My first session today was on search engine patents; what they mean an how they relate. It was pointed out that every search engine knows that SEO’s and competitors will read these patents and so they know to disclose only what is necessary.

Here are a few pointers from the conference.

• Search Engines can see the domain’s inception date
• Like to see updated content (more than just changing the date or some links)
• If links remain after a big page update, they must be important
• Freshness of inbound links, freshness of page that inbound links are on and link history are all taken into account.

Well I’m here and all signed in. Not a whole lot of people here yet and I don’t see breakfast. But I did get a bag of materials for the conference and a free t-shirt.

… but not for long. As I’m in San Jose this week for Search Engine Strategies, I’m using a PC to keep up on work and stay connected to the world. Can one live without email?

So far my PC experience has been well. I’m on Windows 2000 and it’s an older machine but works well. Except for the battery which just seems to drain like nothing else. I have Thunderbird and Firefox installed so I’m good there. Just can’t find the Thunderbird profiles folder to copy over my backed-up email. Oh well. One thing I do really like is this keyboard. It types so nicely. They keys are soft or something.

I’m off to my first conference, Search Engine Strategies Summer 2005 in San Jose. I’ll get to learn more about search engine marketing & optimization. Should be a lot of fun. Especially the Yahoo’s Search Night Off where we get to go to Paramount’s Great America and Google’s party; GoogleDance. I’ll be learning a lot and having some fun. I’ll try and post throughout the week too.