Google’s search engine originally worked according to a simple principle: web pages were ranked according to the number of links they received from other sites, with each link weighted to reflect a site’s popularity. That principle is still part of the equation, but Google’s software has become much more complicated over the years taking into account more than 100 factors in its algorithm.

According to Wikipedia, “a search for ‘miserable failure’ or ‘failure’ on September 29, 2006 brought up the official George W. Bush biography number one on Google, Yahoo! and MSN and number two on Ask.com.

On January 25th, 2007 Google announced on its official Google Webmaster Central blog that they now have “an algorithm that minimizes the impact of many Googlebombs.” The algorithm change had an immediate effect, dropping the well-known ‘miserable failure’ link to the White House off the front page. Instead, the page contained mainly pages which discuss the miserable failure bomb.

What does this mean for online marketers? Probably not much to most- but to some of the “big guys” it means that Google now has a means to manipulate search results by hand, something which in the past they had no ability to do. It also means that if you work hard to get in the top Google results for a certain keyword or keyword phrase, that you could potentially be removed because someone decides you shouldn’t be there.

In my opinion, it’s just another step Google’s taking towards becoming the Ultimate Super Power.

Yahoo’s keyword search tool would allow anyone to type in a keyword or a keyword phrase and in a matter of seconds see exactly how many times that keyword or phrase was searched for in Yahoo / Alta Vista / Overture in the previous month. While it didn’t give net-wide results, you just needed to multiply the results by 4, since at the time it was last with us, Yahoo had a search market share of around 25%.

While clearly the source for market research for many online marketers, the results were always taken with a grain of salt. However, in my opinion there was no better alternative to quick niche market research and it will be dearly missed.

Where do you turn now? Here are some alternatives to Yahoo’s late keyword search tool:

https://adwords.google.com:443/select/KeywordToolExternal

http://www.goodkeywords.com

http://www.wordtracker.com

There’s many more out there, but finding a worthy replacement won’t be easy.