IndustryThe Search Engine Update – Number 211 – Dec. 21, 2005

The Search Engine Update - Number 211 - Dec. 21, 2005

Search Engine Watch editor Danny Sullivan's recap of top search engine stories from the first half of December 2005.

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In This Issue
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+ SES NY Coming!
+ Top Stories
+ More From The Search Engine Watch Blog
+ Daily SearchCast: Search News Via Podcast
+ Our Search Newsletters & Feeds
+ About The Newsletter

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SES NY Coming!
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Missed our SES Chicago show? Don’t worry. Search Engine Strategies New York is coming up fast, happening Feb. 27 through March 2. Many of the popular sessions from SES Chicago will be returning, and you can get a rundown on some of these at the SES NY 2006 web site.

As always, there will be plenty of entirely new sessions happening. In particular for New York, expect sessions that look at branding issues, as well as how search and traditional marketing can blend together and help each other.

The complete SES NY agenda will be up after the New Year. You can sign-up on the SES NY 2006 site to be notified of this or just keep an eye on the SES Blog.

Following SES NY, March sees SES coming to Germany and China, then April sees visits to Japan, Canada and Italy. At the end of May, SES London happens and July sees our first ever SES Latino show coming to Miami. For more about these and other shows later in 2006, see the Search Engine Strategies site.

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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.

=== Dec. 21, 2005 ===

A Compilation How-To Search Book Reviews – Want to be a professional searcher, or at least have the skills of a pro? These books show you how.

=== Dec. 20, 2005 ===

Google/AOL Deal is a Go: AIM and Google Talk To Become Interoperable, White Labelling of Google Ad Technology, and Expansion of Display Ads on Google Network All Part of “What’s New” – It’s final. Google and AOL are partnering up, with Google buying a 5 percent stake in AOL. Google Talk and AIM might become compatable, AOL will sell its own ads on AOL search powered by Google’s ad technology, AOL will be able to sell display ads on Google content network sites, Google web search will NOT get display ads but image and video search might and more. See also:

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Google AdSense For Domains Program Overdue For Reform — And Yahoo & Microsoft Should Also Take Note – Google’s long-standing DomainPark program (AKA AdSense For Domains), where Google puts ads on domains with lots of traffic but no content, comes under new criticism for funding typo domains that probably don’t serve either searchers or advertisers well. It and Yahoo need to consider changes, as this article covers.

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With One Link, Google Book Search Becomes Google’s 5th Most Popular ServiceGoogle Print Is Google’s Ninth Most Popular Service here on the blog last month covered how according to Hitwise, Google Print — since renamed Google Book Search — made the top ten of most used Google services, though usage was only by a tiny 0.4 percent of Google visitors. Since then, a small change by Google has dramatically increased the visits to Google Book search and pushed it into being the fifth most popular service it offers.

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Yahoo Launches Open Shortcuts, Allows Creation Of Custom Search Commands – The new Yahoo Open Shortcuts service lets anyone create their own custom search commands for use on Yahoo. Want to navigate to a particular site quickly or have Yahoo remember a particular search string? The new service lets you do this.

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Google Releases 2005 Year-End Google ZeitgeistThe 2005 Year-End Google Zeitgeist with popular search terms and trends was released today. See also:

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A Pair of Web Pathfinding Gems – Though we rely heavily on search engines these days, sometimes a good ‘old fashioned’ human edited directory is a better choice for helping us locate high quality information on the web.

=== Dec. 19, 2005 ===

A Gangbuster Year for News Aggregator Topix.net – Topix.net has solidified its reputation as a key player in news search and aggregation over the past year, with major developments in both its business and services.

=== Dec. 16, 2005 ===

Search Engines Forum Spotlight – Links to the week’s topics from search engine forums across the web: Yahoo Acquires Del.icio.us – Beware the Reciprocal Link Short Sellers – Ask Jeeves Growing Like Wild Fire! – Alexa Opens Up Crawler To The Public – Google Myths Busted! and more.

