SES Chicago - December 7-11, 2009

September 5, 2006

Search Headlines & Links: September 5, 2006

Below, a recap of stories posted today to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with other items we've spotted but not blogged separately:

From The SEW Blog...

  • Google Updates Terminology Of Last Visit Date In Cache Results Vanessa Fox posted an update at the Google Webmaster Central Blog on what the date and time displayed on the Google Cache page really means. The date displayed technically shows the last time Google "retrieved" data off the page, meaning if you have a page that hasn't been updated, and Google visits the page and sees that it was not updated, then Google will not retrieve any new information from that page and it won't update the date displayed on the cache page. Here is an example of the cache page of Search Engine Watch, carefully look at the date...
  • New Look YellowPages.ca Comes Out Of Beta Canada's Yellow Pages Group took its new search-driven yellow pages redesign out of beta over the weekend. Here's what we wrote when the new site initially launched. The press release outlines the new site's features and capabilities. Yellow Pages Group also operates the popular voice-driven mobile local search portal "Hello Yellow," as well as Canadian city guides and several vertical/classifieds sites. It is Canada's monopoly yellow pages publisher. Local search competitor TrueLocal just launched a Canadian version of its site last week. You can read more on my blog....
  • Netscape Search Inserts Netscape News Above Web Results What's this? Netscape Search has changed? So says Netscape's Jason Calacanis. What's new? From what Jason says and I can see, the big difference is that there's a new "Netscape.com results" section at the top of the page that shows you top voted stories from the Netscape community news service....
  • Google's Click To Call In UK I reported yesterday that Google seems to have launched Click To Call in the UK. A search on jet2 should bring back an ad from Directline Holidays with a green phone, clicking on the phone will allow you to enter your phone number for a call back from that advertiser. Click to call was launched by Google in the US in February 2006. I have screen captures and more details at the Search Engine Roundtable....
  • Google Opens Tesseract OCR Software The Google Code Blog announced that Google has "re-released" the Tesseract OCR software to the open source community. OCR, optical character recognition, is the technology for converting text on a physical paper into computer based text. So if you have a ton of papers you typed up in your college days and you want them stored in digital format, you can use OCR to translate those documents for you....
  • Speakers Wanted For SES Multimedia & Mobile Edition 2006 I've still got openings on a few panels for our SES Multimedia & Mobile Edition 2006 show this October in Los Angeles. In particular, I'm looking for those involved with mobile SEO, though I also have a space on our video SEO, image SEO and possibly the podcast SEO sessions. More details are here. Pitches are being taken through Thursday, September 7 (IE, get them to me before Friday, September 8)....
  • Bringo Click To Call Service Attempts To Help Consumers Foil Voice Response Systems If you're a credit card issuer, a cell phone carrier or an airline you use IVR (interactive voice response) phone trees to resolve calls and avoid sending what you deem to be unnecessary calls to your call center. Live agents are expensive. But almost every consumer hates dealing with IVR systems. They're often frustrating, don't resolve issues and delay what consumers ultimately want, which is to talk to a live customer service agent....
  • Google To Fingerprint Voices With PC Microphones This weekend The Register published an article named Google developing eavesdropping software. The article describes how Google uses existing PC microphones fingerprinting technology to show relevant ads that appeal more to you. The article goes on to explain how the sound fingerprinting works; it "breaks sound into a five-second snippets to pick out audio from a TV, reducing the snippet to a digital "fingerprint", which it matches on an internet server." Privacy folks are worried about the repercussions of such software. Postscript Barry: I should link to Google Paper Explains Listening To Your TV Can Help It Put Ads &...
  • Yahoo Answers Launches In The UK The Guardian Unlimited reports that Yahoo, today, launched the Yahoo Answers product in the UK. The UK version is now available at http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/ and is also available on the left hand navigation of Yahoo UK's home page. Reportedly, Yahoo will be launching a campaign around the Answers product in the that is the "largest advertising campaign in Britain since the dotcom boom."...
  • YouTube Hires Yahoo's Treasurer, Gideon Yu TheStreet.com reports on a Wall Street Journal story that YouTube has hired away Yahoo's Treasurer, Gideon Yu. Gideon Yu is to begin working at YouTube this month, Yahoo said he "is taking advantage of what's a good career opportunity for him to step up to another level."...
  • Google Says They Will Give Brazil Orkut Data The Washington Post reports that Google will give over the Orkut data of specific users including; IP addresses with time and date stamps that can help trace a specific user and registration information including names and e-mail addresses. This comes after Brazil gave Google 15 days to comply or else be fined $23,000 per day....
  • New Engine 'ChaCha' Offers Real-Time Answers From Live 'Guides' Part Wikipedia, part Yahoo Answers and part About.com, ChaCha is a new search engine with a compelling hook – real-time results from human beings. The site launches (in "Alpha") today and offers users two ways to search: traditional algorithmic results or help from live "guides." Users interact with guides via an embedded instant messaging window in the search results page....

Headlines & News From Elsewhere

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 4:57 PM | Permalink

August 31, 2006

Search Headlines & Links: August 31, 2006

Below, a recap of stories posted today to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with other items we've spotted but not blogged separately:

From The SEW Blog...

  • Flickr #1 Photography Site In UK Hitwise is reporting that Flickr is the #1 photography site in the UK. This isn't really a surprise at all - what's more suprising is that it's taken a while to get there, and how it's got there. Flickr's UK market share has increased 39%, Photobucket's share decreased by 17% and Webshot's remained flat. This is apparently due good SEO and searches for soft porn using the brand name and various terms you can work out for yourself. In some respects this is worthy of nothing more than a wry smile and shrug of the shoulders. Unfortunately however, this may...
  • When Good Search Bots go Bad Most people realize the importance of creating a search engine friendly site, but many don't take the final step of assuring that search engine spiders or bots can fully access the site. Even worse, they fail to block bots from non-public parts of the site, or don't recognize rogue bots that are crawling a site to steal content or for other nefarious reasons. In today's SearchDay article, The Taming of the Bots, guest writer Tony Wright has coverage of a recent SES panel where search marketers and representatives from search engines offered tips on managing bots, whether their intent is...
  • Topix's Cool Year-Long News Archive Somewhat lost among all the search news earlier this month was Topix and its launch of an awesome year-long news archive. It's a great resource and much more than just a cool "click-o-gram" that you'll see at the top of news search pages. News search engines typically only let you go back in time for about a month. After that, new stuff flows in and the old stuff moves out. That's terrible if you want to find news articles about a particular event further back in time....
  • Ask.com Adds Emoticons Or Smiley To Smart Answers The Ask.com Blog posted that they have added a new Smart Answer to their suitcase, it is called an emoticon or smiley. You know they look like, :-) or ;-) or :D, you get my point. So now if you search on some of the more popular emoticon at Ask.com you will get a Smart Answer....
  • Google Uses AdWords Conversion Data To Fight AdSense Fraud? ShoeMoney blogged that at the Arbitrage Issues session at SES San Jose, during Q&A time, Kim Malone of Google said that the AdSense team may use AdWords conversion data to determine which sites are trying to fraud advertisers and users (often named Made for AdSense sites - MFAs)....
  • Search Engines Handle No Index Inconsistently Matt Cutts has a nice illustrated survey of how various major search engines deal with the meta noindex tag in Handling noindex meta tags. He finds inconsistency, with this being the summary:...
  • Keywords In URL May Help Rankings, Google's Matt Cutts Says The hotly debated SEO topic of, does having keywords in your file names help with your rankings, will probably start all over again. Matt Cutts of Google wrote at his blog, and I quote; Most bloggy sites tend to have words from the title of a post in the url; having keywords from the post title in the url also can help search engines judge the quality of a page....
  • Understanding Digg.com Valleywag has an excellent Cheatsheet on What is Digg? Basically, if someone asks you what is Digg, just send them there. It describes the basics, how it works, how to break it, Digg's competitors, the recent publicity on Digg, "How Digg fits the buzzwords," oh and don't say "I got digged," I believe it is "I was dugg." Full details on Digg at Valleywag....
  • Tips On Getting Listed In Local Search Results Patricia Hursh wrote a ClickZ column named Four Steps Every Business Can Take to Improve Local Search Results. The article goes over the what, why and how on Local Search. In short, how does one get included in the local results you see search engines providing? She recommends that you (1) update your business listings at Amacai, infoUSA, and Acxiom, (2) submit your site to local engines such as Google Local, MSN Local, Yahoo Local, Ask Local, and TrueLocal, (3) update your Internet Yellow Page listings at YellowPages.com, Verizon SuperPages, and SwitchBoard.com, and (4) make sure to have your address...
  • Google AdSense Sued by Suspended Publisher Steve Bryant at eWeek reports that a woman has sued Google after she was suspended from the program for clicking on her own ads. Theresa B. Bradley filed a lawsuit against Google for $250,000 for fraud and misrepresentation, even though she admits she clicked her own ads "to verify that the advertisers were not selling competing products"....

Headlines & News From Elsewhere

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 3:30 PM | Permalink

August 23, 2006

Daily SearchCast, August 23, 2006: Is Google Bad For Other Businesses? Will Brazil Close Google's Offices There? Isn't Yahoo Coupon Finder Cool? And More!

Today's search podcast covers whether Google is too dominant over businesses? Will Brazil close Google's offices there in a data dispute? Is Yahoo's coupon finder the coolest thing? The answer to these questions and more in this exciting episode of the Daily SearchCast! (Trixie sold separately. All Rights Reserved. Void where multilated by law).

Tune-in by listening to this MP3 file, listening via WebmasterRadio at 11:30am Eastern and repeated at 2pm Eastern Tuesday through Friday, via our Odeo channel or through iTunes via this link (or use alternative iTunes instructions explained here) or though our Yahoo Podcasts channel. Need more help tuning in live or finding the chat room? See the Daily SearchCast FAQ.

  • Aug. 23, 2006 Search News Forecast: Mostly Sunny! It's mellow. Techmeme's mellow, my feeds are mellow, the search news feels calm. The Google-Brazil thing is getting more chatter, and the Microsoft-Facebook deal's also getting chatter, and I'm sure some other items will come up. But I cautiously predict it will be mostly sunny in terms of search news....
  • Google's Dominance Of Big & Small Companies Fortune has a nice write up they named "How Google can make - or break - your company." Not only does this article go over how Google can break a small online retailer who depends on organic results, but also how they can break large firms like travel agencies, newspapers, realtors, advertising firms and software makers (even Microsoft). The article makes a good read if you have the time. If you have more time, also read Google Sees Content Deals As Key to Long-Term Growth at the Wall Street Journal, which explores more of Google's future and how you may...

  • Google Bitches Day: Celebrating "victims" of the world's biggest search company, Valleywag

  • Google Bitch #2: The Wispy Web Startup, Valleywag

  • Google Bitch #3: Publisher's Weakly, Valleywag

  • Brazil To Close Google Brazil's Offices Over Orkut Issues? A post in our SEW Forums and a report from Xinhau says that Brazil's federal prosecution service is moving to close Google's operations in Brazil. So far, there is no other news about this that we've seen. An injunction is apparently being requested ordering the release of information from Orkut, with a threat for closure of Google's Sao Paulo office if they don't comply. Postscript From Danny: Reuters has a story up now here: Google refuses to hand over data to Brazilian authorities. It covers that prosecutors want permission to file a civil lawsuit against Google, with a $61 million...
  • Google Keynote Conversation, Part Two Today's SearchDay article, CEO Schmidt: "Many People are Very Happy with Google Search", continues Andrew Goodman's coverage of Danny Sullivan's keynote conversation with Google's chief executive that began with yesterday's Google CEO Maps Missions, Stays on Message....
  • Facebook Partners With Microsoft In Ad Deal The New York Times reports that Microsoft is to provide and sell banner ads and sponsored ads on FaceBook, a popular social networking site "aimed primarily at college students." The ads will be "graphical ad placements as well as automated text-based advertisements targeted to content, and over time, aggregate user behavior on an anonymous basis." The Facebook deal is for three years and is at a smaller scale to Google's MySpace deal....
  • Facebook Does Ad Deal, But Not With Google, TechCrunch
  • Hitwise: Google & Yahoo Make Tiny Gains In July 2006 Today I look at figures from Hitwise, as part of my series on search engine rating figures that have recently been released and how to analyze them. For those just tuning in, on Monday, I covered comScore stats showing a Google decline in July 2006. On Tuesday, I talked about NetRatings also showing a decline, but a smaller one than comScore. The main point in both of those articles was to stress the need to look at data over a longer period of time than month-to-month and to examine figures from multiple services....
  • Gmail In Japanese Reuters reports that Google is releasing a localized Japanese-language version of Gmail in Japan today. I cannot find the URL to access it as of yet, but hopefully it will be announced shortly....
  • Why Canadians are the Best SEOs, SEOmoz
  • Say It Ain't So, Dave (But We Won't Believe You), Daggle
  • Google Releases Google Base API The Google Code blog announced that Google Base now has an API. You can access the API's details at http://code.google.com/apis/base/. The API is like other APIs in that you can now program your own applications to interact and interface with Google Base. So with this API you can create new Google Base data, edit, delete existing data, and query for data items. This can come in handy for retailers or anyone who wants data to be found within Google Base....
  • Yahoo Adds Coupon Shortcut, Making Finding Coupons Easy Adam Viener of ReveNews.com discovered a Yahoo! Shortcut which gives searchers quick and easy access to coupon codes. Adam highlighted a search for kodak gallery coupon codes. Here are some other examples: circuit city coupon, vistaprint coupon, netflix coupon code, and dell coupon code. This is a great service for consumers who are spared the trouble of weeding through creatively written sponsored listings and pages of organic listings claiming to have the best coupons and then returning out of date deals. This is also a potential win for Yahoo! as affiliate revenue can add up pretty quickly....
  • NearbyNow Brings New 'Inventory' To Local Search The "holy grail" of online shopping is local inventory information. Paradoxical as it may sound I say that because the overwhelming majority of transactions occur in local stores and that isn't going to change any time soon. Though e-commerce is growing fast, growing much faster is the influence of the Internet on offline transactions. Those Internet-influenced local transactions, worth more than $350 billion annually and climbing, typically start online in the form of price comparison shopping or product research....
  • My Nintendo DS Lite Enters The British Airways Lost Property Hell, Daggle
  • Search Medica - The GPs Search Engine Search Medica is a search engine that has been specifically designed for GPs (General Practitioners or Doctors) to use. Pulse, a UK weekly news magazine for doctors conducted research that seemed to suggest that doctors were unhappy with the results of the medical searches that they were running on traditional search engines. Consequently Search Medica has been produced in conjunction with doctors to provide them with a very specific and tailored search experience. It's still in beta testing at the moment, so has lots of requests for feedback. Although I've only taken a brief look at it (and I'm certainly...
  • Google To Party At Worldcon: Shiny! Man. I wrote earlier of Google doing a recruitment and PR push at the Star Trek Convention last week. I joked about wishing I could go to that and this week's Worldcon. Today, Google writes that it will be at Worldcon, recruiting and throwing a party as well. And they semi-taunt me about going in the post. Have a great time, everyone who is going. It'll definitely be shiny....

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 5:38 PM | Permalink

August 22, 2006

Daily SearchCast, August 22, 2006: AOL Firings Over Search Privacy Issue; Evaluating Search Engine Rating Figures; Saving Addresses For Mapping Sites & More!

Today's search podcast covers AOL firing execs over the search privacy issue; how to evaluate search engine popularity figures; Google gets your MTV into web sites; saving addresses for reuse on Google Maps & Yahoo Maps and more!

Tune-in by listening to this MP3 file, listening via WebmasterRadio at 11:30am Eastern and repeated at 2pm Eastern Tuesday through Friday, via our Odeo channel or through iTunes via this link (or use alternative iTunes instructions explained here) or though our Yahoo Podcasts channel. Need more help tuning in live or finding the chat room? See the Daily SearchCast FAQ.

  • AOL Fires CTO & Two Employees After Search Records Slip Up The Wall Street Journal just reported that AOL has fired the Chief Technology Officer, Maureen Govern, and two other employees after releasing search records last week. The article named "AOL Fires Technology Chief After Web-Search Data Scandal" discloses that Maureen Govern, the CTO along with the researcher who released the data and the manager overseeing the research have been all fired. I am kind of surprised that AOL hit someone so high to the top, but it does make a statement, a statement AOL must make....
  • comScore Figures Show First Google Decline For Nearly A Year, But What To Believe? The latest search engine share figures from comScore are now out, and Google's nearly year-long continued rises have came to a halt in July 2006, according to comScore. But how much can you trust any of the figures that ratings services provide? In this post, I look at the latest comScore stats and begin a series about how to critically evaluate search share ratings....
  • NetRatings: Tiny Google Decline, But Not The First Time & Yahoo Growth Yesterday I looked at the latest figures out of comScore that showed Google seeing its first drop in search share for nearly a year. My review of rating service figures continues today with NetRatings. They also show a Google drop, but far less than the comScore figures....
  • Google AdSense Begins Running MTV & Viacom Video Ads for Select Publishers After recently announcing a partnership between Google & Viacom, their new video ads have begun displaying for a small group of specially chosen publishers. The videos, which run clips from a variety of shows from Comedy Central, MTV, MTV2, The N, and Nickelodeon channels, are interspersed with ads, and publishers are paid on a CPM basis on how many of the ads are viewed by the user....
  • David Brent's Microsoft training video, Sydney Morning Herald
  • Google Base Adds Click & Impression Metrics For Merchants The Google Base Blog announced that Google Base has been tracking clicks and impressions since early June. They are now displaying that data to merchants, so that they can see the number of times their Google Base items are viewed (impressions), clicked on and the pageviews of that item. An impression occurs each time a Froogle or Google Base result is displayed for that item, a click is tracked each time someone clicks on that listed item and a pageview occurs each time someone views the items page. The data is mostly just updated daily, but you can use it...
  • Google's Audio Player Philipp notes as does Ionut Alex that with the release of voicemail on Google Talk, you can now use that feature to play audio files over Google's network. Philipp describes a method of easily doing this. One thing to note, as a Mac user. This does not rendered on Apple's Safari web browser, even thought Google Video works fine....
  • Saving Addresses At Google & Yahoo Maps Matt McGee posted an entry on a fairly new feature at Google Maps, that allows you to save locations for later use. He notes that Yahoo has had this feature for a while. In addition, the Google Blog has announced this feature earlier this month. I thought it would be useful to write a "how-to" save addresses at Google Maps and Yahoo Maps....
  • How Much Is Link Baiting Services Or Projects Worth? Honestly, the purpose of this post is selfish, I want someone to come up with the value of a link baiting effort. I am looking for someone to tell me how much time, money and effort should be put towards a link baiting project. What is the minimum you need as an outcome of that link baiting effort to make the link baiting tactic a success? These are questions running through my head over the past couple days....
  • How XSS HTML Injection Might Let Others Put Links On Your Sites SEOMoz has some excellent examples of government sites that are susceptible to cross site (XSS) html injection, something that can also happen to any site. Let me first do my best to explain what this means in layman terms (hope I get it right)....
  • LibreDigital Warehouse Competes With Google Book Search Steve Bryant reports that "publishers fight back against Google," with their own book search service. The new service is named LibreDigital Warehouse and was announced by HarperCollins and LibreDigital the other day. This new service will give "publishers and booksellers the ability to deliver searchable book content on their own Web sites." The technology empowers publishers to define rules on a partner and book title level, defining which pages are viewable, which pages are not, and what percentage of the pages are available. They will begin offer about 200 HarperCollins titles and increase that to 10,000 titles or so. More...
  • ClickTracks Acquired By J.L. Halsey The ClickTracks web analytics service has big news today, that it has been acquired by marketing technology firm J.L. Halsey. J.L. Halsey also owns marketing tools such as Lyris, EmailLabs and Hot Banana. Congrats to John and all the crew over at ClickTracks! More information from the press release here....
  • Subdomains Trademark Violations? ClickZ has a write up named Can Subdomains Violate a Trademark? In there report, they show how the Jews for Jesus sued the people running jewsforjesus.blogspot.com. The case was ultimately settled out of court and no ruling has been made. But this raises interesting questions. What if we here at Search Engine Watch decided to categorize all Google related topics under the subdomain google.blog.searchenginewatch.com. Is that a trademark violation? I can see how a public hosted domain, like blogspot.com subdomains, might be viewed as more of an infringement of trademark then would be a subdomain hosted on searchenginewatch.com - but...
  • Farecast Adds Cities To Flight Fare Prediction Tool GigaOM writes that Farecast, a travel search engine that uses statistical modeling to predict if the prices of tickets will increase or decrease over time, has added cities, to include 55 U.S. cities. Wired News takes the "matter of fact" approach to their coverage of Farecast, describing "turns out 13D paid only $300 for her flight, while 14E shelled out nearly $1,000 for his."...
  • What is Google These Days? Google is a search engine, but it's also one of the world's largest advertising companies. And many analysts are now calling it a media company, as well. So is Google still focused on its mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible? Danny Sullivan put that and other questions to Google CEO Eric Schmidt in his keynote conversation at the recent SES San Jose conference. And, as has become a tradition, Andrew Goodman was on hand to not only report on the dialogue but to add his own laser-like insights. Read on in today's SearchDay article, Google...
  • My Q&A With Eric Schmidt In Video & Transcribed Via Google Blogoscoped, news that Google's now posted a video of my Q&A two weeks ago with Google CEO Eric Schmidt that covered a wide range of topics. I've embedded it below, if you don't want to click through to Google Video. No time to watch? Don't worry, they've also posted a written transcript. There was also a Q&A with press after the conversation, and you'll find a transcript of that here. Can't watch but wish you could listen? You'll find a podcast of the conversation here. That page also has a round-up of press and blogger coverage of the...
  • Stephen Colbert's Tips for Protecting Your Online Identity, YouTube
  • TrackMeNot Extension, Google Blogoscoped

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 4:44 PM | Permalink

August 18, 2006

Daily SearchCast, August 18, 2006: Google Execs Selling Stock; Washington Post Selling Text Links; Honestly, It's Go Ogle Checkout Not Google Checkout & More!

Today's search podcast covers Googler execs selling stock but not buying; is the Washington Post's new text links ad program for bloggers heading for problems with search engines?; goodbye to some old-school blog search engines; another click fraud lawsuit filed against Google; Google gains googlecheckout.com from someone who was planning the so-called "Go Ogle Checkout" dating site and more!

Tune-in by listening to this MP3 file, listening via WebmasterRadio at 11:30am Eastern and repeated at 2pm Eastern Tuesday through Friday, via our Odeo channel or through iTunes via this link (or use alternative iTunes instructions explained here) or though our Yahoo Podcasts channel. Need more help tuning in live or finding the chat room? See the Daily SearchCast FAQ.

  • Aug. 18, 2006 Search News Forecast: Sunny! After reviewing Techmeme, scanning over 100 feeds and consulting with Barry Schwartz on search forums activity, the official Search Engine Watch Blog forecast for search news today is sunny.
  • Googlers Only Have Sold GOOG Stock - Cause Of Drop In Stock Price? Bloomberg has a very interesting report on why they believe Google's stock has been falling this year, down about 7 percent this year. They say that Google's executives have sold off a boatload of stock since the IPO....
  • Google Data Refresh: More Supplemental Results? Wednesday night, Thursday morning, forum threads starting popping up about a Google "data refresh" taking place. A data refresh is like a small Google update, and many webmasters have noticed a change in the search results at Google. Google has not yet confirmed that there has been an update, nor has there been a ton of discussion on the topic, as of yet. That is why I believe this is a "data refresh" and not a full fledge algorithmic change. Part of the data refresh seems to have put many pages into the supplemental index, an index that no webmaster...
  • Washington Post Selling Text Links? Steve Rubel reported that the Washington Post launched a sponsored blogroll product that allows people to pay to be listed in the blogroll. You can see it live on the right hand bottom portion of the WashingtonPost.com web site. I dug into the source code to discover the blogroll is not using the search engine suggested nofollow attribute, which Google in particular pushes to be used for paid links. However, it is using some sort of JavaScript tracking code, that may or may not limit the PageRank and link popularity to flow to those sites advertised....
  • Seevast: It's Kanoodle & More Catching up on some industry news earlier this month, Kanoodle has done some restructuring. Previously, Kanoodle offered both search and contextual ads. Now, Kanoodle only offers search ads. Contextual ads are being sold through a sister business unit, Pulse 360. Meanwhile, the Moniker domain traffic service has been acquired and will run as a third sister business. Above all of these is a new operating company, Seevast. For more, see this ClickZ story: Kanoodle Makes Acquisition, Becomes Seevast....
  • So Long Daypop & Blogdex Back in 2003, I wrote about a number of blog search engines emerging at that time. Feedster was brand new and Technorati still pretty young. Both were babies compared to Daypop and Blogdex. Sadly, Gary Price over at ResourceShelf notes in A Brief Tribute to Dan Chan, Daypop, and MIT's Blogdex that neither of these pioneering services has made it to 2006....
  • Third Click Fraud Lawsuit Filed Against Google, But Does It Even Have A Chance? Third Time's a Charm? Google Sued for Click Fraud (Again) from eWeek covers Google being sued for click fraud again. This follows on the recent settlement in the Lane's Gifts class action click fraud case, a settlement that makes it questionable whether this new case will even succeed....
  • Levi.com Quietly Drops Google Checkout Due To A "Particular Issue" MarketWatch reports that Levi Strauss & Co.'s has dropped the Google Checkout option from Levi.com, their main web site. Steve Davis, from the firm that Levi used to integrated Checkout, said they dropped it from Levi.com due to a "particular issue," which was not disclosed (as far as I can tell). What is important to note is that Levi Strauss left Google Checkout on the dockers.com web site, so that issue couldn't of been a huge one or even a global issue (I suspect). I personally have yet to implement Google Checkout on any site, so I cannot speak from...
  • Fighting For GoogleCheckout.com & More Google Complaints Against Others Who Registered Google-Like Domain Names ResourceShelf has compiled sources of historical complaints Google has issued to those who have registered Google-like domain names...
  • More On Google's Warp Speed Run Into The Star Trek Convention I wrote earlier about how Google was going to be hunting for engineers at the 5th Annual Official Star Trek Convention this week in Las Vegas. Now more news about that and more....

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 4:07 PM | Permalink

August 17, 2006

Daily SearchCast, August 17, 2006: Hot Search Blogs; GoogleTalk Gets New Features; Filing Time For Yahoo Click Fraud Settlement; Beaming Up Google Engineers & More!

Today's search podcast covers finding search news via top search blogs; Google launches free WiFi; GoogleTalk gets new features; Google Analytics opens to all; time to file in Yahoo's class action settlement on click fraud; Star Trekkin' for Google Engineers and more!

Tune-in by listening to this MP3 file, listening via WebmasterRadio at 11:30am Eastern and repeated at 2pm Eastern Tuesday through Friday, via our Odeo channel or through iTunes via this link (or use alternative iTunes instructions explained here) or though our Yahoo Podcasts channel. Need more help tuning in live or finding the chat room? See the Daily SearchCast FAQ.

  • Renewing Our US Passports At The US Embassy In London
  • Remembering Nice Things About London, Such As The London Eye
  • Aug. 17, 2006 Search News Forecast: Mostly Sunny Today, a new feature, our daily search news forecast. I can't say we'll do this everyday, but we thought it might be fun. After reviewing Techmeme, scanning my over 100 feeds and consulting with Barry Schwartz on search forums activity, the official Search Engine Watch Blog forecast for search news today is mostly sunny. Mostly sunny means that you can expect some news, but probably nothing major and a downpour of items is unlikely. In other words, it's a good day to go outside or get actual work done, rather than reading about search. Remember, predicting search news is...
  • Rand & I Rank The Best Search Blogs Rand at SEOMoz posted his Ranking 50 Top Blogs in the Search Space, which encouraged me to finally post my list of the Search Blogs Am I Most Likely To Read In More Detail at my personal blog. Rand ranks this blog as number one on his list and then ranks my blog, the Search Engine Roundtable as number two on his list. I also ranked this blog as number one of my most 'click-through blog' on my list, followed by Google Blogoscoped, which I often cite here. These two lists, I believe make up a great portion of the...
  • The Inside Scoop from Search Bloggers The major search engines all have unofficial bloggers talking about what's going on in their respective companies. At a recent SES session, search-blog stars Jeremy Zawodny, Gary Price, Matt Cutts and Niall Kennedy all revealed their modus operandi, and guest writer Sara Holoubek was there to capture their insights for today's SearchDay article, Expose: Search Engine Bloggers Tell All....
  • SES San Jose 2006 Recap Couldn't make it to last week's monster Search Engine Strategies show in San Jose? Well, maybe next time! In the meantime, I've compiled a list of coverage from across the web, even somewhat organized into topic areas. Our San Jose show is always tough for me, as I arrive a week earlier to visit with the various major search engines out there. That means two weeks of news and email to dig out from, since you can never get it all done on the road. All that digging out means I know I don't have everything listed below. But you'll...
  • 101 Ways To Build Links & Popularity Andy Hagans and Aaron Wall have compiled a list of 101 Ways to Build Link Popularity in 2006. I will not attempt to summarize all 101 tactics here, check out the list at SEO Book....
  • What's the Big Deal With Social Search?, SearchDay
  • A Guide to Social Search Players In yesterday's SearchDay article, What's the Big Deal With Social Search?, I looked at some of the pros and cons of adding human influences to algorithmic search results. In today's SearchDay article, Who's Who in Social Search, I map out the various approaches to social search and offer links to some of the key players in human-mediated search....
  • Google WiFi Hits Mountain View For Free Google is providing a free WiFi network under "GoogleWifi" (802.11b/g) in Mountain View, CA. Anyone can use it, including business, visitors and the 72,000+ residents. You must sign into the network with your Google Account, it is not fully public in that sense, but anyone can register for access. Ready to get started using GoogleWifi? There are more details on the "how to" at http://wifi.google.com/support and at the Google Blog. I believe this is the first of many cities that Google will be providing free Wifi access to....
  • Google Talk Gains Voicemail, Music Status, Photo & File Sharing Features Google has announced that its Google Talk instant messaging platform now allows you to share files with other Google Talk users by dropping files or entire folders into the client. Photo files get special treatment, showing up in your client so you can talk about them with someone else, as covered more here. Listening to music? Another new feature, music status, allows other Google Talkers to see what hip (or embarrassing) song you're listening to, if you use one of these supported players. Along with music status comes a new Google Music Trends feature we mentioned earlier, which allows you...
  • Google Released Trends For Google Music Garett Rogers spotted the release of Google Music Trends. The Google Labs has it listed and described as "See what music is popular among Google Talk users," it is basically, "Google Trends" for music. You can currently filter by music genre, and there is a country filter, but I only see the United States as an option. I am a classic rock fan, so it is cool to see the trends for that genre. As Garett notes, the participate link at the top right, currently does not go anywhere....
  • Shawn Hogan, Hero, Wired
  • Google Analytics Opens to Everyone - No Invitation Required Google announced today that the popular Google Analytics is now instantly available to the public. No more waiting for invitation codes. Anyone with a website can now install the website tracking tool by directly signing up at the Google Analytics homepage, or by clicking through the "Analytics" tab in any Google AdWords account.
  • More than Organizing Photos? Google Acquires Neven Vision Adrian Graham, Picasa's Product Manager, made a post Tuesday morning on the Official Google Blog titled A better way to organize photos? in which he announced that the team at Neven Vision has now joined Google. His post tells us that Neven Vision's software will make it easier for people to find and organize their photos. But, is there more to the purchase? Looking around some blogs that discussed the acquisition holds hints to possibily more....
  • Google AdSense Prompts Ad Viewers to Download Third Party Applications When you visit a site with Google AdSense ads, you would hardly expect the ads to trigger an auto-install prompt window to download various third party applications such as Flash, Quicktime and Adobe Acrobat. But that is just what the AdSense javascript was trying to make Internet Explorer users do when they viewed a page with AdSense ads on it....
  • Orkut Causing Trouble In Brazil Again Komfie Manalo reports that Brazil has threatened to bring Google to court over their social networking application, Orkut, again. Yesterday, the Federal Prosecution Service of Brazil, said Google refused "to cooperate with authorities about user information" on Orkut. Google said in the past that they would work with Brazilian officials to shut down Orkut communities that were participating and helping criminals traffic drugs and distribute pedophilia. Google says they have cooperated with Brazilian authorities, stating, they have "provided information to eight investigations, and kept secret information regarding 60 other cases since June."...
  • Human Rights Group & UK House of Commons Demand Google, Yahoo, & Microsoft To Stop Censorship Earlier this week, GameShout.com published an article reporting that Human Rights Watch group in New York told Google, Yahoo and Microsoft to be upfront with their users about the censorship and stand up to the political pressure China places on them. The quote says it all pretty strongly, "It was ironic that companies whose existence depends on freedom of information and expression have taken on the role of censor, even in cases where the Chinese government makes no specific demands for them to do so." The Inquirer soon after reported that the committee in the UK House of Commons has...
  • Former Yahoo China Head Sues Yahoo For Defamation Reuters reports that Zhou Hongyi, the former head of Yahoo China, has sued Yahoo for defamation. Yahoo said they were about to sue Zhou Hongyi for "unethical business practices." Hongyi has a 40 percent stake in Alibaba.com, which was bought by Yahoo for $1 billion last year. To me, it seems like from the article, that Yahoo finds Hongyi to be a shady character, and Hongyi doesn't like Yahoo telling the public how they feel about him....
  • Yahoo Class Action Settlement Information Released Details of the Yahoo class action settlement have been posted at checkmatesettlement.com. What you need to know right now is: (1) You have until October 14, 2006 to submit a written statement requesting exclusion from the Class (specific guidelines are enclosed in the notice), if you want to be excluded from the class. (2) You have until November 20, 2006 to download the "Assertion of Right to Participate in Additional Claims Review Process Form" from this site and submit it by registered or certified mail, if you want to participate in the class and participate in the claims review process....
  • Yahoo Releases Yahoo Answers API The Yahoo Search Blog announced the release of the Yahoo Answers API. The API will allow developers to pull questions from the Yahoo Answers database by search, category, and user. You can even get the answers for those questions. More details at http://developer.yahoo.com/answers/....
  • Yahoo Partners With Go2 For Mobile Search Ads Forbes reports that Yahoo has signed an agreement with Go2, a mobile Yellow Page directory service, to offer Yahoo sponsored search listings on the search results displayed on the mobile Go2 results. The Wall Street Journal has a bigger write up on cell phones and ads, stating, "some of the largest wireless companies in the U.S. are starting to allow advertising on their cell phone networks." But don't worry, "no major carrier is talking about displaying ads on home pages or while customers are making calls." You will most likely see ad integration in the form of the Yahoo &...
  • Ask.com Adds DVD & TV Data To Movie Smart Answers The Ask.com Blog announced an upgrade to their movie Smart Answer feature that adds DVD purchase information and TV data. Here is a brief summary of the blog entry....
  • Beam Them Engineers Up, Google Google's boldly going where no one has gone before....in search of engineers at the 5th Annual Official Star Trek Convention next week in Las Vegas. Google's going to have a booth and presence at the event, I'm told by a friend who knows. Apparently, many of Google's engineers already attend Trek conventions, so it's fertile recruiting ground. So far, I see nothing about Google on the convention site. But Google Operating System noted yesterday how Google SketchUp is already doing a cross-promotion. Have fun at the con, anyone who's going. Wish it were me! Of course, going to WorldCon in...

