Highlights from the SEW Blog: Sept. 25, 2006

By Chris Sherman , September 25, 2006

If you're not familiar with our blog, click on any of the links below, or visit the blog's home page at http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/.

From The SEW Blog...

• Google Loses Appeal On Posting Belgian Ruling
  Google loses appeal on posting court ruling from Reuters covers Google losing an appeal that it should not be required to post the ruling of a Belgian court over a copyright infringement lawsuit on its Belgian web search and news sites. It now will be fined 500,000 euros per day for each day it fails to comply. Google has a further appeal on the entire case, including posting the ruling, that will be heard in November. My past article Google's Belgium Fight: Show Me The Money, Not The Opt-Out, Say Publishers has more about that and the entire case....


• BusinessWeek's Good Look At Click Fraud
  Via Micropersuasion, Click Fraud is a BusinessWeek cover story on, well, click fraud. What's new from stories we've already read and read and read about click fraud before? Lots, ranging from a new advertiser pressure group, to an industry estimate that click fraud is 10 to 15 percent, along with a couple outing themselves as fraudsters. It's well worth a read. Here are some highlights: BusinessWeek talks about its investigation coming up with "paid to read" rings, spread out in a way to presumably avoid detection. We get a named Minnesota couple talking about how they "dabbled" in click...
  
  
• Nokia To Integrate Live Search Into Mobile Devices
  Echoing earlier deals with Yahoo and Google, Nokia, the world's largest mobile handset maker, has said it will integrate Microsoft's Live search into its mobile search offering. Here's more from Reuters. The handset makers are doing deals with search brands, while the carriers (at least in the U.S.) are seeking to favor their own search solutions over Google and Yahoo for fear that they'll be bypasssed, just as most Internet ISPs have been online....
  
  
• Chicago Tribune Does Big Search Package
  The Chicago Tribune is running a big package on search today. There's little new or suprrising for regular readers of this blog, but you might find it interesting to see how a mainstream newspaper tries to dive into the search wars. Gunning For Google hosts the package from there, you find.......
  
  
• Bush Bio Changes For Miserable Failure Query Due To White House Change
  Since 2004, a search on Google and Yahoo for "miserable failure" has almost always ranked the the official George W. Bush biography tops. Link bombing, as I've covered here, caused it to happen. But yesterday, folks at Threadwatch spotted that it has changed. What happened? The White House moved the bio to a new page, which has caused the old page to disappear for that search temporarily. Now, at least for me, the bio is ranking tops again at a new location. The change is something a future president probably won't like....


• See Google Results As If You Are In Another Country
  This morning at the Search Engine Roundtable, I reported that you can now easily Check Your Google Results in Any Country. How? Well, go to oy-oy.eu/google/world/and then select the locations you want to compare side by side. Danny and I tested this out and it seems to be working well. Danny is in the UK and I am in the US, we searched on liar in Google.com, both not signed in to Google. I then compared the results Danny saw on his screen and I saw on my screen, with a side by side comparison of the US location...
  
  
• The Unchanging Search Interface
  Why Search Sucks & You Won't Fix It The Way You Think from me on my personal blog Daggle covers a session I did at Euro Foo Camp this week. It looks at how the search interface of major search engines has largely stayed unchanged over time. We're still using what I call the "DOS of Search." Interestingly, the Google Base change that just happened is a unique event -- the first major search engine to have an important property without that all-important search box on the home page. For me, it's just another sign of how Google Base is...
  
  
• Again, The Need For Search Ad Revenue To Stand Alone
  Has the search bubble popped, given Yahoo's warning yesterday about declining ad revenue? That warning generated a stock plunge that has hit both Yahoo and Google. No, it's probably not a search bubble. Instead, it's a lesson in the danger of not breaking out search ad revenue from other forms. Exactly as Robert Scoble notes here, the ad slip at Yahoo is not necessarily a search ad problem. What Robert calls "banner ads" is more specifically display advertising, graphical ads that are not pay-per-click text ads that show up in response to a search. Yahoo has a much bigger display...
  
  
• Yahoo Teams Up With Gore's Current TV
  The news is buzzing about the Current TV and Yahoo partnership. Current TV, founded by Al Gore, and Yahoo announced the launch of The Yahoo Current Network. This network is to "combine professional and user-generated video clips" reports the New York Times. The paper says each show will likely "be preceded by a 15- or 30-second commercial," which is the first time Yahoo "included commercials with user-generated content." TechCrunch notes that this video at Yahoo describes a bit more about how the shows will run, and it also describes "VC2," viewer created content (i.e. user generated content). The user contributed...
  