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Company Or Product Names Changed To Be Search Friendly?Idea time — can you think of companies, products or brands that have changed names to be more findable in search engines? Come post in our forum thread on this topic.

=== Dec. 15, 2005 ===

New Year Will Bring New Look to Yahoo Search Results Pages; Shorter Descriptions for Sponsored Listings – Paid listings on Yahoo search are about to get shorter in the new year, as they reduce to a 70 character display.

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Google Adds Music Search Feature – Google has introduced a new feature that provides information about music and musical artists in response to music related search queries. See also Music Searching on the Web.

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HarperCollins To Digitize Own Books; Unclear How That Will Feed Into Book Search Engines HarperCollins To Digitize And Control Its Book Content from the Wall Street Journal looks at HarperCollins saying it will digitize its active backlist of 20,000 titles and up 3,500 books per year. Part of the idea is that by doing this itself, the publisher can give content to the search engines to index but keep the files themselves. That leads me to think HarperCollins doesn’t understand how book indexing works.

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Getting Out Of Google Sandbox Using Subdomain & Redirection – Fresh from SES Chicago, revisiting a tip on how to break from the sandbox effect at Google using an older site’s subdomain and redirection to a new domain.

=== Dec. 14, 2005 ===

Information Wants to be Found – A modern paradox: As information becomes more abundant and easier to access, it’s often more difficult to find what we’re really looking for. That needn’t be the case, writes respected information architecture guru Peter Morville in a new book.

=== Dec. 13, 2005 ===

Google Ads On TV Through Public Television Program Underwriting – Google is currently sponsoring/underwriting the popular public TV program NOVA that airs on PBS. A 15 second Google video “spot” is seen before each program.

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ABC News Named Top News Site of 2005 – Newsknife, an organization that monitors online news sites for quality and other metrics, has released its annual ranking of sites, with ABC News moving into first place.

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Yahoo’s Jeremy Zawodny Caught In Link Selling Debate – Yahoo blogvangelist Jeremy Zawodny is in the ironic situation of selling links on his personal blog without using nofollow attributes while the most direct counterpart he has at Google, Matt Cutts, has been urging for months that nofollow should be used on paid links. A look at the debate.

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Alexa Offers Fee-Based Vertical Search Services – Alexa has announced a new Alexa Web Search Platform that’s available to anyone willing to pay a fee. Pay a fee for what? You can create your own search engine by tapping into the 4 billion web pages Alexa has indexed over time. You can search against the entire index or just a selected set, in case you want to make your own vertical search engine.

=== Dec. 12, 2005 ===

ZoomInfo Enhances People Search – ZoomInfo, the Boston-based ‘people search’ company has added several new features that help you search more than 27 million personal profiles.

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Havoc With Google Accounts – For the past week, I was surprised to discover that despite having an active Google Analytics account, I kept getting a message when logging in that new accounts weren’t being offered. I didn’t need a new account. I needed access to my existing one, which appeared to have gone away along with my data. After further investigation today, it’s a symptom of a bigger problem, that of the Google Accounts system overall being in a mess.

=== Dec. 11, 2005 ===

New Stuff from Google AdWords: Troubleshooting Wizards, Landing Pages & Your Quality Score, and Larger Font Sizes For AdWords – Three items on the Google AdWords beat to report on: a new troubleshooting wizard for advertisers with missing ads, landing pages factored into ranking scores and AdWords headlines going up a font size.

=== Dec. 9, 2005 ===

Tag It: Acquisition, Yahoo Acquires del.icio.us – Even developing their own MyWeb 2.0 (tag, save, share service) and the Yahoo 360 set of services, Yahoo still wants more assets in the community building, tagging, and folksonomy arena. Accordingly, del.icio.us has now been acquired by Yahoo.

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Search Engines Forum Spotlight – Links to the week’s topics from search engine forums across the web: SES Chicago 2005: ‘Triple Play Blog Coverage’ – Yahoo Answers – Search Gaining On Email As Top Internet Activity – AOL to Drop Google and Sign with MSN, and more.