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 1:10 PM | Permalink

August 15, 2006

Daily SearchCast, August 16, 2006: Cut Coupons Via Google Maps; Google Trademark Usage Letters Show Old News Is New News; MattGuy Is GoogleCutts; Why's A Farmer Dating Site Mad At Google & More!

Through the miracle of modern technology (or perhaps Danny's close-guarded and heavily disputed secret of time traveling), you are getting tomorrow's Daily SearchCast today. Actually, Danny's off on Wednesday, August 16 -- so we did an extra long show on Tuesday, August 15 and cut it into two parts. If you get our podcast feed, you already got part one.

In part two, "today's" search podcast, we cover Google Maps getting coupons for local merchants; Google's trademark protection letters spark new controversy despite being three years old; customer satisfaction with search engines; Matt Cutts AKA GoogleGuy; a farmer dating site takes on Google and more!

Tune-in by listening to this MP3 file, listening via WebmasterRadio at 11:30am Eastern and repeated at 2pm Eastern Tuesday through Friday, via our Odeo channel or through iTunes via this link (or use alternative iTunes instructions explained here) or though our Yahoo Podcasts channel. Need more help tuning in live or finding the chat room? See the Daily SearchCast FAQ.

  • Google Maps Gets Coupons Hmm? How do you prove to local merchants who lack tracking software or even web sites that search converts? Coupons! That's right, the conversion tracking tool that requires no internet connection, cookies or software has come to Google Maps....
  • Three Years On, Google's Trademark Usage Letters Become News Again How long does it take the wheel to spin full circle on the internet? Apparently three years, judging from the outcry over Google's "new" move to send out trademark protection letters asking people to be careful about how they use the word Google....
  • Yahoo, MSN, & Google Fall In Customer Satisfaction Survey The American Customer Satisfaction Index has been released and Yahoo, MSN and Google all fell in points from last year's results. If you look at the 2nd quarter scores and scroll down to the portals and search engines section you will see the ratings. Yahoo was hit the hardest, with a drop of five-percentage points from last year. Ask.com followed with a fall of 1.4%, then MSN falling 1.3%, and then Google falling 1.2% year over year. The only gainer is AOL with a 4.2 percentage point increase year-over-year. There is more coverage on this at DMNews, Bloomberg, News.com and...
  • Matt Cutts Confesses To Being GoogleGuy In Monday Morning Roundup, Rand Fishkin writes: Did anyone blog about Matt outing himself as GoogleGuy during SES? I believe his exact words were "I backed into that position." Nope, Rand -- I was surprised about the lack of reaction and blogging to that myself. I'm still doing post-show catch-up, but it hardly seemed to catch any buzz. Perhaps one of the industry's oldest secrets -- Matt Cutts being GoogleGuy -- was no longer a secret to most any longer....
  • Naylor & Amanda Finally Meet: Universe Fails To Be Destroyed
  • More SEO Video 'Cutts' By Matt Matt Cutts at Google has posted a few more videos with Google SEO tips for us. Here they are: + Session 11: Reinclusion requests + Session 12: Tips for Search Engine Strategies (SES) San Jose 2006 + Session 13: Google Webmaster Tools...
  • Google Supplemental Results Get Fresher I reported this morning at the Search Engine Roundtable that GoogleGuy announced Google has updated those pesky supplemental results. Supplemental results are those pages in a secondary index at Google. The pages in the supplemental results tend to be staler and rank worse then the normal documents in the main Google index. In any event, the supplemental results have been updated and should be somewhat more fresh....
  • Yahoo Launches Search Builder During the Social Search Overview session, Tim Mayer of Yahoo announced the launch of Yahoo Search Builder. I haven't had much time to play with it yet, and probably won't until next week. But the Yahoo Search blog has a nice overview of the new product. Keep in mind, this seems very similar to Eurekster, based on my quick quick quick read of it. More on this later....
  • Rollyo Adds More Functionality The roll your own search resource Rollyo adds more functionality to its services. If Rollyo has slipped under your radar it's a resource that allows you to create your own personalized search engine (hence 'roll your own') that will search up to 25 sites that you specify. They've improved layout, added blog search, added the ability to take an existing Searchroll and edit it to your own taste and added a 'Rollbar'. The latter allows searchers to incorporate Rollyo into the browser to search any site, add sites to existing Searchrolls on the fly and create new ones based on...
  • University of California Joins Google's Book Scan Project As expected the University of California is partnering with Google on the Google library scanning project. Reuters reports that Google will be funding "the scanning of "several million" of the 34 million titles in the University of California's libraries." Postscript From Danny: The partnership means that UC becomes the first organization to my knowledge to partner with both major scanning programs from search engines. UC partnered with Microsoft on its project in June. UC is also part of the broader Open Content Alliance backed by both Microsoft and Yahoo...
  • Google To Allow Pornographic Movies In Google Video? TechCrunch wrote that Google has recently removed the term "pornographic" from the restrictions on uploading videos. It is now just a restriction on “obscene” material, with an added categorization for "mature and adult" content. TechCrunch also believes Google removed a checkbox confirmation that said, "video is not pornographic or obscene material." Philipp Lenssen also notes this, and added commentary by Donna Bogatin at News.com....
  • Google Video Replaces Froogle & Expandable More Link Added To Google Home Page Philipp Lenssen spotted that on Google.com, they have removed Froogle, added Video and added a "more" link that opens up some more options, including "books," "froogle," "groups," and "even more." We have seen the expandable more link tested in the past, looks like it has made it to the front page....
  • Beware: Is Your Hosting Provider Cloaking Paid Links On Your Site For Their Benefit? I reported at the Search Engine Roundtable on thread in our forums that shows how some hosts are inserting links on sites they host, without notifying the web site owner, and doing it via cloaking. Matt Cutts from Google looked deeper into the reported issue in the thread and said that "it looks like this webhost is cloaking." The web hosting company is placing paid links within the content using cloaking techniques. If you are worried about this for your site, then check the Google index for you site. You can use a Google site command "with a porn phrase...
  • Yahoo's CEO, Terry Semel, Answers Tough Questions Search Engine Journal pulled out some serious quotes from a Fortune Magazine interview with Yahoo's CEO, Terry Semel. I'll pull out quotes, like Loren did;...
  • Yahoo Hires Away comScore Executive ClickZ reports that Yahoo has hired Peter Daboll, the president and CEO of comScore Media Metrix, to be the chief of insights and head of global market research at Yahoo. Daboll explains that his position was created at Yahoo to "bring together the external world of market research and the wealth of internal data that Yahoo collects." Peter Daboll will be reporting to Cammie Dunaway, Yahoo's chief marketing officer, in Sunnyvale, California....
  • Google Hires Linux Coder, Andrew Morton Andrew Morton, well known in the Linux world for coding under Linus Torvalds, has been hired to work at Google, reports News.com. Linus commented about the job in a message board posting on Aug 6th. Andrew will continue working on Linux, but Google will be paying him to do so....
  • Microsoft adCenter Now Live In The UK The adCenter blog announced that Microsoft adCenter is now live, Tuesday, August 15th, in the UK. 100% of the ads served on Microsoft's properties will run adCenter ads, including MSN Search and Windows Live. Be prepared to see search volume and budget change requirements in your ad campaigns. Want to discuss with others? Join our forum thread named Microsoft adCenter Launches in the UK....
  • Farmer Dating Web Site Sues Google Over Porn Ads INQ7 Network reports that the owners of Farm Data, "a respectable meeting website for farmers," is suing Google for the ads that show up for the query [farm date]. Basically, pornographic sites and sex sites come up for the term and Farm Date says that those ads are "very damaging for Farmdate's reputation." We should know the court ruling on August 24, I will keep you posted on it....
  • Danny & Daron Sumo Wrestle (what, no video? Yeah, YouTube is STILL down. But I also put one of them on Google Video here).

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 6:43 PM | Permalink

Daily SearchCast, August 15, 2006: AOL Sets Off Search Privacy Crisis; Google Webmaster Central Offers Cool Tools & Support; Yahoo Expands Site Explorer; 1,000 Pizzas For Google & More!

Today's search podcast covers AOL's release of search records and the ensuing privacy crisis that followed; Google's support for site owners enlarging into Google Webmaster Central; Yahoo's expanded Site Explorer tools; Google pushes back against click fraud estimates from third parties; 1,000 pizzas descend on Google and more!

Tune-in by listening to this MP3 file, listening via WebmasterRadio at 11:30am Eastern and repeated at 2pm Eastern Tuesday through Friday, via our Odeo channel or through iTunes via this link (or use alternative iTunes instructions explained here) or though our Yahoo Podcasts channel. Need more help tuning in live or finding the chat room? See the Daily SearchCast FAQ.

Below are links to items discussed:

  • Normality At SFO Despite Usual Conflicting Security Bull
  • Arriving At Heathrow Madness
  • AOL Releases Search Data & Raises Privacy Concerns Techmeme is reporting a huge amount of concern over AOL releasing, then pulling, search logs done by 500,000 users over three months. The purpose of the release was to help search researchers better understand user behavior in conjunction with an industry event for search researchers happening in Seattle, SIGIR. The data was posted on the AOL research site, but has since been pulled....
  • Search Privacy Concerns Humanized As The New York Times Tracks Down Anonymous AOL Searcher A Face Is Exposed for AOL Searcher No. 4417749 is an excellent read from the New York Times, where you can meet the person who is about to become the most famous searcher ever: Thelma Arnold, a 62-year-old from Georgia. Using the released AOL search records, the New York Times figured out who she was and interviewed her and her searching habits for the story. No more discussing whether anonymous search records might contain enough information to identify people. In some cases, they do (or at least enough to make an extremely good guess and get confirmation from the...
  • More On AOL's Search Release & Ways To Search The Records I've got some follow-up items about yesterday's story where AOL released user query records, including how anyone can now easily look at the data. First, after Barry did a recap of the news, I added a postscript to the story with more of my thoughts. In case you missed it, here are the key parts below:...
  • New Keyword Suggestion Tool Uses AOL Data SEO Scoop spotted a new keyword suggestion tool that estimates the volume of traffic you can expect for a given query based on the AOL data slip up. Basically, the tool has data from March to May of this year, it then takes the market share figures of Google, Yahoo and MSN and multiples that by the AOL search volumes for those queries. Of course, you have the issue of people searching differently at different engines. AOL users are typically less tech savvy, when compared to Google users. So I wonder how accurate the estimates are? The tool is at...
  • Another Tool Uses AOL Data For Search Term Research SEO Blackhat released a tool that uses AOL data, Hitwise figures and Overture's suggestion tool to figure out the search volume and click-through rate you can expect from a search phrase at the various search engines. Last week we reported on a more basic tool that did something similar but this new tool gives you an "estimate with some certainty how many clicks to expect for ranking anywhere in any search engine for any term." Basically, you go to this tool and enter in the number of searches you expect to be performed for a keyword phrase. Then after you...
  • Targeting Ads Based On Search Behavior & Privacy Issues Post-AOL Back in 2005, I wrote about AlmondNet moving forward with showing ads to surfers across the web based on their search profiles at major search engines. The move raised big search privacy issues. Since then, AlmondNet's kept going -- along with others such as Yahoo, in mining search behavior to deliver ads beyond search results pages. Advertisers Trace Paths Users Leave on Internet from the New York Times today takes a look how Yahoo, MSN and AOL are all trying to push into the post-search ad delivery space....
  • EFF Asks FTC To Limit How Long AOL Can Store Search Records The Electronic Frontier Foundation has asked the US Federal Trade Commission to investigate AOL's release of search records last week and prevent the company from storing search data for longer than two weeks....
  • Daily SearchCast, August 9, 2006: Special Edition, A Conversation With Google CEO Eric Schmidt Today's search podcast covers Search Engine Watch editor-in-chief Danny Sullivan talking with Google CEO Eric Schmidt live before an audience at Search Engine Strategies San Jose 2006 on topics ranging from search privacy to Google's expansion into all aspects of daily life. Tune-in by listening to this MP3 file, via our Odeo channel or through iTunes via this link (or use alternative iTunes instructions explained here) or though our Yahoo Podcasts channel....
  • Google Sitemaps Becomes Google Webmaster Central; Preferred Domain Tool Launched Google Sitemaps has gained a new name along with new features. Google Webmaster Central is the new name of the former Google Sitemaps service, which now has evolved into a central place for Google to provide help information, statistics, reports and tools to help webmasters....
  • Which Queries On Yahoo Search Get Redirected To Site Explorer? The Yahoo Search Blog defines which queries will be redirected from Yahoo Search to Yahoo Site Explorer. Remember on July 11th when we reported that Yahoo Tests Redirecting Some Searches To Site Explorer? So which queries exactly do this? Queries in the format of site:ysearchblog.com or link:http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000341.html or linkdomain:ysearchblog.com but not ysearchblog.com or ysearchblog or site:ysearchblog.com webmasters (looking for ysearchblog posts mentioning webmasters) or link:http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000341.html Danny Sullivan (looking for links to the article mentioning Danny Sullivan) or or linkdomain:ysearchblog.com site:yahoo.com (looking for links to ysearchblog from within yahoo.com). More details at the Yahoo Search Blog....
  • The Bot Obedience Course - New Yahoo! Site Explorer Tool Announced
  • Google Fights Claims Of Some Third Party Click Fraud Studies The Google Blog just posted a report on how they feel some of the independent third party click fraud reports published are exaggerating the clickfraud numbers. Google says they have seen some reports that show "1.5 times the number of clicks in our logs," the reason? Well, Google summarized the "two main points" of the larger paper they published on the issue as being; (1) "mischaracterizing events," i.e. clicking the back button and it being characterized as a click and (2) "conflation across advertisers and ad networks," where cookie issues confuse Yahoo clicks with Google clicks. For the full, 17-page...
  • Yahoo & Google Commit To An Other Independent Click Fraud Audit At SES Donna Bogatin snagged both John Slade, Yahoo Search Marketing, and Shuman Ghosemajumder, Google Trust & Safety into agreeing to an other clickfraud audit. This commitment is for an IAB "independent auditing against the complete guidelines." Donna grilled Yahoo & Google during the Q&A session of the Auditing Paid Listings and Click Fraud Issues, which I hear was pretty heated....
  • Auditing Paid Listings and Click Fraud Issues
  • Google & MySpace In $900 Million Deal On Search & Contextual Ads Just in, an announcement that Google and MySpace have reached a deal for Google to provide search and contextual ads to MySpace, in return for giving MySpace (well, the entire Fox  Interactive Media network) $900 million in guaranteed payments through 2010. From the press release:...
  • Google & Viacom Partner In Video Ad Test Via the NY Times, Google and Viacom have partnered to place Viacom video clips (MTV and other clips) on web site owner pages. The video clips will contain ads from Viacom, which Google and site owns will share the revenues from. These tests are to begin towards the end of the month. This is the first step, I bet, to AdWords on TV. Last week we reported that Google Radio is coming to XM Satellite Radio, so TV isn't so far fetched. FYI - sorry for short posts, SES San Jose is today and coverage will be slow. Towards the...
  • Google Jet Lawsuit Has Been Settled Google Founders Silence Designer Of ‘Party Plane' fromthe New York Sun covers a dispute over the Google founders' private jet being settled. Danny has been poking fun about this Oklahoma designer who spoke out about some of the requests made by Sergey Brin and Larry Page about the the interior design of the jet they bought. I mean, Google went far to try to silence this man from talking. But after enough persistence and encouragement, the designer, Leslie Jennings, has notified the NY Sun, "The case was settled to the satisfaction of both parties."...
  • Googlers Go For Pizza Stunt Via InsideGoogle, Feeding Google - Better than Pirates of the Caribbean is a video over at YouTube where start-up CambrianHouse decides to attract attention by delivering 1,000 pizzas to the Googleplex in Mountain View. Will the Googlers go for it? Yes, they do....

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 3:46 PM | Permalink

August 10, 2006

Daily SearchCast, August 9, 2006: Special Edition, A Conversation With Google CEO Eric Schmidt

Today's search podcast covers Search Engine Watch editor-in-chief Danny Sullivan talking with Google CEO Eric Schmidt live before an audience at Search Engine Strategies San Jose 2006 on topics ranging from search privacy to Google's expansion into all aspects of daily life. Tune-in by listening to this MP3 file, via our Odeo channel or through iTunes via this link (or use alternative iTunes instructions explained here) or though our Yahoo Podcasts channel. Prefer not to listen? Ah, darn. But that's OK, here's a rundown of what was covered:

General Write-Ups

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 2:32 PM | Permalink

August 9, 2006

Tune In Now To Eric Schmidt's Talk At SES Today Live

Want to listen to my conversation with Google CEO Eric Schmidt at Search Engine Strategies San Jose 2006? It's happening in 15 minutes. Instructions on how to tune in are covered in full on this page, as well as a rundown on how to download a podcast of the keynote after the fact and other special podcasts coming out of the show.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 12:45 PM | Permalink

How To Listen To Eric Schmidt's Talk At SES Today Live

Can't make Search Engine Strategies San Jose 2006 today but want to listen to my conversation with Google CEO Eric Schmidt? Here's how to listen live through the internet or how to pick up the podcast of the talk after it ends, plus news on other special podcasts we'll be doing from the show this week.

The talk is being broadcast live by WebmasterRadio.FM at 10am Pacific time, when it begins. To listen, you need to load WebmasterRadio's live broadcast stream into your media player. Instructions for the three major players are below. Just click on the right link, and the stream will begin.

Windows Media Player (any recent Windows PC has this).

  • If you're on a modem connection, click on this link.
  • Got broadband? Listen in better quality by clicking on this link.
  • Got really fast broadband? Get the best quality by clicking on this link.

Winamp

  • If you're on a modem connection, click on this link.
  • Got broadband? Listen in better quality by clicking on this link.
  • Got really fast broadband? Get the best quality by clicking on this link.

RealPlayer

  • If you're on a modem connection, click on this link.
  • Got broadband? Listen in better quality by clicking on this link.
  • Got really fast broadband? Get the best quality by clicking on this link.

Don't want to or can't listen live? Don't worry. Visit our Daily SearchCast podcast home page. There are full instructions on how to subscribe to our podcast feed or listen in alternative ways. If you don't subscribe or use the alternatives, then try this option. The conversation will appear at the top of the archives listed on the Daily SearchCast page. Click through to conversation page, then click on the MP3 file link. That should load the audio into your media player.

After the talk, we're going to do highlights from selected sessions from the conference this week, in place of the usual Daily SearchCast. These won't go out live, but podcasts will be posted and available to those who take the feed.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:40 AM | Permalink

Daily SearchCast, August 4, 2006: Google Hires Former Time President To Head Ad Sales; Del.icou.us Gets Badges; Google Warns Of Hazardous Sites & More!

Today's search podcast covers a former Time Magazine editor joining Google to head ad sales; del.icou.us offering site owner info badges; Google warning users of sites that might have malware before they click to them from search results. and more! SearchReturn editor Detlev Johnson sat in for Danny Sullivan, who is away this week.

Tune-in by listening to this MP3 file, listening via WebmasterRadio at 11:30am Eastern and repeated at 2pm Eastern Tuesday through Friday, via our Odeo channel or through iTunes via this link (or use alternative iTunes instructions explained here) or though our Yahoo Podcasts channel. Need more help tuning in live or finding the chat room? See the Daily SearchCast FAQ.

Below are links to items discussed:

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:31 AM | Permalink

August 3, 2006

Daily SearchCast, August 3, 2006: Google-AP Deal Not Pay-Per-Click; Google Gains 60% US Search Share; Get Your Click Fraud Settlement Requests In Now & More!

Today's search podcast covers more details on the deal between Google and the Associated Press for news content; Google hits 60 percent of the US search market share, says Hitwise; tomorrow's the deadline to file for a click fraud settlement from Google and more! SearchReturn editor Detlev Johnson sat in for Danny Sullivan, who is away this week.

Tune-in by listening to this MP3 file, listening via WebmasterRadio at 11:30am Eastern and repeated at 2pm Eastern Tuesday through Friday, via our Odeo channel or through iTunes via this link (or use alternative iTunes instructions explained here) or though our Yahoo Podcasts channel. Need more help tuning in live or finding the chat room? See the Daily SearchCast FAQ.

Below are links to items discussed:

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 4:36 PM | Permalink

Daily SearchCast, August 2, 2006: Google To Put Advertisers On XM Radio; Bloglines Develops Feed Exclusion Tag; More Matt Cutts SEO Tips Videos & More!

Today's search podcast covers Google to put radio ads from advertisers on XM Radio; Bloglines develops a way to block RSS feeds from being indexed; Google's Matt Cutts does more video blogging to answer webmaster ranking and indexing questions and more! SearchReturn editor Detlev Johnson sat in for Danny Sullivan, who is away this week.

Tune-in by listening to this MP3 file, listening via WebmasterRadio at 11:30am Eastern and repeated at 2pm Eastern Tuesday through Friday, via our Odeo channel or through iTunes via this link (or use alternative iTunes instructions explained here) or though our Yahoo Podcasts channel. Need more help tuning in live or finding the chat room? See the Daily SearchCast FAQ.

Below are links to items discussed:

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:08 AM | Permalink

August 2, 2006

Daily SearchCast, August 1, 2006: Search & Top Global Brands, NASDQ Error Drops Google Price By Over $300 Temporarily; Google's Matt Cutts Does Video Answers & More!

Today's search podcast covers top search brands and how they do in the BusinessWeek top 100 global brands; a NASDAQ area sends Google's stock price tumbling by over $300 in after hours trading, due to a glitch; Google's Matt Cutts tries video blogging to answer webmaster ranking and indexing questions and more! SearchReturn editor Detlev Johnson sat in for Danny Sullivan, who is away this week.

Tune-in by listening to this MP3 file, listening via WebmasterRadio at 11:30am Eastern and repeated at 2pm Eastern Tuesday through Friday, via our Odeo channel or through iTunes via this link (or use alternative iTunes instructions explained here) or though our Yahoo Podcasts channel. Need more help tuning in live or finding the chat room? See the Daily SearchCast FAQ.

Below are links to items discussed:

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:11 AM | Permalink

July 28, 2006

Daily SearchCast, July 28, 2006: Google Class Action Suit Over Click Fraud Settled; Google Radio Ads; Anti-Phishing Protection In Search Results & More!

Today's search podcast covers the class action lawsuit settlement against Google over click fraud getting final approval; Google ramping up radio ad testing; putting anti-phishing warnings into your search results; ranking woes and more!

Tune-in by listening to this MP3 file, listening via WebmasterRadio at 11:30am Eastern and repeated at 2pm Eastern Tuesday through Friday, via our Odeo channel or through iTunes via this link (or use alternative iTunes instructions explained here) or though our Yahoo Podcasts channel. Need more help tuning in live or finding the chat room? See the Daily SearchCast FAQ.

Below are links to items discussed:

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 2:53 PM | Permalink

July 27, 2006

Daily SearchCast, July 27, 2006: Daily SearchCast's First Birthday!; Microsoft Hires 10,000; Baidu Cuts HP Deal; Google Ranking Changes; Google: The Musical & More!

Today's search podcast covers the Daily SearchCast podcast celebrating its first birthday; Microsoft's record breaking army of new hires; Baidu getting on HP computers in China; Google rankings shifting around; a musical about Google and more!

Tune-in by listening to this MP3 file, listening via WebmasterRadio at 11:30am Eastern and repeated at 2pm Eastern Tuesday through Friday, via our Odeo channel or through iTunes via this link (or use alternative iTunes instructions explained here) or though our Yahoo Podcasts channel. Need more help tuning in live or finding the chat room? See the Daily SearchCast FAQ.

Below are links to items discussed:

  • Microsoft Hires Over Ten Thousand Employees In Past Year The Seattle Pi reports that Microsoft has broke their own hiring records, by hiring 10,081 new employees worldwide over the past fiscal year. The article takes the angle that the hires were in order to compete with Google. Now Microsoft has 71,553 people worldwide as of June 30, 2006. Wow!...
  • Yahoo Launches Visual Link Map Tool Named Webzari The Yahoo Search Blog announced a new tool developed by the Yahoo Korea team named Webzari. Webzari is a tool that visually maps the data from Yahoo Site Explorer. It takes a site's inlinks, and maps them in planets on a map. Check out Search Engine Watch's map which is kinda hard to read, but you can also check out Search Engine Roundtable which has easier to read planets. Notice, when you mouse over the planets, it shows you the location of the server linking to you, and if you click on it shows you more. Very cool interface. Check...
  • Study Reveals Changing Web A report of a new study over on WebSiteOptimization.com has some interesting research showing how users ineract with web sites, revealing an "F-shaped" eyetracking patterns similar to the results Enquiro found looking at earch results. From the study: A new browser study revealed a shift in how we interact with the Web. University of Hamburg researchers found the Web moving from static hypertext information to dynamic interactive services. Clickstream heatmaps and web page statistics show rapid interaction over smaller areas of the screen. The authors recommend that web developers create concise, flexible, and fast loading web pages to keep pace...
  • Powerful Search + Social Bookmarking = Diigo Social bookmarking and search services have been exploding in popularity recently, but I've yet to find one that combined ease of use and flexibility in just the right way. I've been playing around with a new "social annotation" service called Diigo that launched this week, and have been favorably impressed. It's simple, easy to use, but offers a lot of power, especially when it comes to searching—both the web as well as content that you've decided to save. More on the new service in today's SearchDay article, Diigo Offers "Social Annotation" Tool....
  • Baidu To Be Default Engine On All HP Computers Ship To China Philipp Lenssen reports that Baidu, the popular Chinese search engine, will be the default search engine on all new HP's shipped to China after October 2006. As Philipp notes, this is bad for Google who has been pushing hard into the Chinese market. Today the Wall Street Journal reports that Baidu's second-quarter earnings were very high, "but didn't meet some investors' higher expectations."...
  • Changes Spotted In Google Search Results I reported this morning at the Search Engine Roundtable that Google Search Results Shifting Again. What folks in the forums are finding is that some, but not all, of the pre June 27th results are coming back to the way they were. They are also finding that the Google site command search is again working on those datacenters that have the new results. There is a lot of commotion going on in the forums about these changes that began this morning....
  • Possible Shift in Google-Webmasters Communication Policy!, Threadwatch
  • Were All of Google Properties Down Last Night?, Search Engine Roundtable
  • Adam "Mini-Matt" Lasnik's Blog
  • ComScore Adds Competitive Search Data to qSearch, ClickZ
  • UK Microsoft adCenter public opening mid August, Threadwatch
  • Yahoo Partners With British Telecom For Yahoo Local UK Revolution Magazine reports that Yahoo has partnered with British Telecom to share the "Phone Book" data. Yahoo will add 120,000 businesses who advertise in The Phone Book from BT within the Yahoo Local UK platform. This helps BT offer an additional service to their Phone Book customers and gives Yahoo access to some more data and marketing opportunities they may have not had otherwise....
  • Live From GoogleFi, GigaOM
  • New Metasearch for Events and Ticket Providers, ResearchBuzz
  • New Natuaral Hazards Gateway Site from USGS, Fact Sheets & More, ResourceShelf
  • French Court Preventing Greenpeace France From Displaying Crop Data On Google Maps BoingBoing spotted an interesting case where a French court ordered Greenpeace France to remove a site using the Google Maps tool to display "locations of commercial, genetically engineered corn fields in France." Greenpeace France overlaid an X in the spot of those corn fields. They have removed the site, but plan on appealing the order. "Greenpeace argues the online maps should not be censored because an EU law requires the French government to make the crop site information public anyway," Xeni Jardin of BoingBoing writes....
  • Flickr set of bad parking at Yahoo lot, Boing Boing
  • MSN Gets Rights to 'Arrested', Los Angeles Times
  • Google The Musical Coming Soon Philipp Lenssen spots a new musical named Google: The Musical. The musical is being hosted at the Rarig Center on the University of Minnesota Twin Cities campus. The dates of the musical include; Friday on August 4th at 5:30 pm, Tuesday on August 8th at 7:00 pm, Thursday on August 10th at 10:00 pm, Friday on August 11th at 8:30 pm, and Sunday on August 13th at 1:00 pm. What to expect?...

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 2:00 PM | Permalink

July 26, 2006

Daily SearchCast, July 26, 2006: Google Use Of Landing Pages For Ad Rank Raises Issues; Google Now Reporting Invalid Clicks? Google Parachute (Beta) & More!

Today's search podcast covers issues with Google making more use of landing pages to rank ads; Google now reporting invalid clicks to advertisers; online ad spend expected to continue rising; bailing out of the Google Jet and more!

Tune-in by listening to this MP3 file, listening via WebmasterRadio at 11:30am Eastern and repeated at 2pm Eastern Tuesday through Friday, via our Odeo channel or through iTunes via this link (or use alternative iTunes instructions explained here) or though our Yahoo Podcasts channel. Need more help tuning in live or finding the chat room? See the Daily SearchCast FAQ.

Below are links to items discussed:

  • Detailed Look into the Google AdWords Landing Page Algo The Google AdWords landing page algo changes this month have resulted in many advertisers sitting up and thinking about quality issues beyond their ad copy, and looking more closely at their landing pages. I caught up with Google to get specifics on how the algo works, including just how they decided what made a good landing page versus what didn't when they created their algo. I also have ten best practices for advertisers needing to improve landing page quality. The full length SEW subscribers article is here. A shorter (but free!) version is here. Want to share your own best...
  • Virgin's Not So Generous Frequent Flyer Program
  • Google AdWords Now Reporting Invalid Click Rates Google is now offering AdWords advertisers the ability to see how many invalid clicks that Google catches before they are billed. "Estimating invalid clicks" from the Official Google Blog has more about this good move, which should help to better educate advertisers.
  • Google Toolbar Look-Alike Installing Malicious Programs Search Engine Journal reports on a SurfControl release that fake Google Toolbars are being downloaded unknowingly and causing those computers to be contaminated with malicious programs. The programs then use the computers to send out mass-email spam and/or for "internet attacks." So be careful where you download your toolbars.
  • Online Ad Spend 9% Of All Ad Spend By 2011 ClickZ reports on a JupiterResearch report that online advertising spend is projected to snag up nine-percent of the total advertising pie by 2011. They estimate that $25.9 billion in revenues will be spent on online ads by 2011, "rising at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 11 percent over the next five years." For search marketers, of that 9-percent of the pie, 43-percent of the online ad spend will be search base ads accounting for $11.1 billion, by 2011.
  • AOL Redesigns Local CityGuides Thanks to Gary Price for pointing out that AOL has launched a beta redesign of its popular CityGuides. Here's the current version of the site for New York and here's the new beta version of the same city site. Of the more than 300 CityGuides AOL offers, the top 25 are part of the new beta.
  • FAA Safety Instructions For The Google Jet InsideGoogle spotted a funny write up named Google founders eager to take users for a ride. I'll quote the piece InsideGoogle quoted. I'm now required by the Federal Aviation Administration to give the following safety instructions, because our aircraft is in beta and always will be:

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 3:16 PM | Permalink

July 25, 2006

Daily SearchCast, July 25, 2006: Report Says Google's Click Fraud Practices "Reasonable;" Few Opposed Proposed Google Click Fraud Settlement; Tracking Packages Via Search; Getting Real-Time Traffic Info & More!

Today's search podcast covers an independent report finding Google's click fraud practices to be "reasonable," few object to Google's proposed click fraud settlement; Google's "wow" versus Yahoo's "consistency" in terms of product development; tracking packages via search engines; getting live traffic reports via maps and more!

Tune-in by listening to this MP3 file, listening via WebmasterRadio at 11:30am Eastern and repeated at 2pm Eastern Tuesday through Friday, via our Odeo channel or through iTunes via this link (or use alternative iTunes instructions explained here) or though our Yahoo Podcasts channel. Need more help tuning in live or finding the chat room? See the Daily SearchCast FAQ.

Below are links to items discussed:

  • Judge Hears Objections To Google's Click Fraud Settlement Associate Press reports that now that the independent report is out, a judge will consider the fifty-plus objections to the Lane's Gifts v. Google settlement. The judge will hear out advertisers today and tomorrow before finalizing that settlement....
  • Independent Report: Google Click Fraud Detection Practices Are "Reasonable" The Google Blog just posted the independent study on their click fraud detection practices that shows Google makes reasonable efforts to detect click fraud. The report was part of an agreement of the Lane's Gifts v. Google settlement and was performed by Dr. Alexander Tuzhilin, Professor of Information Systems at NYU. Obviously Google is pretty happy about this report and I didn't have time to go through the full 47 page report, but if you have time, I bet you as Search Engine Marketer can learn a ton about the AdWords system. Possibly, Danny will dig into this deeper next...
  • The Abridged Version: Independent Report On Google's Click Fraud Detection Practices Last Friday, an independent report on how Google deals with click fraud was published as part of the ongoing Lane's Gifts v. Google class action lawsuit over click fraud. To my knowledge, it is the most comprehensive, detailed public look into how Google deals with click fraud that's ever come out. It finds that Google's efforts to combat the issue have been reasonable, though there are some eyebrow raising bits on how the author only finds the situation was in control by the end of 2005 and how it's impossible to fully know whether some clicks are invalid -- and...
  • GoDaddy Launches Private Label Domain Park Program GoDaddy has long placed ads on registered domains that customers have parked at GoDaddy. Now, GoDaddy is allowing webmasters to sign up for a paid monthly subscription to CashParking, that would see webmasters get a share of the profits made from all clicks on the parked domain....
  • Google Versus Yahoo: Consistency Or Wow In Product Development? An article over at the New York Times 'In the race with Google, it's consistency vs 'wow'' discusses the differing approaches of Google and Yahoo to the introduction of new technology and resources. The fact that Google hasn't added some of the basics to its mapping service in comparison to the Yahoo and AOL offerings is the starting point for an indepth discussion on how both engines (MSN, AOL and Ask get very short shrift) are trying to increase their user base....
  • Yahoo Invests In Social Search Research Reuters reports Yahoo hired Dr. Raghu Ramakrishnan, as vice president and Yahoo research fellow. Dr. Ramakrishnan is a well-respect database expert who has joined Yahoo to study "links between computer and human-aided Web search." Honestly, I am excited what this can potentially mean for social search. Yahoo has so many properties that can be tightly integrated with social search; Flickr, Del.io.us, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Video, web search, desktop search, Yahoo Groups and so on....
  • Yahoo & Symantec To Offer "New Security Offerings" News.com reports that Symantec and Yahoo will be announcing a "new security offering" sometime today. News.com says this partnership will "improve online security for consumers." But honestly, I have no more details. Is it email focused? Web search focused? Is it desktop focused? We don't know as of yet. So stay tuned....
  • Librarians And Google: Tips Of The Trade Google attended the ALA Conference in New Orleans and produced a video entitled Tips of the Trade together with some additional text only tips from librarians and other information professionals. It's a shame that Google limited participation to American librarians, but it was explained to me that there would have been technical and legal problems with filming librarians from other countries (though that doesn't explain why they couldn't have added in anecdotes from them; a lovely opportunity to draw together and share global experiences). However this is perhaps carping; it's good to see a search engine (other than Ask who...
  • SEOMoz Spills The Beans On Pricing An SEO Campaign Rand posted a blog entry named How to Price an SEO Campaign. He actually broke down his pricing methodology for everyone to see. I have personally never seen this done to this extent before in this industry. SEOs and SEMs can learn a lot about how to price their campaigns and proposals by Rand's post. Rand breaks down a consulting contract versus an implementation contact. His post is very detailed and can give many SEMs an idea on how to improve their contracts. Check out Rand's post here....
  • Google Test Expandable "More" Link Philipp Lenssen reports Google is testing an expandable box that opens with options, when you click on the "more" link from the Google.com home page. The more link currently takes people to the more google products page, but this link, is a little DHTML popup that has links to these products directly on the page. The pop up cannot possibly have all of the products listed, so they have a link to "even more" products that probably links to the page. A screen shot is at Philipp's site....
  • Become.com Launches Search Zoom Filtering Feature No longer do you have to weed through hundreds or thousands of search results to find a discussion forum or product specs for Aston Martin's Vanquish. With Become, you can search for 'Aston Martin Vanquish' or any other product and then filter by Product Reveiws, Buying Guides, Discussion Forums, and Product Details. As Jon Glick, Become's Sr. Director of Product Search told me, "users can see what type of listing it is before going into it." I think this is an extremely useful feature. My original search results for 'Aston Martin Vanquish' (yes, I'm obsessed) contained 171, 573 results vs....
  • Tracking Packages Via MSN Search The MSN Search weblog has now announced that it is possible to use the system for tracking packages, or more specifically, packages from FedEx, DHL, UPS and USPS. Searchers can simply enter a tracking ID and some other tracking keywords and the Package Tracking Instant Answer will correctly construct the link. An example given is 'Where is UPS tracking number?' Additionally you could use the RSS feed for the search to really keep up to date on where your package has gone. Google has had this feature for years now, although it doesn't have an option for DHL. Postscript from...
  • Real-Time Traffic From Google Maps Mobile Google Maps has rolled out a new mobile version offering real-time traffic information in 30 US cities. The service also offers directions designed for those who are walking, in addition to driving....
  • Real-Time Traffic Via My MSN Direct Spot Watch

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 2:47 PM | Permalink

Daily SearchCast, July 21, 2006: Google's Great Second Quarter Results; MSN Revenue Down; RSS Feeds For Ask Smart Answers And Google Base Results & More!

