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…
Other Things We Read, Didn’t Blog But You Might Want To Read…
- Yahoo
embraces Internet Explorer 7, releases customized version, Ars Technica
Internet Librarian International 2006, Phil Bradley
Yahoo Mail Worm Harvesting Addresses, CRN
- Marissa
Mayer’s Typical Day at Work, Google Blogoscoped
- Ask Jeeves
Co-Founder and Former CTO Joins Answerbag, Yahoo News
- Google
Earth 4, Google Blogoscoped
- Google “Onebox”
Results We Still Need, Google Blogoscoped
China Lifts Blockade Against Access to Google, GigaLaw
Digg: Threat to Yahoo! News?, Hitwise
- Google
Local Time Results, Google Blogoscoped
SearchStatus 1.16 Release, Oilman
- TrafficLand Continues to Expand,
Aggregating Traffic Cams Around the Nation, ResourceShelf
Under Recommendation Engines’ Hood, Wall Street Journal
- MySpace Careers
Launches Sunday Night, TechCrunch (powered by Simply Hired)
Windows Live Product Reader, Niall Kennedy (read officially blogged news
of Microsoft product announcements all in one place)
Technorati Confusion, A VC (trusting counts from anyone is often a waste
of time, but a revisit to issues at Technorati, which have been covered in the
past)
- Dotster Caught
Cybersquatting, Threadwatch
- Google
?spying? on IDF: YNet News