=== Dec. 8, 2005 ===

Windows Live Local Beta is Now Online; Some Global Imagery Also Added – The new Windows Live Local service offers new “bird’s eye” imagery showing close up aerial views of cities with a unique “side on” perspective along with other new features.

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A Compilation Search Technology Book Reviews – Want to hack together your own search engine? Curious to dig deeper into data mining? Here’s a compilation of various search-related book reviews published in SearchDay over the past several years.

=== Dec. 6, 2005 ===

Two Alternative Local Search Services – Local search from the major players is steadily improving, but meanwhile, two smaller players are making impressive advances in providing search results from your own neighborhood.

=== Dec. 5, 2005 ===

More Online Books Resources – NetLibrary and The Online Books Page are two excellent services for searching for and reading online books, offering access free of charge.

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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 Danny Sullivan, Gary Price or Chris Sherman, all of whom post to the blog.

=== Dec. 21, 2005 ===

Google Worries Traditional Marketers & Google Print Ads To Enter New Phase – A twofer of stories out of MediaPost looking at how Google will be trying new things with its Google Publication Ads program, a program which is one of the latest things to get traditional marketers worried that Google may be making moves on their turf….[MORE”

=== Dec. 20, 2005 ===

Yahoo’s Mayer and Zawodny Ready to Debut New Webcast/Podcast on Webmaster Radio – Two very well-known members of the Yahoo Search team, Tim Mayer and Jeremy Zawodny will host a new webcast/podcast that will debut on Wednesday about Silicon Valley’s newest and hottest companies….[MORE”

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New Resource Pages About Google’s Content Network Now Available, Includes Optimization Tool – A note on the Inside AdWords blog points to this new page with a bunch of information about the Google Content Network., from Contextual Targeting, Site Targeting, Ad Formats, Pricing, Tools, Partner Sites. Along with this new resource, Google has released a tool with six tips to help optimize your content for the network.

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Ask Jeeves Adds Translations, Pronunciations & Synonym Lookups – Word from Oakland today that Ask Jeeves has just added page translation, easier synonym lookups and definitions with pronunciations….[MORE”

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Lexar Flash Drives To Come Pre-Loaded with Google Software – Lexar, the well-known maker of USB flash drives, announced today a partnership with Google that will bring Google applications like Picasa, Google Toolbar and Google Desktop Search pre-loaded onto Lexar USB Drives….[MORE”

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Governments Ask Google to Turn a Blind Eye – Some of those incredibly detailed aerial images available using Google Earth are making some governments nervous. In Governments Tremble at Google’s Bird’s-Eye View, the New York Times writes about several governments who have expressed alarm. Since Google is simply repackaging imagery that’s available elsewhere, there’s little governments can do to influence what’s included in Google Earth….[MORE”

=== Dec. 19, 2005 ===

Japan’s Government Forms Study Group To Determine if Country Should Launch Its Own Search Engine – Both the AP and Agence France Press report that Japan’s government is asking both the business and education/research sectors if the country should develop its own search engine technology and a service that’s “unique to Japan” to compete with AJ Japan, Google Japan, Yahoo Japan, and others….[MORE”

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First Issue Of Google’s Newsletter For Librarians Released; Cutts Writes On Inverted Index & Ranking – Google’s promised quarterly newsletter for librarians has finally come out with a nice article on how an inverted index works from Google’s Matt Cutts….[MORE”

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Google One of Five Finalists for San Franscisco Citywide Wi-Fi Project – Om Malik posts over on Gigaom that Google has been shortlisted as one of the five finalists for the free San Fransciso Wi-Fi service that the sitting hopes to have up and running in 2006….[MORE”

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Ask Jeeves Plans to Grow Personnel Ranks in 2006 – Jonathan Berr, reports in The Street.com story: Diller Asks Jeeves to Grow, that AJ management has been charged by IAC/InterActive CEO, Barry Diller, to grow the company in terms of personnel….[MORE”

