Prognostications are the last can of chicken noodle soup in every writer’s cupboard, and we have a bowl of them for you.

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Editor’s Note: Ah, the New Year. And with it, fresh wind. Thanks, Dave. Think you know which way the wind is blowing this year? Let us know in the comment section, and don’t be afraid of being, well, windy.

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So it’s 2008 in WebProNews land, where the weather today matches Tom Brady’s jersey number (that’s a 12 for you non-sports fans.) The start of the year represents a good time to guess what might happen over the course of the year.As rough as webmasters thought they had it with Google over paid links in 2007, we think Google will play rougher in 2008. Their approved acquisition of DoubleClick in the US needs only similar approval from the European Union to be completed.

When that happens, and we think it will, imagine Google making the same PageRank adjustments to sites that display graphical ads to what they deem as low-quality destinations. Webmasters will long for the days when it was just text links getting this treatment.

Here is something we think won’t happen - Yahoo isn’t going anywhere. Not to Microsoft. Not to Google. Not to Martin Sorrell and WPP, or anyone else. Being second in search market share and having a display ad business that can bring brand names to its pages may not be sexy, but it brings revenue to Yahoo.

Another thing we won’t see - Powerset launching to the public. The natural language search engine lost its CEO in November 2007. Though they offered us a peek at the site months ago, Powerset never followed through. Natural language search is hard, kids. Lots of favorable press hype can’t counter that.

Enough of the won’ts. We think we will see the first efforts of disenchanted Hollywood writers show up on the Internet as they turn to creating content they control, instead of a studio.

But don’t expect a two and a half hour summer blockbusters showing up on the web. We think a short series of 7 to 8 minute episodes with a name star participating, and sufficient financial backing to deliver high-quality production of the shows, could lead to someone becoming the first Tony Gilroy of the Internet.

We also expect Microsoft to reorg its Net brands again and shuffle people up, down, in, and out of MSN and Windows Live. The company is stuck with two brands to promote. It makes more sense for Microsoft to promote Windows Live than MSN as a name, so we think the transition to one distinct identity should happen in 2008.

Though it’s popular now, Facebook gets its comeuppance in 2008. Someone somewhere will adopt Facebook’s old model of requiring .edu email addresses for membership in a social networking site, build up some buzz, and start grabbing members before they get to Facebook.

We now predict this article will come to an end. Hey, it came true! If you have a prediction, drop it into the comments.

About the Author:
David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

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By Jason Lee Miller

The four-year experiment is over.

Webmasters can stop fretting about Google’s supplemental results – they’re not really there anymore. Google has lifted the veil between indices.

Google introduced its supplemental results in 2003, much to the chagrin of webmasters actively looking to have more of their content indexed for search. In what the company then called “a new Google experiment,” a pair of indexes were created, one for the search engine’s main results, and a second for more obscure queries.

And then four years of confusion ensued – at least for webmasters. The new index appeared to be “where Google puts the trash.”

Though Google repeatedly said that webpages placed in the supplemental index were not placed there because of some kind of penalty, webmasters quickly realized how badly their search traffic suffered.

Though not an outright penalty, voices from inside Google suggested that pages in the supplemental index often had certain things in common: few or no quality backlinks, orphaned pages, URLs with too many parameters, low PageRank, duplicate content, et cetera.

Pages in the supplemental index were not crawled as often, and not returned in the main results unless not enough results were found for a query. Thus, a new SEO focus was on how to get one’s pages out of “Google Hell” and into the main search results.

Back in July of this year, Google stopped labeling them as “supplemental results” as such a label implied that the results were inferior. The crew was in the process of overhauling the system to provide deeper and more continuous indexing with fewer restrictions and a greater ability to handle URLs with more parameters.

This was the first real signal that the supplemental index was on its last legs, as engineers noted that “the distinction between the main and the supplemental index is therefore continuing to narrow.”

Yesterday, even as forums around the net were upset by an apparent increase in the number of pages relegated to the supplemental index, Google’s Yonatan Zunger announced that “the elimination of the artificial difference between indices” was complete.

Zunger writes, “rather than searching some part of our index in more depth for obscure queries, we’re now searching the whole index for every query.

“From a user perspective, this means that you’ll be seeing more relevant documents and a much deeper slice of the web, especially for non-English queries. For webmasters, this means that good-quality pages that were less visible in our index are more likely to come up for queries.”

So that’s good news. Google will search both indexes for all queries rather than only bringing up supplemental results for difficult queries. Zunger said it took “some truly amazing technical feats,” but webmasters no doubt will feel it’s four years overdue.

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