Friday's search podcast covers Google's great second quarter results; MSN's revenues decline; Windows Live Local deserving a second look; RSS feeds for Ask Smart Answers and Google Base results and more!

Tune-in by listening to this MP3 file, listening via WebmasterRadio at 11:30am Eastern and repeated at 2pm Eastern Tuesday through Friday, via our Odeo channel or through iTunes via this link (or use alternative iTunes instructions explained here) or though our Yahoo Podcasts channel. Need more help tuning in live or finding the chat room? See the Daily SearchCast FAQ.

Below are links to items discussed:

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 5:29 AM | Permalink

July 20, 2006

Daily SearchCast, July 20, 2006: Amnesty International Raps Search Engines On Censorship; Currency Exchange Rates In Google AdWords Kept Secret; Microsoft To Allow More Search Default Choice & More!

Today's search podcast covers Amnesty International calling on searchers to lobby Google, Yahoo and Microsoft to stop censoring in China; Microsoft to allow manufacturers more choice in search defaults; why does Google consider exchange rates in AdWords a secret?; Google behind in indexing a changed site and more!

Tune-in by listening to this MP3 file, listening via WebmasterRadio at 11:30am Eastern and repeated at 2pm Eastern Tuesday through Friday, via our Odeo channel or through iTunes via this link (or use alternative iTunes instructions explained here) or though our Yahoo Podcasts channel. Need more help tuning in live or finding the chat room? See the Daily SearchCast FAQ.

Below are links to items discussed:

  • Amnesty International Asking Users To Pressure Google, Yahoo & Microsoft Over China Policies BBC News reports that Amnesty International is urging users of Google, Yahoo and MSN in the UK to email the search engines opposing the way each operates in China. Amnesty International says that the search engines are aiding the censorship. The search engines say that Chinese users are more well off then they were prior. More on the Amnesty campaign can be found here from the organization....
  • Microsoft Says Vista & Other Operating Systems Will Allow Search Engine Choice News from News.com and Reuters that Microsoft said, they will adopt a "voluntary principle" that will allow the manufacturers of the computers to decide which search engine the operating system should default to. News.com describes this as Microsoft wanting to "bolstering choice and competition" in the market place. Wise move by Microsoft? I think so. Take a look back at Google & Dell partnership, IE7 defaulting to MSN Search and read this. Too funny, but smart on Microsoft's part, IMO....
  • Google Scholar Trademark Case Settled Out Of Court News.com reports that Google and American Chemical Society trademark case has been settled out of court. The case was brought up against Google for using the name "Scholar," when American Chemical Society has a similar product named "ACS?s SciFinder Scholar." The case was dropped and each side will pay their own legal fees. No other details were provided and both sides have confidentiality clauses....
  • Google Won't Reveal Details Of AdWords Exchange Rates I spotted an interesting thread which I then followed up on today at the Search Engine Roundtable which shows that Google won't reveal the source of the exchange rate they use. So if you are an international AdWords customer and you pay in your local currency, and you want to know why the exchange rate is so poor, you are out of luck. The AdWords representative states: "the product managers are not willing to discuss the former at this time as part of protecting the whole." And Threadwatch notes Google also claims it can't give this information out for "competitive...
  • Google Behind Others, Again, Catching TagJag's New Name SEOMoz reports that Google is once again behind the 8-ball when it comes to picking up a domain name switch. Chris Pirillo's TagJag site was originally named Gada.be but was 301 redirected several weeks ago. Yahoo and MSN Search both display the site for a search on the name, TagJag.com, but Google shows nothing. Like we said before, Google had similar issues when Techmeme changed their name....
  • Motorola To Add Yahoo Go for Mobile On Phones Reuters reports that Yahoo and Motorola have teamed up. The Yahoo Go for Mobile service will be added to many new Motorola phones. The multi-year deal sets Motorola to add this Yahoo service on new mid-priced and high-end Motorola phones. No specific models numbers were provided....
  • Swapping My Treo 700W For The UTStarcom XV6700
  • Orange SPV M3100
  • Can IAC's Pronto Shopping Search Compete? IAC, parent of search engine Ask.com, has had a shopping search tool for some time, in the form of Pronto, a downloadable application. Recently, IAC created a web-based version of Pronto, which has some useful features?but it joins a crowded field with hundreds of other players. SEW correspondent Brian Smith takes a look at Pronto and muses about the challenges it faces in today's SearchDay article, Up Close with IAC's Pronto Shopping Search....
  • ApartmentRatings.com: 'What The Neighbors Pay' Apartment locator ApartmentRatings.com has introduced a new service it calls "What The Neighbors Pay." As co-founder and CEO Jeremy Bencken describes it, "It's not quite 'Zillow for renters.'" Regardless, it offers helpful pricing information, benchmarking individual apartment rates vs. averages in the area....
  • Lycos Powered By Windows Live & Retriever Directory It's been a long time since I've looked at Lycos, given how far it has slipped in the search world. Someone asked me about it today, so I took a look -- and what's this at the bottom of the page? "Portions powered by Windows Live."...

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 2:16 PM | Permalink

July 19, 2006

Daily SearchCast, July 19, 2006: Yahoo Stock Drops On Panama Ad System Delay; Google Finance Gets Conference Call Transcripts; Yahoo Gets House Pricing Data; A Semantic Web Smackdown? & More!

Today's search podcast covers Yahoo's stock dropping on delays with its new ad system; keyword prices dropping; Google Finance getting cool conference call transcript links; Yahoo makes it easy to learn your house's worth; a semantic web smackdown between Google and Sir Tim Berners-Lee? And more!

Tune-in by listening to this MP3 file, listening via WebmasterRadio at 11:30am Eastern and repeated at 2pm Eastern Tuesday through Friday, via our Odeo channel or through iTunes via this link (or use alternative iTunes instructions explained here) or though our Yahoo Podcasts channel. Need more help tuning in live or finding the chat room? See the Daily SearchCast FAQ.

Below are links to items discussed:

  • Search Engine Watch Server Change About a year ago, Incisive Media purchased Search Engine Watch from Jupitermedia. Part of the purchase meant that Jupitermedia would continue to host Search Engine Watch for a year. With that time up, we're finally moving. This is a heads-up that the change is happening....
  • Yahoo's Stock Falls On Panama Delay & Q2 Earnings Release Everyone is blaming the fall in Yahoo's stock price due to the delayed launch of Panama, Yahoo's new ad system. We have USA Today reporting that "Yahoo said net income fell 78% from a year ago." Bloomberg saying Yahoo "had their biggest drop in more than four years." CNN has a catchy title for their "No yodeling for Yahoo investors" article. The Wall Street Journal and Reuters explain that Yahoo's number meet expectations but the delayed launch caused concern that Microsoft can catch up with Yahoo in the sponsored search game....
  • Yahoo Delays Launch Of New Ad System, "Panama" ClickZ reports that Yahoo's new ad system, aka Panama, will not be launching in the 3rd quarter. They now estimate a delayed launch date of the 4th quarter. The new ad system was reported on by Danny back in early May. ClickZ has more details on how the delayed launch has affected the company's stock....
  • Reporting Data Delayed At Microsoft adCenter I reported at the Search Engine Roundtable that Microsoft adCenter has been having some reporting issues, where data in your adCenter reports are delayed as far back as the 14th (almost five full days). Microsoft is aware of the issue and will have things working properly as soon as possible....
  • Yahoo Revamps Behavioral Targeting Platform ClickZ reports on the details of Yahoo's revised behavioral targeting platform, once known as Fusion and Impulse. Fusion and Impulse has been renamed to Engagers and Shoppers to better describe what the product does. Anna Papadopoulos of ClickZ interviewed Richard Frankel, senior director of product marketing at Yahoo about the new upgrade....
  • Keyword Prices Continue To Fall: Down 8.6 Percent Fathom Online released a keyword price index update that shows keyword prices fell again quarter over quarter by 8.6 percent. Prices on average fell from $1.39 on March 31 to $1.27 on June 30. Last report also showed keyword prices dropping $1.43 at the end of 2005 to $1.39 in the first quarter of 2006, but folks blamed seasonality for the price drop. The reason for this drop? Marketers are bidding smarter says Matt McMahon, VP Marketing Services at Fathom....
  • Google Finance Adds Suggest Auto Complete & Conference Call Transcripts We have been tipped off that Google Finance has added two new features today. The first is auto-complete, like Google Suggest. If you go to Google Finance and begin typing something, it will offer suggestions tailored to stock symbols (pretty useful). Also, if you view a particular stock quote, you may notice an additional link added under the "Facts" section where it has "Site Links." The additional link is named "Transcripts" and links to SeekingAlpha.com. If you view GOOG and click on the transcript link, it takes you to Recent Transcripts for GOOG at SeekingAlpha.com....
  • Google Says Goodbye To Affiliates At the Search Engine Roundtable I wrote Google AdWords Ridding Themselves of Affiliates which documents a case of a long time AdWords advertiser being told by his Google representative that he and his kind are no longer wanted in the AdWords program. This all goes back to the new quality score for landing pages, which tend to weed out affiliate sites. Basically, the "quality" of affiliate sites are not high enough anymore to do well in the new quality score algorithm. Google is weeding out these affiliates by inflating their minimum bid to prices that are not economically sound for...
  • Judge Gives AFP Case Against Google More Time A US federal judge has declined to dismiss a copyright infringement case filed by Agence France Press against Google News. Instead, she's given both sides more time to assemble evidence before ruling on a dismissal motion....
  • What Does Google's Spam Score Mean? Earlier this month we reported on Google's Spam Score Details, but no one knew what it meant exactly. Todd Malicoat took a peek into the Google algorithm a week ago with his best guesses on what each value represents. I am not going to go through all the details, but Todd makes some smart and detailed responses for each listed value listed in the spam score. Re-inspired by Rand....
  • Zillow Partners With Yahoo! Zillow, the real estate wunderkind, announced a partnership with Yahoo! in which Zillow's Zestimates (home value estimates) will show up on Yahoo! search result pages as a Shortcut. Here's the result for 'home values' on Yahoo!. Zillow will also be featured in Yahoo's real estate section (under the 'what's my home worth' link). Read the official press release, Zillow's blog post, or the Yahoo! Search blog post....
  • Google: Semantic Web Faces Webmaster Challenges For years, Sir Tim Berners-Lee has posed the idea of a semantic web that will be smarter through tagging. I've always said the flaw with this idea is that people make mistakes with tagging. Google's also said this type of thing before, as well -- but Google's director of search Peter Norvig gave fresh pushback yesterday when on a panel with Lee. Google exec challenges Berners-Lee from News.com has the details, with Norvig explaining that site owners often don't tag information correctly, along with some simply being misleading. True enough....

  • Google suit disagrees with inventor of the Web, loses, Valleywag

  • 11 Ways To Drive Traffic To Your Site Rand at SEOMoz writes up an excellent post he named 10 Remarkably Effective Strategies for Driving Traffic. He has given us 10, plus one bonus idea for driving traffic to your site. I will list them in summery here, but Rand has posted the "ingredients", "process", "results" and "examples" for each listed traffic driving strategy at his post....
  • North Korean Missiles & Chinese Helicopter Training Site On Google Earth TheRegister spots Chinese black helicopters in a remote Chinese village of Huangyangtan. And Boing Boing locates North Korean missile sites including Musudan-ri/No-Dong missile test site, Pipa Got naval base and Cho Do naval base. More details on the North Korean sites here....
  • How much for a Google Fridge?
  • My Google Dilbert Logo Mug

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 2:16 PM | Permalink

July 18, 2006

Daily SearchCast, July 18, 2006: Google Maps Jump Into Regular Google; Avast Ye Click Pirates; Google: "We Are Idiots;" Yahoo's New Home Page, Finance & More!

Today's search podcast covers Google Maps getting mixed into regular Google; ahoy, matey, here come the click pirates to rob from the rich advertisers and give to, well, the pirates; Eric Schmidt admits to Google idiocy [but does he really believe it]; Yahoo updates its home page and Yahoo Finance; Google sends an advertiser pai relief; is your mom Googling you? and more!

Tune-in by listening to this MP3 file, listening via WebmasterRadio at 11:30am Eastern and repeated at 2pm Eastern Tuesday through Friday, via our Odeo channel or through iTunes via this link (or use alternative iTunes instructions explained here) or though our Yahoo Podcasts channel. Need more help tuning in live or finding the chat room? See the Daily SearchCast FAQ.

Below are links to items discussed:

  • Google Maps Added As OneBox Result Rob over in our Search Engine Watch forums thread Google Maps + Reviews In Main Search Results and Philipp Lenssen reports that Google seems to have added a new Google Maps "OneBox" display for some results. Philipp shows how a search on sf mortgage broker brings up a Google Maps like UI at the top of the results. In the past, it would have just brought up links to local results and not a full-fledged map. I tested it out on my own company and it also brings up the Google Maps OneBox. You can see the difference between local...
  • Report: Click Fraud Rises in Q2 & High-Priced Keywords Click Fraud Rate At 20.2% The Click Fraud Index issued an updated report on the state of click fraud. In the second quarter click fraud rose four points to 14.1 percent, compared with the Q1 results of 13.7 percent. In addition, this time they broke out click fraud rates in terms of high-prices keywords versus low-price keywords. For terms that cost over $2.00 per click, high-priced keywords, the click fraud rate is higher than the average, at 20.2 percent. Click fraud is less of an issue at Google and Yahoo, tier one providers at 12.8 percent but did rise from 12.1 percent in Q1. Tier...
  • Click Pirates Making A Mockery Of The Text Ad Space Peter Da Vanzo uncovers a disturbing practice where there are people out there clicking on ads, with the sole desire to hurt advertisers and enrich themselves....
  • Malware Search Engine Powered By Google H.D. Moore of Metasploit designed a vertical search engine using the Google API to search specifically for malware. The search engine can be found here....
  • The Google Idiots Are Damn Smart Spotted via Battelle, the folks running Google are a bunch of idiots! At least that is what Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt wants you to think. Schmidt remarked to reporters the other day, ?So, yes we are IDIOTS ? and please WRITE THAT DOWN.? Huh? Write it down? What does that get you? Schmidt continues, ?We have every known problem that a growth company has ? quicker?Write down all the obvious problems, we have every one of them. So we make a list of them (potential problems) and we anticipate them.? Sarcasm, personally, I think it is great. Some people may...
  • Google Hiring Television Engineers & Wireless Software Engineer Search Engine Watch Forums moderator evilgreenmonkey (brand new moderator) has informed me that Google posted two new interesting jobs for the London office for Software Engineer, Television Technology & Wireless Software Engineer in Test....
  • More On MySpace After A Search Partner Mining for Gold on MySpace from BusinessWeek gives a few more details on the story we covered earlier about MySpace seeking a partner to power searches. The story says RevenueScience is powering search there currently, though when I did my earlier post, neither Yahoo nor RevenueScience confirmed that. RevenueScience did confirm they do contextual/behavioral targeting, but that's an entirely other type of service. The story also gives new, amazing stats that MySpace generates 5 percent of all searches on the web. Hmm. Just a month ago, this was said to be 0.6% of all searches, according to comScore. And...
  • AdWords Adds Category Site Selection Feature The Inside AdWords blog announced that you can now tell them what category of sites you want your ads to be displayed on. For example, if you run a karate site that sells Samurai swords, then you can tell AdWords to display your ads on sites that talk about the sport of karate. Now, I did not look if karate is a category under "sports" but if it is, then you can choose it. More details on how to use this feature at the AdWords support page....
  • Yahoo Officially Launches New Home Page Design Yahoo has officially launched the new design they have been beta testing since mid-February. If you go to www.yahoo.com you will get the new design even if you have never seen it before. Yahoo launched the design in the UK & Ireland earlier this month. TechCrunch notes in the comments that the new design has been live in India for weeks now. The full press release is posted below....
  • Yahoo Finance Upgrades Features & Charts Part of the launch of the new Yahoo homepage, Yahoo has added some features to Yahoo Finance. Those features include new tools to manage charts, an improved "investors chat room" and financial video news. SearchViews explains that Yahoo "hopes to tone down the wild west atmosphere of boards by introducing a way to rate posts on a scale of 1 to 5 stars, with lower rated posts to be filtered out." Part of the upgrade includes access to adding Yahoo badges to your site, something we beta tested in mid-May....
  • Yahoo Tests Redirecting Some Searches To Site Explorer & Yahoo Search Update Yahoo is testing out redirecting some of those who conduct a link command or site command search at search.yahoo.com to the Yahoo Site Explorer tool. I reported this and just now received confirmation from Yahoo that they are testing out this solution with a "percentage of users" conducting these searches. Yahoo has always wanted to move these special searches off the main search.yahoo.com page and onto the Site Explorer front. On other Yahoo news, Yahoo just announced a weather report stating, "we rolled out an index update last night. As usual, you may see some changes in ranking as well...
  • Find Great Podcasts Podcasts are a very good way of keeping up to date with what is going on, they're entertaining, you can play them in the background while you're doing other things - but have you ever tried to find them? Quite frankly, it's been pretty messy and not a lot of fun. However the article "Find great podcasts" is a very useful summary of podcast search engines, directories, and other resources. The comments also provide a useful collection of resources that can be used to find that elusive podcast....
  • AFP Content Still In Google News, Probably Via AFP's Own Partners "Despite suit, Google News still indexing AFP content" from IDG News Service covers Agence France Press content still appearing in Google News after the company said last year that it would no longer carry AFP content, following a copyright infringement lawsuit. The problem seems to be that AFP content is distributed by other publishers, such as the New York Times....
  • Hawaiian Airlines Cries Search Engine Foul Over Use Of "Hawaiian" On Competitor Web Site Hawaiian Airlines is alleging that new rival Go because Go made use of the word "Hawaiian" too often and thus might be influencing search results....
  • Mom's Googling: Be Careful! Andy Beal points to an article published at the Los Angeles Times named Oops, Mom Googled Me. The story is about how a mom decided to Google her daughter. What she found was an article from her daughter named "9 Tips For Surviving The Holidays At Your Republican Parents? Home" (you can see the article by scrolling down on this page)....
  • Google Sends Aspirin After AdWords Changes Causes Headache Earlier this week, Al Scillitani posted at Marketing Pilgrim about how all the recent Google AdWords changes were giving him a headache. Today, he posted how in response, he'd been sent some acetaminophen in response from Google. I thought it was interesting enough to note in today's search headlines roundup but not that big of a deal overall. How wrong I was :) Over 3,000 Diggs later, the story's got legs. Adam Lasnik from Google's search quality team says he's the culprit. Adam's actually got nothing to do with AdWords, but the gesture was funny anyway....

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 3:03 PM | Permalink

July 14, 2006

Daily SearchCast, July 14, 2006: Judge Decides Google Can Rank Pages As It Pleases; Google Lets You Just Say No To ODP Descriptions; Microsoft An Enterprise Search Player? & More!

Today's search podcast covers KinderStart's loss in a lawsuit over search rankings; Google allowing webmasters to prevent Open Directory descriptions from being used for their pages; Microsoft's pot show at Google coming into Microsoft's "enterprise search space" feels weak and more!

Tune-in by listening to this MP3 file, listening via WebmasterRadio at 11:30am Eastern and repeated at 2pm Eastern Tuesday through Friday, via our Odeo channel or through iTunes via this link (or use alternative iTunes instructions explained here) or though our Yahoo Podcasts channel. Need more help tuning in live or finding the chat room? See the Daily SearchCast FAQ.

Below are links to items discussed:

  • KinderStart Becomes KinderStopped In Ranking Lawsuit Against Google Kinderstart has lost its case over lost rankings on Google, though the company will be allowed to amend defamation claims relating to its PageRank zero score. If it does by September 29, I suspect that reattempt will go down in flames as well. But the entire case exposes vulnerabilities Google has created for itself with mixed messages over how keyword ranking and Pagerank work....
  • Interactive Review of SEOMoz's Page Strength Tool Rand posted information about a new tool he launched named the Page Strength Tool. It is pretty cool, and why can't it replace PageRank? :) Anyway, here is my interactive review of the tool, you can find more details about what the tool exactly measures here....
  • Counting Links At The Search Engines Rand has an excellent post on how to get your hands dirty by manually checking your links at the various search engines. He reviews Google's link command and how bad it is. He also reviews MSN's link command and explains how you can add modifiers to the link or linkdomain commands (i.e. exclude site A from the command). Rand then reviews the Yahoo link command, and explains that although Yahoo has Site Explorer, the "most accurate" result set still comes from search.yahoo.com. He recommends you use search.yahoo.com and then append &b=999 to the end of the URL manually. Like MSN,...
  • Google Adds Supports For NOODP Tag To Opt Out Of ODP Titles Singing for joy! Google has now added support for the NOODP tag that MSN initiated on May 22nd of this year. Yes, Danny asked for this back in June, and now Google has granted our wish. If you have one of those pesky titles pulled from the ODP (dmoz.org) directory, don't fret it, just add the NOODP tag. How do you do it? Just add <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP"> to your page source. If you want to just exclude MSN use <META NAME="msnbot" CONTENT="NOODP"> if you just want to exclude Google use <META NAME="googlebot" CONTENT="NOODP">....
  • More Details On Google Sitemaps Query Stats DaveN at ThreadWatch posted his love/hate for Google Sitemaps, but what I find to be the most interesting part is the discussion taking place in his post at his blog. Vanessa Fox, Google Engineering, from the Inside Google Sitemaps blog posted a comment at Dave's blog explaining why a the Sitemaps query stats may say you come up for a popular term even though you don't mention that term or phrase on your pages of your site....
  • Eric Schmidt Claims The PPC Model is "Self-Correcting" In Terms Of Click Fraud Donna Bogatin reports that Google's CEO Eric Schmidt claims that click fraud is "self-correcting." Meaning, Eventually, the price that the advertiser is willing to pay for the conversion will decline, because the advertiser will realize that these are bad clicks, in other words, the value of the ad declines, so over some amount of time, the system is in-fact, self-correcting. In fact, there is a perfect economic solution which is to let it happen. So the "let it happen" quote, in terms of Eric Schmidt saying let click fraud happen, has been buzzing through the blogging community. Schmidt writes off...
  • Google: No, We Don't Let Click Fraud Happen We posted earlier about Google CEO Eric Schmidt quoted as saying click fraud was "self correcting" with an economic solution of "let it happen." Those quotes got the blogosphere buzzing. Google's now responded on its official blog in "Let click fraud happen"? Uh, no., to say that Schmidt was talking about hypothetical approaches to click fraud rather than what Google itself does. The post also links to the entire presentation, so people can watch and judge for themselves....
  • Many Advertisers Are Frustrated With Google's New Quality Score & Pricing On July 7th Jennifer Slegg reported that the new Google AdWords landing page quality score algorithm has been updated. Since then, the effects of the new algorithm have been rippling through AdWords campaigns and digging deep into the pockets of many of Google's advertisers....
  • Dr. Google Sends Pain Relief
  • Booby Trap, Star Trek: The Next Generation, episode 54
  • Galaxy's Child, Star Trek: The Next Generation, episode 90
  • Microsoft: "Enterprise Search Is Our Business" (It's Not) & Google Can't Have It (They Don't) Microsoft to Google: Hands off enterprise search from News.com and a similar report from The Register both cite Microsoft Chief Operating Office Kevin Turner declaring "enterprise search is our business, it's our house and Google is not going to take that business." Gosh -- I though enterprise search was Autonomy's business, Autonomy's house. This recent Investors Business Daily article had Autonomy as the "clear leader" in enterprise search, followed by FAST, IBM and then Google. Microsoft isn't even mentioned -- not once....
  • Newspapers To Team Up With Yahoo To Create An Online Classifieds Network Reuters reports on a Business Week article that shows how a "loose consortium of newspaper publishers" are in discussions with Yahoo's HotJobs to build an online classifieds network. For Yahoo, this can help increase the popularity of HotJobs and for the newspapers, it can help them drive more ad dollars, but this time, online ad dollars....
  • Windows Live Adds Search/Personalized Toggle & 34 New Markets Gary Price points to two Windows Live blog posts including, search/personalized toggle and now in 34 new markets. The first describes how you can now toggle between search and personalized experience. Your last selection will be remembered for your next session. The blog says that this "replaces our old 'hide' option, with a much improved experience in 'search only' mode that is faster and includes search filters." Windows Live also entered 34 new markets including;.
  • Yahoo's Livesearch Added To Firefox Yahoo launched Livesearch on AllTheWeb back in May. Danny has a detailed post about how it is similar to Lookahead and Google Suggest. Anyway, as we suggested on May 16th, Livesearch capabilities from Yahoo has been added to a new version of Firefox 2.0. You can download the new Firefox here and give it a try. Also you can read more at the Yahoo Search Blog, which has links to more methods of downloads....
  • Specialty Search Roundup #7 Another week and another set of specialty databases and research tools that were posted on ResourceShelf during the past week or so....
  • Caffeine and Tin Foil At Windows Live Search What do Microsoft Interns, birthdays, caffeine and tin foil have to do with each other? Well, nothing. But at Microsoft, they have tin foiled and over caffeinated an Intern in the Windows Live Search group. Check out this picture of the Intern sitting at his desk, with his computer wrapped up in tin foil and with 99 cans of Cherry Coke. Why did they do this to that Intern?...
  • Here?s What Happens When You Scrape a Hacker Site, SEO BlackHat

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 1:51 PM | Permalink

July 13, 2006

Daily SearchCast, July 13, 2006: SES Latino; Yahoo's Expansion To US Hispanic Sites; Google Does Radio Ads Survey & More!

Today's search podcast covers the SES Latino show that just concluded in Miami; a new Yahoo deal to reach Hispanics; Google & radio ad moves; search engine office expansions; Google Force One revisited and more!

Tune-in by listening to this MP3 file, listening via WebmasterRadio at 11:30am Eastern and repeated at 2pm Eastern Tuesday through Friday, via our Odeo channel or through iTunes via this link (or use alternative iTunes instructions explained here) or though our Yahoo Podcasts channel. Need more help tuning in live or finding the chat room? See the Daily SearchCast FAQ.

Below are links to items discussed:

  • Search Engine Strategies Latino, Miami, Florida - Day One Day one of the first ever Search Engine Strategies Latino edition is pretty much complete. The networking cocktail is taking place now, there is a Google party tonight and also some Yahoo boat thing. I have managed to cover the Landscape & Tactics tracks, so here is the roundup. + The Opportunity: Tapping Into US Hispanics & Latin America Via Search + Search Landscape: US Hispanics + Search Landscape: Latin America + The Challenges Of Search Marketing To US Hispanics & Latin Americans I also took pictures of the sessions and outside of the hotel, you can see them here....
  • Search Engine Strategies Latino, Miami, Florida - Day Two The conference has officially ended, it was a really great event. Huge congrats to Nacho for running this. I am writing this quickly, because they are breaking down the room as I type this. Here are the sessions I covered today. + Translate Or Create: Strategies For Those With English-Language Sites + Domain Issues - Latin American Version + Spanish / Portuguese Language Ad Issues + SEO & Spanish / Portuguese Language Issues Again, pictures of the event tagged with seslatino at Flickr....
  • Cartoon Barry Interactive by SitePal, Search Engine Roundtable
  • Yahoo Reaches Out To U.S. Hispanics Via Deal With Hispanic Digital Network ClickZ reports that Yahoo has reached a deal with Hispanic Digital Network (HDN) to supply web search and sponsored search listings for HDN's 70+ Spanish-language Web sites. Reportedly, this gives Yahoo access to 2.8 million U.S. Hispanic visitors per month. The ads will be both in Spanish and English, not based on geo-location but based on the language used in the query. Yahoo would like to see more Spanish content web sites developed in the future, according to Peter Celeste, regional general manager for the Americas for Yahoo Search and Search Marketing. For more information on the Hispanic market, check...
  • Speculation: Google To Begin Selling Radio Ads Through AdWords Soon TechToolBlog said he received a survey from Google specifically asking questions about radio ads. Most of the questions in the survey are related to radio ads, see the screen captures here or the close ups Donna Bogatin has done here. He said that last time Google sent out a survey, it was about print ads, and then they ran print ads soon after. Keep in mind, DMarc Broadcasting, currently sells radio ads, but this seems like Google may begin pushing AdWords advertisers into the radio ad game....
  • New Landing Page Quality Score Announced for Google AdWords Advertisers The Google AdWords blog has announced new changes that will be seen next week that will result in some advertisers faced with higher minimum bids to keep their campaigns running on AdWords, as a result in changes being made to the landing page quality score algorithm. While a small number of advertisers will be affected, AdWords is targeting those landing pages that offer a poor user experience to those who click the ads....
  • Judge Orders Google To Disclose Advertiser's Information Out-Law reports that Google was ordered by Justice Rimer to hand over the information on an advertiser to Helen Grant for copyright infringement. Helen Grant "complained that a Google advert led to a service which she claimed violated her copyright in a forthcoming book." A search brought up a site named Realityunlocked.com, "which offered a free download of an earlier draft of the book, and that the site violated the Trust's copyright." Google asked Grant to take the issue to court, this way Google does not have to worry about the privacy issues with handing over the information....
  • Click Packages Draw Local Advertisers Into Search The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) reports on the "bundle of clicks" search distribution packages that all the major yellow pages publishers in the U.S. are now selling to their local advertisers. Here's an amazing quote from Simon Greenman, SVP of digital products at R.H. Donnelly, "Our strategy is to connect our customers with their customers wherever they may be." That's a radical statement for a yellow pages executive to make because he's not asserting that print yellow pages is the best lead generation vehicle "and we also have Internet." He's saying Donnelly is "agnostic."...
  • SuperPages For Sale Verizon has formally filed with the SEC to sell its directory unit, which contains the print yellow pages and online yellow pages/local search businesses. A likely sale could bring as much as $15 billion. And because AT&T does not look like it's going to spin off its directory business, SuperPages could fetch a significant premium....
  • SuperPages Upgrades Maps With Microsoft I never saw a press release. But today I discovered that SuperPages, which had dynamic mapping almost before anyone else in local (though it was "cludgey"), has upgraded the mapping on its site using the Microsoft Virtual Earth platform. The "new" maps are much nicer and easier to use than the last time I checked, which was admittedly a long time ago. While there is aerial photography, there's no "Birds Eye" view here. YellowPages.com licensed Virtual Earth, including Birds Eye, several months ago....
  • Google Maps Adds Click To Zoom Loren Baker at Search Engine Journal points out that Google Maps has added another way to zoom: double clicking. Of course you can still zoom with the mouse rollerball. Here's the official statement from the Google Maps API Blog. Google Earth and Google Maps are now apparently running off the same platform, which should permit more integration of Earth features into Maps over time....
  • Yahoo Buys Land In Santa Clara The San Jose Business Journal reports that Yahoo has purchased 42.5 acres in Santa Clara. The price of the land was not disclosed, but we do know they bought it from San Francisco's TMG Partners. Yahoo's CFO, Sue Decker, said: "We see this as an attractive asset that provides attractive additional capacity and flexibility for Yahoo's future. We are planning for future growth and will analyze several different scenarios over the coming year regarding the development of the property."...
  • Google To Set Up Offices In Michigan The NY Times reports (also try Reuters) that Google will house up to 1,000 employees in a new facility in Michigan. The office is to reside in downtown Ann Arbor, "the hometown of the University of Michigan, where Larry Page, one of Google?s founders, earned his undergraduate degree in engineering." The Times reports that the majority of the building will be used for "technology and call center, with about 40,000 square feet needed to house the library digitization project."...
  • Google Drive Revealed? Yesterday, Cocaman posted a screen capture of what was named Platypus or GDrive. From the looks of the screen capture it seems like an internal tool used at Google is getting ready for prime time. The page is now offline, of course, but the screen capture read;...
  • The Matt Cutts Hard Drive Collection
  • Matt Cutts Of Google Comments On Recent Listings Issues Last week we reported that Google may have revealed the spam scores to the world. Well, Matt Cutts came back from vacation and he confirmed the data "was real." He promised not to "comment on what any of it means" but at least we know Google is part of the borg. Just kidding. I doubt we will see a treasure like that again, but if we do, it would be interesting to see if Google does add "extra settings for fun," such as ?initial_time_travel_wormhole=?Wednesday, December 31 1969 11:11 pm."...
  • Weird Results Counts On Google I've written before about Google giving strange results counts and why maybe it's time for them to go. Yesterday, I came across the oddest ones ever, when doing some typical searches to gauge the size of the index....
  • MySpace More Popular Than Google Or Yahoo Bill Tancer over at his HitWise blog has data that claims MySpace Moves Into #1 Position for all Internet Sites. This is incredibly important, MySpace.com is more popular that Yahoo Mail, and MySpace's growth of visits has surpassed Google towards the end of May of this year. But as Bill points out, what is most revealing is that the "top search terms driving traffic to all Internet sites" is MySpace and MySpace.com with 1.28%, compared with last years top search term being eBay at .31%. See all the details at HitWise....
  • AdSense Consulting Group Fed Up With Google AdSense Wired has a story on AdSense, not Google AdSense, but AdSense Consulting, the company who registered AdSense.com back in 1996....
  • Google Jet Plane Security Threat? And Testing A Sofa In Mountain View Josh Gerstein at the New York sun has an update on the suit over Google Jet disclosure. Basically, Google's founders argue that the information given up by aircraft designer can be could put the lives of those on the plane in danger. Google asked for a court order to keep the designer quiet. Well, the judge declined to hear or rule on the case - go figure. Read more about it from Danny's earlier post. Postscript From Danny: The security concerns voiced in the case made me wonder out details getting out about Google Force One compare to Air Force...
  • Google boys are "sofa king" rich

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 3:18 PM | Permalink

July 12, 2006

Daily SearchCast Programming Note

The Daily SearchCast didn't happen on Tuesday, July 11 due to me being away in Miami for the SES Latino conference. It also won't happen today, Wednesday, July 12. I expect to be back at it on Thursday, July 13.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 12:03 PM | Permalink

July 7, 2006

Daily SearchCast, July 7, 2006: Business.com's Nofollow On Non-Paid Links; Buying Links The W3C Way; Stephen Hawking On Yahoo Answers; A California King Bed For Google Force One & More!