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Specialty Databases (Verticals) The Focus Of A Wall Street Journal Article – “Beyond Google” from the Wall Street Journal covers the many vertical search engines out there that help you locate information better than Google can, in many cases….[MORE”

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Blinkx.tv Ends a Busy Year with a New Feature and Some New ContentBlinkx.tv has announced a new service named “blinkx.tv To Go” that allows users to download video blogs to their iPod and other type of portable video devices with just a single click….[MORE”

=== Dec. 17, 2005 ===

New Issue Of Information Science Publication Focuses On “Paid Search” – Here’s a bunch of new reading for your reading lists. The December/Januaury Issue of the Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) is new online (free). This issue of the Bulletin was, edited by Dr. Bernard Jansen from Penn State University and features a look at what’s termed “paid search”….[MORE”

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Special Holiday Goodies, Pages, and Info from a Few of the Major Engines – Several of the large web engines are offering special holiday goodies from smart answers to holiday questions to logos to holiday borders around ads….[MORE”

=== Dec. 16, 2005 ===

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New Google UI Test: Vertical Search Links In New Left Column – Over on Threadwatch, Aaron has news about what appears to be yet another UI test from Google. The post includes a screenshot of the test. Note the various Google verticals (Froogle, News, Local, etc.) listed in a column (or rail) on the far left side of a web results page. The column also contains links to the advanced search interface, preferences, and search history. Want to comment or discuss? Visit our SEW Forums thread, Google Testing Vertical Search Links In Right Column.

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New or Improved Databases With U.S. Government Information – A brief post to point out one new and one updated compilation of databases, that might be of value to people tying to find U.S. government information….[MORE”

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Gates Keynoting CES – And So Are Semel & Page – Microsoft chairman Bill Gates will be giving a keynote at the big Consumer Electronics Show as you might expect, but showing how search is muscling into the wider consumer world, keynotes are also being given by Yahoo chairman Terry Semel and Google cofounder Larry Page….[MORE”

=== Dec. 15, 2005 ===

New Year Will Bring New Look to Yahoo Search Results Pages; Shorter Descriptions for Sponsored Listings – Paid listings on Yahoo search are about to get shorter in the new year, as they reduce to a 70 character display.

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Google Gmail Now Accessible via Mobile Phones – If you’ve got a web-enabled mobile phone and a Gmail account, you can now access your mail on the run. Gmail mobile allows you to get your mail from just about any mobile phone browser, and most of the key features of Gmail are available in the smaller format as well. See also A Brief Look at Mobile Mail Access from Yahoo and MSN.

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Technorati Begins Cooking Up Ideas in their New “Kitchen” – Today, Ben Charny at eWeek reports on where Technorati is now “cooking up new” ideas. Yes, what Charny refers to as half-baked ideas (aka betas) are now available in the Technorati Kitchen….[MORE”

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Search Execs Talk at MIT Forum – Via Searchblog, word of this just released podcast of a forum that took place at MIT about a week ago and featured an all-star lineup of search execs from Google, Microsoft and Yahoo along with Oren Etzioni from the University of Washington. Background here, direct to podcast (MP3) here.

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Google Announces Plan to Open Pittsburgh Engineering Office; Yahoo Opens NYC Research Center – Both Google and Yahoo today have announcements about new offices and research facilities….[MORE”

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Yahoo Tweaks Pure Search Interface; Adds New Page Highlighting Popular Services – In the past few days, Yahoo has tweaked the look of its pure search page. The tabs can still be customized but not as easily….[MORE”

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Google Firefox Extensions For Anti-Phishing & Popping-Up Google Blog Search Results New Firefox extensions over at Google highlights that there’s a new anti-phishing tool now out for Firefox users plus a new add-on that lets you see what people are saying about pages you visit through Google Blog Search.