  
• Video Search Usage for August 2006
  Hitwise just released August 2006 market share data for the most popular online video search sites.
  
  
• Yahoo CEO Says Ad Growth Slowing Down; Ask.com To Increase Market Share
  The Wall Street Journal reports that Terry Semel, Yahoo's CEO, has warned that online advertising growth will be slowing in automotive and financial services industries. He said that there is still growth, but "but they're not growing as quickly as we might have hoped at this point in time," Semel said. On that news, Yahoo's shared dropped $3.47, or 12%, to $25.54. Barry Diller, CEO of IAC, said he can see Ask.com gaining market share, about 8 to 10 percent share. More details on that story at Reuters.com. Postscript From Danny: See my follow-up post, Again, The Need For Search...
  
  
• URL Vs. Navigational Queries Explained: AKA, Why Did URL Searches At Google Change?
  Matt Cutts from Google has a great follow up on our reports that Google Modifies Navigational Search Results from about two-plus weeks ago. In his post, he explains that when you search on a URL (i.e. www.searchenginewatch.com), Google has stopped showing the information for the URL and now shows a standard search on the words in the URL itself. I learned two things from Matt's post....
  
  
• Google's Political Action Committee: Google NetPAC
  Threadwatch Via Threadwatch, Google will flex political muscles PAC to raise money for causes, candidates; lobbyists on board from the San Francisco Chronicle covers how Google has created its own Political Action Committee named Google NetPAC to to support candidates backing "an open and free internet." Google has some small footprints in Washington already, hiring a lobbying firm in the past to help push public policy in the direction Google wants it to go....
  
  
• Belgian Court Orders Google To Remove Content From Google News & Cache
  Reuters reports the big news of the day that Google has been ordered by a Belgian court to remove all articles, photographs and graphics from French-speaking newspapers. Copiepresse issued the complaint and won the court ruling on September 5th. Not only does this require Google to remove content from Google News, the court order requires removing the content from the Google cache. ChillingEffects.org has a link to the full court order....

Search Headlines

• Tom is not your friend, Valleywag
• Podcast: BusinessWeek Cover Story On Click Fraud; Got SEO On The Brain? And More!, Daily SearchCast
• Interview With Google Analytics' Senior Manager, Web Pro News
• Google Ajax Search, To Help JavaScript Worms, Google Operating System
• Want To Be a Google Lab Rat?, Search Engine Roundtable
• ATM cashpoints hacked via Google, TechWorld
• Google AdSense Tips Brochure, Google Blogoscoped
• Top 21 Signs You Need a Break from SEO, Small Business SEM
• Ask.com To Upgrade Paid Search Platform, MediaPost
• Google Study: Internet Directs Moviegoers, MediaPost
• Everyone Can Go Home Now, ClickZ
• AOL to Reorganize, ClickZ
• Hitwise: Steve Irwin Searches, iMedia Connection
• Google erases Operation Ore campaign site, The Register
• Ooops! YPN error causes low impression reporting, JenSense
• How to explain RSS the Oprah way, Back in skinny jeans
• Leveraging Comments & the Spelling Police, SEO Book
• New Google Spreadsheets Features, Official Google Blog
• AdSense adds a new 200x200 ad unit size, JenSense
• No Charge: Outsell’s 2007 Info Industry Outlook Available, ResourceShelf
• New Research PARC: Social information foraging and collaborative search, ResourceShelf
• Google’s Indexbench: Domains and a Now a Trademark Application, ResourceShelf
• UK’s Incisive Media To Be Bought By Apax For $375 million; Some Shareholders Unhappy, PaidContent.org
• Search every code-example in every O'Reilly book, Boing Boing
• MeeVee Overhauls Site. I Want More, TechCrunch
• InfoSpace’s Shares Tank 22 Percent on Carrier Loss; Need To Windup?, PaidContent.org
• Yahoo Hack Day, a career fair for an era of participation, Niall Kennedy
• NASA, Google alliance slow going, News.com
• AOL Opens Powerful Video Metasearch Engine, Micro Persuasion
• How to get on the digg homepage, Pronet Advertising

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