Today's search podcast covers Business.com putting nofollow on non-paid links; buying links via the W3C; Dr. Stephen Hawking getting answers from Yahoo Answers?; just how big of a bed will fit into the Google founders' new jet and more!

Tune-in by listening to this MP3 file, listening via WebmasterRadio at 11:30am Eastern and repeated at 2pm Eastern Tuesday through Friday, via our Odeo channel or through iTunes via this link (or use alternative iTunes instructions explained here) or though our Yahoo Podcasts channel. Need more help tuning in live or finding the chat room? See the Daily SearchCast FAQ.

Below are links to items discussed:

  • Business.com Adds NoFollow To Many Links Threadwatch reports that Business.com has added the nofollow attribute, a method of telling search engines not to count particular links as a "vote," to many of its outbound links. Aaron Wall discusses how the use of the nofollow in this sense "muddies their credibility," by saying, we have links on our web site that we posted but we don't trust them. It turns out that only those that pay business.com for a directory listing gets a link without the nofollow added to it. Everyone else who is accepted into the directory, is tagged as untrusted....
  • W3C Selling PageRank Or Thanking Supporters? Nathan Weinberg linked to a post by Emad Fanous who notes that the W3C is selling PageRank 9 and PR7 links. You can buy a link on this page also and earn yourself a PR9 link from the w3.org site. How much is it? $1,000 per year and if you do that, you will also get yourself a free PR7 link on this page. How about that for a good deal? :) I'll stop being sarcastic now... Things to note: (1) The links do not carry the nofollow attribute (2) It seems like anyone can buy the links. See the...
  • Google's Q&A Database Different From Web Search Database This morning I posted at SER that Google was displaying results for a particular site in the Q&A section of the Google SERPs but at the same time does not have any pages of that site listed in the Google web search index....
  • AOL Podcast Search Beta Live TVEyes' podcast search engine Podscope.com has been launched as a service on AOL Search in Beta. You can access the AOL Podcast Beta Search after accepting the license agreement, you will then be directed to http://podcast.search.aol.com/. A search will provide a method to listen to podcast excerpts with a link to hear the whole podcast. You can submit your podcast to AOL here. You can also learn more about AOL Podcast Search beta here....
  • Smarter.com Updates Site Smarter.com made 4 major changes to its website. The company introduced a new design, new ranking methodology, clustering beta, and limited crawling. While Smarter is one of the little guys in the shopping comparison engine industry (Shopping.com and Shopzilla being the leaders according to comScore data), these are bold moves which show how serious the company is about becoming a major player....
  • Search Engine Optimization in an Hour a Day If you're just getting started with search marketing, it can be tough to know where to start or which sources of information to trust. Things change quickly, and what worked yesterday doesn't always work today. Fortunately, there are some fundamental approaches and techniques that always seem to work, and a new book does a great job of laying a foundation for search engine success. Even better, the book avoids jargon and stays away from the countless hotly debated "tactics" that often cause more harm than good. I've got a review of this new book in today's SearchDay article, A Beginner's...
  • Dr. Stephen Hawking Turns To Yahoo Answers For How Humans Will Survive Wow. Dr. Stephen Hawking, yes, the real Stephen Hawking, has turned to Yahoo Answers for help. How can the human race survive the next hundred years?, he asks, in a question that Yahoo reassures us is really from the famous physicist and not a joke. And stay tuned, because Yahoo's planning to get U2's Bono to post later today. How's it going for Hawking? There were 15,867 answers when I looked. That means his next question should be, "How can I review all these answers?" The answer is to sit back and let the Yahoo Answers community itself do it....
  • Google In Another Dictionary: Merriam-Webster The LA Times reports that the term 'Google' has been added to the Merriam-Webster, the dictionary I grew up on. The other day we reported that Google was added to the Oxford English Dictionary, the most authoritative dictionary of the English language....
  • Lawsuits Over The Google Party Jet; Arguments Over Bed Sizes On Board New details out now about the Google Jet we've written about before, the used 767 that Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have purchased. Turns out, there are lawsuits filed over the retrofit of the plane, and with them, news of hammocks hanging from the ceiling and an apparent fight between the cofounders over bed sizes that Google CEO Eric Schmidt had to referee....

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 5:24 PM | Permalink

July 6, 2006

Daily SearchCast, July 6, 2006: $800 Million In Click Fraud Or Not?; Does Google Need An Ombudsman?; Google Jockeying In The Classroom & More! (Corrected MP3 File)

Today's search podcast covers a report of $800 million lost to click fraud last year -- or was it?; should Google and other search engines have ombudsmen to resolve disputes and concerns?; what's with Yahoo being suggested as alternative search results for "therapy products" on Google; Google Jockeying is coming to a classroom near you and more!

Tune-in by listening to this MP3 file, listening via WebmasterRadio at 11:30am Eastern and repeated at 2pm Eastern Tuesday through Friday, via our Odeo channel or through iTunes via this link (or use alternative iTunes instructions explained here) or though our Yahoo Podcasts channel. Need more help tuning in live or finding the chat room? See the Daily SearchCast FAQ.

Below are links to items discussed:

  • SES Latino Edition - Miami: July 10-11, 2006
  • Report: Advertisers Lost $800 Million To Click Fraud Last Year The San Francisco Chronicle reports on a click fraud study that claims 14.6 percent of all clicks and $800 million worth of fraudulent clicks were charged to advertisers....
  • Google's Ranking Algorithm Too Dependent On Trust Factors? Todd Malicoat went off on a bit of a rant which he named The Trust Knob is WAY too High - Google Trustbox. Todd, as do many SEOs, believe that Google places too much weight on "trust factors" when determining if a page should rank well or not. Todd quotes some well-known SEOs saying that trust factors are weighted at 85%, whereas copy is only given 15%. Why does this upset SEOs like Todd? As Todd explains, One of the extremely big problems with trust filters is that they don?t seem to be retroactive?meaning that sites that were around and...
  • Techmeme's Front Pages: What's Really A Big Story & How To Go Back In Time
  • Kinderstart Transcript Available Eric Goldman posted the Kinderstart transcript and other case documents on his site. Recently, Kinderstart's case was heard in court and the judge requested Kinderstart to provide some more information. The full, 45 page, transcript of the June 30th hearing can be downloaded here....
  • Google Ombudsman? Search Ombudsman? Great Idea -- Bring Them On! Back in 2004, Gary Stein suggested that Yahoo hire an ombudsman, a sort of impartial referee to handle disputes involving advertising programs. I thought it was a great idea. Today, Steve Bryant over at eWeek's Google Watch calls for Google to do the same thing. Again, great idea -- let's see the search engines all start hiring ombudsmen, in the way that many newspapers and others have done....
  • Myanmar Enables Access To Google After Blocking Gmail & GTalk Mizzima News reports that Myanmar (also known as Burma) has opened up access to Google again, after blocking it about a week ago. Reportedly Myanmar blocked Google and Gmail/GTalk because they want to control the revenues earned from the state-controlled telephone companies. Myanmar has been known to block web-based email accounts because they want to only allow state-controlled email usage....
  • Google Fixes XSS Security Holes A security vulnerability in Google, discovered and posted at ha.ckers.org was patched quickly by Google. Both Philipp Lenssen and JasonD posted about the XSS hole that enables hackers to deploy phishing scams, cookie stealing, and creation of worms. Matt Cutts of Google was quick to reply to the Threadwatch post stating that the hole has "either fixed or the fix is going out."...
  • Search For "Therapy Products" On Google Suggests Yahoo As Alternative Results SEO Speedwagon posts notes that a query on Google for [therapy products] displays a See Results For box listing pages from Yahoo. These mid-page results are supposed to help people find pages somehow related to their original query -- but Yahoo really has nothing to do with therapy products. How weird, how strange? I had to take a screen capture myself, just in case the others get lost....
  • Google Posts First Quarter '06 Quarterly Report 10-Q For those of you who own Google stock or track Google's revenues, Google has just posted their quarterly statement. You can find the update on the Google investors page with a link to a PDF document for Google's March 31, 2006 10-Q....
  • eBay Disallows Google Checkout Andy Beal reports that eBay has officially banned Google Checkout as a payment solution on eBay. Here is a list of payment solutions not allowed on eBay, including Google Checkout....
  • New Search Patent Applications: July 5, 2006 - Google Coming to a Shopping Mall Near You Google files patents for shopping offline with online assistance, a secondary map in Google Maps, and an updated review aggregator. Yahoo adds a patent application for search results PPC advertising, and managing blog content. Microsoft looks to anchor text to help train a machine learning classification system when user behavior data isn't available. AOL details a method of filtering search results using ontologies and expert domains for queries. IBM explains differences in how images can be indexed, and presents a method based upon the semantic meanings of pictures. Become, Inc., describes how different links can be assigned different values while...
  • Google Jockeying Another phrase to join 'surfing' and 'browsing' - we now have 'jockeying' or Google jockeying, to be precise, according to the article from Pandia. Briefly put, Google jockeying (though it can be any search engine, it just seems that in order to gain attention Google has to be mentioned somewhere) is a situation where a teacher or presenter is giving a lecture and someone (the jockey) sits in the background running searches or using the search engine to demonstrate something that the presenter is talking about. There's an interesting presentation on it provided by the Educause Learning Initiative....
  • Wi-Fi Comes to New York Parks The New York Times today is reporting on the progress of a project to unwire New York City parks, which was announced three years ago. Reportedly by early August of this year 10 of New York's "most prominent parks" will have Wi-Fi access. The project is being implemented by a small company called WiFi Salon. Mobile handset maker Nokia is now underwriting the project as a sponsor....
  • Incroyable! 'Le Tour' Uses Google Earth Not GeoPortail WebProNews points to the Google Earth Blog in explaining that The Tour de France has integrated Google Earth into its site and functionality. In particular, the site offers complete 3-D rendering of all tour stages. But we must ask, why wasn't this done on France's homegrown Google Earth challenger GeoPortail?...

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 4:16 PM | Permalink

July 5, 2006

Daily SearchCast, July 5, 2006: Google's Ranking Criteria Categories Exposed?; Lawsuit Over Rankings Might Go Ahead; Google's Not-So-Killer Products; Windows Live Local Click-To-Call & More!

Today's search podcast covers Google's categories of ranking criteria accidentally exposed?; SEO tools to try; is Google a flop unless all of its products are winners?; Windows Live Local gets click-to-call and more!

Tune-in by listening to this MP3 file, listening via WebmasterRadio at 11:30am Eastern and repeated at 2pm Eastern Tuesday through Friday, via our Odeo channel or through iTunes via this link (or use alternative iTunes instructions explained here) or though our Yahoo Podcasts channel. Need more help tuning in live or finding the chat room? See the Daily SearchCast FAQ.

Below are links to items discussed:

  • Hamburg, The Ukraine Football Team & Seeing The World Cup
  • Hamburg Fan Fest & Germany V. Argentina
  • Google's Spam Score Details Shown? Peter Da Vanzo spotted a DigitalPoint thread that found clues as to how Google scores spam results behind the scenes. Now, honestly, I have no idea if this is about spam or something else, it is just that the information posted in the forum, seems to appear like a spam score report by Google. How did it come about? The user was presented with this information after clicking on a cache URL in the Google results. The user was shocked to see the following information revealed to him....
  • Report a Content Violation
  • KinderStart.com Case May Proceed To Court? News.com reports that the KinderStart.com case may proceed to court, based on this past Friday's hearing. Kinderstart.com initially sued Google for a site penalty that downgraded the site's rankings in the Google search results. Kinderstart.com claims Google violated antitrust laws, "What Google is trying to do is take out the competition," Kinderstart.com's lawyer said. The judge gave KinderStart.com's lawyers until September 29th to make revisions to the complaint. The judge said, "You can't just file a blanket lawsuit and say, 'We think we're going to find some stuff.'" Also see news brief at ComputerWorld....
  • SEOMoz's Keyword Difficulty Tool Rand posted an update to a tool named keyword difficulty tool. The tool's name is pretty descriptive enough, it tells you how competitive a keyword is to rank for. There is great detail on how it works here and here....
  • Interactive Review Of SEOBook's SEO Firefox Extension Aaron Wall over at SEO Book released a Firefox extension for SEOs. The Firefox extension can be viewed here, it allows you to see on the Google and Yahoo search result pages the PageRank, the age, the links, the .edu links the .gov links, the del.icio.us numbers and Technorati rank, the Alexa rank a cached link and much more, right on the page. I decided it would be fun to do an other video cast. You can view the video cast by reading more....
  • Google Warns U.S. Legislators On Anti-Trust Complaints Over Net Neutrality The Washington Post reports that Google has warned the United States, that if telecoms abuse net neutrality principles it backs, through a new law that might go through, it could consider an anti-trust action. If you want all the details, check out the Washington Post....
  • Yahoo China To Be Sued For Linking To Sites Selling Pirated Music Spotted via TechCrunch, Bloomberg reports that Yahoo China is to be sued for linking to sites that sell pirated music. The article claims "about 90 percent of all recordings in China are illegal, with sales of pirated music worth about $400 million annually," according to the International Federation for the Phonographic Industry. A new law in China that came into effect on July 1 "fines distributors of illegally copied music, movies and other material over the Internet as much as 100,000 yuan ($12,500)."...
  • Ending Click Fraud with Pay-Per-Percentage In Pay-Per-Percentage vs. PPC, Shimon Sandler points out an interesting new paper from the folks at Microsoft Research - Pay-Per-Percentage of Impressions: An Advertising Method that is Highly Robust to Fraud (pdf) As Shimon notes, the idea is that this type of advertising approach would be "immune to both click fraud and impression fraud," and would use something called "pre-fix match" instead of broad match....
  • Windows Live Local Integrates 'Call For Free' Into All Business Listings The intrepid Gary Price called my attention to the quiet integration of "click to call" functionality into Windows Live Local over the weekend. I couldn't determine whether this was homegrown or whether Microsoft was working with a partner such as eStara or Ingenio to offer the service....
  • Microsoft Running Out Of Room In Redmond A New York Times article looks into how Microsoft is running out of room in Redmond. The company is adding 12,000 new employees, which requires them to expand the headquarters 3.1 million square feet, more than a third of its current size. They will be adding fourteen new buildings and leases to fit all these new employees. The problem is, there is not enough room for them to expand at this pace....
  • New York Times Looks At Google's Hardware & Infrastructure A New York Times article has a detailed analysis of Google's infrastructure and discussion with Urs Hölzle, senior vice president for operations at Google. Here are some of the key points I pulled from that article. + Google tends builds from ground up versus buying. + Google's computing costs are half those of other large Internet companies and a tenth those of traditional corporate technology users. + Critics call Google's philosophy "unnecessary and inefficient." + "Google is reducing cost while maintaining performance by shifting the burden of reliability from hardware to software ? individual hardware components can fail, but software...
  • Google's Non Search Products A Flop BusinessWeek reports that when Google launches a new non-search product, the competition "shivers," Google has yet to lead in market share for any of those non-search products. Google's Gtalk is currently ranked number ten with two percent market share, Google Finance is the "40th-most-visited finance site," and Gmail "is the system of choice for only about one-quarter the number of people who use MSN and Yahoo e-mail." So with all these product launches, is Google a threat? Read more at BusinessWeek....
  • Google To Launch Book Search Service In China The People's Daily Online reports that Google will be launching an on-line book search service in China. Google signed agreements with publishing houses, instead of libraries (as Baidu has), including publishers named Tsinghua University Press and the Children's Publishing House. Google said that the books would be available on-line, "provide search links and grant free access to a segment of each work, but readers would have to pay to read the full content." Google plans on taking a 30 percent commission from the profit on selling books online....
  • Yahoo Launches New Home Page Design In UK & Ireland Personal Computer World in the UK reports that Yahoo has finally released out of beta, the new home page redesign that has been in beta since mid-February. The new design, is visible for all at http://uk.yahoo.com/ and is described "as the biggest redesign in its history, and promised that the new homepages would focus on search, content, community and personalisation." Danny confirms that his Yahoo home page has switched to the beta version, and he is based in the UK, of course. I am based in New York, and my Yahoo home page has remained the same....

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 3:13 PM | Permalink

July 3, 2006

Search Headlines & Links: July 3, 2006

Below, a recap of stories posted today to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with other items we've spotted but not blogged separately:

From The SEW Blog...

  • 'Point and Search' Redux After my most recent post on "point and search" mobile technology, prompted by last week's NY Times' article on GeoVector's efforts in Japan, Search Engine Watch alum (now Director of Online Information Resources at Ask) Gary Price directed me to a number of his earlier posts on mobile search using camera phones. In this post he discusses Google's voice search patent, "point and search" mobile technology from Microsoft and several-other camera phone search tools....
  • Ending Click Fraud with Pay-Per-Percentage In Pay-Per-Percentage vs. PPC, Shimon Sandler points out an interesting new paper from the folks at Microsoft Research - Pay-Per-Percentage of Impressions: An Advertising Method that is Highly Robust to Fraud (pdf) As Shimon notes, the idea is that this type of advertising approach would be "immune to both click fraud and impression fraud," and would use something called "pre-fix match" instead of broad match....
  • Yahoo China To Be Sued For Linking To Sites Selling Pirated Music Spotted via TechCrunch, Bloomberg reports that Yahoo China is to be sued for linking to sites that sell pirated music. The article claims "about 90 percent of all recordings in China are illegal, with sales of pirated music worth about $400 million annually," according to the International Federation for the Phonographic Industry. A new law in China that came into effect on July 1 "fines distributors of illegally copied music, movies and other material over the Internet as much as 100,000 yuan ($12,500)."...
  • New York Times Looks At Google's Hardware & Infrastructure A New York Times article has a detailed analysis of Google's infrastructure and discussion with Urs Hölzle, senior vice president for operations at Google. Here are some of the key points I pulled from that article. + Google tends builds from ground up versus buying. + Google's computing costs are half those of other large Internet companies and a tenth those of traditional corporate technology users. + Critics call Google's philosophy "unnecessary and inefficient." + "Google is reducing cost while maintaining performance by shifting the burden of reliability from hardware to software ? individual hardware components can fail, but software...
  • Matt Cutts Is Back From Vacation We all missed him, Matt Cutts has returned from his long vacation. Hopefully he can get back in the saddle and begin working on those issues at Google. :) Seriously, we all miss you Matt, thanks for coming back and winking (blinking that is) at us....
  • BBC News Features Article On Google Search Spam A BBC News front-page article named Google to stay focused on search brings the issues of search spam to the public. The article explains how seventy-percent of Google's focus in on Web search and then goes into several paragraphs on how search spam is a huge issue. The article quotes Douglas Merrill, of Google engineering, saying, "Spam is an arms race," explaining that "spammers are highly motivated. There is a lot of money at stake."...
  • Google Page Creator Now Supporting AdSense Google Page Creator, which I recently reported did not support AdSense, now does. Garett Rogers has invitations sent out to Google Page Creator accounts from Google, notifying them that they now accept AdSense. Honestly, when I read this, it made me sad. Why? One word, "MFAs". Below is a copy of that email invitation....
  • Google's Non Search Products A Flop BusinessWeek reports that when Google launches a new non-search product, the competition "shivers," Google has yet to lead in market share for any of those non-search products. Google's Gtalk is currently ranked number ten with two percent market share, Google Finance is the "40th-most-visited finance site," and Gmail "is the system of choice for only about one-quarter the number of people who use MSN and Yahoo e-mail." So with all these product launches, is Google a threat? Read more at BusinessWeek....
  • KinderStart.com Case May Proceed To Court? News.com reports that the KinderStart.com case may proceed to court, based on this past Friday's hearing. Kinderstart.com initially sued Google for a site penalty that downgraded the site's rankings in the Google search results. Kinderstart.com claims Google violated antitrust laws, "What Google is trying to do is take out the competition," Kinderstart.com's lawyer said. The judge gave KinderStart.com's lawyers until September 29th to make revisions to the complaint. The judge said, "You can't just file a blanket lawsuit and say, 'We think we're going to find some stuff.'" Also see news brief at ComputerWorld....
  • Daily SearchCast, June 30, 2006
  • Daily SearchCast, June 29, 2006

Other Things We Read, Didn't Blog But You Might Want To Read...

  • No search headlines today because of a light work schedule due to tomorrow's Fourth Of July holiday in the US. Sorry!

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 5:21 PM | Permalink

June 30, 2006

Daily SearchCast, June 30, 2006

Friday's search podcast covering the day's news

Tune-in by listening to this MP3 file, listening via WebmasterRadio at 11:30am Eastern and repeated at 2pm Eastern Tuesday through Friday, via our Odeo channel or through iTunes via this link (or use alternative iTunes instructions explained here) or though our Yahoo Podcasts channel. Need more help tuning in live or finding the chat room? See the Daily SearchCast FAQ.

Below are links to items discussed:

  • Google AdWords Adds Statistics Tabs Google has updated their AdWords interface to include "account statistics tabs." The new tabs are named "Summary," "Keywords," and "Ad Variations," they can be found if you click into Adgroup levels.
  • GooglePlex Irvine To Revolutionize Radio Advertising Zachary Applegate posted his visit to the GooglePlex Irvine at SEOMoz, where he describes the demonstration given to him by Google. The demo, Zach coined, "Google AdSense Audio," a method of "dynamically generate and change commercial content according to demographic and what is currently going on in the geographic area of radio stations." Zach explains that Google is entering this market to enable those with "$200 budgets to break into radio advertising."
  • Changes for the Yahoo Publisher Network The Yahoo Publisher Network has made a series of changes to their interface and support documents which seem to be appealing to the new publishers. They have added a new "RPC" column to reporting, meaning publishers can see their average earning per click. Jennifer interviewed Cody Simms, the YPN product manager behind all the updates on her radio show Click This! You can download the MP3 from a link off the blog to listen to Cody explain the changes and information about the decisions behind them.
  • MSN Search To Officially Not Use Yahoo Search Marketing For Sponsored Search July 1 MSN's U.S. search distribution agreement with Yahoo! Search Marketing ends this month, and Yahoo! Sponsored Search listings will no longer appear in MSN's U.S. search results." MSN has been displaying mostly Microsoft adCenter ads on their search results pages for a couple months now. So the transition has been pretty gradual for advertisers and searchers.
  • Yahoo Gains Market Share In China, Google Loses Share TMCnet.com reports that Google has slipped back to third place with 13.2% share in China. Yahoo is in second place with 21.1% market share and Baidu with 43.9%. TMCnet sources this information from the Beijing Modern Business Daily on page 1 from the Tuesday, June 27, 2006 edition.
  • Google Video Adds New Features Google Video is letting now letting users add comments, labels and ratings to any video on the site. Yes, tagging by any other name.
  • Vertical Images From AdSense Include Images in Ad Units Vertical Images is the latest beta test being run by Google AdSense. Usually Google beta tests in the US, then rolls out products across the world wide Web. This beta is different in that it is immediately available across the world. Vertical images displays a related generic image within the ad unit, which then links to a results page similar to the results page seen when clicking on an Ad Links keyword.
  • Myanmar Government Blocks Google & GMail? The Times of India reports that Myanmar government has blocked Internet users from reaching Google.com and Gmail. They claim users trying to reach Google and Gmail for the past week have been received "Access Denied" responses. Myanmar's largest ISP, Bagan Cybertech, confirmed the issue that the sites were "inaccessible but declined to comment further."
  • Ask.com Removes "Legacy Filters" To Enable Pedophilia Keyword Search we covered a story that Ask.com was blocking search terms such as laws against pedophilia and preventing child pornography, amongst others. Philipp notes that Ask.com has removed the "legacy filters" to enable those types of searches. In fact, for the search on preventing child pornography, you get a special "smart answer" for "Child Abuse Resources."
  • Specialty Search Roundup
  • eBay's PayPal Mocks Google Checkout Philipp Lenssen cracked me up with just the title of his post named EBay Guy Trashes Google Checkout, Then Deletes Post. Here, read the post; I find it amusing how the general media is claiming GBuy [aka Google Checkout] will be a significant competitor to Paypal based on GBuy having near zero buyers actually using the service vs over 100MM using Paypal. Let?s recall something here folks. In its current form, GBuy is a glorified merchant account. The post was then deleted, but you can read it all here

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:06 PM | Permalink

Daily SearchCast, June 29, 2006

Thursday's search podcast covering the day's news

Tune-in by listening to this MP3 file, listening via WebmasterRadio at 11:30am Eastern and repeated at 2pm Eastern Tuesday through Friday, via our Odeo channel or through iTunes via this link (or use alternative iTunes instructions explained here) or though our Yahoo Podcasts channel. Need more help tuning in live or finding the chat room? See the Daily SearchCast FAQ.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:04 PM | Permalink

June 28, 2006

Daily SearchCast, June 28, 2006: Digg Goes Beyond Tech; Google Earth & Real-Time Tracking; funny Yahoo-related videos; Google Water & More!

Today's search podcast covers Digg's relaunch taking it beyond technology news, FeedBurner's ad plans; Google's challenge in enterprise search; Google Earth and real-time tracking, funny Yahoo videos, Google water and more!

Tune-in by listening to this MP3 file, listening via WebmasterRadio at 11:30am Eastern and repeated at 2pm Eastern Tuesday through Friday, via our Odeo channel or through iTunes via this link (or use alternative iTunes instructions explained here) or though our Yahoo Podcasts channel. Need more help tuning in live or finding the chat room? See the Daily SearchCast FAQ.

Below are links to items discussed:

  • Social News Site Digg Adds New Categories, Features Sites that rely on user generated content are all the rage these days, from online encyclopedia Wikipedia to social bookmark sites like Del.ico.us. Digg relies on its 300,000 users to suggest important news stories from sites all over the web, and promotes those that get the most "diggs" (votes) to its front pages, providing a collective view of what web users think are the most important stories of the moment. Earlier this week the site rolled out new subject areas and tools that make it easier to drill down on the types of news that interests you personally and ignore...
  • FeedBurner CEO, Dick Costolo, Interviewed By Business 2.0 Magazine CNN Money has an Business 2.0 interview with Dick Costolo, FeedBurner's CEO. The article discusses the challenge FeedBurner had raising capital for such a new technology, RSS. It also discusses their recent success and future challenges (RSS ads, Google, etc.). Read the article named Redefining the RSS feed....
  • 'Point and Search' on Japanese Cellphones The NY Times covers "Point and Click" mobile local search in Japan on GPS-enabled mobile phones using technology from American firm GeoVector. I wrote about GeoVector's technology and the very different user paradigm it represents earlier this year. Beyond the intriguing possibilities of tying together the mobile and physical worlds, there are two things that are quite interesting about the technology and use case: 1) it accommodates the current limitations of cellphones and 2) it's more "passive" than other forms of mobile local search. In other words, the input mechanism is more like taking a picture than "triple tapping."...
  • Google Not The Leader In Enterprise Search Google is synonymous with "search," everyone knows that, some people hate it and some people love it. An Investors Business Daily article reviews enterprise search and Google's role in that niche. The article explains "enterprise search is a different animal from Web search," that linkage data is not "aren't ideal for helping people find specific data on large private networks." So who are the other players the article mentions? Autonomy, Fast Search & Transfer, IBM's OmniFind, Endeca, and upcoming rival Oracle's Secure Enterprise Search 10g....
  • Dell To Use Google Earth To Provide Enhanced Tech Support The Detroit News reports that Dell is going to use Google Earth as a tool to enhanced their technical support services. The new tech support service, to be released today, is named "Platinum Plus." Platinum Plus subscribers will be given access to "Google Earth Pro to see in real-time how the Round Rock company is responding to technical support issues around the globe." Dell and Google have some recent past positive relationships this just adds to that list....
  • Switching To The Nintendo DS Lite For Me & The Kids
  • David Beach Leaves Yahoo For Start Up Wink Brian Smith notes that the senior product manager of Yahoo Shopping Search, David Beach, has decided to leave Yahoo after five years. Beach confirmed his departure from Yahoo on his blog, stating that Yahoo could not provide "the kind of opportunity that Wink is providing." Wink, a social search engine, "analyzes tags and submissions from Digg, Furl, Slashdot, Yahoo MyWeb, and other services, plus user-imported tags from del.icio.us, and favorites marked at Wink, and figure out which pages are most relevant through our TagRank (tm) algorithms." Should be a fun move for Beach....
  • New Search Patent Applications: June 27, 2006 - Searching Amongst Malicious Web Sites Microsoft's patent applications from the end of last week include ways for search engines to scan malicious web sites, clustering queries for more relevant searches, and extracting feature and formatting information from pages. IBM introduces a new query dependent page ranking algorithm, and a way to preload the URLs of a site into your history file before you've ever visited. Xerox searches for more meaningful snippets, Alcatel takes the PC out of search, and replaces it with TV, and British Telecommunications describes a way to make user profiles more helpful in returning search results....
  • Microsoft Demographics Prediction Tool Interactive Review We posted about Microsoft Center Labs once again, but this time I wanted to show you, my eight-minute review of the demographics prediction tool at the lab. I created a movie of my running through the tool and uploaded it to YouTube. Now, before you watch the video, keep in mind that the percentages I discussed in the video may be determined as a "confidence" ratio and not a simple flat percentage -- you will see what I mean. In any case, there is no way that google.com has predominantly a female audience, with a confidence ratio of 1.00 and...
  • Some Funny & Crazy Yahoo Videos On YouTube Loren Baker posted some of the funniest and craziest videos he found on YouTube related to Yahoo. If you have time to only watch one video, I recommend watching the first one. Pretty funny stuff. Other videos include, Tom Cruise's Yahoo visit, David Filo and Jerry Yang commercial, "Yahoo Cubicle Craziness," and some others. Check them out at Search Engine Journal....
  • Marine Selling "Google Water" For Military Families Charity Boing Boing links to a Marine who just got back from Iraq. The Marine posted on his blog that he began selling "Google Water" on auction to raise money for The Fisher House, an organization that helps military families in need. Google and eBay shut down his auction, "due to copyright violations," but he still has some left over Google Water. He is looking to sell them for a bottle for $500 and give that money to the Fisher House....

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 3:09 PM | Permalink

June 27, 2006

Search Headlines & Links: June 27, 2006

Below, a recap of stories posted today to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with other items we've spotted but not blogged separately:

From The SEW Blog...

  • Daily SearchCast, June 27, 2006: School Upset Over Student Data In Google; Is GBuy GooglePal?; Microsoft adCenter Gets Promoted; New Travel Search Engines; The Matt Cutts Doll & More! Today's search podcast covers a school district's student social security numbers getting into Google; Amazon.com going missing on Google; Google's PayPal-like system about to launch; Microsoft promotes adCenter with advertisements and lab tools; new travel search engines to try; dress up Matt Cutts and more!
  • Microsoft Demographics Prediction Tool Interactive Review We posted about Microsoft Center Labs once again, but this time I wanted to show you, my eight-minute review of the demographics prediction tool at the lab. I created a movie of my running through the tool and uploaded it to YouTube. Now, before you watch the video, keep in mind that the percentages I discussed in the video may be determined as a "confidence" ratio and not a simple flat percentage -- you will see what I mean. In any case, there is no way that google.com has predominantly a female audience, with a confidence ratio of 1.00 and.
  • Image Database To Fight Online Child Porn The AP reports that AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft, EarthLink, NetZero and Juno are teaming up to fight child pornography. They are pooling together $1 million to build a database of pornographic images of children and software to match the image database with similar matches on their own networks. So Yahoo may scan email attachments, Yahoo Groups images and other places in the Yahoo network where images may be. If any of the images match an image in the database, it can be flagged and sent to the authorities. The exact details of the software and how it will be used have...
  • New Players in Travel Search Threaten to Disrupt Status Quo Travel search has improved enormously over the past several years, but serious travellers still find themselves checking multiple web sites to make sure they're getting the best deal. That may change with the launch of two new services that use historical and predictive data to not only find the best prices for specific flights, but also to suggest the best dates on which to purchase your tickets. Brian Smith has more about the new services in today's SearchDay article, New Players in Travel Search....
  • Microsoft Re-Launches adCenter Labs Again Been hearing about the "new" Microsoft adCenter Labs tools this week? That's because Microsoft has done another round of publicity on them after initially launching them earlier this month. Our past recap is here and here....
  • Still No Results Found For A Google Search on Amazon.com John Battelle asked why Google was/is returning no results for a search on [amazon.com] at 9am (PST, I think) yesterday. At the time, I felt it wasn't a huge deal, these things happen on occasion at Google, normally not for such a large brand, but it happens, nevertheless. What is a bit surprising is that Google is obviously aware of the issue, based on John telling us Google contacted him with a confirmation of the issue, but Google has yet to fix the issue, almost a day later. LeeAnn Prescott at the HitWise blog provides some value statistical insight into...
  • Google's PayPal-Rival GBay Looks Set To Launch This Week We've had rumors that Google would launch its own PayPal-like payment system this week. Widely reported as GBuy, the Wall Street Journal has a few further details of what looks to be coming any day now....

Other Things We Read, Didn't Blog But You Might Want To Read...

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 3:49 PM | Permalink

Daily SearchCast, June 27, 2006: School Upset Over Student Data In Google; Is GBuy GooglePal?; Microsoft adCenter Gets Promoted; New Travel Search Engines; The Matt Cutts Doll & More!

Today's search podcast covers a school district's student social security numbers getting into Google; Amazon.com going missing on Google; Google's PayPal-like system about to launch; Microsoft promotes adCenter with advertisements and lab tools; new travel search engines to try; dress up Matt Cutts and more!

Tune-in by listening to this MP3 file, listening via WebmasterRadio at 11:30am Eastern and repeated at 2pm Eastern Tuesday through Friday, via our Odeo channel or through iTunes via this link (or use alternative iTunes instructions explained here) or though our Yahoo Podcasts channel. Need more help tuning in live or finding the chat room? See the Daily SearchCast FAQ.