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Yahoo Dec. 2005 Update ComingSixth Weather Report: Yahoo Update Tonight from Yahoo warns that an index change will be taking place tonight and provides a feedback address for anyone encountering rocky weather. Dec. ’05 Yahoo Weather Report: Update Underway! at our forums is a place to discuss.

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UDDI Business Registry Closing – Way back in 2001, I had a reader or two ask me about UDDI and a business registry that IBM, Microsoft and others were building upon it, which is now closing. Today, I got an email from Microsoft that it was pulling out of the registry….[MORE”

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New from Yahoo: Manage of All of Your Podcast Subscriptions on a Single Page – Word from Sunnyvale that Yahoo’s has just added a new feature to their podcast directory called My Subscriptions that allows registered Yahoo users to keep track and organize all of their podcast subscriptions on a single page….[MORE”

=== Dec. 14, 2005 ===

Ask Jeeves UK Releases Smart Search Tool for Football Fans – Football fans in the UK (see, I didn’t call it soccer) have a new Ask Jeeves Smart Search resource to use and quickly find and access info about their favorite clubs(s) and players….[MORE”

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Click Defense Out, AIT In as Lead Plaintiff in Click Fraud Case Against Google – At the end of June we posted a story (with several links) about a click fraud case filed by Click Defense against Google, we even have a > copy of the complaint. Almost six months to the day later, the Reuters story, Google click fraud plaintiff gets ‘cold feet’ reports that Click Defense was “seeking to withdraw” as lead plaintiff in the case so they can focus on their Ft. Collins, Colorado based business….[MORE”

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Windows Live Location Finder & Privacy – Microsoft has responded to user concerns about the type of information that’s transmitted and used when you use the new Windows Live Local “locate me” feature….[MORE”

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All About Microsoft’s Fremont: Product Manager Interviewed – About 10 days ago, the web was buzzing with news of Microsoft’s classified ad service code named Fremont. Zachary Rodgers from Clickz, sat done with Garry Wiseman, the product manager of this yet to be publicly released service for a Q&A interview….[MORE”

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Nielsen: Search Queries Up, Google Has 48% of All Searches, Ask Jeeves Soars in Search Volume – The MediaWeek article: Nielsen: Google Dominates, Local Grows, reports that new October, Nielsen//NetRatings ratings numbers have been released….[MORE”

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Experian Parent Buys PriceGrabber For $485 Million – Well, that didn’t take long. Little more than a month after PriceGrabber CEO Kamran Pourzanjani told me that his company would “continue to do well as a stand-alone company,” retail and financial services company GUS PLC announced today that it has bought PriceGrabber.com for $485 million….[MORE”

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Mobile Search: 4Info.net Has Plans to Release Client Software4INFO, the mobile search and info provider I like and use quite a bit and that has been mentioned many times here on the blog has plans to release some client software will that run on J2ME, BREW, Symbian, BlackBerry, and Palm devices in mid-January….[MORE”

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Yahoo Plans Reality TV Show: “Wow House” – Continuing to believe that to be a media company, you’ve got to own your own original media, Yahoo’s planning a reality TV show. Yahoo Wows MPG Summit, Reveals Plans For Reality Show from MediaPost covers “Wow House,” where two families get $10,000 to upgrade their homes….[MORE”

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Google Releases Homepage API – Tonight, Google released a new service allowing developers the opportunity to create “modules” for the Google personalized homepage….[MORE”. See also:

=== Dec. 13, 2005 ===

Search Engine Roundtable Launches New Online Forums – Popular search blog Search Engine Roundtable now has its own online forums. Founder Barry Schwartz writes on why he started the forums, introduces the moderators, and more in this post….[MORE”

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Have You Been Googleshanked? – I had dinner with Allan Dick of Vintage Tub & Bath last week at SES Chicago. Allan’s a great guy, an attendee who turned into a moderator and creator of some interesting unique sessions we do at the show. He’s also a great storyteller, and he recounted how he felt with Google over the past year or so like the character seemingly without hope from The Shawshank Redemption. The Googleshank Redemption on his blog tells his tale of being Googleshanked and regaining hope afterward.

