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!
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Below are links to items discussed:
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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!
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