How do they assign relevance to tweets? Google's search algorithms are based, in large measure, on the number and quality of backlinks -- relevant links to a given page. How is Google assigning relevance to tweets? By hashmarks? By the number of followers on an account? That's obviously problematic, given the triviality of manipulating it. By the number of relevant followers? Then what determines relevance?

Is more weight given to official pronouncements from known or trusted entities? How do the entities get to be known or trusted? And if "official" sites do get preference, isn't that contrary to the whole idea of Twitter?

What about a common situation where a reporter for a publication tweets about a story that's about to break on their site or in print? How is that differentiated from an unsubstantiated rumor that some celebrity has died? It's not Google's place to be judging the truth value of tweets or posts, but I worry (as often) that this will only accelerate a race to the bottom.

And one more: Tweets are 140 characters long. Google snippets are 156. By presenting tweets on SERPs, Google is preempting one possible means for Twitter to monetize: ads. Why click through to a Twitter page when you get all you need on Google's?

Mary Travers was by then well past her ingenue years and well into motherhood and later, grandmotherhood. She relished it. It was easy to see the dynamic of the group; the things that made Peter Paul & Mary work so well, the things about each of them that made the others crazy, and the ways that they adapted to each other as life progressed.

But what was also plain about them was the depth of their commitment to each other and their causes.

Dan Hoffman, CEO of hosted VoIP provider M5 Networks, very intelligently points out that Silver Lake is also invested in Avaya (telecom equipment), and IPC (trading systems). Think those could be strategic partners for Skype? Me too.

I'd add to that roster NXP (chips for set-top boxes and mobile phones), Avago (chips for wired infrastructure and computer peripherals), NetScout network management, and Sabre Holdings (Travelocity). I can think of one or two pieces of synergy there, too.

I suspect Silver Lake's board meetings are going to be very interesting places for the next five years.

I'm certain that I forgot to ask "June of what year?"

It's a dangerous and possibly self-deluding conclusion for any content provider. Remember: you -- the content provider -- are not the search engines' market. You are, in fact, the product that they're selling.

Bing is not innovating in search, as far as anyone can tell. It gives some very different results than Google; in many cases, it presents much deeper results than Google's while missing other stuff.

Where Bing (and Yahoo) are innovating are in user experience. The goal of all these search engines is to give their users as much information as possible without their leaving the SERP. You want them to click on your URL to see your content and ads. But the search engines would just as soon that their page be the final word. That's why Google is relying less on Description tags and more on page scrapes and microformats for its snippets. It's why Bing has page excerpts pop up next to the URLs on the SERPs.

Bing has looked at the heat maps of what people look at in SERPs and is innovating around that upper left quadrant of the window. Google is making more options more easily available to searchers. But what kind of business model would your site have if it only existed to send people away? Right: none. The search engines are ever more in the business of helping people stick around, showing your information on their pages, and building environments where they let people leave only if they really want to -- but would rather have them stick around, thanks.

The technological Onanism of this aside, it's just a dumb observation. The idea of a search engine isn't to provide the most results. It's to provide the most relevant results. Maybe those "missing" 33,000 results weren't especially interesting; it's hard to imagine that 100,000 results on anything, let alone a blogger, would be worth investigating. (And I mean, really -- who keeps track of the number of results for their own name?)

Does this have anything to do with Google's "Caffeine" update (about which I'll write more shortly)? Possibly, but unlikely; Caffeine seems to be about speed and resources, not index size.

Q: What does it mean for a press release to be "search engine ready"?

Search engines put a premium on relevance, so the press release services work (to varying degrees) to make the release as relevant to the release's subject as possible. That means using the targeted keyword repeatedly, and linking to the site being promoted with keyword-y anchor text.

It sounds simple. It isn't. First of all, press releases are usually written with more care than United Nations resolutions. They're the result of endless rounds of writing, re-writing, negotiating and re-negotiatiating -- and it's worse if there's more than one company involved. By the time a press release gets to a distribution service, the competing interests have been balanced like a Wallenda. The distribution service isn't going to have any leeway to change words just for SEO purposes. The best they can do is stick a bunch of links onto the most promising text.

