IndustrySearch Headlines & Links: June 12, 2006

Search Headlines & Links: June 12, 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…

  • 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…
  • 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….
  • ‘Search:
    Thy Name Is Google’

    Last week, MediaPost reported on an Outsell report, “How Information Providers
    Can Keep Pace With User Demands For Time-Saving Solutions,” which showed
    Google increasing its market share dominance but also reportedly increasing
    dissatisfaction with the quality of search results. To get a better look at
    these provocative findings, we obtained a copy of the report….
  • 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…
  • 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…

  • 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….

  • 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…
  • 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….

  • 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…
  • 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….
  • 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…
  • 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;…
  • #&@$%@
    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….
  • New
    Search Patents: June 12, 2006 – More Yahoo Concepts and Google Predictive
    Searches

    Microsoft describes the use of block level analysis to improve mobile
    browsing, writes of allowing searchers to customize search results, presents a
    query refinement system which provides concepts for users to choose from, and
    offers a look at a video browser for video search. IBM has filed a patent
    which could let a browser be used to exclude selected pages, and pages linked
    to or from those pages, from search engine results. In another filing, they
    detail how a focused random crawl could be used to gather statistical
    information on chosen topics. Google further builds upon the use of
    predictive…

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