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A Look Back as Google’s Library Project Passes the One Year Mark – Tomorrow, the Google Library Project will be one year old. It’s been quite a year of news and controversy. Let’s review….[MORE”

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Google Joins NASDAQ 100 Stock Index; Visualize the Index with Cool Dynamic “Heat Map” – Word that Google has been added to the NASDAQ 100 stock index. This index is, “designed to comprise the largest and most liquid nonfinancial stocks on the Nasdaq,” according to The Street.com….[MORE”

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Konfabulator Becomes Yahoo Widgets – Yahoo has renamed their Konfabulator widgets service to Yahoo Widgets and at the same time released a new engine (Yahoo Widget Engine 3.0) that powers the widgets….[MORE”

=== Dec. 12, 2005 ===

New Google Catalogs Database Now Live – Google Catalogs has a slightly new look though what, if anything, has changed under the hood remains uncertain.

=== Dec. 11, 2005 ===

Melissa Data’s Hearty Buffet Of Lookup Databases Grows Larger, More Useful – Melissa Data now offers a variety of new databases, including ZIP code maps, congressional district maps, US home sales by ZIP code and more. Below are some of the latest offerings:

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Create Your Own Collection Of Searchable RSS Feeds With ScoopGo & Blogdigger Groups – A quick post to point out Tara’s recent item about ScoopGo, a new tool that allows the user to create a searchable database of whatever feeds they choose….[MORE”

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Big Guys Crowd Out Little Guys in SEM Arena; Some Branding Focused Advertisers Willing to Spend “Whatever” It Takes – The Media Post article: Search Execs: Big Brands Muscling Out Small Players, reports on comments during a search engine marketing session where panelists said that as search engine marketing grows in popularity, big name advertisers (the ones with lots of money) are “crowding out” small advertisers….[MORE”

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Yahoo and Aussie TV Net Announce Ad Partnership; Plans to Form New CompanyKevin Newcomb reports in Clickz that Yahoo Australia & NZ and Australian TV network, Seven Network will form a new company that will allow advertisers the opportunity to create packages of online and offline advertising….[MORE”

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Book Digitization: Project Gutenberg Founder Interviewed – Project Gutenberg has been around since 1971 digitizing and copying public domain books. This Wall Street Journal Q&A interview (free) with its founder Michael Hart on book digitization, Google Book Search, and more….[MORE”

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A Recommended Reading List for Info Retrieval Geeks – If your a search and information retrieval geek, an article in the just online issue of SIGIR Forum has a great annotated bibliography that you’ll want to take a look at….[MORE”

=== Dec. 10, 2005 ===

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Google Job Opening For Head Of Classified Advertising Efforts – There has been massive amounts of talk about Google’s involvement and role in the classified advertising business (Google Base? Google Automat?). Yesterday, Google posted a job opening for someone to run their classified advertising efforts….[MORE”

=== Dec. 9, 2005 ===

Jux2 Returns!Jux2 the metasearch/comparative search engine that won our Best Meta Search Engine site in the 5th Annual Search Engine Awards, is back online and fully functioning after being sold in October on eBay for over $100,000….[MORE”

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Redesigned Yahoo Video Home Page Now Online – Today, you’ll notice a redesigned Yahoo Video home page that is much more aesthetically pleasing. You’ll see a lot more color and three modules that include featured videos, new videos and popular clips.

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New Patent Apps from Yahoo (Data Extraction) and Microsoft (Electronic Yellow Pages) Published – The USPTO published two patent applications yesterday. One from Yahoo and and the other from Microsoft….[MORE”

=== Dec. 8, 2005 ===

Google Releases New Version of Sitemap Generator Tool – A new version (v1.4) of the Google Sitemap Generator Tool is now available according to Vanessa Fox from Google Engineering.