That's a shame, because most releases have been so acutely lawyered that they don't use words that most constituencies would want to search for. Press releases, of course, have multiple constituencies -- the media, the public, investors, competitors, government agencies, suppliers, consumers, the closely interested, the casually interested, and now search engines. They frequently will use different terminology to discuss the same thing; that's poison for SEO, which is most effective when the copy uses language that people are actually searching for.

For all of those issues, distribution services are a fine way for a site to to gain authority by building backlinks. Unless it is hopelessly ham-handed, a release about the latest frammistat from XYZ Corp. will inevitably use the words "frammistat" and "XYZ Corp." repeatedly enough to appear relevant for those terms in search engines. By including a few links back to the XYZ Corp. Web site -- particularly using the word "frammistat" as the anchor text (and, even better, linking to the frammistat landing page on XYZCorp.com) -- the release distribution service has cast a "vote" for the XYZ site. The more votes for a site on any given search term, the more relevant the search engines see that site as being, and position on search results pages go up.

But wait -- it gets better. Many web sites republish press releases put out by the distribution services. So if publication sites that search engines regard highly take the bait -- sites like Forbes.com, CNNMoney.com, whatever -- now *they* are linking to the XYZ Corp. Web page. The technical SEO term for this is "jackpot."

Q: How do people go wrong making documents SEO-ready?

Over-optimizing. It's true that repetition is your friend when you're writing copy that you want to be especially SEO friendly. But even though repetition is your friend, it's possible to overdo it. Repetition is your friend, but keep in mind that search engines understand that the Web is for people and not machines, and if you insist too hard that repetition is your friend you will write copy that no one will read -- and although repetition is your friend, search engines will understand that they are being pandered to. And repetition will no longer be your friend. Neither will anyone else.

Q: Does this work?

As noted earlier, it's very effective and it's an excellent way to start building a good backlink profile. But like anything that works, it's possible to overdo it to the point that search engine algorithms catch on and start devaluing those links. If the only sites that are linking back to you are news distribution sites, you need to rethink the way you're addressing the public. For one thing, if your only backlinks are from distribution services, it's a good indication that no one cares about the news you're putting out and search engines will understand that. At their core, press releases are a not-especially-pernicious form of paid links, which search engines -- Google in particular -- rail against. Like anything that can give a sugary rush, press releases should be a delicious part of a well-balanced SEO breakfast -- not the whole thing.

Q: Why are backlinks important to search?

Backlinks are important because Google sees them as votes of relevance. If one page has 1,000 backlinks from relevant pages and another page has 10,000 backlinks from relevant pages, Google sees the second page as being more relevant for a particular search term -- and will place it higher on the SERP (search engine result page) for that search.

Counting backlinks and judging their relevance is what Google's revolutionary PageRank algorithm is all about. But it's important to remember that PageRank is only one of 200 or 250 "signals" that Google uses to rank pages.

And it's also important to remember that only Google has ever said anything about how it ranks pages. Yahoo and Microsoft have never said how they build their SERPs. It may be some PageRank knockoff, or time-based randomization, or chicken entrails, or 5 million hamsters running on 5 million hamster wheels with roulette numbers randomly attached to them.

To searchers and readers, all that matters is that they get highly relevant results quickly. If Microsoft ever decides to reveal anything about how they rank the Web, you could expect SEOs to start optimizing more for Bing, which will increase the utility of Bing's index, which will draw more users, which will increase the advertising value of Bing's index.

A white paper from Microsoft didn't provide much detail about Bing's algorithm, but was forthcoming about why and how its user interface got that way. Interesting stuff.

But what's even more important is that Bing (like Google) is presenting ever more of a web site's content before users go to a web site. If you're a site owner who tries to monetize eyeballs, you should start getting the message that you're less and less in control of the presentation of your information. That's not a good thing.

Rob interviewed me the other day about SEO, and it came out pretty well, although I was talking a little faster than he could type. Click through for the whole deal, but here are a couple of pullquotes:

Ranking in the SERP (Search Results Page) is meaningless. Anyone can get to the first page for something. What I always watch for is traffic, and changes in traffic. I care about the conversion of what happens once someone hits my page…clicking the buy button or the ad. I can rank #1 on a search of “cellphone”…but if they come to my page and don’t convert, all I’ve done is cost my company money. If I can generate meaningful traffic to my reader, to my customer…that’s the win.

