IndustryThe Search Engine Update – Number 232 – Nov. 7, 2006

The Search Engine Update - Number 232 - Nov. 7, 2006

Search Engine Watch editor-in-chief Danny Sullivan's recap of top search engine stories from the second half of October 2006.

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In This Issue
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+ Upcoming Search Engine Strategies Events
+ Renewing With SES & My Last Month With SEW
+ Top Stories
+ More From The Search Engine Watch Blog
+ Our Search Newsletters & Feeds
+ About The Newsletter

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Upcoming Search Engine Strategies Events
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I’m very happy to announce that Netscape general manager Jason Calacanis will be doing keynote conversation with me for SES Chicago 2006. This will happen from 9-9:45am on Tuesday, December 5.

Just over a year ago, Jason sold the Weblogs Inc. blog network to AOL. Since then, he’s been revitalizing the Netscape brand by transforming it into a social news site. Detractors have called Netscape a Digg clone and got incensed when he offered to steal away top Digg contributors with cash. Undeterred, he said spreading the wealth would benefit everyone. That includes perhaps rewarding bloggers with links rather than cash for finding stories.

Is the rise of social media just a bubble or the beginning of a massive change on how we consume media? Will citizen journalists put professional publications out of business? Often controversial, always outspoken, Jason will share thoughts on these and other issues during the SES Chicago 2006 show.

In addition to Jason’s keynote, there will be over 70 sessions covering search marketing, including an evening keynote that I’ll be doing covering the year’s events in search. See the SES Chicago 2006 web site for full details. Aside from Chicago, here are other upcoming SES events:

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Renewing With SES & My Last Month At SEW
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As readers know, I announced I was leaving Search Engine Watch and the Search Engine Strategies conference series earlier this year. I left it open that there was a slight chance I might be staying on. Since that time, Incisive Media diligently worked to come up with a solution for me to stay part of the SES shows in the United States for another year.

News On My Plans For Next Year on my personal blog has more details. In short, I’ll be chairing the SES NY 2007 show as normal, co-chairing the SES San Jose 2007 event and participating in the SES Chicago 2007 conference. Aside from SES, I also expect to do events on my own.

As for Search Engine Watch, this remains my last month, with November 30 my last day with the site. I’ll be doing my usual day of blogging, plus I’ll be sending out my last email newsletter to readers of the monthly Search Engine Report or the twice-monthly Search Engine Update. I’ll save my farewells for that!

Post-Search Engine Watch, I will be continuing to write about search engines via a new search blog that I’m starting. I’ll have more news about that later this month, and the best place to stay tuned for now is to keep up with my personal blog, Daggle.

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Top Stories
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Below is a recap of major articles from our daily SearchDay newsletter and important Search Engine Watch Blog postings since the last newsletter. Want to receive these stories daily or via RSS/feed? See the Search Engine Watch Newsletters & Web Feeds page for sign-up instructions.

=== Nov. 7, 2006 ===

Australia’s Proposed Copyright Rules Would Make Search Engines Impossible, Warns Google – Google has warned Australia that if they pass a new copyright law that it will set the country back to “the pre-Internet era.” See also:

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Google’s Adam Lasnik Interviewed – Lee Odden interviewed Adam Lasnik of Google the other day. Adam Lasnik is one of the folks at Google responsible for being the voice of the webmaster. His day job is to help webmasters with ranking and indexing issues either through communication or other means. See also:

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AdWords Landing Page Quality Score Coming To AdSense Network – Google has made changes that better take into account landing page quality to determine how much an advertiser pays. See also:

=== Nov. 6, 2006 ===

Windows Live Local Gets “Virtual Earth” 3-D Cities – Windows Live has gained photorealistic 3-D imagery for the “urban core” of 15 U.S. cities: San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, Boston, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Detroit, Phoenix, Houston, Baltimore, Atlanta, Denver, Dallas and Fort Worth. See also:

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Google Wins Right To Buy YouTube In Antitrust Review – Google has won the right to buy YouTube after antitrust authorities reviewed the documents by the Federal Trade Commission. See also:

=== Nov. 2, 2006 ===

Yahoo Slurp Adds Wildcard Support For Robots.txt – The Yahoo Search Blog announced that Yahoo’s web crawler, aka Yahoo Slurp, now supports wildcards in the robots.txt file. See also:

=== Nov. 1, 2006 ===

A Closer Look at Yahoo Shortcuts – Continuing our four-part series on the special information sections creeping into general search results, today we take a look at Yahoo Shortcuts. See also:

=== Oct. 31, 2006 ===

Ask.com’s Revenue Increases 62 Percent – IAC posted Q3 earning results, and part of that included results for Ask.com. Bloomberg reports that Ask.com’s revenue increased 62-percent but at a cost of $2.1 million. The $2.1 million more than doubled from their previous operating cost. See also:

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Rampant Malpractice Among Health Searchers – Although most internet users turn to general-purpose search engines to find health related information, the majority don’t bother to check the source and date of the information they find, according to a new study from the Pew Internet Project.

=== Oct. 30, 2006 ===

The 100th Birthday of the Press Release – The press release turned 100-years-old over the weekend. As search marketers debate over the future of the online press release, we can learn some important lessons from the early history of public relations.

=== Oct. 26, 2006 ===

AOL Enhances Search with FullView Results – AOL has rolled out a slick new search interface that automatically integrates Google-powered web search results with multimedia, local or other content from AOL and its partners.

=== Oct. 25, 2006 ===

Yahoo Updates Toolbar and Bookmarks – Yahoo is releasing a new version of its toolbar with a powerful new bookmarking feature that integrates seamlessly with Yahoo web search.

=== Oct. 24, 2006 ===

Google Launches Custom Search Engine Service – Want your own Google-flavored specialized search engine for your web site or blog? With Google’s new Custom Search Engine service, it takes just minutes to set up your own unique search engine. See also:

=== Oct. 19, 2006 ===

Google Releases 2006 3rd Quarter Results – Google has released their earnings for the third quarter of 2006. Profits almost doubled and revenue increase seventy-percent. See also:

=== Oct. 19, 2006 ===

Click Fraud Dropping Amongst Google & Yahoo – A new Click Fraud Index study that shows the click fraud rate dropping from 12.8 percent to 11.9 percent in the 3rd quarter amongst top-tier PPC engines. See also: Google Click Fraud Settlement Payments Received, Disappoints Some.

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Searching Via Internet Explorer 7 & The Battle To Be The Default Search Engine – Now that Internet Explorer 7 has been released in final format, I wanted to look at how search is being handled within the browser. There’s been lots of discussion and worries about this in the past. Speculation time is over; reality is here. In this article, how the IE7 search box works, how you can change it and how Google and Yahoo’s toolbars behave within it to try and maintain their default status, once gained. See also: Google Asks Microsoft To Give Users A Choice In Europe.

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More From The SEW Blog
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Below are posts from the Search Engine Watch Blog since the last newsletter and not mentioned above. Want to keep up on daily news from the blog? Visit the home page or subscribe to the blog feed. Note that references to “I” may becoming from any of the Search Engine Watch staff who post to the blog.

=== Nov. 7, 2006 ===

Text Link Ads Aquired By MediaWhiz – Text Link Ads has been acquired by MediaWhiz as of yesterday.

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Use Of AdWords In US Senate Campaigns – The Rimm-Kaufman Group conducted a small study on how the US Senate candidates and campaigns used Google AdWords this weekend to “swing Senate races” in the last minute hustle and bustle. See also:

=== Nov. 6, 2006 ===

Google Confirms Small Test With Newspaper Ads – Google will once again testing placing ads for advertisers in newspapers. See also:

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ChaCha Search: Take Two – When “human-powered” search engine ChaCha launched in September it was a great idea with very flawed execution. Today, the site has gone from “alpha” to “beta” based on lessons learned during the alpha period. And it appears from casual searching there have been some significant improvements.

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Topix.net Gains $15 Million Investment From Newspaper Parents – News aggregator and search engine Topix.net announced a new round of funding in which its newspaper owners, Gannett, Tribune Co. and McClatchy, have invested $15 million in the site to help further develop it.