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Yahoo Releases International Web Search Services; Yahoo Switzerland Search Goes Live – Yahoo’s Toby Elliott points out that the company has just released the Yahoo Web Search API for all regional and country sites….[MORE”

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Tag Your Job Postings with the New MyIndeed.com – New at job metasearch vertical engine Indeed.com is the ability to tag your job search findings….[MORE”

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Search Engine Strategies Chicago: Day Four – Missed the show? Here’s a recap of live session coverage on the first day. Seee also Day Three, Day Two, and Day One.

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Google Labs Quietly Releases Transit Trip Travel Planner for Portland, OregonGoogle Transit Trip Planner allows people in Portland, Oregon (only, for the moment) to plan trips with Google Maps using public transportation….[MORE”

=== Dec. 7, 2005 ===

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The Birth of Yahoo Answers – Now out in beta is Yahoo Answers, Yahoo’s new social networking/online community/question answering service. The service allows any registered Yahoo user to ask just about any question and hopefully get an answer from another member of the question answering community. Access to Yahoo Answers is free….[MORE”. See also:

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Google Once Again Looking for Ad Quality Raters – We’ve blogged numerous times about Google and their quality rater program. A quick note to let you know that once again Google is looking for quality raters….[MORE”. See also MSN Using Human Quality Raters to Review Results.

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Infospace Calls On Ingenio for Pay Per Call Partnership – News out of San Francisco and Seattle today that InfoSpace and Ingenio have announced a partnership that will bring Ingenio’s Pay Per Call technology to the entire network of Infospace properties….[MORE. See also: Click to Call Pilot Project Begins in Australia.

=== Dec. 6, 2005 ===

Answers.com Buys “Answer Extraction” Engine Brainboost for $4 Million in Cash and Some Shares of Restricted Stock – Word from Answers.com that they’ve acquired an “answer extraction” database that utilizes NLP (natural language processing), Brainboost.com for $4 million in cash and 439,000 shares of restricted stock….[MORE”

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Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales Interviewed on NPR – One of the most popular topics in the mainstream press the few days has been the Wikipedia. What it is, how it works and controversies over edits. Founder Jimmy Wales and Wikipedia critic John Seigenthaler discussed the service on NPR recently….[MORE”

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Human Podcast Transcribers from CastingWords.comCastingWords.com is a new service (not much there at the moment) that instead of using technology to transcribe podcasts will use human transcribers to get the job done….[MORE”

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Blinkx Releases Keyword Searchable Archive of Classic European TV Commercials OnlineBlinkxTV is offering a searchable archive of more than 5000 “classic” or “vintage” European television commercials….[MORE”

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Survey: Google Earns Top Corporate Reputation in Only Seven Years – A Wall Street Journal article (free): Ranking Corporate Reputations, reports that Google placed third this year in the annual Reputation Quotient ranking, a debut on the list that puts it only behind only No. 1 Johnson & Johnson and No. 2 Coca-Cola Co….[MORE”

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Eric Schmidt Lays Out Google’s Ten Golden Rules – Google CEO Eric Schmidt, along with co-author UC Berkeley professor Hal Varian,, has written: “Google’s Ten Golden Rules” for Newsweek on getting the most out of knowledge workers….[MORE”

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Links to RSS Feeds and Podcasts from the U.S.Government – Here’s a quickie set of reference links for you. If you’re looking for RSS feeds and podcasts from U.S. Government, FirstGov offers a couple of useful directories with links to both types of material….[MORE”

=== Dec. 5, 2005 ===

Looking for Revenue Opportunities in Microsoft’s Plans to Digitize British Library Materials – In an exclusive Information World Review interview: BL opens up to Microsoft and reveals revenue aims, Alistair Baker, Microsoft’s UK managing director, talks about both parties [The BL and Microsoft” investigating new business opportunities in the recently announced arrangement that will have MS scanning 25 million pages (about 100,000 books) of only out-of-copright material that will become available via MS Book Search, a member of the Open Content Alliance. Hmm. Since the recent announcement is about books from what Baker has to say perhaps MS and the BL are thinking about digitizing other types of objects?

