing for machines" and the corresponding loss of creativity such an endeavor entails.

What always amazes me is the fear and anger that many writers express about writing with search engines in mind. Just in using the phrase "writing for machines" they create among themselves a rather Orwellian hysteria, but it is only just that: hysterics. Why? Because it simply isn't true, symbolically or factually. Search engines--and especially Google--are designed to examine text published on the Internet and simply return accurate results when a human user plugs in words on the other end. To that end, there is no writing for machines, there is only writing for other human beings.

What has been affected is twofold. First, the writer must want to be found, or at least must be paid, in part, to be found. Most newspapers, which make money in part from online advertising, encourage this. Second, in response to this need, the accuracy of writing and the logistics of words must be taken into consideration more than in the past. These attributes aren't for the proverbial "machine," however, but specifically for the end user, the searcher.

Thus, creativity is not challenged at all. Rather, the creativity simply needs to shift with the new paradigm. Let's take writing a news story headline as an example. One headline in a recent edition of The New York Times is "Tangoing Cheek to Cheek for 3 Minutes in the Park." The story is about dancers hooking up in Central Park to tango and otherwise skip and hop together. The title above is fun and creative. It may not be fully optimized for search engines, but in fact, it's not far off.

What could be done to improve this headline for search engine users without obliterating its creative edge? It's a matter of including focused, common-sense wording without replacing colorfulness or colloquialisms. The term "cheek to cheek" is fun and describes dancing in a way that might not reflect how a user would employ a search engine. But that doesn't mean it has to go away. The other half of the headline, "for 3 minutes" is also colorful, but has less to do with the story. Little of the article focuses on the length of the dances, but instead the positive attributes of the dancing that goes on among the middle-aged in Central Park. Calling Central Park "the Park" adds ambiguity for humans and spiders alike, so call it "Central Park" instead.

A search-friendly headline can often incorporate search-savvy words within a creative headline by halving the headline into two distinct yet complementary parts. For example, our headline here could become "Dancing the Tango in Central Park, Cheek to Cheek." What have we lost? The time reference, which isn't core to the story anyway. What have we gained? Descriptive and focused search terms in the form of "Central Park" and "dancing" and "tango" (which is more popular with searchers than "tangoing"). And, I would argue, we have not lost any of the creativity or local color of the original headline.

This is just one example, but the core philosophy here is for journalists to let go of their search engine "machine" fears and simply embrace accuracy; writing search-friendly content is not to consider "the machine," but rather to consider the same humans they otherwise write for. Reaching them is the only difference, and through search engines, writers have both a larger and more focused audience to reach. Why on earth do they complain? Hey journalists, these search engines are actually good for you!