=== Nov. 3, 2006 ===

Yahoo Sending Panama Invites Out – Those who requested an upgrade to Yahoo’s new ad system are now getting them.

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How Much Should SEOs Earn – Rand at SEOMoz details what he believes SEOs of all calibers should make.

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See And Find With QuinturaQuintura is the latest in the line of visual search engines such as Kartoo, Mooter and WebBrain. Quintura basically takes your search term, runs a search and then translates the results into a tag cloud effect on the screen.

=== Nov. 2, 2006 ===

Gmail Mobile Client Released – Google just announced the release of a mobile client to manage your gmail account on your mobile device.

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ClickRiver New Pay Per Click Program from Amazon – Ever wanted to put your ads right on the product page of your competitor’s product at Amazon.com, or wanted your product advertised with something related to it? Now with Amazon’s new pay per click program ClickRiver, now you can.

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Yahoo Launches Yahoo Food – Yahoo launched food.yahoo.com that contains “recipes, advice from regional celebrity chefs, video cooking guides and easy-to-use Web tools.”

=== Nov. 1, 2006 ===

The Interestingness of Social Networks – Interestingness is a great name for a ranking algorithm. It’s what Yahoo’s photo-based social network Flickr uses to show which images the community finds the most “interesting” — one Yahoo seeks to patent.

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100 Million Sites = Search Wins – The Internet has now crossed a significant milestone; there are 100 million operating websites.

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Zotspot Wants To Share The Search Wealth – Zotspot is a general-purpose engine that officially launched yesterday. Like a number of others before it, the idea here is to “reward” users for searching.

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New adCenter Blog & adCenter Lab Features – There is a new location for the adCenter blog, and adCenter labs released updates for some of the tools.

=== Oct. 31, 2006 ===

Google Buys Wiki Maker, JotSpot – Google has bought JotSpot, a Wiki maker software solution. See also:

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Smarter Launches Visual Search – Smarter.com today launched visual color search for clothing. See also: Become Adds Color Search.

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SnapShot: A Better Version Of Alexa – Compete, Inc. is a B2B firm that conducts consumer-oriented research for large clients. Now the company has released SnapShot, a free tool that anyone can use. It operates like Alexa or Google Trends to display relative traffic, as well as several other metrics such as page views and time on site.

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SideStep Buys TravelPost – SideStep acquired TravelPost for a combination of cash and stock. TravelPost will become a wholly owned subsidiary of SideStep.

=== Oct. 30, 2006 ===

Google Reader Bug Swatting – Quick post from the Official Google Reader Blog – they’ve swatted some bugs in the product.

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Yahoo To Buy AOL? Sell To Microsoft? Merge With eBay? Or Keep Status Quo? – Fortune reports that rumors are spreading that Yahoo is in talks with Time Warner about buying AOL.

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Google Appeals Federal Judge’s Orkut Ruling – The International Herald Tribune reports that Google has appealed a federal judge’s order to hand over the IP address information to Brazilian authorities.

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Judge To Rule By End Of Year On Kinderstart Case – Judge Jeremy Fogel said he will take until the end of this year to rule on the Kinderstart case. The case was about how Kinderstart’s ranking and PageRank fell and Kinderstart sued Google on numerous counts for the ranking drop.

=== Oct. 28, 2006 ===

Mazda ‘Craves’ Clicks From Honda – Mazda’s once again crashing in on another car maker’s search marketing parade.

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Windows Live Mobile Now Live – Windows Live Mobile is now live at http://mobile.live.com/.

=== Oct. 27, 2006 ===

Google AdSense For Audio Coming Soon – Blogs are buzzing on recent “credible” sources saying that Google is going to be releasing AdSense for Audio. See also Google To Partner With Clear Channel Communications?

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Search Engine Forums Spotlight – Links to the week’s topics from search engine forums across the web: NYT calls Google Bombing a ‘campaign tactic’ – Googling With Google Is Good, But Very Bad Elsewhere – Coming Soon: Yahoo Directory Tag, With ‘No’ Option – Did-it President Takes a Shot at SEO – What Does Your Holiday SEM Campaign Look Like? and more.