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Eric Schmidt Tells John Battelle: “We’re Not in the Portal Business” – In a new Q&A style interview in Business 2.0 , the covers a lot of ground, John “The Search” Battelle chats with Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt….[MORE”

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Exploring the Googleverse on SiliconValley.com’s Roundtable – This week the team at SiliconValley.com are running on online roundtable discussion titled:
The Googleverse: Intelligently designed and evolving. Topics range from search and ads to Google as a network to ethics & trust and trust. The roundtable features an impressive list of particpants including John Battelle, Charlene Li, Rich Skrenta, Gautam Godhwani, Steve Arnold, Michael Bazeley, and many others including some person who happens to be the News Editor of Search Engine Watch. More here.

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Latest on Insider Sales at the Googleplex – The AP covers nsiders at Google selling shares of Goog….[MORE”

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AOL Video Search Adds Slew of New Content from MTV and Many Other Cable Networks – AOL Video and MTV Networks (part of Viacom, also owners of CBS) are announcing a partnership that will make video material available via AOL Video Search (beta) from numerous cable services….[MORE”

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Podscope Now Offering Keyword RSS Feeds – Today, Podscope is announcing that users can set up keyword-based RSS feeds and receive alerts when certain words are uttered in a podcast or another type of audio or video program….[MORE”

=== Dec. 4, 2005 ===

The Fear of Google Continues as a Hot Topic and Popular News Story – Reuters has a lengthy look at how Madison Avenue advertisersfear Google in the article Madison Avenue faces Google fears. We’re reading article like this on a very regular basis these days…[MORE”

=== Dec. 3, 2005 ===

New from from The Internet Movie Database: The Movie Keyword Analyzer, Fun!!! – IMDb has a new tool that lets you find titles that have a particular keyword and then presents a tally of all keywords from the titles that matched your initial keyword set.

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Gary Price’s Other Blogs: Resources, Tools, and Documents – I thought I would take just a brief moment of your time and invite you to visit/bookmark/whatever what have become known around here as Gary’s “other sites” or blogs. I wouldn’t call them personal but I hope you call them useful and interesting….[MOPE”

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Collaborative Web Tagging Will Be Topic of Workshop at WWW 2006 – Collaborative taggers should tag the following item “workshop”….[MORE”

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Millions of eBay Items Now Searchable on MSN Shopping – Just in time for the holiday shopping season and interesting move from MS. You can now search MSN Shopping and find items up for auction or for sale on eBay and still get access to many of the refinements available on the actual eBay site….[MORE”

=== Dec. 2, 2005 ===

Google: From AdWords and AdSense to Publication Ads – BusinessWeeks’s Ben Elgin takes an in-depth look at what appears to be Google’s growing interest in the publication ad business in the new article: Can Google Go Glossy? It was just the other day that I blogged about numerous job openings in NYC to work selling, mananging, etc. with Google’s publication ad business that Sergey Brin says is an R&D experiment….[MORE”

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On Craigslist, Job Loses at Mainstream News Orgamizations, and Citizen Journalism – The San Franscisco Weekly reports in the article Craig$list.com, that the very popular classified ad site, its founder calls it an online marketplace “like a fleamarket,” is beginning to cause layoffs at well-known and established news organizations. The story offers all sorts of interesting facts….[MORE”

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Yahoo Adds RSS Alerts Delivered via E-Mail, IM, or SMS – In a blog post, Scott Gatz points out that via Yahoo’s very robust Alert Service you can now have alerts for (for ANY RSS feed) delivered to you via email, SMS (text messaging), and/or Yahoo Messenger. Very cool and for me, very useful, especially the SMS alerts….[MORE”

===================

A Look at Working at Ask Jeeves – The San Francisco Chronicle offers a profile of what it’s like to work for AJ in the article: Bay Area Premier Employers, Ask Jeeves, Inc.…[MORE”

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Daily SearchCast: Search News Via Podcast
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