Dan Taylor

Founder & Editor
Dan Taylor is the founder and editor of International Search Insights (ISI), the publication behind ReadIsi, and a Partner and Head of Innovation (Search & AI) at SALT.agency. He has worked in search for more than a decade, in-house and agency-side, and is regarded as one of the West’s leading voices on search engines beyond Google, including Yandex, Baidu, Naver and Cốc Cốc. On ReadIsi, Dan covers the engines and AI answer platforms that English-language coverage tends to miss: Baidu and ERNIE, Yandex and Alice AI, Naver, Cốc Cốc, Shenma, Sogou, WeChat and Weibo search, plus DeepSeek and Alibaba’s Qwen. He also keeps dated records of documented changes, such as the Yandex, Baidu and Naver algorithm update histories and the DeepSeek, ERNIE and Qwen model update histories. His approach is to take learnings from global search engines and apply logic with a high evidence threshold. A claim needs a source, patterns seen in one market are treated as a hypothesis until they are checked in another, and where the evidence is thin he says so. For brands, that means advice built on what can be shown, with measurement that separates being cited from being chosen. Dan is credited with coining the term “edge SEO” and won the inaugural TechSEO Boost research competition in 2018 for his work on CDN and edge changes for SEO. In 2026 he was credited with coining “Infinite Tail” to describe how keyword research is changing with AI search. He is the author of AI Search Marketing For The Travel Sector, writes for Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land and Travel Marketing Guy, and has advised technology, SaaS, travel and enterprise ecommerce brands, including Cloudflare, GitLab and Airbnb. He has given multiple talks and panels at the International Search Summit in Barcelona, and has also spoken at Optimization Moscow, brightonSEO, Google Search Central Live Deep Dive Asia in Bangkok, Athens SEO and the Asia SEO Virtual Summit 2026, where his talk looked at how Baidu, Naver, DeepSeek, Tencent, Cốc Cốc and Yandex built their own AI answers.

Naver AI Briefing Favours Why/How Queries — Commercial Recommend Keywords Still Struggle

Korea SEOs keep asking the wrong first question about Naver AI Briefing. It is not “how do I write better content so the box appears?” It is “does this query type even trigger Briefing?” A practical breakdown from SEO Korea ...

Chrome Added Brave Search — Brave Is Using It to Sell Brave Browser

Google quietly put Brave Search on Chrome’s list of available search engines. Brave, being Brave, immediately used that foothold to advertise Brave Browser back at Chrome users. Search Engine Watch’s 15 September 2026 report (Venkat) documents a sticky “Get Brave ...

Baidu's visibility on Sistrix

Baidu’s Authority Provenance Trial Rewrites the Old News-Source Playbook for AI Search

Baidu is quietly trying to reinvent “新闻源” for a world where the primary consumer of your article may be a model, not a human scroller. Chinese coverage dated 22 September 2026 — including 大众财经网’s summary — says the Search Resource ...

baidu ai search

Baidu Opens Search Widgets: Stop Submitting Pages, Start Submitting Skills

Baidu’s Search Resource Platform just tried to change what “webmaster submission” means. Alongside the better-known AI Traffic Analysis rollout, the platform’s 15 September 2026 announcement opened 搜索小工具 (Search Widgets / mini-tools): a path for verified sites to submit interactive, demonstrable ...

Beyond the Western Bubble: International Search News is Now International Search Insights (ISI)

Seven years ago, the international search landscape looked radically different, yet one reality remained obvious: the industry was dangerously obsessed with Google and Bing, leaving massive blind spots across global markets. That realization sparked the launch of Russian Search News, ...

Yahoo’s CEO: Micropayments Will Never Pay Publishers — Scout Keeps the Blue Links

Yahoo is making an oddly old-fashioned argument in the middle of the AI-answer gold rush: keep the blue links, and stop pretending micropayments will save publishers. At HumanX in Amsterdam on 23 September 2026, CEO Jim Lanzone told the room ...

Yandex Trains AliceAI-Foundation-80B From Scratch — and Open-Sources the Base

Yandex just drew a brighter line under its Alice AI stack: the company has released AliceAI-Foundation-80B-A3B-Base — an 80-billion-parameter Mixture-of-Experts base model with about 3B active parameters per token — trained entirely from scratch at Yandex and published under Apache ...

Shenma for Business in 2026: A Practical Guide to Indexing, Ads and Mobile SEO

If your China brief still says “do Baidu and call it done,” you are leaving an Alibaba-shaped hole in the plan. Shenma (神马搜索) is the mobile-first search engine born from the 2014 UCWeb–Alibaba joint venture, still wired into UC Browser ...

Ecosia Ships a Linux Browser as Europe’s Sovereignty Pitch Hits Desktops

Ecosia’s sovereignty pitch just grew a desktop package managers can install. On 4 September 2026 The Register reported that the Berlin-based tree-planting search company shipped a Linux build of its Chromium-based browser, available via Ubuntu’s App Center, the Snap Store ...

Wolfram on Pure Math in the Age of AI: Questions Still Beat Proof Farms

Stephen Wolfram’s 28 September 2026 essay on pure mathematics in the age of AI is long, opinionated and unusually useful for people who sell “AI search” for a living. The through-line: headlines about AIs solving named math problems keep misunderstanding ...