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Competitive Intelligence & Link Searches – Rand over at SEOMoz has a great write up on Long List of Link Searches where he goes through a sample client and how he would approach the competitive intelligence aspect of the SEO research.

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Google Enhanced Google Alerts & Adds Blog Search Alerts – Google has added Google Blog Search email alerts to the Google Alerts system.

=== Oct. 26, 2006 ===

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Yahoo Search Marketing Blog Now Live – Yahoo has announced the launch of a new blog named Yahoo Search Marketing Blog.

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Googling Google And Searching Yahoo – There is a strange feeling of deja vue with the Official Google blog entry ‘Do you “Google”?’ as we’re once again looking at the way in which the word can be used.

=== Oct. 25, 2006 ===

Search Influenced $15.2 Billion In Consumer Electronics Spending Through First Half – Yahoo yesterday released findings from a joint study conducted with the Consumer Electronics Association. The study was fielded in June of this year and surveyed more than 2,000 U.S. adults who were pre-qualified as intending to make consumer electronics (CE) purchases.

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Next Up For Sale, Digg.com – Techcrunch reports that Digg.com is looking to sell the property for $150 million. Digg’s recent discussions to sell included negotiations with News Corp, and some other non-disclosed bidders. The word is that Digg wants “at least $150 million” but no one is willing to pay that much to them.

=== Oct. 24, 2006 ===

Google Gains Traction In Japan – InfoWorld reports that Google has “17.4 million users in September, up from 12.1 million in the same period a year earlier.” See also: Yahoo Japan’s Profit & Sales Grow 20+ Percent

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President George Bush Uses Google Maps To Get Away – President George Bush said he uses Google Maps.

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Google News Adds Link To Google Blog Search – Google News has added a link on the top right of the home page to Google Blog Search. Also, if you do a search on anything at Google News, such as [google custom search engine” you will see at the bottom of the results, “New! More ways to find the latest on google custom search engine:” and a link to “Search blogs.”

=== Oct. 23, 2006 ===

Google Tries To Streamline Hiring Process – The Wall Street Journal reports that Google has begun trying to improve their well-known hiring process. See also:

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Google’s NetPAC Begins Donating Money – Mercury News reports that Google’s NetPAC has begun handing out small $1,000 donations to three different Republicans.

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SpaceShipOne Replica Lands At GooglePlex – Google has acquired a replica version of SpaceShipOne. The replica is to be housed at building 43 at the GooglePlex.

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Yahoo Resigns Ad Deal With Guardian Unlimited – Guardian Unlimited has renewed their advertising deal with Yahoo.

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Google Finance Adds Compare, Timeline & More Features – Google Finance has added personalized chart settings that include News Flags, Dividends, Splits, or Volume on your chart and Zoom levels. See also: Yahoo Finance Adds New Web 2.0 Stock Charts

=== Oct. 22, 2006 ===

Grayboxx: A Better Local Search Engine? – A new San Francisco-Bay Area startup called Grayboxx is making claims it will greatly improve local search.

=== Oct. 20, 2006 ===

WebFetchPro UK Metasearch – WebFetch Pro is a multi/meta search engine creted by InfoSpace and it promises to give you the ‘best search results available on the Web’.

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Search Engine Forums Spotlight – Links to the week’s topics from search engine forums across the web: Link Building Vs. Brand Building – Yahoo Sales Up, Profits Down – Google AdWords Landing Page Website Optimizer – Live Search’s LinkFromDomain Command – Conversion Tracking Revisited, and more.

=== Oct. 19, 2006 ===

Verizon Announces SuperPages Spin Off, To Be Called “Idearc” – Ending several months of speculation Verizon announced yesterday that its SuperPages unit would be spun off as a separate company, to be called, somewhat awkwardly, “Idearc Inc.”

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Our Search Newsletters & Feeds
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About The Search Engine Update
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The Search Engine Update is a twice-monthly update of search engine news. It is available only to Search Engine Watch members. Please note that long URLs may break into two lines in some mail readers. Cut and paste, should this occur.

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