SEO isn’t an event, it’s a process... Too often, employers aren’t emotionally equipped to understand what SEO really is — it’s a quality process… that involves the entire company. When Toyota decided they were going to out-quality Detroit, they didn’t hire a quality guy and stick him in a cube. They hired someone who would come in and look at the operations of the entire company and build a process that baked quality in. And the best companies that do SEO, bake SEO in.

The study found that:

• The tools seen as most effective for generating conversions were SEO (48 percent) email and e-newsletter marketing (46 percent), and pay-per-click/search marketing (32 percent).
• In the coming six months, respondents expect that ad networks will see the biggest declines in allocation of marketing spend; viral marketing and SEO will likely see the biggest increases. Behavioral Targeting is the category that is least likely to see any changes in spend.

And one more encouraging thing: the companies Forbes surveys understood that the important thing about search isn't traffic (37 percent) or SERP position (34 percent.) It's conversions: 70 percent.

Organic search = money. Remember that.

As a consumer, I like free. As a content pro, I know that "free" has cost many of my friends their jobs -- and that "free" would not have produced journalistic accounts of this meeting. I'm uncomfortable when industry groups convene in private to discuss whether and how to charge for their products. (Imagine if Exxon, Texaco, and Chevron had a meeting where pricing strategy was discussed.) That's why there were lawyers there.

But on balance, I guess I'm rooting for them. Reliable, curated information has a commercial value. I'm just not sure I trust them to set the right price on that value.

Sprint has had six-month exclusives with Palm smartphones since the first Treo, so a post-exclusive deal is surprising only if you haven't been paying attention. But usually, Palm's next move is to ship an unlocked GSM phone for the world market, with Verizon coming a few months after that. But now, AT&T has its own very nice smartphone -- the iPhone -- not to mention a bunch of Blackberries that people like. And T-Mobile is doing very well with the Android G1 and Sidekick lines, thanks very much, with more Android phones imminent. So the two U.S. GSM players don't care so much about the Palm Pre. Verizon, on the other hand, could use some sex in its handset lineup.

But what's big trouble here for Palm is that the Pre now doesn't have a GSM outlet in the U.S. There's no question that there will be a Pre for the world; GSM is far and away the most popular mobile technology globally. But don't count on a U.S. cellco distributor for it anytime soon, which means it will be wicked expensive because there won't be any subsidized sales. For the U.S. market, the Verizon deal shows Palm's weakness, not its strengths.

Polling has found Limbaugh, a self-described prescription-drug addict who sees America from a private jet, to be nearly as unpopular as Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who damned America in the way that Limbaugh has now damned the nation’s newly elected leader. But Republicans just can’t quit him. So even poor Michael Steele, the nominal head of the Republican Party who dared to criticize him, had to grovel and crawl back to the feet of Limbaugh.

Where Democrats have gotten smarter is in their ability to push the whacko fringe off-stage when they start getting too much attention. That's going to be a problem with Limbaugh, whose livelihood and lifeblood is tied into getting as big an audience is possible. Rev. Wright will be able to feed his family if he doesn't have a mass audience; not so Limbaugh. That will make Rush exceptionally difficult to shut up, even if he were willing to in the name of party unity. Which he isn't.

Which is a pity. What this country needs is principled dialog and problem-solving, not demagoguery. The more Limbaugh drives the Republican agenda and dialog, the less likely bipartisanship becomes, which weakens the nation at a time when it requires the best effort from all available smart people.

Frankly, ladies and gentlemen, I expect you not only to master music; I expect you to save the planet. If there is a future wave of wellness on this planet, of harmony, of peace, of an end to war, of mutual understanding, of equality, of fairness, I don’t expect it will come from a government, a military force or a corporation. I no longer even expect it to come from the religions of the world, which together seem to have brought us as much war as they have peace. If there is a future of peace for humankind... I expect it will come from the artists, because that’s what we do..."

This article from Technology Review gives a neat overview of portable flat-screen technology, and why it's so hard to combine both flex and touch. First applications will be, unsurprisingly, military. God only knows how much it'll cost.