Below are links to items discussed:

  • Google Blamed For Indexing Student Test Scores & Social Security Numbers Google "hacked our website" from The Inquirer points to Blame game from the Hickory Record, a story about how the Catawba County Schools in North Carolina has gained a temporary injunction for "Google to remove any information pertaining to Catawba County Schools Board of Education from its server and index and alleges conversion and trespass against the corporation." The school blames Google for some how getting into a password protected area and indexing the content. Let me make this clear, Google cannot submit forms or type in usernames and passwords. Someone at the school must of left an opening for...
  • Follow-Up: School Couldn't Reach Google Until Injunction Filed Catawba County Schools in North Carolina obtained an injunction to remove private material from Google because it had no luck getting action from the search engine after trying other routes, the district tells me. The school district also stressed that it didn't claim that Google had somehow hacked into its servers. Here's what Catawba County School's chief technology officer Judith Ray emailed me about the situation:...
  • Still No Results Found For A Google Search on Amazon.com John Battelle asked why Google was/is returning no results for a search on [amazon.com] at 9am (PST, I think) yesterday. At the time, I felt it wasn't a huge deal, these things happen on occasion at Google, normally not for such a large brand, but it happens, nevertheless. What is a bit surprising is that Google is obviously aware of the issue, based on John telling us Google contacted him with a confirmation of the issue, but Google has yet to fix the issue, almost a day later. LeeAnn Prescott at the HitWise blog provides some value statistical insight into...
  • MSN Talks Spam Defenses; Takes Weekends Off From Indexing This morning I uncovered two threads at WebmasterWorld that provide information on MSN from spam defense to when search indexes get updated. The first is named MSN Asks Webmasters, What is Spam? where MSNdude provides some insights into how MSN determines what is spam, what are junk pages and determining the "hierarchy of spam." The second is named MSN Won't Do a Search Index Update on Fridays, Saturdays or Sundays where we see MSNdude posting that normally MSN will not conduct a search index update on Saturdays and Sundays, and also they are unlikely to conduct an update on Fridays,...
  • Google's PayPal-Rival GBuy Looks Set To Launch This Week We've had rumors that Google would launch its own PayPal-like payment system this week. Widely reported as GBuy, the Wall Street Journal has a few further details of what looks to be coming any day now....
  • Microsoft Promotes adCenter In Full Page New York Times Ad ClickZ reports that Microsoft has a full-page color ad in this morning's New York Times that promotes Microsoft adCenter, Microsoft's PPC engine. The ad has a link to msftadcenter.com/nyt that notably prompts you with a few security warnings on the redirects to the final landing page. The ad headline reportedly reads "She found your furniture ad on Google." Then there is an "image is a little girl and her dollhouse." The ad continues by explaining the difference between a customer and a click. The ad also touts a "2006 study by WebSideStory shows that Microsoft adCenter converts customers at a...
  • Microsoft Re-Launches adCenter Labs Again Been hearing about the "new" Microsoft adCenter Labs tools this week? That's because Microsoft has done another round of publicity on them after initially launching them earlier this month. Our past recap is here and here....
  • Cost-Per-Keyword Drops In Q1 MediaPost reports that the cost-per-keyword has dropped from around $30 in the first quarter of 2006 to "the yearly high of $59 last December." The data comes from a DoubleClick study, which also shows that the "cost-per-keyword was nearly unchanged from the first three months of 2005 to this year's first quarter." The number of clicks (up 24%) and number of keywords did rise from the year-over-year data....
  • Google Vs. France Trademark Appeal Ruling Expected Wednesday The International Herald Tribune reports that a Paris appeals court is expected to issue judgment on a trademark violation appeals case this Wednesday. Google is expected to lose this appeal once again, due to how France has treated Google in the past. Just look at these three selected stories we covered in the past on Jan 20, 2005, Feb 4, 2005, and Mar 16, 2005. If Louis Vuitton wins the case, they are expected to push to block the use of the Louis Vuitton trademarks at other Google local properties. But it is highly unlikely that they will have as...
  • Google To Also Lobby In Europe Pandia covers that Google is looking to hire a "senior European government affairs and public policy leader," to lobby in Europe. Google has hired a lobbying firm in the states a few months back. More details on the story at Pandia....
  • France's Géoportail Mapping Site: La Demande C'est Fantastique! The French answer to Google Earth, the indirectly government funded Geoportail, launched Friday and was immediately overwhelmed with visits from eager French citoyens (citizens) and other curious would-be users. After several visits to the site this weekend, I was still unable to get in to see anything. Each time I tried I encountered this message: "Vous êtes incroyablement nombreux à vous connecter au Géoportail, portail des territoires et des citoyens depuis sa mise en ligne." In my broken French it roughly translates: "An incredible number of you have connected to Geoportail, portal of the territories and the citizens, since the...
  • The SEO Event Google Calendar Aaron Wall posted a very useful SEO Event & Conference Calendar using the Google Calendar platform. The conferences on this calendar include Search Engine Strategies, WebmasterWorld's PubCon, Ad Tech, Affiliate Summit, Gnomedex, Search Bash, SEO Roadshow, SXSW Interactive, Webmasters in the Sun and Web 2.0 Conference. I think I will create something similar at the Search Engine Roundtable to give people an idea how what conferences you can expect us to cover (I may update this post when my schedule is posted)....
  • New Players in Travel Search Threaten to Disrupt Status Quo Travel search has improved enormously over the past several years, but serious travellers still find themselves checking multiple web sites to make sure they're getting the best deal. That may change with the launch of two new services that use historical and predictive data to not only find the best prices for specific flights, but also to suggest the best dates on which to purchase your tickets. Brian Smith has more about the new services in today's SearchDay article, New Players in Travel Search....
  • Image Database To Fight Online Child Porn The AP reports that AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft, EarthLink, NetZero and Juno are teaming up to fight child pornography. They are pooling together $1 million to build a database of pornographic images of children and software to match the image database with similar matches on their own networks. So Yahoo may scan email attachments, Yahoo Groups images and other places in the Yahoo network where images may be. If any of the images match an image in the database, it can be flagged and sent to the authorities. The exact details of the software and how it will be used have...
  • Build Your Own Matt Cutts I reported at the Search Engine Roundtable on a funny little web site that gives you a way to build your own Matt Cutts. To dress up Matt Cutts, go to the Matt Cutts Doll and drag and drop clothing on top of Matt's body. Oh, if you ever wondered if Matt was a briefs or boxers guys, now you know. Too funny....

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 3:19 PM | Permalink

June 23, 2006

Daily SearchCast, June 23, 2006: Google Sells Baidu Stake While Expanding Its Own Numbers In China; Google Testing Ads In Video; & More!

Today's search podcast covers Google selling its stake in the Chinese Baidu search engine; Google planning to expand employees for its own Chinese efforts; Google testing ads in video content; looking at issues with filtering adult content in video and web search and more!

Tune-in by listening to this MP3 file, listening via WebmasterRadio at 11:30am Eastern and repeated at 2pm Eastern Tuesday through Friday, via our Odeo channel or through iTunes via this link (or use alternative iTunes instructions explained here) or though our Yahoo Podcasts channel. Need more help tuning in live or finding the chat room? See the Daily SearchCast FAQ.

Below are links to items discussed:

  • Google Disposes Of Stake In Baidu Reuters reports that Google has sold its "modest investment in Baidu." Google owned about two-percent of Baidu.com, worth about $63 million, and "disposed" of that investment on May 25th. Google spokesperson, Debbie Frost said, "It has always been our goal to grow our own successful business in China and we are very focused on that."...
  • Google To Have 1000 Employees In China By 2007 Pacific Epoch reports that Google expect to have over 1,000 employees in Google China by 2007. By the end of this year, Google hopes to have 200 employees based in China. Google will have three research and development centers in China, they will be based in Beijing, Shanghai and Taiwan according the article....
  • AdWords Tweaks & Bug Fixes Documented I reported this morning at the Search Engine Roundtable on Small But Important New Google AdWords Features & Fixes. eWhisper at WebmasterWorld tracked the small, sometimes unnoticed, changes within Google AdWords and put together a list. Here is that list. + Local time zone added to MCC reports. + Bug fixed where the 'account' box didn't show on sub mcc reports. + Add your GAP business to Google Local (although, not sure why this wasn't attached to base so the pin was unnecessary) + HTTPs errors fixed on internal help pages (note, the only place I can tell the error...
  • Google Testing Ad Supported Premium Video Google is running a test offering about 2,000 premium videos available for free streaming viewing, inserting a persistent banner-type ad at the top of the screen and showing an additional post-roll video ad once the premium content has finished streaming. The test is expected to last about a week, according to Peter Chane, group business product manager, Google Video. , inserting a persistent banner-type ad at the top of the screen and showing an additional post-roll video ad once the premium content has finished streaming. The test is expected to last about a week, according to Peter Chane, group business...
  • Child Porn Suit Dropped Against Google The Associate Press reports that the suit brought against Google for profiting on child pornography has been dropped. Jeffrey Toback, of the Nassau County Legislature, filed the suit in early May. Toback said he dropped the suit because "Google has offered to sit down and discuss the issues. They didn't want to do that while litigation was pending, so we're taking them up on their offer."...
  • Video Search, Smut and Censorship Earlier this week, ZDNet News published an article discussing the presence and availability of explicit content on video search sites like, YouTube, Yahoo Video and Google Video. "A weeklong review of some of the top user-generated video sites by CNET News.com unearthed scenes of beheadings, masturbation, bloody car accidents, bondage and sadomasochism," wrote the reporter, Greg Sandoval. He did say that this review found no child pornography....
  • Ask.com Too Strict With Child & Sex Keywords? The Hammer of Trust writes that Ask.com is way too strict for searches on keywords about sex and children. For example, a search on Ask.com on [laws against pedophilia] brings back a message that reads, "This query does not comply with Ask.com Terms of Service." The "Go" button following the message links you to Ask.com Terms of Service. Other similar searches do the same thing, such as , talking to your children about sex, blocking porn from kids and warning your kids about sex offenders. I also tried searching on preventing child pornography and that also was blocked. It is...
  • PhotoBucket Has 44% Share of Photo Sharing Sites: Beating Yahoo & Flickr The Hitwise blog posted what I found to be surprising statistics on what is the most popular photo sharing site. I would have thought Yahoo Photos or Flickr would be a one of the most popular services, but it looks like PhotoBucket has almost 44% of the share, compared with Yahoo Photos with only 18% share in the number two spot. Even more surprising, to me at least, is that Flickr has barely 6% share, ranking number six in the list. Hitwise tells me that Photobucket surpassed Yahoo! Photos in January 2006, and its share of visits increased by 34%...
  • Japan's Softbank Mobile Phones To Use Yahoo As Content Portal MarketWatch reports that Softbank, who acquired Vodafone, will be using Yahoo to "bring the broad world of the Internet" to their mobile users. The mobile phones will have some sort of direct link to the Yahoo portal, to bring the content of that portal to Softbank's mobile users....
  • Google Mixes Up Referrals Buttons I reported at the Search Engine Roundtable that Google has mixed up the referral buttons with the Google AdSense referral program. For example, I have inserted the code to display the Google Pack referral button on this page but instead it is displaying the graphics and materials for the Google Firefox referrals. This was first reported at WebmasterWorld yesterday at 11:50am (EST). It continues to be a problem to this minute....
  • Specialty Search Roundup #4 Another week has gone by and the world of databases of special interest to the web researcher have appeared on ResourceShelf. Here's a look at a few of them along with a couple of database news items via ResourceShelf. By the way, the ResourceShelf site itself has also been updated and enhanced with a new look this week....
  • Technorati Betting: New Link Bait Idea Omar emailed me that he has posted a Technorati Blog Betting competition. Basically, you bet as much as you like, on the chances that a particular blog will be at the number one spot. As ThreadWatch notes Matt Cutts has 6 to 1 odds in this competition. They currently have Matt Cutts, Robert Scoble, Engadget, and some others in the competition. This site, nor is my site in the running. Currently, the Technorati top 100 shows me at #35, Philipp at #29, ShoeMoney at #52, John Battelle at #63 and Danny (SEW) at #69....

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 4:12 PM | Permalink

June 22, 2006

Daily SearchCast, June 22, 2006: Ask Not On Google Answers About Google; Should Google Dump Results Counts?; Google And Adobe Partner & More!

Today's search podcast covers Google Answers not allowing questions about Google; Google's inaccurate results counts; Google partnering with Adobe on distribution; the Matt Cutts vacation countdown and more!

Tune-in by listening to this MP3 file, listening via WebmasterRadio at 11:30am Eastern and repeated at 2pm Eastern Tuesday through Friday, via our Odeo channel or through iTunes via this link (or use alternative iTunes instructions explained here) or though our Yahoo Podcasts channel. Need more help tuning in live or finding the chat room? See the Daily SearchCast FAQ.

Below are links to items discussed:

  • Google Answers: Ask Whatever You Like, Except About Google We wrote earlier about Google pulling a question at Google Answers about Google. Philipp Lenssen at Google Blogoscoped followed-up further and found that Google officially disallows people to ask questions about the company because the researchers at Google Answers aren't Google employees. Got that? Freelance researchers are apparently qualified to answer questions about any other company in the world, but when it comes to Google, special treatment is required. Incredible....
  • Google, Kill The Web Search Counts! Number one on my 25 Things I Hate About Google list from March was "web search counts that make no sense." This week's fiasco with the "5 billion spam pages" in Google only underscores that those counts really are a big issue that can be noticed by more than a few tech heads. Fix them or get rid of them, I say....
  • More Stats & Features From Google Sitemaps The Inside Google Sitemaps Blog announced more features and statistics added to the Google Sitemaps product. The features mainly include additional statistics, but you can also find additional tools. Here is a quick rundown of the new items you can find at Google Sitemaps. + Unlimited crawl errors in reports + More query stats, a lot more, including reporting on subfolders + Common words report increased to show 75 words from 20 + Submit up to 500 sitemaps under one Google Account, up from 200 + Adsbot-Google useragent added to robots.txt tool + Added a rate this tool poll. That...
  • Google Partners With Adobe For Toolbar Distribution In Shockwave, Other Product To Be Named Both Adobe (PDF link) and Google have announced a new deal where Adobe will distribute the Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer as part of Adobe Macromedia Shockwave Player downloads. That was supposed to begin yesterday, and bundling with other Adobe products will happen in the future. Wait a minute? Weren't Yahoo and Adobe buddy-buddies? Yes -- a special version of the Yahoo Toolbar is built into the popular Adobe Acrobat Reader program, through a deal dating back to October 2004....
  • Google Updates Toolbar Privacy Policy It appears to me that Google updated the Google Toolbar Privacy Policy yesterday. I know the dates do not reflect that on the page, but if you take a look at the current version and compare it to the cached version from Jun 16, 2006 you will notice a lot of changes. Below are some of the larger changes to the privacy policy....
  • New Search Patents: June 22, 2006 - Google File System, Microsoft Blocks, and Yahoo Autonotifications Google patents the Google File System, Microsoft claims a Functional Object Model for mobile devices, and Yahoo! (Overture) describes an autonotification process to inform advertisers of when a certain condition has been met concerning one of their ads....
  • Wall Street Journal Piece On Tracking Mylene Mangalindan of the Wall Street Journal wrote a solid piece on Monday that was unfortunately buried at the end of the annual All Things Digital section. If you're a multi-channel internet marketer, read her article, Ad Vantage (Paid reg. required). The piece looks at potential pitfalls of advertising online without proper analytics tracking and covers such topics as Garden Harware?s difficulties tracking which search advertising or comparison shopping clicks actually convert (PriceGrabber and Shopping.com are singled out), eBay?s solution for search marketing (seems they developed a system in-house after leaving Efficient Frontier), Alibris? problems with affiliate sales (not all...
  • What the Critics Said The web has made it easy to seek out criticism to help us decide what to watch, listen to or read. But as with web search in general, finding the best sources of criticism can sometimes be a frustrating experience. In today's SearchDay article, Searching for Critical Acclaim, I take an in-depth look at a service that aggregates reviews of movies, books, music and more and assigns a unique score that represents the collective critical opinion on the quality of each reviewed title....
  • When's Matt Cutts Back From Vacation Countdown Clock Thomas Bindl does what I was hoping someone would do -- make a countdown clock for when Google's Matt Cutts is returning from his vacation, spotted via Threadwatch. I've seen a number of posts in various places suggesting that Google has been having its recent spam and indexing problems because Matt's finally taken a nice, long break. Bull. Matt's great, a huge resource to Google, but the problems going on seem far more fundamental than Matt being away. If they really are due to him being gone, then Google has even bigger issues to deal with. Still, plenty of us...

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 2:32 PM | Permalink

June 21, 2006

Daily SearchCast, June 21, 2006: Can Search Build Brands?; Microsoft Execs Surprise Departure; What Search Engine Do Those At Search Engines Use & More!

Today's search podcast covers issues on if search can build brand; Microsoft loses a key exec; do people at Google really only search with Google? and more!

Tune-in by listening to this MP3 file, listening via WebmasterRadio at 11:30am Eastern and repeated at 2pm Eastern Tuesday through Friday, via our Odeo channel or through iTunes via this link (or use alternative iTunes instructions explained here) or though our Yahoo Podcasts channel. Need more help tuning in live or finding the chat room? See the Daily SearchCast FAQ.

Below are links to items discussed:

  • The Search & Branding Tug-Of-War, Again "Cannes Lions Diary: Search under scrutiny" from the Financial Times at the Cannes Lions Advertising Festival covers what we've seen before, traditional ad buyers worried that search is going to rob their budgets while search engines planning to do that theft try to distract with a "search is a brand thing" message....
  • Nielsen//NetRatings Stats Keep Google On Top In May 2006 Last month, Nielsen/NetRatings had Google hitting the 50 percent mark of percentage of searches handled in the United States (when rounded up from 49.8%). This month, Google slips back down very slightly to 49 percent. I've warned before that you should be wary of month-to-month changes. That said, here's the rundown, which gives Yahoo a percentage gain to Google's loss:...
  • Chinese Authorities Temporarily Shut Down Two Large Chinese Portals PaidContent reports that two of the largest Chinese portals have been temporarily shut down by the Chinese authorities for not passing a "an on-the-spot censorship test." The chief editors of Sina.com and Sohu.com "were summoned to the State Council Information Office," that morning. While on the topic of Chinese censorship, take a look at the list Philipp compiled of Censored Domains in Google.cn....
  • Martin Taylor, VP Of Windows Live & MSN Marketing Leaves Microsoft ClickZ reports on a Bloomberg story about Martin Taylor, the vice president of Windows Live and MSN marketing group has left MSN. Reportedly, Taylor was good friends with CEO Steve Ballmer and was a possible candidate in the future for that position. The ClickZ article says, "The wording of the Microsoft statement seems to imply the company, and not Taylor, made "the difficult decision to part ways."" But why then would Taylor just be appointed the VP position and credited with being the "a go-to guy for problem areas," in late March? I dunno. Interesting and I wonder what type...
  • Microsoft Employees Use Google More Than MSN? Philipp Lenssen reported on a Andrew Hitchcock post that detailed search engine usage by search engine firm. It appears that Microsoft employees prefer Google to MSN Search when searching the web. At Microsoft 66.31 percent use Google, 19.65 percent use MSN and 10.18 percent use Yahoo. Yahoo employees aren't afraid to use Google search either, with 29.80 percent of searches conducted on Google and 68.87 percent on Yahoo Search. Google employees seem to be 100 percent loyal to Google search, based on the data....
  • InfoSpace Rebrands, Upgrades Local Search Site InfoSpace, which also owns and operates the Dogpile metasearch engine, has cleaned up its interface and yesterday rebranded its local search engine as "Infospacefindit." The chief purpose behind the rebranding according to the company is to create consistency between its mobile and online local search platforms. In addition, the online platform is moving from one that more resembles an Internet yellow pages product to a local search engine. The company has struggled to gain market share in local search online but has a very strong position in mobile....
  • Mashups and Other Fun with Flickr A big part of the appeal of Flickr, Yahoo's photo sharing service, is its ease of use. It's not only easy to upload and work with your own images, but it's also a snap to search for and play around with images uploaded by others?in relatively sophisticated ways, if you take advantage of the Flickr API to create mashups that combine images with other applications. In today's SearchDay article, Hacking Flickr I review a new book that's part of the O'Reilly Hacks series that shows you how to take maximum advantage of Flickr's capabilities....
  • Zillow Announces 'Zillow Labs' Everybody's going "Web2.0." Real estate vertical search engine and valuation site Zillow.com has launched Zillow Labs, "a sandbox where developers and others can try out new, cutting-edge projects. You can help by testing them, then sharing your suggestions, comments and even your own tools." Right now the tools include a Firefox plug-in, a Google Toolbar button and a search box you can add to your site....
  • Don't Vote For Us As Best Search Marketing Blog At MarketingSherpa! That's right. We don't want your vote in the "Blogs On Search Marketing" or "Best Podcast" categories of MarketingSherpa's awards, happening right now. We couldn't take them if we wanted to, since we didn't make the short list. Then again, neither did John Battelle's blog, nor Threadwatch, nor Matt Cutts, nor many of the others we list in our blog roll. I guess either:...
  • Google CEO Eric Schmidt In Featured Session At SES San Jose 2006 I'm very pleased to announce that Google's CEO Eric Schmidt will be in a featured session at our upcoming Search Engine Strategies San Jose 2006 show this August. "A Conversation With Eric Schmidt" will happen from 10am to 10:45am on August 9, the third day of our four day show. During the session, I'll be talking with Eric about how Google is growing and dealing with challenges and issues in search, especially given its stature as the leader in the space. Eric's session hasn't yet been posted to the conference agenda, but that will change shortly. You'll find full...

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 2:50 PM | Permalink

June 20, 2006

Daily SearchCast, June 20, 2006: Google's Got Spam! - Everyone's Got Spam! - Spam Spam Spam!; Oh Where Or Where Has My Google Answers Question Gone; Ask Helps Treasure Hunters & More!

Today's search podcast covers concerns that Google is letting too much spam through; concerns that all the search engines could do better; Google pulling a question about itself from Google Answers; search engines ask for federal guidelines on privacy; Ask helps treasure hunters and more!

Tune-in by listening to this MP3 file, listening via WebmasterRadio at 11:30am Eastern and repeated at 2pm Eastern Tuesday through Friday, via our Odeo channel or through iTunes via this link (or use alternative iTunes instructions explained here) or though our Yahoo Podcasts channel. Need more help tuning in live or finding the chat room? See the Daily SearchCast FAQ.

Below are links to items discussed:

  • Google Yanks Sites 5 Billion Pages After Spam Complaint I covered a DigitalPoint thread which uncovered several domains that was able to rank billions of pages at the top of the Google results within a couple of weeks. The methods deployed to rank the pages seemed to include excessive use of subdomains, cloaking, content theft scraping, alexa traffic boosting and blog comment spam. I listed the documented steps here. Some suspect that Google's new URL handling with the big daddy update allowed "old school" cloaking to begin working again....
  • Google Sub Sub Domain Issues Clearly Visible Threadwatch reveals some more examples of issues Google is having. They note a search on queer forum returns CraigsList 97 times out of the top 100 results. That is not all, a search on wedding forum returns about 50 of 100 results from CraigsList's site, just scroll down to number 50 and you will see. Is CraigsList spamming? No! Is Google suffering? :) Google is clearly having issues with sub sub domains. Continued coverage of Google's public index issues. Postscript From Danny: Comments at Threadwatch also note Yahoo has the same issue. MSN does not as badly (but that could...
  • Craigslist Adds Cities, Now 300 Strong
  • It's Not Just Google With Disappointing Results We have been poking hard at Google for disappointing search results, but Google is not the only search engine that has been disappointing me recently. You can group Yahoo and MSN and even Ask.com into the search engines that I have been disappointed with. Over at the Search Engine Roundtable I cover what I call, "forum buzz," the discussions taking place within the SEM/SEO community. I tend to pick up on algorithm shifts and post the details at my site. Today I covered two threads, one I named Yahoo! Also Easy To Spam and the other MSN Asks Webmasters What...
  • Google Pulls Question About Google From Google Answers Peter Da Vanzo reports on an individual who posted a question on Google Answers that was removed by Google. The question was, "What percentage of Google searches are contextual?" Specifically, the person wanted to know what percentage of Google searches give back results based on the content of a page someone is reading. You can see the thread title in the cache or via this image capture, at this moment in time, where the poster was willing to pay $20 for the answer. A Google editor removed the question, stating:...
  • Google Search Results Differ On Mac Versus PC? Threadwatch links to a blog post named Google SERPs Platform Dependant? that shows how a search for a query on Google, on the same network but on two computer operating systems, can product a different result set. The screen captures documented show the differences between a Mac and a PC....
  • Google's Mobile Operations Expected To See Largest Growth The Times Online UK reports that Google's mobile division, which is based in London, is expected to "become the biggest driver of new business" for Google. Search on mobile phones, wireless laptops and personal digital assistants (PDAs) are seen as a huge opportunity for many search companies. In Britain, there is a mobile phone for every person, but in some other areas, like Scandinavia, "mobile ownership is almost double that rate."...
  • Google To "Internationalize" All Products InsideGoogle reports that Google has asked University of Limerick based in Ireland to help find an "experienced localization guru" to help localize and "internationalize" all of Google's products. The PC World article goes into more details about the job, describing that job calls for an "executive with 10 or more years of product management experience to serve as group product director of internationalization."...
  • A Web of Local Search Services The major search engines tend to capture the lion's share of press, but there are dozens of other players in the local search space, offering myriad opportunities for search marketers trying to get in front of people searching for local products and services. I've got a review of an excellent guide to many of these services in today's SearchDay article, Who's Who in Local Search....
  • Canada's YellowPages.ca Launches New Local Search Site Since this is Local Search Day at Search Engine Watch, here's some additional news. Canada's yellow pages publisher, Yellow Pages Group, which also operates city guides and a variety of other Canadian web destinations, has launched a new beta version of its flagship site, YellowPages.ca. The new interface is considerably more appealing and the new site has a number of improvements, outlined in the press release. YellowPages.ca provides the content for Google
  • Microsoft, Google & Others Call For Unified Federal Privacy Protection Microsoft bravely took part in the search privacy panel we did at our SES New York show earlier this year (coverage here and here), saying it would welcome better US federal protections on privacy issues. Why? It would let Microsoft and the searchers it serves know exactly what data government agencies could and could not have. Now Microsoft, along with Google and other tech companies, are pushing to make this happen....
  • Ask.com Sponsors NBC's Treasure Hunters I was flipping through the channels (actually, my wife was, I wanted to watch the NBA finals) and saw some people wearing Ask.com t-shirts on TV. It was a new show on NBC named Treasure Hunters. The Ask blog says that Ask is the "Official Search Engine of Treasure Hunters." I did not watch the whole show, so I am not sure how beyond the t-shirts and commercials Ask promoted themselves in the show. Postscript: Got word back from an Ask rep on what took place. Team members conducted searches at Ask for "us presidents" and another for "mount theodore...
  • Summer Solstice 2006 At Stonehenge Tips & Info

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 2:21 PM | Permalink

June 16, 2006

Daily SearchCast, June 16, 2006: Bill Gates Stepping Back At Microsoft; Eric Schmidt Speaks On Google Issues; Google Gets Dayparting & More!

Today's search podcast covers Microsoft chairman Bill Gates giving up his chief software architect role and going part time in two years; Google CEO Eric Schmidt talking on big issues; Yahoo damned over censorship in China (but were six queries a fair test?); Riya shifts focus to web image search; Big.com makes it easier to see your search results and more!

Tune-in by listening to this MP3 file, listening via WebmasterRadio at 11:30am Eastern and repeated at 2pm Eastern Tuesday through Friday, via our Odeo channel or through iTunes via this link (or use alternative iTunes instructions explained here) or though our Yahoo Podcasts channel. Need more help tuning in live or finding the chat room? See the Daily SearchCast FAQ.

Below are links to items discussed:

  • Bill Gates To Work Part Time at Microsoft in 2008 Tons and tons of news coverage on Bill Gates's announcement he has given up his "chief software architect" role now and will be stepping down to be a part time employee and chairman in July 2008. Gates would like to spend more time working on his charitable foundation the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The BBC has a nice Q&A on the changes here....
  • MSN's Hand Crafted Results (Fake? - Shame On Me!)
  • Schmidt Talks On Staying In China, GBuy & More Conde Nast Portfolio, a new business magazine out next year, landed a nice coup of having Eric Schmidt speak yesterday at its launch party (Schmidt's also apparently set to be one of the first profiles in the new magazine). The video of the interview is online here, covering mostly stuff you've already heard Schmidt say before in other interviews (the LA Times had one last week) over the past years. But here are some things worth highlighting to me....
  • Yahoo China Highest Censorship Enforcing Wired News reports that Yahoo China is the strictest at censoring out politically sensitive results when compared to Google China and MSN China. Reporters Without Borders, an advocacy group, conducted tests by querying ten "politically-sensitive keywords" including ?press freedom? or ?human rights." Editors & Publisher adds the group found Yahoo's censorship was shocking, for example, as when a keyword search on "subversive" brought back 97% pro-Beijing results. More from Reporters Without Borders is here, explaining how six keywords were tested and the first ten results analyzed....
  • Riya To Expand Into Web Image Search SiliconBeat reports that Riya will expand to a web image search service. Currently, Riya allows you to upload a photo, define the photo as matching a particular person and then it tries to scan other photos to figure out if other photos in your collecton match that person, using face recognition. Riya is expanding that to match images of almost anything on the web. In other words, if I am looking to buy a big blue pineapple chair (love that chair) and I have an image of the one I like, Riya will scan the web for similar images of...

  • That guy with Larry and Sergey...wossname...the President

  • AdWords Ad Scheduling Officially Launches Google AdWords officially launched their new ad scheduling, enabling advertisers the ability to schedule the appearance of their ads based on both time of day and day of the week. This new feature, which competes with dayparting that Microsoft AdCenter has had since their beta launch, was released worldwide to all advertisers across 40+ languages....
  • Google Slaps Booble
  • Google Adds Support For Greek & Bulgarian To AdSense For Search The Inside AdSense blog announced that they have added support for Greek and Bulgarian languages in AdSense for search. So if you have a site in those languages, you can add the Google search box from your AdSense control panel and earn some euros or some Bulgarian lev. More details at Greek AdSense and Bulgarian AdSense....
  • JenSense
  • Yahoo To Reduce Search Ad Minimum Bid In UK To 5p? I reported this morning at the Search Engine Roundtable that Yahoo may be reducing the minimum bid price from 10p to 5p. A WebmasterWorld member claimed to read the news in Interactive magazine that Yahoo will be reducing the minimum bid due to competition from Microsoft....
  • Google Analytics Launches Blog Google Analytics has launched the Google Analytics Blog to provide product update news, bug fixes, and probably some how to posts....
  • More Real Estate Search Engines & Sites There were many interesting responses to the Real Estate Roundups that appeared in Search Day earlier this week (part II) and last week (part I). Most of the feedback called attention to other sites or features that had not been mentioned in those two articles. Of course, there are far more real estate sites than can be discussed in 1,100 words, so I had to leave out many interesting sites. (Some were excluded because I simply was unaware of them.)...
  • SEO Roadshow Copenhagen Sept. 23rd Dave Naylor just announced the dates for the next SEO Roadshow. The event is to take place on Saturday 23rd of September 2006 in Copenhagen, Denmark. The hotel is called First Hotel Vesterbro, and the start time of the event is at 1PM until the crowd breaks down. These events are always nice, even though I can never make it to them. I believe Danny has attended some in the past and he enjoyed them :)...
  • Search Engine Strategies
  • Search Bash 2006
  • Big.com Gets Ask Results, Toolbar I mentioned how useful Big.com was back in October, making it easy for those with low vision to see things more clearly thanks to its big fonts. Brad Haugaard, the project manager over there, dropped a note to say there's been some changes to improve the service. What's new? Results now come from Ask, rather than LookSmart. There's been a general facelift all around. And there's a new Big Toolbar for Internet Explorer to let you make any page look bigger -- perhaps even those from the major search engines. When I looked at Big last time, I found none...
  • Most Searched For Famous Dads Father's Day is coming up this Sunday and AOL has compiled a list of the most searched for famous dads. Here is a list on the most popular dads on AOL Search based on searches from May 21 through June 10: 1 Brad Pitt 2 Chris Daughtry 3 Howard Stern 4 Allen Iverson 5 Eminem 6 50 Cent 7 Daddy Yankee 8 Paul McCartney 9 Elvis Presley 10 George Bush...

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 2:45 PM | Permalink

June 15, 2006

Daily SearchCast, June 15, 2006: You Got Digg In My Netscape; When NYT Met SEO; Google's New US Government Search; Searching For Products By Color & More!

Today's search podcast covers Netscape transforming into a Digg-like community news site; the New York Times and its industrial-strength search engine optimization work; Google relaunches its US government search service; searching for products by color and more!

Tune-in by listening to this MP3 file, listening via WebmasterRadio at 11:30am Eastern and repeated at 2pm Eastern Tuesday through Friday, via our Odeo channel or through iTunes via this link (or use alternative iTunes instructions explained here) or though our Yahoo Podcasts channel. Need more help tuning in live or finding the chat room? See the Daily SearchCast FAQ.

Below are links to items discussed:

  • Netscape Aims To Be Digg 2.0, Slashdot 3.0 With Community News Model I was never a big Slashdot fan, given that I found the conversations about search often had comments from people who didn't know what they were talking about. Digg came along and hardly won me over. Having one of my stories Dugg over there reinforced the idea that Digg was Slashdot 2.0 in all the wrong ways. Now AOL is trying to revive its flagging Netscape brand by turning it into a Digg-clone or Slashdot 3.0, if you will. You'll find the new version here....
  • SEO for All the News That's Fit to Search The New York Times has one of the most popular news web sites, but until this year that was largely because of the strength of its brand. After its acquisition of About.com, the Times embarked on an aggressive campaign to make its web site more search friendly, a complex process that's paid off with notable traffic gains for the company. Today's SearchDay article, Getting The New York Times More Search Engine Friendly, takes a look behind the scenes at how the Times and its vice president of enterprise search, Marshall Simmonds, pulled it off....
  • Google Relaunches US Government Search, Now With Personalized Home Page Google launched its search engine for US government information, informally known as Google Uncle Sam, many years ago. It's been running since at least 1999. But now the service has received an update giving it a personalized home page and formal branding as Google US Government Search....
  • Google's Complete Plays Of Shakespeare Less Than Compleat The Google blog 'Inside Google Book Search' announced in No holds bard that it is now possible to explore Shakespeare with Google - The complete plays of Shakespeare now at your fingertips. Well no, not exactly. I've spent some time playing around with this resource and it's less than impressive for a number of reasons....
  • Google Buys Headquarters For $319 Million Last night I was notified of a SEC Filing showing Google has entered into an agreement to purchase their headquarters (The GooglePlex) for $319 million. Of the $319 million, $10 million was already placed into escrow on June 9. Google is technically buying 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway and 1200-1500 Crittenden Lane, Mountain View, California, about 978,066 square feet of land. In addition to the $319 million price tag, Google has to pay $315,000 per month to the city; $140,000 per month for ground lease and $175,000 per month for rent with rent increases of 4 percent to 7 percent. More details...
  • Google's UK Chief Kate Burns Leaving For More Family Time Last time I saw Kate Burns last year, she was about six months pregnant. Now Google managing director of UK, Benelux and Ireland is leaving the company to spend more time with that growing family. Best of luck, Kate! More details in Burns set to leave Google director role from Brand Republic....
  • A New Local Search Marketing Guide I've often been amazed that there isn't a more organized effort by search engines and others targeting small business advertisers to "educate" them about online marketing. There are independent efforts here and there, but all players would benefit from a concerted initiative. Until then, small businesses have to rely on more informed colleagues and the serendipity of discovering resources online. One such resource, put together by Matt McGee, is the relatively concise Local Search Marketing Guide....
  • Google Maps Table Tilt Control Solution
  • Yahoo, MapQuest Bring Where 2.0 Back to Earth Excuse the pun, of sorts. Many of the speakers and panelists over the past couple of days at Where 2.0 demonstrated a range of cool technologies or whiz-bang features that probably don't have a hope of becoming breakout, mass market consumer applications. That doesn't mean they aren't interesting or useful. But the question is: where will these companies be in 5 years?...
  • New Yahoo Publisher Network Changes Focus on New Publishers Yahoo Publisher Network released a new version of the control panel today which focuses on helping a new user get the most out of Yahoo, both within and outside the Publisher Network realm. For new publishers many how-tos, help guides and demos were added. But also included is a new Publisher Services tab which promotes other areas of Yahoo....
  • Yahoo Sued For Trademark Infringement Using Google AdWords DenverPost.com reports that Yahoo was sued by lovecity.com for bidding on the lovecity.com trademark in Google AdWords. Reportedly, Yahoo placed bids on "www.lovecity" and "lovecity.com," so when someone searches on those phrases, Yahoo Personals would come up in the search ads on Google and Google's search ad network. I tried a search on www.lovecity and saw two competing dating services but not Yahoo, come up in the sponsored listings section. I actually find it humorous that Yahoo would go this far, only because the left hand does not talk to the right hand....
  • SEMPO & Fair Issac Team Up To Study Click Fraud
  • ClickZ reports that SEMPO and Fair Issac have teamed up to study PPC click fraud. Fair Issac is the organization that developed FICO scores to measure of credit risk, a service used by most credit agencies. ClickZ explains that the study will use several "artificial intelligence methods to determine the extent of click fraud and to develop a solution for the search marketing industry," developed by Fair Issac....
  • MSN's Hand Crafted Results "MSN Hiring People to Hand Code SERPS" at SEO Blackhat is a nice catch from the MSN Search jobs page talking about needing people to help hand-craft results. Philipp Lenssen at Google Blogoscoped reacts with "Oh my." I react with "Hallelujah."...
  • ShopWiki Launches Search By Color ShopWiki this morning launched its 'Search by Color' feature which lets consumers quickly and easily filter search results by color. From the press release: Accessible on ShopWiki's search results page, the Search by Color tool displays more than 60,000 RGB colors for shoppers to choose from. A shopper looking for a turquoise v-neck shirt, for example, can search "women's v-neck" then select the desired shade from the color tool. Once selected, the search results are instantly updated to list those shirts available in the chosen hue. You have to play around with Shop by Color to really understand the power...
  • Website designers want searches to work for free
  • The Dilbert Google Logo Story Remember the Google Dilbert logos? If you do, and you want to read the story behind it, check out Doug Edwards' post at Xooglers. Doug also notes some controversy over Google selling coffee mugs (Danny's posted pictures of one here) with the Dilbert logo. You can see the old story about Google on at InternetNews.com from May 20, 2002. Edwards begins the tale of Google logo changes here and talks at the end about how recently the Dilbert strip poked fun at Google. The story of Google and Dilbert continues to this second installment, ending with today's post....  

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 3:53 PM | Permalink

June 14, 2006

Daily SearchCast, June 14, 2006: MySpace To Auction Search Traffic; Google Picasa Gets Photo Sharing; NY State Says Shame On Google Video; Is That Google Earth In My Coffee Table? & More!

Today's search podcast covers MySpace planning to auction its search traffic; Google's Picasa getting web albums; New York State raps Google over its video content and children; Google not obeying the noindex stop sign?; an interactive table lets you control Google Earth with your hands and more!

Tune-in by listening to this MP3 file, listening via WebmasterRadio at 11:30am Eastern and repeated at 2pm Eastern Tuesday through Friday, via our Odeo channel or through iTunes via this link (or use alternative iTunes instructions explained here) or though our Yahoo Podcasts channel. Need more help tuning in live or finding the chat room? See the Daily SearchCast FAQ.

Below are links to items discussed:

  • MySpace Looking To Auction Search To Google, Microsoft or Yahoo We heard last month that MySpace is interested in partnering with Google or Microsoft. Now Yahoo appears to be in the running. MySpace-owner News Corp's Chief Operating Officer Peter Chermin said today MySpace plans to "auction off our search business of of the three biggest, Google, Yahoo and MSN, and see the best we can get." I thought Yahoo was already powering the results at MySpace, since you can see Yahoo results coming up when you search over there. This Reuters article mentions the same. But Yahoo tells me that's not the case. It's a Yahoo partner, Revenue Science, that's...
  • Google Introduces Picasa Web Albums Google has enhanced its desktop-based Picasa photo organizing program by offering users the ability to upload albums and easily share photos with others. Picasa Web Albums is launching as a limited test that will be available only to existing Gmail users on a first-come, first-served basis?if you want to try the service, you should act quickly to try to secure your account....
  • No Privacy for Picasa Web Albums, Google Blogoscoped
  • Google finally puts Picasa albums on the Web, News.com
  • Picasa Web Albums: First Impressions, InsideGoogle
  • Google Images Home Page Design Test Philipp Lenssen has screen captures of an other new search interface design, this time being test on Google Images. The test is running a vertical navigation of Google's other properties either on the left hand side or directly above the search box. The one directly above the search box looks awkward to me....
  • New York State Sends Warning On Google Video Service ResourceShelf notes a Red Herring article about the New York State Consumer Protection Board (CPB) warning parents about Google Video. The warning discussed that Google Video enables children to "easily access and view videos with sexual themes and off-color material" all for free. ResourceShelf also notes that the only video service mentioned in this warning is Google Video, not YouTube or Yahoo Video....
  • Google Not Obeying NoIndex Meta Tag? I reported at the Search Engine Roundtable that Google.com Displaying Pages in Index with NoIndex Meta Tags. The details come from a WebmasterWorld thread where two members I would trust claim Google is not obeying the noindex meta tag. Currently, I have no evidence, since examples are not allowed at WebmasterWorld. If you have examples of this in action, please let us know by starting a thread in our Google Web Search Forum at Search Engine Watch Forums....
  • A Look At Google's Oregon Operation & Yahoo Leaves Pasadena Niall Kennedy summarizes a NY Times article about Google's Oregon center and Yahoo and Microsoft's exploration in areas like that. The Google Oregon center would be one of the largest data centers, taking up about two football fields. The NY Times article also estimated Google having "450,000 servers spread over at least 25 locations around the world." Microsoft with an estimated 200,000 servers is expected to grow to 800,000 by 2011. Yahoo is on the move as well, moving to Burbank by end of June. There is no doubt that energy costs will be on the mind of these search...
  • Japan To Build Own Search Engine With 30 Japanese Companies & Government Help The Mainichi Daily show that Japan is going to be building out their own search engine after conducting a focus group on the idea. Thirty organizations in Japan and the University of Tokyo will be working to develop the Japanese based search engine. Part of the group includes big brands such as Hitachi, Fujitsu and Nippon. The Japanese government plans on providing a subsidy for the project. Why? "Many people in Japan fear that the domination of the three firms will prevent Japanese companies from entering the market." The European Union, led by France, is doing something very similar....
  • Searcher Behavior Update Search marketing has evolved from relatively simple optimization of web pages into a more sophisticated process involving a number of variables. Apart from tactical maneuvers with SEO or PPC campaigns, savvy search marketers are increasingly trying to understand searcher behavior, and attempting to proactively anticipate user needs. More and more research is providing hard data to support these efforts, writes Grant Crowell in today's SearchDay article, Understanding Searcher Behavior....
  • Forecasted Online Ad Spend Is Corrected Upwards Search is winning the hearts and minds of marketing managers across the US, (and this is good news for search worldwide). Brand managers that tend to buy display advertising more readily will continue to be a tough sell for search, but that may be its only limitation. TNS Media Intelligence (which tracks online display advertising spend) has increased their forecast for 2006. This is a 4% correction from their earlier estimated growth, (and bucks the hold pattern or downward trend for other forms of advertising). The company cited earlier estimates as far too conservative after tracking faster than expected migration...
  • Clickbot.A Click Fraud Network Dismantled ClickZ reports that the Clickbot.A virus that infected 34,000 machines (last report more than 50,000 PCs) and auto clicked on an unknown amount of PPC ads, has been shut down. Panda Software and RSA Security worked together to dismantle the virus. Read the full details over at Panda Software....
  • New Public Link Spam Exploits Peter Da Vanzo has posted information on XSS Redirects & SEO. Peter linked to two documented methods of exploiting comments and links at blogs and other sites. The two links include; XSS and Redirection Attacks, which makes for a nice and interested educational read and Moveable Type Backlink Exploit that makes me a little depressed (running MovableType and all). Point being? The nofollow attribute, created to slow down link spam, has not worked, IMO, I actually had to pull comments and trackbacks completely from my blog after 3 years of them being enabled. Sad....
  • Looking At Links After Looking At Patents I know, I know. Everyone everywhere is running SEO interviews with everyone. But Bill Slawski Interview over at SEO Buzz Box is well worth a read. Aaron Pratt's got a great set of questions that he puts to Bill, who in turn has very clear, good responses that show how the original Google notion of links as votes has become complicated for both Google and search marketers....
  • Searching for a Place to Live, Part 2 SEW correspondent Greg Sterling continues his roundup of a number of the most popular new real estate search verticals in today's SearchDay article, A Real Estate Vertical Search Roundup....
  • Microsoft 'Mix-ins' vs. Google Mashups Steven Lawler of Microsoft didn't directly mention Google by name, but many of his comments this morning at Where2.0 were directed toward differentiating Microsoft's Virtual Earth platform and Windows Live Local's consumer destination from the company's chief online rival. As part of his very accelerated presentation (15 minutes) he said that Microsoft's goal is to "leverage local information on a global basis" through a mapping interface. That's very much like the message Google presented yesterday....
  • Minority Report-Like Interactive Google Earth Via our SEW Forums, a great find. Check out this video showing how PhD candidate Edward Tse of the Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs at the University of Calgary rigged Google Earth into an interactive tabletop display:  ...
  • A Look At 20 Googlers Via Orkut Philipp Lenssen complied a list of 20 Googler Orkut profiles. Orkut is Google's social networking software, and many Googlers have profiles and accounts with Orkut. Some of the 20 compiled by Philipp include; Sergey Brin, Adam Bosworth, Jeff Huber, David Krane, Marissa Mayer and more. Nice work!...
  • Googlers' Orkut profiles: The better parts, Valleywag

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 1:43 PM | Permalink

June 13, 2006

Daily SearchCast, June 13, 2006: Google Still A Tech Company, Says Schmdit; Google Earth Gets New Features; GBuy To Take On eBay's PayPay?; eBay Takes On AdSense; Yahoo Answerers In Times Square & More!

Today's search podcast covers Google CEO Eric Schmidt saying that Google isn't a media company; Google Earth revolves new features; Will Google's rumored GBuy take on eBay's PayPal?; if so, eBay's got an AdSense challenger that's been unleashed. In Times Square, Yahoo Answers is getting big promotion and more!

Tune-in by listening to this MP3 file, listening via WebmasterRadio at 11:30am Eastern and repeated at 2pm Eastern Tuesday through Friday, via our Odeo channel or through iTunes via this link (or use alternative iTunes instructions explained here) or though our Yahoo Podcasts channel. Need more help tuning in live or finding the chat room? See the Daily SearchCast FAQ.

Below are links to items discussed:

  • Schmidt: Google Still A Tech Company Despite The Billboards Figuring everyone's had enough Google exec interviews at the moment that cover the same old ground, I put the Los Angeles Times interview today with Google CEO Eric Schmidt on our budget to be a headlines-only reference, like this: At Google, Innovation Is Not Just Fun, Games, LA Times (Q&A with CEO Eric Schmidt - and Google, he says, it still a tech company despite making 99 percent of its income off of ads) Said Schmidt: Q: Is Google a media company or a technology company? A: It's better to think of Google as a technology company. Google is run...
  • Google Earth: An Emerging 'Geobrowser' I often hear people say about Google, "Other than search it's just a bunch of 'me-too' products." Whether or not you agree, you have to admit that in the case of Earth and Maps that's clearly not true. Although maps have become an important "battleground" in the so-called "search wars," it's an area where Google has clearly innovated with its developer tools and user experience. There were a number of technical things about the new Google Earth rollout yesterday that went over my head; I'm not a developer and I was in a room of developers and engineers who were...
  • Google Earth Won't Have Distribution Blocked Google Earth is out in a new version with new features, as Greg Sterling will be detailing more on the blog later today. But meanwhile, Google escapes having an injunction against the software. Judge won't block distribution of Google Earth from News.com covers how Google is being sued by Skyline Software Systems over a patent dispute on terrain mapping. The judge in the case has denied a preliminary injunction request to block downloads of Google Earth....
  • Google GBuy Launch Later This Month To Challenge PayPal? Google's GBuy Could Be 'Revolutionary' from Forbes covers news from RBC analyst Jordan Rohan that Google's existing payment system -- Google Payments -- may be expanded for any merchant to use outside of Google Base....
  • Rumor: Google Caller ID Via Google Talk Coming Soon? Garett Rogers discovered that Google added the directory /call to the Google robots.txt file. So when he checked out http://www.google.com/call he noticed that it is an XML file that contains and error and also a "caller id" field. What can we guess that this means? Do you think they may be adding VOIP services to Google Talk? Can this be related to AdWords Click to Call features? Or do you think Google is opening a Vonage like service named GoogleCall? Again, this is just a rumor, no one really has any idea what the /call directory is, as of yet....
  • How Google Is Killing The Internet Seth Jayson has written an interesting piece "How Google is killing the internet" over at The Motley Fool. It's a lengthy analysis which takes in part its premise that web authors are so desperate to get visitors to click on their Adsense links that they're creating pages of junk without any useful content. As a result the content that is returned as the result of a search (not just on Google but on its competitors websites as well) is valueless. I'm rather ambivalent about this but the implications for search are interesting to say the least....
  • eBay AdContext To Promote Auctions Via Contextual Based Ads I covered this morning the news that eBay is launching a contextual advertising program named eBay AdContext. The program uses contextual based technology to match eBay auctions with the content from the publisher's Web pages. Publishers will not get paid on a PPC or CPM basis, but rather it seems like they will be paid a commission of the sale generated from the click. The commission percentage seems to be as low as 35%, according to CNN Money and as high as 70%, according to USA Today....
  • The Downside Of Google? I'm all for keeping a close and critical eye on search engines, but the Observer article "The readers editor on ... the downside of Google" does perhaps go too far. An Observer commissioning editor ran a search on Google for an MRSA expert and the 'expert' was approached to write an article. It turns out he wasn't really an expert at all. This doesn't seem to me to be a downside of Google (particularly since other results pointed out that the self proclaimed expert was anything but); but more a downside of journalists being too quick off the mark and...
  • New Flavor Of Expand & Collapse Results Back in April, Google was testing expand and collapse results that contained more detailed information about a site when expanded. Then, Google used an arrow to expand and collapse the results. New details, I reported at the Search Engine Roundtable this morning, shows screen captures of Google now testing a similar expand and collapse feature, but this time with using plus and minus signs. You can see an image at the Search Engine Roundtable. Want to discuss? Join our forum thread named Plus button for more info on results....
  • #&@$%@ Gmail! It's been six hours now without POP access to my Gmail account. I've been through this irritating problem before with Google, as covered here and here, as have others. Annoyingly, Google still hasn't provided any better help information about it, much less some type of status report page to tell you if it is localized to a particular area or not. My solution is easy -- I just redirected everything back to my own POP server, and eventually I'll get the 60 or so messages from Gmail into Outlook when the problem inevitably goes away. Others probably aren't so happy....
  • Getting Gmail To Resume POP Access With Captcha Unlock
  • Yamanner Worm Targets Yahoo Mail Users Silicon.com reports on a Yahoo Mail worm named Yamanner that comes in the form of an email named "New Graphic Site." When you open the email, it infects your computer and spreads the worm to your Yahoo Mail address book....
  • Tips On Across The Engines Ranking From SEO Book People are beginning to remember again that there are search engines beyond Google. This reawakening is one reason why I added the Can You Please Them All? session to our upcoming Search Engine Strategies San Jose show next August. Aaron Wall over at SEO Book has also clearly seen the renewed interest in pleasure more than Google. Out today is his excellent Google vs Yahoo! vs MSN Search: Defining Search Engine Relevancy piece today....
  • Is Duplicate Content Killing Your Rankings? A paper presented at the 10th International Conference on Extending Database Technology conference in Munich near the end of March, Indexing Shared Content in Information Retrieval Systems (pdf), jointly authored by employees of Yahoo, Google, and IBM, discusses how to limit index sizes of search engines by reducing the amount of duplicate content contained in their indexes. After reading it, I started considering and listing some of the problems that sites may have that could cause search engines to not index the pages of those sites, or display them in search results. My list is in a post at SEO...
  • Duplicate Content Solutions Yesterday, Bill Slawski wrote about some of the issues with duplicate content and how it can hurt your rankings. Todd Malicoat (aka Stuntdubl) followed up Bill's analysis with some solutions for duplicate content issues. The combination of Bill's and Todd's posts make for the most recent and comprehensive duplicate content guide I have possibly ever seen. Both are worth a read: + Duplicate Content Issues and Search Engines by Bill Slawski + How to Remedy Duplicate Content and Magical % Thinking by Todd Malicoat...
  • Submitting Your News Site To Google News Google News can drive a nice amount of traffic to a site. A few months ago, I had the privilege of having my site included in Google News. Since then others have been asking the question, how can I get my news site included in Google News? This morning, I did my best to answer the question with a post named Getting Into Google News Revisited. I outlined the technical requirements, the editorial requirements and what you can do to encourage Google to accept you into Google News. If you are interested in Google News inclusion, check it out....
  • High Rankings In Google Image Search Amit Agarwal has a nice write-up on how to increase your chances of listing your images high in Google Image Search. The tips include;...
  • SimplyHired Powers MySpace Jobs A number of people have talked about the potential power of MySpace getting into search. Well, the company put its toes in the water this morning with the launch of MySpace Jobs, powered by SimplyHired. Back in April, SimplyHired raised $13.5m from Fox Interactive Media (FIM), MySpace's parent company. At that time, Ross Levinsohn, FIM?s president joined the SimplyHired Board....
  • MySpace, The 27.4 Billion Pound Gorilla
  • A Ring Tone Meant to Fall on Deaf Ears
  • Reflecting On Direct Hit, The Google Rival Perspective: The man who would be Sergey from News.com talks with Gary Culliss, formerly of Direct Hit, on cashing out of search early on. Google and Direct Hit came along at the same time (see Counting Clicks and Looking at Links from me in 1998). Ask Jeeves bought Direct Hit, making the original group involved with it a good chunk of money. But Direct Hit effectively died as a brand and a technology while Google.... I disagree with News.com that in 1998, Google was somehow lumped in with "non-household name" sites while Direct Hit was the shining hope. They both...
  • Trovetopia - Yahoo Shopping Test Bed Site Gary Price at ResourceShelf noticed that Yahoo registered two trademarks: "Trovetopia" and "THE N9NE," with Trovetopia also being the name of an active Yahoo shopping site. I'm not sure about THE N9NE, but according to Chris Saito [thanks for the quick response!] Trovetopia turns out to be a "test bed for [Yahoo!] APIs ? it?s built entirely using the web services available on the Yahoo! Developer Network. It's cool to see Yahoo playing around with its own APIs. Yahoo Tech is another place to see the power of the APIs. Considering that I get an email each week about people...
  • Robert Scoble Departs Microsoft To Startup Podtech Blogvangelist Robert Scoble is leaving Microsoft to work for start-up Podtech.net. Robert's not been tied into the Microsoft search efforts, but he has commented publicly on them on many occasions, providing an unofficial voice in the way he's done on many things Microsoft. His departure certainly is a PR blow to Microsoft. Robert Scoble leaving Microsoft for a Silicon Valley startup from Niall Kennedy is a nice, short rundown on the news. Niall was a recent PR win for Microsoft in terms of bloggers, so perhaps he'll benefit from Robert's departure. Microsoft's top blogger Robert Scoble is leaving from Silicon...
  • Throwing chairs?
  • Search Companies Energetically Seeking Electricity The Wall Street Journal reports that the search companies, including Microsoft, Yahoo, Ask and possibly Google are looking to find cheap electricity to power all the computers and hardware that power the companies. The article says that one large data center can use as much energy as a city of 40,000 people! The search companies are looking for locations next to cheap energy sources such as former defense bunkers, near hydroelectric plants, and other locations where electricity is cheaper. Microsoft's data center consumption of power doubled over the past four years, so this is a serious concern for Microsoft and...
  • Yahoo Answers Launches "Ask the Planet 2006" Campaign Yahoo Answers has launched a new promotional campaign named Ask the Planet 2006. The Yahoo Answers blog describes how this feature will work; Each weekday a new category will be featured, and each one will be accompanied by a question asked by a notable celebrity, expert, or even a featured user. For each best answer you receive in the category of the day you will get one entry for a chance to win the prize for the day. The full press release can be found here and if you want to see the big brain in times square check out...

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 2:11 PM | Permalink

June 9, 2006

Daily SearchCast, June 9, 2006: How The ODP Sends Sites Back In Time In Major Search Engines; Google, Your TV Companion; The World Cup Cometh To Search & More!

Today's search podcast covers the use of Open Directory information making more sites seem outdating in major search engines; Google listening to your TV and perhaps making ads and info show up on your computer screen in the future; the World Cup hits search and more!

Tune-in by listening to this MP3 file, listening via WebmasterRadio at 11:30am Eastern and repeated at 2pm Eastern Tuesday through Friday, via our Odeo channel or through iTunes via this link (or use alternative iTunes instructions explained here) or though our Yahoo Podcasts channel. Need more help tuning in live or finding the chat room? See the Daily SearchCast FAQ.

Below are links to items discussed:

  • "Gnomedex 2002" On Google Shows Again The Need For Webmaster Control Over Titles & Descriptions We've written before about the need for search engines to give webmasters more control over their titles and descriptions. Today, I came across another good example illustrating why this is needed -- Google telling me that Chris Pirillo's popular Gnomedex event is happening in 2002, as you see in the screenshot above....
  • Brands, Search and Local ClickZ local columnist Phil Stelter wrote a piece this week about brands taking notice of local search. Geotargeting online is something that all brands are waking up to and will need to address. Like all politics, most spending is local; 97% of consumer buying behavior still happens offline, despite the impressive growth of e-commerce. But the Internet's and search's influence over that offline spending increases daily. Tracking that growth and a true picture of consumer behavior is what prompted comScore to launch qSearch Retail this week. (On a related note, ClickZ's Kevin Lee has a nice article on search, multi-channel...
  • Google Paper Explains Listening To Your TV Can Help It Put Ads & Info On Your Computer There are many people discussing a recent award Google was awarded for picking up on ambient audio from your TV and pairing those sounds to your computer to serve up ads based on what you are watching (or something like that). Google Research Scientists, Michele Covell & Shumeet Baluja, described the technology as;...
  • Google Video Movers & Shakers (AKA Zeitgeist) David Krane posted that Google Video launched a new feature named Movers & Shakers. The Movers & Shakers feature is a page that shows you the most popular videos at Google Video. You can filter by which videos are most popular by country....
  • Microsoft Expands Windows Live Book Search With Two Universities & Submission Service Microsoft announced that the University of California and University of Toronto Libraries will be participating in the Windows Live Book Search program. Both the universities will be digitizing "primarily out-of-copyright books" for Microsoft. In addition, Microsoft plans on making it easier for publishers to submit content for inclusion in the Windows Live Book Search index. http://publisher.live.com/ will be expanded within a few weeks to accept submissions in both digital and printed form....
  • MSN Windows Live Launches News & Local Live Answers The MSN Search blog announced that MSN Search now supports news specific and local specific "live answers." What that means is if you do a search on something news related like, george bush at live.com, you will get news related results at the top. Same deal with local specific searches such as, edison, nj dentist. Google, Yahoo and Ask.com all have this type of feature....
  • World Cup: Google Does The Logo Thing; Yahoo & Ask Have Smart Shortcuts Google's sporting a special World Cup-version of its logo in honor of the start of the World Cup today, while Yahoo and Ask are offering special results that come up after World Cup-related searches. A round-up of what's going on, below....
  • In The Middle Of World Cup Mad England, I Root For The US
  • The Captain's Back?., WebGuerrilla (the mustache auction is back)

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 2:24 PM | Permalink

June 8, 2006

Daily SearchCast, June 8, 2006: Yahoo Answers Grows And Grows; Google Sued Over Ad It Refuses To Run; Google Urges Users To Rally For Net Neutrality & More!

Today's search podcast covers the growth of Yahoo Answers; alternative ways to be listed in Google and Yahoo; Google sued over ads it doesn't want to run; Google rallies users behind net neutrality and more!

Tune-in by listening to this MP3 file, listening via WebmasterRadio at 11:30am Eastern and repeated at 2pm Eastern Tuesday through Friday, via our Odeo channel or through iTunes via this link (or use alternative iTunes instructions explained here) or though our Yahoo Podcasts channel. Need more help tuning in live or finding the chat room? See the Daily SearchCast FAQ.

Below are links to items discussed:

  • Look Out Wikipedia, Here Comes Yahoo Answers! New stats add fuel to the idea that Yahoo Answers is perhaps becoming a social interacting phenomenon like YouTube or MySpace. A look at the service's growth and how it works.
  • Yahoo Photos Upgraded, Beta Available TechCrunch has a good writeup on the new Yahoo Photos beta. To access the beta go to http://photos.yahoo.com/ and after you sign in, you may see a "try the new beta" link, click on that. I personally do not see it, so I will base my notes after TechCrunch's coverage....
  • Alternative Ways Into Google & Yahoo Search Engine Guide has an article named Alternative Ways to Get Into Google and About.com has an article named 8 Ways to Submit Your Site to Yahoo, so we thought it would be nice to make one summary of both....
  • New Link Building Guide Andy Hagans linked to a new link building guide by Jim Westergren. The guide goes over how to build links in 2006. For example it describes the "natural simulation" of link development and methods of building links naturally and quickly. Just be warned on some of the tactics, there are 43 comments appended to the guide, probably worth a full read before deploying all the ideas....
  • Unique Content VS. Plagiarism In The Eyes Of An Algorithm Chris Boggs over at the Search Engine Roundtable wrote an item named Which Came First: the Content or the Plagiarism? which discusses the challenge search engines face when it comes to determining the original source of a particular piece of content....
  • IceRocket Sale To Think Is Off That deal for Think Partnership to purchase blog search engine IceRocket? Andy Beal notes that it's off....
  • Google Calls On Users To Lobby For Net Neutrality Google cofounder Sergey Brin might not have been able to lobby all the US senators he wanted earlier this week to stop a bill that threatens net neutrality. But Google still has a big stick to wave -- its users. The Debate over Net Neutrality on the Official Google Blog urges Google users to call their representatives and ask that the bill be stopped (it's up for a vote this week)....
  • Lawsuit Over Killed Anti-China Ad On Google Google Sued for Allegedly Refusing Anti-China Ad at Wired News covers a lawsuit filed against Google after it refused to carry ads from activist Christopher Langdon protesting against the Chinese government....
  • Google Browser Sync For Firefox Google announced a new Firefox plugin named Google Browser Sync. The Firefox extension allows you to "synchronizes your browser settings ? including bookmarks, history, persistent cookies, and saved passwords ? across your computers. It also allows you to restore open tabs and windows across different machines and browser sessions." I have a more detailed write up and walk through of the extension at the Search Engine Roundtable....
  • The Top 100 Companies Searched Most On Hoover's Web site Hoover's released the Hoover's 100, the top 100 companies searches most on at the Hoover's web site. The top ten are; Wal-Mart, Apple, Proctor & Gamble, Dell, Microsoft, GE, Starbucks, Johnson & Johnson, Google and IBM, respectively. To view the full top 100, visit The Hoover's 100....
  • US, UK Searchers & The World Cup The World Cup opens tomorrow. For my fellow Americans, many of whom may have no idea that the US is in it, you might want to check out my personal experiences living in World Cup-mad Eng-er-land at the moment. And now the run-up to search and soccer is starting. Hitwise: World Cup and Soccer Searches over at iMedia Connection covers stats from Hitwise showing how Yahoo sent the official FIFA World Cup site the most traffic -- no surprise given Yahoo's a key sponsor. You can also see what soccer players are most popular among US searchers, with former women's...

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 2:47 PM | Permalink

June 7, 2006

Daily SearchCast, June 7, 2006: Google Rethinking Chinese Censorship? Rock, Paper, Scissors, US Senator, Google Guy; What People Search For At The CIA Web Site & More!

Today's search podcast covers Google reconsidering Chinese censorship; who's more powerful, a US senator or a Google Guy?; making your site search more successful; search marketing budgets on the rise; what people search for on the CIA web site and more!

Tune-in by listening to this MP3 file, listening via WebmasterRadio at 11:30am Eastern and repeated at 2pm Eastern Tuesday through Friday, via our Odeo channel or through iTunes via this link (or use alternative iTunes instructions explained here) or though our Yahoo Podcasts channel. Need more help tuning in live or finding the chat room? See the Daily SearchCast FAQ.

Below are links to items discussed:

  • Brin Suggests Google Might Reverse Chinese Censorship In The Short Term; Meanwhile, China Ramps Up Google.com Blocks "Brin says Google compromised principles" from the Associated Press covers Google cofounder Sergey Brin telling reporters yesterday that it's possible Google might reverse its policy of censoring on behalf of the Chinese government. That's the real news from his talk -- a possible reversal, perhaps soon -- not the admission of compromise which Google's made before. The news comes on the heels of China apparently ramping up blocks on the uncensored Google.com site....
  • Brin Can't Get Some Senate Meetings On Last-Minute DC Trip; Admits Needing Better Organization It wasn't only China that Google cofounder Sergey Brin was talking about in Washington DC yesterday. The purpose of his trip primarily was to lobby for net neutrality, to prevent phone companies for charging web sites for better access to them by web surfers. However, Google Is A Tourist In D.C., Brin Finds from the Washington Post covers how being super-powerful in search doesn't equal getting congressional members to drop everything for your visit....
  • Top Four & Two Percent Are Key For On Site Search Keyword Optimization ClickZ has the details of a Patricia Seybold Group study which says that for e-commerce sites, the top two-percent of search queries conducted within the site are the most important. The top four-percent of search queries conducted on non-ecommerce sites are the most important. If you improve the searcher experience for those top 4 or 2 percent of your internal site searches, half of all searchers will be happier....
  • comScore Research Tool To Track From Search To Sale (Even Offline Sales) ClickZ reports that comScore Networks will soon offer a new tool named qSearch Retail. qSearch Retail will track from the initial Web search to succeeding conversions, the conversions also include offline sales. comScore believes that 60-90 percent of all conversions happen offline. To obtain the offline sales data, comScore will use panel data and follow-up surveys to capture the offline sale....
  • Advertisers Increase Search Marketing Budgets Loren Baker reports on a JupiterResearch study that shows both revenues earned from search marketing campaigns and budgets allocated to those campaigns have increased. Search marketers with annual revenues of $15 million or more have increased the share of the ad budget from 25 percent in 2005 to 37 percent in 2006. Plus 66 percent of marketers plan to increase search spend this year....
  • Specialty Search Roundup #2 Here's another collection of new or "just discovered" specialty search tools, mobile tools, and more via Gary over at ResourceShelf. New: Amtrak Mobile Get real time train info on your SmartPhone or web accessible PDA New Beta: SEC Web Site Adds Beta: Full Text Search To Two Years of EDGAR Filings We also list a couple of other tools for full text EDGAR searching....
  • AdWords Editor Open For All To Download ThreadWatch noted the other day that the Google AdWords Editor is now open for everyone to use. Google started beta testing the desktop based AdWords management software in late January. You can download the AdWords Editor at services.google.com/adwordseditor....
  • AdWords Advertiser Pays $2,000 After Misleading Searchers ComputerWorld reports that a man who was selling "ineffective antispyware" software through AdWords has paid $2,000 to settle the dispute out of court. Seth Traub, of New Hampshire, used Microsoft's name in the ads, such as "Microsoft AntiSpyware" for keyword searches on "Microsoft spyware cleaner" or "Microsoft antispyware." The software Traub sold did not remove spyware, in fact, it reportedly made "users' computers less secure." He settled out of court by paying off the legal costs and attorney's fees....
  • Google To Offer Picasa Web Albums? Philipp Lenssen reports that he found signs of a "Picasa Web Albums" feature coming to Picasa. Picasa is Google's desktop based photo management software, that they bought back in July 2004. Philipp has screen captures of a button that was visible on the Picasa homepage that read, "New! Picasa Web Albums." The button has now been removed but it did link to a dead page at picasaweb.google.com. Should we expect a Web based version of Picasa soon? I suspect so, especially with the release of all these other Web applications from Google....
  • Google to add Albums to Picasa! And I Need to Vent
  • Yahoo! Shopping Launches Blog Chris Saito announced the launch of the Yahoo! Shopping Blog at Internet Retailer 2006 yesterday. While I wasn't at the conference, Chris filled me in, saying the blog is a great way to merchandise products, drive engagement (subscribe through RSS, build loyalty, etc.), and drive transactions. The blog will get more promotion on Yahoo! Shopping over time. There will be 4-5 people contributing (David Beach and Joe Lazarus have each contributed thus far)....
  • Top 25 Search Phrases Conducted At The CIA FOIA Collection Listed The CIA has a site that enables people to access and search CIA information such as previously released documents that were approved for release to the public. Gary Price discovers that the CIA has come up with a list of the top 25 searches at the CIA's FOIA Electronic Reading Room. Which phrases made the top 25, yea, UFO is one of them, what are the others?... 

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 2:58 PM | Permalink

June 6, 2006

Daily SearchCast, June 6, 2006: Yahoo MyWeb Gets New Look, More Features; Google Spreadsheets Want Your Tabular Data; The ODP Rigs The Alaskan Governor Election On Google; Baidu's Kickin' Commercial & More!

Today's search podcast covers Yahoo's revamped MyWeb bookmarking service; Google's shot across the Microsoft Excel bow with Google Spreadsheets; Google faces another book scanning lawsuit; think less of Google and it may think more of your web site; Google asks if you like its ads; Baidu's cool TV commercial; the Open Directory keeps a former Alaskan governor in office on Google and more!

Tune-in by listening to this MP3 file, listening via WebmasterRadio at 11:30am Eastern and repeated at 2pm Eastern Tuesday through Friday, via our Odeo channel or through iTunes via this link (or use alternative iTunes instructions explained here) or though our Yahoo Podcasts channel. Need more help tuning in live or finding the chat room? See the Daily SearchCast FAQ.

Below are links to items discussed:

  • Facelift, New Features For Yahoo's MyWeb Bookmark Service Yahoo's MyWeb bookmark service has gotten a facelift and new features to make it easier than before for people to find what others are saving and sharing on the service. Yahoo MyWeb Gets New Look, Easier Browsing & Viewing Features in today's SearchDay from me covers the changes and revisits how the system works in general....
  • Google Spreadsheets To Launch Shortly Google is to release a new Google Spreadsheets product on Tuesday, allowing anyone with a web browser to create and interact with spreadsheet information. The product will be a limited test release, which basically means first come, first served until Google shuts off the flow. Want it? Then watch Google Labs. Google Spreadsheets was planned to be posted there at 6am Pacific time Tuesday, when I talked with the company about the service earlier today....
  • Windows Live Mail's Active Search: Gmail-Like Contextual Ads Next To Your Mail Two years ago, Gmail launched with the idea of showing ads contextually based on your email. Soon after, the shit hit the fan, with one California state senator even backing a special anti-Gmail law that failed to pass. Fast forward to last week, with Microsoft rolling out Active Search within Windows Live Mail. Just like Gmail, it will deliver ads based on what you're reading. Unlike Gmail, there's been no privacy freakout that I've seen....
  • Mark Fletcher Leaves Ask.com & Bloglines Mark Fletcher, the founder of the most popular Web base RSS reader, Bloglines, announced that he is leaving the company. On February 8th 2005 Ask Jeeves (Ask.com) acquired Bloglines and continued to add features and resources to the service. Just last week Ask.com launched a blog & feed search feature with the help of the Bloglines team. Mark is leaving not just to spend more time with his family, but more because he wants to start up new companies and help other startups succeed. Mark says he is confident in leaving Bloglines in the Ask.com hands, read Mark's full moving...
  • Topix Adds Free Local Classifieds Joining the free classifieds fray, news aggregator Topix.net has added the ability to post listings on the site for housing, jobs, private party items, services, events and "local shops." Here's the ad-entry interface and here's an example of where and how the ads appear. This program has been going on quietly for a few months but is now gaining notice....
  • Kozoru Opens Public Beta Testing Of Byoms Kozoru opens public beta testing of byoms (build your own mobile search) today. I mentioned this was coming last week. Today, I've spent some time exploring some of the byoms that are available, and creating my own. I found the system easy to use, reasonably intuitive, fast and generally effective. As a searcher, it's going to be something that will be a useful addition to the search tools available; both the ready made byoms and more importantly those that you make yourself....
  • broadband
  • New Search Patent Applications: June 5, 2006 - Taking Care of Web Decay, Dead Links, and Parked Domains Yahoo provides an XML based bid management tool, and a way to maintain a persistent link to dynamic information between a browser and specific web pages. Microsoft marries email and search to provide a way store and track queries, and also introduces a method of calculating similarity between pages without the computational overhead of a Latent Semantic Indexing methodology. IBM aims to improve text search by preprocessing and maintaining relationship data between documents, delivers a means of spellchecking URLs, describes a process for personalizing web pages which include personalized search results, and introduces a method to rank pages while accounting...
  • French Lawsuit Over Google Book Search French publisher sues Google for piracy from AFP covers how a French publishing group becomes the third to sue Google over its book scanning program. La Martiniere alleges the indexing project violates copyright. Association of American Publishers Sues Google over Library Digitization Plan and Google's Library Scanning Project Heads to Court (action by the Authors Guild) covers the two other suits that I know of, which we've blogged about before....
  • Google Stops New Ranking Lawuit With Anti-SLAPP Threat; Previous KinderStart Suit Continues Despite This Google Avoids Another Lawsuit Over Rankings (For Now)--Roberts v. Google from Eric Goldman at his Technology & Marketing Law Blog looks at how a case involving rankings on Google got dismissed before going to trial, thanks in large part to a counter-suit that Google threatened....
  • Google Indexing Fewer Pages: Signs Of The Google Crawling Sandbox? Aaron Wall over at SEOBook.com has an excellent write up on the recent indexing phenomenon at Google. Google has been indexing fewer and fewer pages and webmasters are trying to figure out how to get more of their pages indexed and found by searchers. Aaron posted a blog entry he named The Google Crawling Sandbox....
  • A Current List Of Google's Robots What Bots Does Google Have These Days? from Ben Pfeiffer on my Search Engine Roundtable blog lists the names of the current spiders/robots/bots Google has roaming the web. The list includes the classic web spider Googlebot, the AdSense spider MediaBot, Google's image spider ImageBot, the AdWords spider AdsBot, Google's RSS feed spider Feedfetcher-Google, and Googlebot-Mobile for the spiders that go mobile. It's a great short post by Ben while I was away....
  • Googlebowling A Reality? Googlebowling is a term used to describe the method of knocking out a page from the Google search results. Googlebowling is conducted by linking to a particular site from sites within bad neighborhoods. Rand over at SEOMoz.org posted recent information he learned about Googlebowling while at SES London a week ago. To successfully deploy Googlebowling, Rand writes that you need to "use patterns that would show that the site has "participated" in the program." That means, you need to make sure to point the same "spammy" links to the other sites linking to the site you want to penalize. If...
  • Google Asks If AdWords Is Useful With Feedback Buttons Philipp Lenssen reports that Google is testing feedback buttons near AdWords ads. The feedback buttons asks, "Was this link useful?" You can then click on either a Yes or No button to provide the feedback. I was unable to duplicate this on my browsers, but interesting nevertheless....
  • Google Testing Expandable "More Google" Links On Home Page & More Philipp Lenssen reports that Google has been testing an expandable "More you can do with Google" link on the Google.com home page....
  • Searching With Invisible Tabs
  • Get Our Search News At The Top Of Google & Other New Subscribed Links
  • How To Contact Yahoo Search Last week, Yahoo posted helpful contact information at the Yahoo Search blog. Yahoo has a new contact form that can be accessed at http://help.yahoo.com/search/feedback and completed to submit feedback and questions to Yahoo. In addition, Yahoo improved the Yahoo Search Help section and also posted a useful Webmaster Resources section....
  • Yahoo's CEO Terry Semel's Salary Adjusted To One Dollar Bloomberg reports that Yahoo CEO Terry Semel will soon be earning a base salary of $1 per year. The rest of his income will come from a bonus and retention plan with options for nine million shares. Last year, Semel earned $600,000 as a base salary. The change to taking only $1 has him joining the "low" base salary ranks of Google's two cofounder Larry Page and Sergey Brin and CEO Eric Schmidt....
  • UK Journalists Boycott Yahoo Services America's Network reports that journalists in the UK are set to boycott Yahoo's services and products. The boycott is in protest of how Yahoo has handled some matters in China, such as allegations that the yahoo sent information about journalists to the Chinese authorities....
  • Baidu, Chinese Search Engine TV Ad Baidu, the Chinese based search engine, launched a new TV commercial. The commercial was translated and posted over at ValleyWag.com and can also be watched at YouTube. The commercial has an ending tag line that reads something like; "with Baidu, you can 'find' whoever you want to search for." Check out more of the details and the video at ValleyWag....
  • Funny Example Of Why DMOZ Titles Are Bad In Search Results Threadwatch posted a funny example of why DMOZ (ODP) directory titles should not always be used in the Google search results page. Search for Tony Knowles and you will see the top two results read, "Tony Knowles for Governor" and "Governor Tony Knowles" respectively. Yes, Tony Knowles is running to be the Governor Alaska but is not yet the governor there. If you click through to the second result, the one that reads "Governor Tony Knowles", and points to http://gov.state.ak.us/, you will notice the actual title of the page is "Governor Frank Murkowski," the current Governor of Alaska. So where...
  • Super Awesome, Super Bad Moustache!!! Low Reserve!

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 2:47 PM | Permalink

June 2, 2006

Daily SearchCast, June 2, 2006: NoFollow Changes Linking, Reputation Management, DOJ Wants Records, Microsoft's Planned Investment and much & More!

Today's search podcast covers how the "psychology of linking" has changed, handling bad behavior with reputation management and the DOJ wanting to prosecute so Internet companies need to store those records! Plus Microsoft's planned investment that totals $6.2 billion and much more!

Tune-in by listening to this MP3 file, listening via WebmasterRadio at 11:30am Eastern and repeated at 2pm Eastern Tuesday through Friday, via our Odeo channel or through iTunes via this link (or use alternative iTunes instructions explained here) or though our Yahoo Podcasts channel. Need more help tuning in live or finding the chat room? See the Daily SearchCast FAQ.

Below are links to items discussed:

  • Reputation Management: How To Handle Saboteurs The [failure] GoogleBomb had become well-known enough to have seen Marrissa Mayer post a response on the Google company blog last September. I first heard the phrase "Reputation Management" as applied to search from Heather Lloyd-Martin during a private conversation a long time before this. It was obvious Heather was on to something because we've all seen search results that produce unexpected listings. David Dalka recently posted his frustration that Googling his name could confuse searchers into thinking he is a millionaire. This may be a personal example, but what if you have a bona-fide saboteur?...
  • NoFollow Changes Linking Behavior Jeremy Zawodny posts his commentary on the NoFollow tag after finding an interesting blog entry on how the NoFollow attribute has changed linking behavior. NoFollow was introduced by Google over a year ago to combat prevalent comment spam as blogs became extremely popular. Ever since, NoFollow has had mixed responses from Webmasters, and Jeremy nicely puts it all in perspective. NoFollow has done very little to actually thwart comment spam, and its other effect is to dissuade some from entering legitimate comments. Without a reciprocal link, what motivates readers from commenting on someone else's website? Jeremy notes the "psychology of...
  • DOJ Asks Microsoft, AOL And Google To Keep records Last week during meetings with executives, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales asked several Internet companies to retain records for aiding in their prosecution efforts of terrorists and child predators. They requested lists of emails sent and received and web search information be kept for a reasonable length of time. The content of emails aren't part of this request, since the proper legal channels through which such information can be sought is by subpoena only....
  • Microsoft's Investment In The Coming Year The open source phenomenon presented a challenge to Microsoft some years back, and it took the company a few years to learn to deal with it. The advent of Google has presented them with a new challenge that a transformation is "not optional" according to Steve Ballmer. While Google exemplifies the type of company success that ad supported software services can yield, Microsoft's model to date has been entirely different. The investment Microsoft plans for the coming year includes $6.2 billion, $2 billion more than previously budgeted. This investment will go towards building success in ad supported software which includes...
  • SideStep Adds Travel Guides Beta, Names SVP of Engineering The battle of features in travel search continues with SideStep launching Travel Guides Beta. Most of the content is licensed from Frommer's with additional information courtesy of hotel partners. This launch by SideStep comes just about a month after the company announced its activities search....
  • AdSense Calendar If you're an AdSense publisher, then you have a Google Account with access to Google Calendar and other services. As announced on their blog, you can now populate your Google Calendar with events by the AdSense team. Instructions for doing so are in the blog entry. It enables you to view and keep track of system maintenance, blog entries and upcoming events....
  • 55 Ways To Have Fun With Google Interested in playing games? Want to learn a few other trick things you can do with Google? Google Blogoscoped author Phillip Lenssen has written a book titled: 55 Ways to Have Fun With Google. Learn about playing the classic Snake game among others, and using Google calculator utilities etc. According to the description, there's no programming skills needed. I haven't read the book, but knowing Phillip's blog, it sounds like it could be very interesting reading....

Posted by Detlev Johnson at 12:48 PM | Permalink

June 1, 2006

Daily SearchCast, June 1, 2006: New Online Ad Spending Record, Offline Print Ads Disappoint, Ask Debuts Impressive Blog Search, Clickfraud, The Google settlement And Much & More!

Today's search podcast covers record new online ad spending while offline print ads disappoint, Ask launches impressive blog search with preview feature, a new AdSense API and Google Base used to generate Froogle feeds. Listen in as we talk about clickfraud, the Google settlement and much more!

Tune-in by listening to this MP3 file, listening via WebmasterRadio at 11:30am Eastern and repeated at 2pm Eastern Tuesday through Friday, via our Odeo channel or through iTunes via this link (or use alternative iTunes instructions explained here) or though our Yahoo Podcasts channel. Need more help tuning in live or finding the chat room? See the Daily SearchCast FAQ.

Below are links to items discussed:

  • Record New Online Ad Spend The latest figures from PricewaterhouseCoopers and the IAB shows another quarter of tremendous growth in online ad spending. By now it has reached just about double the spend during the year 2000 before the tumble. Inside the numbers, search is going to be a fraction of that total spend since media placement with banners, email and affiliate marketing also are represented in "online ad spend" figures. Online ad spending shifted since the year 2000, to a better portion of it ending up with search than ever before. Tim Beyers of The Motley Fool helps us do the numbers with respect...
  • Offline Print Ad Experiment Disappointed Google During an investor call held yesterday, Google's Jonathan Rosenberg mentioned the experiment in print ads "probably hasn't taken off as fast as we would like." The plan for future success is to seek the right combination of ideas with producers of magazines to find the format that can work. Eric Schmidt commented that it took several years for the successful model to crystalize online, and he is not detered from further development of offline print ad experimenting....
  • Ask Launches Blog & Feed Search Nearly a year after acquiring Bloglines, Ask has rolled out a new blog & feed search that combines the best aspects of its web search engine with the intelligence it has gained from the thousands of Bloglines users who read blogs on a daily basis. The result is a terrific new search tool for the blogosphere?one that will appeal to heavy feed readers and casual searchers alike. More on the new service in today's SearchDay article, Ask Debuts Blog & Feed Search....
  • Yahoo Video Allows Uploads & Sharing Yahoo Video, previously offering content found only by crawling the web, now has changed to also allow uploads from content owners, similar to services that YouTube and Google Video offer. I'm away at our SES London show, so I can't take a longer look at the service now. Instead, TechCrunch has a short review here and the press release is below. TechCrunch is disappointed that the product isn't integrated into Flickr. Putting video into Flickr is something that Yahoo's debating, they told me when I talked with them about upcoming changes last month. However, there's a concern that it might...
  • AdSense API Launched for Developers Developers with 100,000+ daily page views and users contributing content will now be able to offer a "one stop shop" for their content creators to sign up for AdSense while allowing developers to integrate and optimize their AdSense ads for them. And while doing so, developers could be eligible to earn not only a $100 referral bounty, but also a 15% revenue share which would be paid directly by Google....
  • MSN adLab Launches With a Variety of Keyword Tools MSN first announced adLab back in January, but it has now been made available to everyone (in beta) with a wide variety of interesting keyword tools for advertisers and marketers. They have launched with 11 demos, broken down into areas Paid Search, Contextual Advertising, Behavior Targeting and Emerging Markets....
  • Google Base Absorbs Froogle Feeds; Other Submission Systems Remain Independent When I was at Google last this month, I got an update on Google Base for a forthcoming article. One of the things I was told was that Google Base was now the preferred way for merchants to submit content to Froogle. Really? Then why was Google still telling people on the Froogle site still to submit Froogle feeds? That oversight has now been corrected. As Garett Rogers notes, the feed submission mechanism formerly in the Google Merchant Center has now been replaced with Google Base submissions. Garett also highlights specific help pages about the change here. The consolidation is...
  • Google Settlement: Online Merchant Opting Out The unfolding story of Radiator.com starts as the company began spending $1,000 per month on search ads, and grew the spend up to $20,000 at which point Google wrote a case study to help promote AdWords. Since they are reportedly a mid-sized company that "lives on data," there came a time to analyze the effectiveness of the campaign. They found that between Yahoo! and Google they were not turning a profit, and much of the problem was easily discovered as buying broad terms that stood little chance of converting. But it didn't end there. Analyzing the data, an outside firm...

Posted by Detlev Johnson at 3:05 PM | Permalink

May 31, 2006

Daily SearchCast, May 31, 2006: Travelin' Green With Google, Microsoft Waiting To Advertise , Language Specific SEO, Pay-Per-Call & More!

Today's search podcast covers Travelin' green with advice from The Earthday Network and Google, Bill Gates talking about Microsoft's 5-year battle plan to get users to navigate to them for search (instead of Google) and some nice SEO tips about optimizing using languages outside English. Listen to Daron Babin and Detlev Johnson discuss Google supporting Mozilla Firefox 2.0 with Anti-Phishing technology, and with such strong ties to the Firefox browser, shouldn't Google just buy Mozilla Corporation? Hear all these stories and much more!

Tune-in by listening to this MP3 file, listening via WebmasterRadio at 11:30am Eastern and repeated at 2pm Eastern Tuesday through Friday, via our Odeo channel or through iTunes via this link (or use alternative iTunes instructions explained here) or though our Yahoo Podcasts channel. Need more help tuning in live or finding the chat room? See the Daily SearchCast FAQ.

Below are links to items discussed:

  • Travel Green With Tips From Google Promoting companies that offer environmental benefits, Google has partnered with The Earth Day Network to provide Have a Green Summer tips for traveling green. Check out special "tours" using Google technologies that highlight businesses that offer a useful green alternative to the status quo, including an alternative fuel car service out of New York, (I actually used Ozo on a previous trip), and earth friendly fun activities pinpointing parks, links to hiking trails and museums. The tips Google provides are meant to guide searchers and better help those looking for environmentally responsible hotels and accommodations. The tips simply add environmental...
  • Microsoft Patiently Waiting To Advertise Marketwatch, reporting from the D4 conference, quotes Bill Gates discussing Google as "very much the leader" contrary to Microsoft having made previous grand statements about matching Google within 6-months far longer ago. Bill Gates announced "it's a five year battle." The plan is to get users to navigate to Microsoft search rather than Google. Mocrosoft has invested heavily in search, and search (among other Web services) will see an increase of $2 billion more in investment over the next year than what was initially planned. And when it all comes together, the plan is to spend on advertising to let...
  • Language Specific SEO Advice A very well written elaborate (PDF) whitepaper by Huiping Iler explains in great detail what's involved, and most of the difficulties, with search engine rankings outside English. Consider that users are faced with filters, radio buttons and other obstacles during the search process, and you can picture what must be done to establish visibility with your target audience. Consider the facts pointed out by Iler, such as 60% of searches are performed in languages other than English, English has approximately 500,000 words, compared with French having approximately 300,000 and all forms of Chinese combined characters amount to approximately 50,000. One...
  • Google Anti-Phishing Will Be Part Of Firefox 2.0 While Microsoft makes the dominant Internet Explorer 7 which will be bundled with Vista, Google has strong ties to the upstart Firefox browser, employing key developers and supporting Firefox with a search affiliate deal worth 10's of millions of dollars. Both browsers will have state of the art anti-phishing capability, protecting users from online scams that steal identities among other crimes. Google collects an online list of phishing sites to help alert users of the Google Toolbar, and the same technology is planned to provide Firefox 2.0's Safe Browsing features. Firefox has approximately 20% of the browser market share and...
  • Redfin Gets Funding and Prepares to Go National Seattle-based Redfin.com was one of the first real estate ?mashups? to employ a map interface as a primary navigation tool for real-estate search. The site was quickly joined by other real-estate mashups, HousingMaps.com (the early poster child for mashups), HomePages.com, Trulia and, more recently, Zillow....
  • Pay-Per-Call Looking For Ways To Grow The Pay-Per-Call industry has a number of folks that assumed far faster growth than what has realized to date. Looking for ways to get more advertisers participating, the companies that offer Pay-Per-Call advertising are posturing and making deals with mobile search service providers to expand inventory. Search users are also slow to adopt mobile search, although acceptance of mobile, especially with local mobile search for travelers, is probably a mere matter of time and excellent small screen device options. Pay-Per-Call advertising networks hooking up with mobile search providers makes a lot of sense, since the small screen device people will...

Posted by Detlev Johnson at 7:37 PM | Permalink

May 30, 2006

Daily SearchCast, May 30, 2006: Ask's Memorial Day Link, About Links From Google, WikiMapia, Political Google, Google Powered TV Guide & More!

Today's search podcast covers Ask, the only major search engine that had a special Memorial Day homepage, a quick heads up on the new Yahoo! Weather report and a reasoned breakdown about links as confusing messages appear from Google company blogs. Meanwhile, the rumors about Google Payments start to swarm and build up to the tempest that hit the likes of CNet. So, we ride the tempest wind and rain to tell you all about what we hear might be happening. Check out the new Mashup WikiMapia!. We tell you how to find a UK PacMan crop-circle gobbling up dots and much much more!

Tune-in by listening to this MP3 file, listening via WebmasterRadio at 11:30am Eastern and repeated at 2pm Eastern Tuesday through Friday, via our Odeo channel or through iTunes via this link (or use alternative iTunes instructions explained here) or though our Yahoo Podcasts channel. Need more help tuning in live or finding the chat room? See the Daily SearchCast FAQ.

Below are links to items discussed:

  • Mazeltov Barry & Yisha! If all seems quiet from hard-working chief news correspondent Barry Schwartz, that's because he's off on his honeymoon. Barry married Yisha yesterday, concluding the engagement he started with a wedding proposal on Ask last year. Congrats from all of us at Search Engine Watch to the happy couple! If you'd like to send your best wishes, pop by our Search Engine Watch Forums thread, Rustybrick Getting Hitched This Weekend!...
  • Ask Recognizing Memorial Day The Ask homepage has recognized Memorial Day with an image and link to customized search results. While Memorial Day is specifically an American holiday, Thanksgiving is also specifically American and most search engines had fun with their logo on that day last year. Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft apparently skipped the day for custom search, while Ask has nicely provided references to the history of Memorial Day, recipes and other observance tips. Postscript: We can expect most Holidays to be highlighted on Ask in the future. Our friend Gary Price wrote in to explain the Memorial Day reference at Ask is...
  • Yahoo! Weather Report Yahoo! announced late yesterday that they have begun an update to their Web Search index. You can expect some changes to your Yahoo! rankings over the next several days, and if you want to provide feedback, they supply a new form that you can use to do so. The form field is limited to 6 lines of text, so prepare only short commentary, but you can specify whether your issues are technical in nature, a suggestion or just general feedback....
  • About Links From Google The Google Sitemaps team posted to their blog in response to a question at SearchEngineWatch Seattle. Interestingly, they note that links from bad neighborhoods do not harm a site's rankings, only links to bad neighborhoods. It has long been theorized that links from bad neighborhoods do cause ranking problems and this goes against conventional thinking. Link networks often populate quality content sites with paid text links as part of their program. If at all possible, Google obviously wouldn't want to remove quality content from their search engine. One solution is to make outbound links from quality sites that sell links...
  • Rumor: Google Payments Rumors have been flying since yesterday about Google's plan for a payment system and recent developments. Although unsubstantiated at this time, the talk is not new. Google itself has made some overtures about a pending payment system, and we can expect one to arrive sometime in the near future....
  • WikiMapia: Google Maps and Wikipedia Mashup Coming on the heels of the recently launched Microsoft MapCruncher, WikiMapia uses the Google Maps API and a Wiki interface. This enables users to enter or edit information with map hotspots. They ask that you refrain from adding anything that wouldn't be useful to everyone. Currently, the entries mainly consist of empty hotspots on buildings of interest, but a UK PacMan was also spotted. The search functionality only works searching tags applied to entries. There just aren't enough entries yet. I searched [cropcircle] from the main screen, and it limited the hotspots to the single entry with that tag. If...
  • Political Actions By Google In Washington Seen As Naive Threatening everything from Net Neutrality to regulating companies with operations in China, tech companies must take their cause to Washington. The Seattle Times details lessons learned by Microsoft over its antitrust woes, and characterized Google has having taken serious missteps by irritating Republicans in power with its employees modestly contributing nearly entirely to Democrats and under staffing its DC operations. Google countered that they are "not a partisan presence in Washington," and "recently announced the hiring of Bush White House aide Jamie Brown for a senior position." The general sense is that Google will take lessons learned from Microsoft and...
  • Google Pressures CHMoogle Into Name Change The chemistry search engine CHMoogle encountered opposition to its Trademark filing by Google, and decided to resort to eMolecules rather than take on the search giant. Although eMolecules' attorneys could argue the different audience and content wouldn't cause consumer confusion, the complaint against them met its mark with CEO Klaus Gubernator. A legal proceeding would distract the company from its mission addressing the lack of "cheminformatics" in Web-wide search engines....
  • Free New AdWords Alerts Service A free alert service kicks off with two alerts related to Google AdWords and AdSense. You can get daily email alerts with the costs of the most expensive AdWords both by bid and by cost per day. Today is a new alert by keyword that emails you when new advertisers appear for a keyword you supply. Assuming you don't mind a flurry of email when tracking popular categories, this can be handy....
  • A Google Powered TV Guide Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, comments that their mission is to provide access to everything, including television content. Using Google search capability, coupled (for instance) with Media Center or an XBox, this vision could potentially be realized. There are questions, of course, about Internet connections fast enough to withstand the bulky data transfer that such content requires. This may ultimately get supported by a new format of advertising that Google is continually testing on a weekly basis....
  • Marchex Acquires Local-Vertical Search Company Openlist New York-based Openlist, a local, vertical search engine, was acquired by Marchex, which provides search and contextual marketing but also owns a network of thousands of "direct navigation" domains. Little-known Openlist was co-founded by former Jupiter analyst Matthew Berk as Local-i and has been around for roughly two years. The deal is worth $13 million in cash and stock and Berk, among several others, now joins Marchex. One can think of Openlist as Citysearch built by aggregation. I think that Openlist is doing some of the most interesting work in Local right now; and the acquisition makes Marchex a potentially...
  • Kozoru To Launch Chat-Based Search Technology, Byoms Internet search is in many ways fairly standard now, and although existing search engines bring out new features, or new engines appear, it isn't often that you see anything that's really different. However kozoru is launching a chat based search resource called byoms or 'build your own mobile search', with a public beta going live on June 5th. This is something of a departure from traditional search, by allowing users to run their own searches using a chat client....
  • Fixing AOL Search Jason Calacanis has written a forthright piece on the importance of fixing AOL search. He's examined Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL search, and in particular looked at the position of the first organic result, down to the number of pixels from the top and the left, together with useful screen shots. Danny wrote on the same subject of the positioning of results a couple of years ago. There's absolutely no doubt that the positioning of organic results is very important, but as a searcher there are other things that I worry about rather more....

Posted by Detlev Johnson at 2:55 PM | Permalink

May 26, 2006

Daily SearchCast, May 26, 2006: Dell's Doing Google, Dude; Google Does 50% Of US Searches; Don't Be Evil? Don't Make Ballmer Laugh & More!

Today's search podcast covers Google and Dell sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g. Well, Dell agreeing that for an undisclosed sum, putting Google software on its new computers is a good thing, dude. Meanwhile, Google does half the US's searches and is sending a new spider after your landing pages, to see if you're running a quality ad campaign. YouTube grows and grows in video search, plus Ballmer laughs and laughs over Don't Be Evil (ok, just one laugh) and more! Warning, this episode contains occasional off-the-cuff singing, which might be harmful to your ears. Sorry, it was a holiday weekend coming up, so I was feelin' kind of funky.

Tune-in by listening to this MP3 file, listening via WebmasterRadio at 11:30am Eastern and repeated at 2pm Eastern Tuesday through Friday, via our Odeo channel or through iTunes via this link (or use alternative iTunes instructions explained here) or though our Yahoo Podcasts channel. Need more help tuning in live or finding the chat room? See the Daily SearchCast FAQ.

Below are links to items discussed:

  • Google & Dell Partner: Google Software To Be Installed On Dell PCs The Wall Street Journal reports that Dell will be installing Google software on "millions of Dell personal computers." That means software like Google Desktop search, the Google Toolbar, and the default search engine will be set to Google on these Dell PCs. Google is paying Dell an undisclosed amount for this partnership....
  • Dell De-Crapifier Page Gets stuff Dell puts on your computer off.
  • NetRatings: Google Tops 50 Percent Mark In US Web Searches New stats (PDF) out from NetRatings show Google now handles half the web searches in the United States:...
  • NetRatings Data: The Local Angle Danny posted here about April Nielsen//NetRatings data reflecting that Google had crossed the 50% threshold in search market share. I want to point to another part of the release, which jumped out at me: the Internet driving people to local retailers ("big boxes" in this case)....
  • Google AdsBot Now Coming To Assess Your Landing Pages, Will Impact Your AdRank Google's rolling out a new system where ad landing pages will be automatically spidered by a new AdsBot. The content of landing pages will help determine the quality of an ad campaign. That quality score, along with the amount you are willing to pay, is then used to determine an ad's AdRank, the position where an ad will appear in the results. A high quality score means you can rank higher even if you pay less than others. And not participating in the new spidering system can hurt your AdRank....
  • Google Dropping Conservative Sites? Is Google Dropping Conservative Sites They Disagree With? from Jennifer Laycock at Search Engine Guide is an interesting article regarding the possibility that Google is dropping sites from their index due to their political content. Jennifer has done some excellent digging around into some of the allegations surrounding the issue. However, the interesting, larger point is the extent to which Google (or indeed any other search engine) has a responsibility to be impartial in the information they provide, for financial reasons if no other....
  • New Search Patents: May 25, 2006 - Yahoo Units and Microsoft Redundancy Filters New patents from this week from Yahoo on indexing by concepts and on uses of scripts on different computers to share data between them. Microsoft looks at reranking search results based upon redundancy, annotations on web pages, and showing web ads based upon a person's television viewing habits. IBM comes up with smarter bookmarks, and Amazon shows smarter search results when a first query doesn't quite work....
  • Travel Search Used By Few But Will Grow & Kayak Gets Top Honors In Review A new report finds few use travel search engines but that declares the area set to grow. Meanwhile, an recent review gives Kayak top honors when pitted against some competitors....
  • YouTube Dominant In Video Search, Now an Acquisition Target? The short answer is "yes." The site -- shall we call it the "MySpace" of video :) -- is now the dominant destination for online video search, according to a press release out today from Hitwise. YouTube has an almost 50% market share....
  • Search Marketing Growing Rapidly in the U.K. A new report from industry analyst firm E-consultancy finds that search marketing revenues grew more than 65% in the U.K last year, and that same level of growth is on track for 2006. The report also offers interesting insights into the division of revenues between PPC and organic SEO, as well as insights into how much search marketers are charging for their services. More details on the report in today's SearchDay article, U.K. Search Marketing Environment Thriving....
  • MIVA Seeing PPCall Monetization Growth One of the most interesting elements of the announced eBay-Yahoo! ?alliance? today is the potential for ?click to call? and ?pay per phone call? (PPCall). These are two distinct things: click to call is a VoIP-based calling infrastructure and PPCall is a billing or ad model. They?re related but one doesn?t always mean the other. However, in the case of portals and search engines ?testing click to call? usually means ?we?re thinking about PPCall.? They obviously want to make money from calls; MIVA (though a partnership with Ingenio) appears to be doing so. Earlier this month the company reported that...
  • AOL Video Gets Google Video Promotion Way back when Google and AOL cut their partnership deal, AOL was to get promotion on Google Video. What, big flashing neon AOL banners? Actually, Google said it would be low-key. And that's pretty much what's been delivered. Gary Price noted earlier this week that a small AOL Video link had been added to the reverse bar of the Featured section of Google Video. Look over there on the right-hand side. You can't -- well, you can -- miss it....
  • Google Seeks Employees Through Wired Ad Google Ad in Wired from Google Blogoscoped covers Google doing print ads. No, not to drum up new users, though it has done some of that before. This time it's to attract employees to work for the company. If you didn't skip three grades and failed to learn Lisp by age 10 like Niniane, there's no need to apply. Darn, and there's me wasting all that time on Basic at age, um, 13? Well, I can still make my name fill the screen of a TRS-80....
  • Ballmer On Google And Don't Be Evil: Laugh & No Comment When I asked Barry Diller earlier this year if Ask needed some type of "Don't Be Evil" like Google, his answer got the audience roaring with laughter. "Be Evil," he said, then qualifying that businesses needed to be realistic. Now Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer gets to swing at the same question in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle. He basically dodges the question by saying Google doesn't seem to follow it....

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 5:12 PM | Permalink

May 25, 2006

Daily SearchCast, May 25, 2006: Google To Get Dayparting; Affiliate Sites Have New Worries From Google; YahooBay? eBayhoo? Not Quite, But The Two Are Partnering & More!

Today's search podcast covers Google getting dayparting of ads; Google saying no to low-quality affiliate sites; eBay and Yahoo get chummy; Ask's aerial maps and more!

Tune-in by listening to this MP3 file, listening via WebmasterRadio at 11:30am Eastern and repeated at 2pm Eastern Tuesday through Friday, via our Odeo channel or through iTunes via this link (or use alternative iTunes instructions explained here) or though our Yahoo Podcasts channel. Need more help tuning in live or finding the chat room? See the Daily SearchCast FAQ.

Below are links to items discussed:

  • New Google AdWords Dayparting & Ad Scheduling Coming At Search Engine Watch Live in Seattle last week, Lexa Pope from the Google AdWords team discussed their new ad scheduling features that will be released in a few weeks. The new features will allow advertisers to schedule the ads to show on weekends or weekdays only, or on other set days the advertiser specifies. Dayparting is also included allowing advertisers to schedule their ads during specific hours, such as to run late at night or at lunchtime only. Also unusual is the fact that Google AdWords preannounced the new features launch....
  • Google Rankings Depend On Data Center, Geographic Location & Personalization Aaron Wall has a nice write up on the different ways one searcher can see one set up results, compared to a different search seeing a different set up results, all for the same search query. Aaron explains that three primary things may determine the results sets you see for any particular query. They include the search engine data center you hit, the location of your computer and if you have personalization preference turned on....
  • Google Updates Webmaster Quality Guidelines To Include Affiliates Google added some lines to the What are Google's quality guidelines? At the top, there is one slight change to the wording, nothing material. But Google added two points to the bottom. They added a bullet to the "Quality guidelines - specific guidelines and a paragraph at the bottom of the page....
  • Duplicate Content Detection Tool I reported this morning about a new tool that checks your site to see how much duplicate content like content you have throughout your site. As many of you know, duplicate content is a major issue for many SEOs today. This tool will hopefully give you the ability to catch any duplicate content issues before they become a serious issue. The tool is named Site Wide Duplicate Content Analyzer....
  • eBay & Yahoo Partner On Graphical Ads, Other Areas Everyone is talking about the eBay & Yahoo partnership, where Yahoo will be eBay's exclusive provider of graphical ads and Yahoo will promote eBay's PayPal to its merchants and publishers. Reports via the Washington Post, The Street and BusinessWeek.com stress how this poses a threat to Google and Microsoft. It is important to note that this partnership is primarily to provide graphical ads and click-to-call ads and on a lesser standpoint to provide some search ads. The limited search ads are probably because eBay does not want to detract visitors from the eBay products and auctions, which is logical....
  • Google Works With Brazil To Shut Down Orkut Communities The Associated Press reports that Google has finally agreed to pull the plug on some communities within Orkut, Google's social networking software. Google has specifically agreed to shut down any community that violates Orkut's terms of service. This includes "any illegal or unauthorized purpose" such as;...
  • del.icio.us Adds Most Popular Links On Home Page del.icio.us announced that they have made the del.icio.us popular page more visible by adding the content of the page, in the form of a "hot list" to the del.icio.us home page. So, now when you visit http://del.icio.us/ you will see "the del.icio.us hotlist" featured with hourly updates from the popular page. SEOs & SEMs will soon report how much of an impact this change will have in traffic and link bait retrieval, until then, it is hard to know....
  • "Add To My Yahoo" Feature Removed From Yahoo SERPs I reported at the Search Engine Roundtable that Yahoo seems to have removed the "Add To My Yahoo" button from the search results. In the past, when you conducted a search at Yahoo and the sites in the results had an RSS feed, Yahoo would often enable the searcher to click on a "Add To My Yahoo" link, which would place the RSS subscription directly into the registered user's My Yahoo home page. I am not exactly sure when Yahoo removed this feature....
  • MSN Talking Acquisition With Wireless Ad Provider ThreadWatch links to a Wall Street Journal report that shows MSN is in talks to buy a wireless ad provider, Third Screen Media. If this acquisition is successful, Microsoft can immediately, or almost immediately, begin serving up ads on mobile devices and phones....
  • Ask.com Has Sweet Europe Maps With Aerials Search Engine Journal reports that Ask.com has some pretty impressive Europe maps, with aerial imagery. Loren Baker links to three examples including Charles De Gaulle Airport in Paris, France, Houses of Parliament, London and even some nice coverage of The Canals of Amsterdam....
  • Phil Bradley Our New Searching Correspondent; Jennifer Slegg Picks Up Paid Search Coverage Search Engine Watch has always had two main audiences: search marketers and searchers. We want marketers to understand how to reach an audience through search engines. Equally important, we want that audience -- the searchers -- to know how to search better and to be kept informed of great new tools and features. Having Gary Price on board was a huge help in better serving our searcher audience, since his background was as a librarian -- you know, those human search engines that have helped people for thousands of years. Our readers know that Gary left us earlier this year....

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 4:06 PM | Permalink

May 24, 2006

Daily SearchCast, May 24, 2006: Windows Live Local Gets UK Images & Easier Map Sharing; Is That Site In Your Search Results Safe?; A Spam Detection Tool; A Search Marketing Magazine Arrives & More!

Today's search podcast covers Windows Live Local getting new UK images and easier ability to share mapped points, Microsoft's many shopping moves, a new tool to detect if a site in search results is "safe" or not, Ask's smart answers for stock searching; a tool to help tell if you are spamming search engines; a search magazine makes its debut and more!

Tune-in by listening to this MP3 file, listening via WebmasterRadio at 11:30am Eastern and repeated at 2pm Eastern Tuesday through Friday, via our Odeo channel or through iTunes via this link (or use alternative iTunes instructions explained here) or though our Yahoo Podcasts channel. Need more help tuning in live or finding the chat room? See the Daily SearchCast FAQ.

Below are links to items discussed:

  • Windows Live Local Adds Traffic and Sharing Yesterday some people spotted Microsoft?s roll out of aerial photography in the UK (and Canada). That was part of a set of new enhancements to Windows Live Local that were more fully introduced this morning. (TechCrunch does a nice run-down.)...  
  • Seeing Stonehenge The Right Way -- Private Access  
  • Microsoft Talks Shopping Last week I briefly introduced three of Microsoft's e-commerce initiatives: MSN Shopping, Windows Live Shopping, and Windows Live Product Search. This week I talked with Jim Barr, GM of Microsoft's Shopping and Marketplaces group for a little more insight. Here's an excerpt: ?Search is very important. Half of the shopping starts in search. 15-25% of all searches go to a shopping site. MSN search will not win unless we are good at commerce search. That?s a strong reason why we invested.? ?Windows Live Product Search goes on the presumption that the audience wants to see as much selection as possible....  
  • New Tool Scandoo Scans for Scumware in Search Results The reports of hackers poisoning search results by optimizing landing pages that included links to viruses, spyware and other malware alarmed many people. Now a free new service called Scandoo serves as a front-end to Ask, Google, MSN Search and Yahoo, scanning results for potential nasties. It identifies potential threats in real-time without requiring a plug-in or download. "Clean" results are labeled with a green checkmark; those with potential threats are labeled with a red "X" (see it in action with this search for "warez"). More about Scandoo and how it works here....  
  • New Search Patent Applications: May 23, 2006 - Yahoo Wallets, Microsoft Answers, and Google Phrases A number of patent applications published last week proved intriguing. The US Patent and Trademark Office (USTPO) filings offered us additions to Google phrase searching and predictive queries, some enhancements to interacting with ecommerce sites that appear to be from Yahoo, a Microsoft Answers system and a page location based bidding process, a link-based ranking system from Oracle, and "phone gestures" from V-Enable....  
  • New AdWords Layout Being Tested? I reported at the Search Engine Roundtable this morning that people are noticing a new layout for the AdWords ads on the Google search results page. The new layout shows two ads at the top and four ads at the bottom of the results. There are currently no signs of ads on the right hand side of the page. You can see an image of the ad at my blog by clicking on the image. I started a rumor that possibly Google is saving the right hand side for Ask.com zoom like features (i.e. refine search, etc.) but that is...  
  • Ask.com Shows Off More Smart Answers Gary Price, Director of Online Information Resources at Ask.com, writes at the Ask.com Blog about some of the stock related smart answers. Gary details how Ask.com is able to give you the answer to your query quickly. Some stock examples Ask.com gives you include; Stocks AMR, Ticker Symbol Sirius, CSCO, Stock Quote Pepsico. But this also works well for more investor researcher like questions such as; Market Capitalization KO (Coca-Cola), Outstanding Shares Fedex, Price Earnings Ratio GE, or Nike stock. Personally, I have set Ask.com to be my homepage months ago. I use it often when I want the quick...  
  • The Body Shop Versus Body Time  
  • Yahoo's Annual Meeting Of Stockholders Tomorrow At 1PM (EST) Yahoo is hosting the Annual Meeting Of Stockholders tomorrow at 1pm (EST). You can enroll for the meeting by clicking here and providing your email address. Once enrolled you should receive electronic delivery of the proxy statement, annual report, and related materials. More details at the Investor Events page....  
  • Google Investor Conference Call May 31st Google posted the details of the investor conference call today. The conference call is to take place on May 31, 2006 at 11:00 AM PT. Google is supposedly going to "offer more opportunities for the investment community to interact with" Google's senior management. The Webcast can be accessed live at http://investor.google.com/webcast at that time....  
  • Larry Page Video Interview Channel 4 interviewed Larry Page and the video is available by clicking here. He discusses that artificial intelligence will play an important role in the future of search. He also answers questions about China and privacy concerns. Watch the video at Channel 4 News....  
  • Search Spam Detection Tool: How White Hat Is Your Web Site? Nathan Weinberg spots a tool named Search engine spam detector. The tool looks at a particular URL and classifies what elements on the page may raise a spam flag at a search engine. So let us test it out on the SEW Blog, shall we? :)...  
  • Google Behind Others On Catching TechMeme's New Name SEOMoz reports that Google has been having issues ranking and indexing TechMeme.com, the new name for TechMemorandum. Yesterday, Google did not rank TechMeme.com for its own name Techmeme, a classic sign of what is called the Google Sandbox. Rand also noticed that Techmeme.com was not indexed at all. Today, this morning, the new name seems to have been indexed and is now ranking #1 for the Techmeme name. This only happened after Adam Lasnik, MiniMatt, took a look at Rand's post and refused to comment on "specific sites." It is also important to note that Ask.com, Yahoo and MSN all...  
  • Search Engines Using Search Ads To Promote Themselves In the past week or so, I have been reporting on the different ways search engines use search ads to promote their own search engine. I have spotted Ask.com bidding on Google for "pimped out search engine," which is part of their marketing speak of the TV commercials. I have also spotted Yahoo using Google AdSense to promote Yahoo Search products. Search engines like MSN come up in Google AdWords for a search on search engine, MSN and Google come up in Yahoo Search for a query on search engine also. But at this time, none of the search engines...  
  • Search Marketing Standard Hits The Newsstands I reported last week that the new search marketing magazine, the Search Marketing Standard was delivered to over 15,000 people. Danny first mentioned this magazine back in April, and now it is here. The first issue has a lot of nice beginner style articles on SEM as well as some news related coverage from the industry. The next issue is expected by the end of August with the cover story being "Search Engine Marketing and Web Site Usability - a Winning Combination."...

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 1:13 PM | Permalink

May 23, 2006

Daily SearchCast, May 23, 2006: Google Removes Sites Over Hate Speech From News; Google Bug Makes Your Site Seem To Disappear; MSN Gives ODP Description Opt-Out (Hurray!) & More!

Today's search podcast covers Google removing some sites from Google News over hate speech issues; a bug that causes Google to report fewer pages indexed than it actually has for your site; MSN goes where other search engines have yet to go, offering an opt-out for Open Directory titles and descriptions being forced upon your listings and more!

Tune-in by listening to this MP3 file, listening via WebmasterRadio at 11:30am Eastern and repeated at 2pm Eastern Tuesday through Friday, via our Odeo channel or through iTunes via this link (or use alternative iTunes instructions explained here) or though our Yahoo Podcasts channel. Need more help tuning in live or finding the chat room? See the Daily SearchCast FAQ.

Below are links to items discussed:

  • Amazon Upgrades Amazon Online Reader Gary Price has a detailed & step-by-step write up on the new Amazon Online Reader. You can view the new look for the reader by clicking here. The new features include; search for words within the pages, scroll from page to page (looks AJAX like), and a zoom feature. More details at Gary and/or at Amazon....
  • Google's Eric Schmidt Interviewed on CNBC ResourceShelf points to a CNBC interview of Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt. The two-part interview goes over the "plan B" for Google's growth, Google the "portal," the competitive landscape, the CNET controversy, Bill Gates comments about Google, Wall Street, the international front, and finally click fraud. A few things I will put out for you is that Google wants to increase "targeted ads" for all media, Google won't call itself a portal, content companies are not competitors, there is a difference between public information being available and publicizing that information, and Asia is a growing market that Google will be aiming...
  • Google Removing News Sources For Hate Speech NewsBusters.org reports that Google has removed two Islamic sites from the Google News index for "hate speech." Google cited three examples of articles that Google News readers reported to them, including this one and this one. Philipp Lenssen has a nice write up on the subject here. It is also important to note that Google has not removed the site from the Google Web search index, site:www.michnews.com returns almost 33,000 results....
  • MySpace In Partnership Talks With Google & Microsoft The Financial Times reports that MySpace, the huge social networking site, is in talks with Google and Microsoft over partnership opportunities to better monetize MySpace with contextual and search ads. MySpace, that has "nearly 80m registered users", is seeking a search company, like Google or Microsoft to "supply internet searches on its pages, along with adverts tied to results." The Financial Times says that Yahoo is "less interested," possibly because they have their own consumer generated content going on there. This deal can be huge for both Google and Microsoft, and also MySpace....
  • Windows Live Local Maps UK With Aerial Imagery Loren Baker spotted a LiveSide post noting that Windows Live Local has added UK aerial imagery coverage. LiveSide explains that they are still lacking Birds-Eye feature at many UK cities, but expect improvements to that feature by the "end of the summer."...
  • Google Base Live in UK & Germany Philipp notes that Google Base is now live in the UK and Germany. The UK version is at http://www.google.co.uk/base/ and the German version is at http://www.google.de/base/....
  • AdSense Video Ads Out of Rich Media Beta Test AdWords advertisers will be able to display video ads across the AdSense content network. The video ads, in a click-to-play video format so not to be too obtrustive to the user experience, will be available as both site targeted ads as well as on a keyword basis. However, it does not seem to be an ad format that publishers will be able to opt-out of....
  • Show Me More Pictures Like This One... Image search can be frustrating, because search engines can't "see" pictures in the same way that they can "read" text?indeed, image search involves a lot of guesswork on the part of the engines. Experimental image search services are trying to overcome the inherent challenges with image retrieval by allowing you to use a reference image as a starting point to find similar images based on color, texture and so on. More on two of these services in today's SearchDay article, Searching for Images by Similarity....
  • Google Continues To Gain Market Share While Others Lose comScore released their latest stats on the "Share of Online Searches by Engine". Google gained April 2005 to April 2006 6.6 percentage points, claiming 43.1%, up from 42.7% March 2006. Yahoo with 28.0% in April 2006, dropped 2.7 percentage points from April 2005, but remained flat from March 2006 to April 2006 with 28% share. MSN dropped 3.2 percentage points claiming 12.9%, and also saw a decline from March 2006 to April 2006 by .3%. What is a bit surprising is that Ask.com's share also decreased both from April 2005 with 6.1% to March 2006 with 5.9% and then in...
  • MSN Allows Webmasters To Opt Out Of ODP Titles Huge props to MSN Search for enabling Webmasters to tell MSN not to display a site's ODP directory title in the MSN Search results. Basically, some times when a site is listed in MSN Search results, they use the ODP (dmoz.org) directory listing's data, specifically the title and description from the ODP database. Now, MSN allows Webmasters to specify if that data should be used or not. How do you implement it?...
  • Tool Estimates How Much Selling Your Links Is Worth The folks at Text Link Ads announced via the Link Building Blog a tool that calculated the value of links on your page. This nifty and stylish AJAX powered tool asks you to type in the URL of the site, the site's theme, the number of links you want to sell on the page, if the links will be site wide or single page link only and then to specify the location of the links on the page. According to the tool, a single link on this site, if placed on the left hand navigation bottom bar, is worth $5,200...
  • Google Sends Settlement Notices In Click Fraud Class Action Case The Inside AdWords Blog posted an update on the Lane's Gifts v. Google Settlement. They posted a statement by Nicole Wong, Associate General Counsel;...
  • Searcher Behavior: An SEOs Perspective Shari Thurow has a new ClickZ article live named Analyzing Search Behavior for SEO, which looks at searcher behavior from the SEO's perspective. She defines the different modes of search behavior that include; Berrypicking, Querying, Refining, Expanding, Browsing/surfing, Pogo-sticking, Foraging, Scanning (eye-tracking) and Reading. Shari goes deep into a paper written by Marcia J. Bates in 1989 named Berrypicking, for the inspiration of Analyzing Search Behavior for SEO....
  • New Click Fraud Bot Exploiting 34,000 PCs & Hundreds Of Advertisers Help Net Security reports that PandaLabs discovered a bot named Clickbot.A, which infected 34,000 computers. The Clickbot.A automatically clicks on search ads, costing advertises hundreds of dollars (or more) for invalid clicks. This clicks act as if they are real, in nature, since they are on 34,000 different machines, on different networks, and are being instructed to the style of search ad clicking they should take. So it may look as if the clicks are valid, when they may not be. Jen will be posting more details later about this case, for now you can get more information at Help...
  • Google Finds Bug With Site Search Command Vanessa Fox from Google Engineering posted at the Inside Google Sitemaps blog, that Google found a bug with the site search command. The post explains that some of the reason people are noticing indexing issues at Google, is because of this bug. The two of a "few bugs that affected the site: operator" include using the site command with a trailing slash (i.e. site:www.example.com/) or trying it on a hyphenated domain name (i.e. site:www.example-site.com). Google says they will have it fixed within a few days, but until then, use the syntax site:www.example.com. I have the forum roundup on this bug...
  • Google Adds /Music To Robots.txt File: Google Music Coming Soon? Garett Rogers discovers that Google just changed their robots.txt file to include Disallow: /music. That suggests that Google is ready to launch a music portal, of some sort soon. Gary Price has been speculating about Google Music for over a year now....
  • Yahoo Publisher Network Launches Direct Deposit & Tax Withholding Yahoo! Publisher Network has just launched a few new features for publishers, including the much longed for direct deposit. They have also included an option for publishers to automatically allow YPN to do tax withholding on their earnings. And lastly, they have announced that they will pay publishers on the 25th of the month, which puts them several days ahead of when Google AdSense sends their payments to publishers. For more details on all the changes, please see YPN launches direct deposit, tax withholding and faster payment turnaround on JenSense....
  • Potato Bugs

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 3:48 PM | Permalink

May 19, 2006

Daily SearchCast, May 19, 2006: What Parts Of Google Get The Most Traffic, Get Your Google Collector Cards & More!

Today's search podcast covers how Google web search remains what generates most of Google's traffic, new unofficial Google collector cards spotlighting prominent employees and more! SearchReturn editor Detlev Johnson sat in for Danny Sullivan, who is away this week.

Tune-in by listening to this MP3 file, listening via WebmasterRadio at 11:30am Eastern and repeated at 2pm Eastern Tuesday through Friday, via our Odeo channel or through iTunes via this link (or use alternative iTunes instructions explained here) or though our Yahoo Podcasts channel. Need more help tuning in live or finding the chat room? See the Daily SearchCast FAQ.

Below are links to items discussed:

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 4:54 PM | Permalink

Daily SearchCast, May 18, 2006: Yahoo Analyst Day; Google's New Ad Budget Options & More!

Today's search podcast covers Yahoo execs talking about current and future moves at Yahoo analyst day, Google getting a new budget option, Vint Cerf on book search more! SearchReturn editor Detlev Johnson sat in for Danny Sullivan, who is away this week.

Tune-in by listening to this MP3 file, listening via WebmasterRadio at 11:30am Eastern and repeated at 2pm Eastern Tuesday through Friday, via our Odeo channel or through iTunes via this link (or use alternative iTunes instructions explained here) or though our Yahoo Podcasts channel. Need more help tuning in live or finding the chat room? See the Daily SearchCast FAQ.

Also, yesterday's show linked to the wrong MP3 file. That now corrected, and here the file again for those of you doing auto-downloads.

Below are links to items discussed:

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 3:44 PM | Permalink

May 17, 2006

Daily SearchCast, May 17, 2006: Making Subscribed Links For Google; Flickr Improves; Google Hiring More Than Yahoo & More! (Corrected Link)

Today's search podcast covers how to make and get the new subscribe links listed with Google; changes as Flickr upgrades and improves; Google said to be hiring more than Yahoo and more! SearchReturn editor Detlev Johnson sat in for Danny Sullivan, who is away this week.

Tune-in by listening to this MP3 file, listening via WebmasterRadio at 11:30am Eastern and repeated at 2pm Eastern Tuesday through Friday, via our Odeo channel or through iTunes via this link (or use alternative iTunes instructions explained here) or though our Yahoo Podcasts channel. Need more help tuning in live or finding the chat room? See the Daily SearchCast FAQ.

Below are links to items discussed:

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 11:40 PM | Permalink

Daily SearchCast, May 16, 2006: Special Edition, Live From The Googleplex With Matt Cutts

This special edition of the Daily SearchCast covers Danny Sullivan talking with Google's Matt Cutts during a visit to the Googleplex. Tune-in by listening to this MP3 file. Below are links to items discussed:

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 11:02 PM | Permalink

Daily SearchCast, May 16, 2006: New Yahoo Home Page Available; Google Notebook Launches; Google Hires Webmaster Relations Help; Google Loses A Chef & More!

Today's search podcast covers Yahoo allowing people to try a new home page; Google's new note taking web service launches; Google hires a search marketer to help work with search marketers; soon after finally hiring new chief chefs, Google loses one of them and more! SearchReturn editor Detlev Johnson sat in for Danny Sullivan, who is away this week.

Tune-in by listening to this MP3 file, listening via WebmasterRadio at 11:30am Eastern and repeated at 2pm Eastern Tuesday through Friday, via our Odeo channel or through iTunes via this link (or use alternative iTunes instructions explained here) or though our Yahoo Podcasts channel. Need more help tuning in live or finding the chat room? See the Daily SearchCast FAQ.

Today From The SEW Blog...

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 3:46 AM | Permalink

May 16, 2006

Starting Now: Special Edition Daily SearchCast With Matt Cutts, Live From The Googleplex

My special edition Daily SearchCast with Google's Matt Cutts live from the Googleplex begins in a few minutes. More info on tuning in live or listening afterward is covered here.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:10 PM | Permalink

Later Today: Special Edition Daily SearchCast With Matt Cutts, Live From The Googleplex

As a reminder, my special edition Daily SearchCast with Google's Matt Cutts will be happening live from the Googleplex later today. The regular Daily SearchCast will happen, followed by the special show at 7:15pm Eastern time. More info on tuning in live or listening afterward is covered here.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:50 AM | Permalink

May 12, 2006

Daily SearchCast, May 12, 2006: Microsoft Pushes Back On Google IE7 Complaint; Yahoo's Semel Says Microsoft Has "No Chance" In Search & More!

Today's search podcast covers Microsoft pushing back on Google's Internet Explorer 7 favoritism complaints; Yahoo's Terry Semel Saying Microsoft has "no chance" in search; Google New Co-op Subscriber Links in action and more!

Tune-in by listening to this MP3 file, listening via WebmasterRadio at 11:30am Eastern and repeated at 2pm Eastern Tuesday through Friday, via our Odeo channel or through iTunes via this link (or use alternative iTunes instructions explained here) or though our Yahoo Podcasts channel. Need more help tuning in live or finding the chat room? See the Daily SearchCast FAQ.

Below are links to items discussed:

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 2:30 PM | Permalink

May 11, 2006

Daily SearchCast, May 11, 2006: Google Trends For Researching What's Hot & What's Not; Google Co-op, Google's Big Time Tagging Experiment; Complaints Over Commission Cuts & More!

Today's search podcast covers new Google products unveiled during yesterday's Press Day, including the hot research tool Google Trends, the "freaky weird" mass tagging system of Google Co-op, Google Gadgets for your desktop and a coming Google Notebook. Also a look at Google issues with a click fraud settlement, pushback on cutting commissions and more!

Tune-in by listening to this MP3 file, listening via WebmasterRadio at 11:30am Eastern and repeated at 2pm Eastern Tuesday through Friday, via our Odeo channel or through iTunes via this link (or use alternative iTunes instructions explained here) or though our Yahoo Podcasts channel. Need more help tuning in live or finding the chat room? See the Daily SearchCast FAQ.

Below are links to items discussed:

  • My Big Fat Google Press Day 2006 Round-Up We've blogged a number of items out of Google Press Day today. I wanted to recap them below, along with coverage from across the web that's beginning to flow in. I'll likely update this page over the next day, as well. New items will be posted below old stuff and flagged, or we'll do postscripts, to help those who keep checking back. Let's go!...
  • Google Trends: Peer Into Google's Database Of Searches Now live via Google Labs is a new Google Trends service, announced today as part of Google Press Day. The service allows you to tap into Google's database of searches, to determine what's popular. For example, do a trends query on cars, and you can see the volume of queries over time, by city, regions, languages and so on....
  • Fun With Google Trends Danny just posted about Google Trends, a service of Google that shows you search volume trends over time for a keyword or for multiple keywords. I thought it would be fun to ask Google Trends which search engine, of the top four, is the most popular, in terms of search volume. So I queries Google Trends for Google, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, MSN (keep in mind ask jeeves is now ask.com). I also thought it would be fun to pin Apple vs. Windows vs. Linux. So let's see what Google Trends had to say......
  • Google Co-op: Add Your Own Vertical Search To Google Google said it would have a health-related announcement at today's Google Press Day -- but no, it's not Google Health. Instead, it's Google Co-op, a way for people to create specialized search engines by tapping into the main Google index or the option for searchers to pick preferred vertical search providers to show up in Google OneBox results. Yes, health information is one of the new features -- but this is more than Google Health. This is Google making a giant and somewhat perplexing leap into mass tagging....
  • Google Destination Guides: Not Much There -- Yet A part of Google Co-op, "Destination Guides" was promoted as ?Google City Guides? at Google Press Day today. And while everything about Co-op has been officially qualified as a ?work in progress,? this is something of a disappointment ?- as are many of the content areas and the general user-experience of Co-op. Danny has a more complete write up of Co-op here. Co-op is an ambitious project, not unlike Base, to create verticals, add structured and user-generated content and make the search experience more personalized. If you want to create your own "vertical search engine," which is one of the...
  • NetworkWorld Talks With Raul Valdes-Perez, CEO of Vivisimo & Clusty Gary Price points to a NetworkWorld.com interview with Vivisimo CEO Raul Valdes-Perez, of Clusty Search. Clusty uses clustering technology to provide results. The NetworkWorld author was convinced, during his interview with Mr. Perez, that Google/Yahoo/MSN provide "incomplete results." Is clustering the future of search? Give Clusty a try for yourself. Also, for past articles at Search Engine Watch on Clusty click here....
  • New Google Desktop Beta Features Google Gadgets The Inside Google Desktop blog announced the release of a new version of Google Desktop. The new version's main feature are Google Gadgets, some of the many widgets include Weather Globe, Google Calendar and many more....
  • Google Notebook Comes Next Week Announced today as part of Google Press Day is a new Google Notebook service to go live via Google Labs next week. The service will allow you to add notes to search results, which in turn can be saved into one or more notebooks. Notes you make about a site also will show up when you visit those sites, similar to how the A9 Your Diary feature works. Yahoo and Ask also offer the ability to add notes associated with search results....
  • New Google AdWords Traffic & Cost Estimator Google AdWords has finally launched a standalone tool where advertisers can get traffic and cost information for keywords without needing to login to their AdWords accounts to do so. Data included in the results are keywords/minimum bid, maximum CPC/predicted status, search volume, estimated average CPC, estimated ad positions, potential clicks per day and potential cost per day....
  • Advertiser Files Complaint To Block Google Click Fraud Settlement One Google advertiser is making a very formal rejection of the proposed Google click fraud settlement -- he's filed a complaint to try and block the agreement, and this before notifications from Google have even gone out....
  • Google Commission Woes In Sweden, Australia Over the past few months, Google's been trying to reduce or eliminate commission on its ad products in countries where they are offered (North America, notably, has never had them). Now there are some news reports that the plans aren't well received Down Under and in Sweden....
  • Online Ad Spending Continues to Grow During the Dot Com Boom, many companies planned their online revenue models around free services supported by advertising, and for many, this model didn't pan out because many traditional ad agencies - and their big brand, big spend clients - did not embrace the online advertising opportunities available at the time. However, a new article from CNET reports on the current status of online advertising, including how it has cycled back to a point where many new services are expected to be supported through online advertising and where big brands are a major part of the expected growth of online...
  • Google & Yahoo Are Challenged In Mobile Search Space A Wall Street Journal article reports that InfoSpace, amongst other startup search engines, are providing a challenge for Google & Yahoo in the mobile search space. I believe both Yahoo and Google are taking mobile search very seriously. The market is still extremely new and there is a lot of opportunity for startups to make key partnerships with the carriers....
  • Finding European Flights On The Move Stuck in a European airport and looking for a cheap flight while on the move? Skyscanner has got a new tool for you -- a mobile-friendly version of its site, Skyscanner Mobile....
  • Google Maps Marriage Proposal Or Not? Nathan Weinberg reports that someone has proposed to his girlfriend via Google Maps. If you take a look at the this roof top in Google Maps, you will notice it reads, "Will U Marry Me." But the true question is, was this meant for a fly over via plane or helicopter or was it meant to be a proposal via Google Maps?...

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 4:28 PM | Permalink

May 10, 2006

Daily SearchCast, May 10, 2006: Yahoo Livesearch: Answers Before You Finish Typing!; Yahoo & Google Seek IE7 Users; Will It Be Google Rather Than Vegemite Sandwich? & More! (Corrected File)

Today's search podcast covers Yahoo's new Livesearch feature, which gives you results before you even finish typing in a query; Yahoo & Telemundo merge web sites; Yahoo and Google try to woo IE7 users; will Google be more popular than Vegemite Down Under? and more!

Tune-in by listening to this MP3 file, listening via WebmasterRadio at 11:30am Eastern and repeated at 2pm Eastern Tuesday through Friday, via our Odeo channel or through iTunes via this link (or use alternative iTunes instructions explained here) or though our Yahoo Podcasts channel. Need more help tuning in live or finding the chat room? See the Daily SearchCast FAQ.

Below are links to items discussed:

  • Yahoo Tests Livesearch On AllTheWeb; Google Patent Problem, Perhaps? Yahoo's AllTheWeb service is sporting a new Livesearch feature. It's pretty interesting. As you type into the search box, search results automatically start appearing. And more interesting, it's similar to something Google's already sought to patent....
  • Yahoo En Español & Telemundo.com To Merge The Wall Street Journal reports that Yahoo En Español and Telemundo.com will be merging companies. They will be merging the staff and sharing one advertising budget. If you visit http://espanol.yahoo.com/ now, you will find both logos at the top of the page, representing each company. The reason for the merger is because the online Hispanic market is growing extremely quickly and the two companies want to take advantage of "the incredible growth of the Hispanic marketplace," today. It appears that the two companies will fold under the Yahoo umbrella....
  • Yahoo Italy Blocking Certain Queries? Nathan Weinberg reported and so did I that Yahoo Italy appears to be blocking results for certain queries. If you conduct a search on preteen at Yahoo Italy, you should notice that no results are returned. Nathan also says if you search for the capitalized version no results are returned as well. So is this some sort of censorship by Yahoo Italy? If so why? Want to discuss? Join our forum thread named Yahoo.it censored for 'preteen'?...
  • IE7 Users Are Prompted To Use Google, Yahoo ClickZ reports that they have noticed when using Microsoft's new browser, Internet Explorer 7, and visiting Google, you are prompted with a DTHML popup box that says, "Make Google your Search Engine in Internet Explorer." Is this Google's way of fighting back against their objections of IE7? Google is upset that Microsoft sets MSN Search as the default engine on IE7. So if you are using IE7 and visit Google, Google will go out of their way to help you switch that default to engine to Google Search....
  • Google Bug or Webmaster Bug? Google Responds To Shared Server Bug Issue Matt Cutts responded to the Google anomaly we reported last week, where Google was displaying a different site's information from the same shared server. In short, two sites are hosted on the same server and same IP address. When conducting a search that should have brought up Site A, Site B was coming up in the SERPs. The issue was technically not on Google's side, as Matt explained. The server folks that set up the server set up the virtual hosting configuration incorrectly. So why wasn't it an issue on Yahoo, MSN or Ask.com? Matt explains that Google uses "persistent...
  • Google Ban Checker Tool This morning, I reported on a tool that allows you to check if you are banned in Google. The tool is a desktop application that searches Google using a site: command and also checks sites that link to you, to see if they are banned as well. You can check out the tool by clicking here. Keep in mind, Google also can notify you of some site penalties with Google Sitemaps....
  • Search Engine Journal Launches SEO Directory, SEOdex.com Search Engine Journal announced the launch of a new directory they just purchased named SEOdex. Loren Baker, from Search Engine Journal says he plans "on heavily marketing it in the near future on Search Engine Journal and other related properties." You can submit your firm or resource to SEOdex by finding the relevant category and clicking on "Add SEO Firm or Resource."...
  • GeoVector and the Mo-Lo Search 'Use Case' I continue to think about the challenges of mobile-local search, where there is arguably a more compelling consumer use case than on the Internet -- user needs are generally more immediate. Microsoft?s Search GM Erik Jorgensen publicly stated that he believed the majority of local searches will eventually be conducted on mobile devices. In concept it's not hard to agree. But the question is one of timing and technology. The form factor (hardware), the business model and network speeds will all need to come together to drive consumer adoption. Once the use cases are established then we can think about...
  • Yokel Launches Local Shopping Search Engine Yokel today announced the beta release of it's local shopping search engine. Yokel is run by Scott Randall, former CEO of FairMarket, and Don Zeresky, former VP of Products for Lycos. Local search engines, especially local shopping engines will continue to be important as most people still research online and then buy offline at local retailers. As Scott explained to me, "even people who go to online shopping comparison engines still buy offline. 98% of commerce is still done locally." Yokel is set up to solve this problem. Scott continued "there seems to be a void. Yokel answers the question,...
  • Windows Live Adds New Features The Windows Live Blog announced changes they have made to Live.com. The changes include;...
  • TiVo Getting Into the Ad Serving Business While TiVo is well known for allowing television watchers to skip advertising, they are hoping they can entice viewers to watch branded advertising that provide entertainment value or user interest within the commercials. The program, called Product Watch, allows viewers to actually search for ads in various categories and there are already has 70 advertisers signed up....
  • Australians Fond Of Google; Vegemite Getting Jealous The Courier Mail reports that Australians are becoming more found of Google as each day pasts. A survey performed by George Patterson Y&R found that Google was amongst the top 20 brands in Australia. Supposedly, Vegemite, which I never heard of before, is the most popular brand in Australia, but Google is gaining on it. Can Google beat out a dark brown, salty food paste made from yeast extract, to become the number one brand in Australia?...
  • Vegemite - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  • History of Vegemite

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 2:27 PM | Permalink

Daily SearchCast, May 9, 2006: Yahoo's New Panama Ad System; Getting Real Time Date; Microsoft's New Moves In Maps; Googlers Fuel California Tax Revenues & More!

Yesterday's search podcast is now online Sorry for the delay! It covers details about Yahoo's new ad system; Microsoft's mapping moves; how to get real time data; fighting search spam; Googlers make California richer -- but have they been downgraded from Captain Crunch to Lt. Crunch and more!

Tune-in by listening to this MP3 file, listening via WebmasterRadio at 11:30am Eastern and repeated at 2pm Eastern Tuesday through Friday, via our Odeo channel or through iTunes via this link (or use alternative iTunes instructions explained here) or though our Yahoo Podcasts channel. Need more help tuning in live or finding the chat room? See the Daily SearchCast FAQ.

Below are links to items discussed:

  • Yahoo Unveils Public Details Of "Panama" Ad System Upgrade Yahoo's finally gone public with details about its new "Panama" ad system upgrade, which when launched later this year will bring the system up to matching what Google's long offered, though both Yahoo and Google will remain behind Microsoft's third-generation ad platform "adCenter," launched last week. Details have leaked before, but now Yahoo's doing the talking directly....  
  • Google Resets Many Inactive AdWords Keywords to Active I reported this morning about Google resetting many of the "inactive" keywords in a Google AdWords account to the "active" status. Keywords become inactive often if the "quality" of those ads are too low, most likely because the click-through rate on that keyword is too low. It seems as if Google has reset many of the "inactive" keywords in AdWords advertisers campaigns, so they can start fresh....  
  • AdWords Advertisements Not Censored in Google China Google China has censored their search results to remove certain sites and listings that are deemed by the Chinese government. However, an advertiser has discovered a loophole in the censoring system that results in these censored sites showing up in google.cn search results via the Google AdWords sponsored listings program....  
  • New Product Additions for AdSense Referrals & Buttons Get a Makeover Google AdSense has launched a couple new products to their AdSense referral program, adding Google Pack and Picasso to the list of products that publishers can refer new users to. They have also updated the styling of the old buttons and added a few new color schemes to the mix as well....  
  • New Way To Try Google Health (Maybe) Garett Rogers reports and Philipp Lenssen reports on a what may appear to be Google Health, which we suspect will be coming this Wednesday. They both have screen captures of new query refinement that might be related to the expected lunch of Google health. I personally can't replicate it, but with some digging, Danny and I found a way for you to hit the underlying health filters....  
  • Windows Live QnA In Action The MSN Search Blog mentions the new