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...
- 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.... - 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.... - 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.... -
MerchantCircle: SEO-Friendly Services for Small Businesses
What is MerchantCircle you ask? It?s an online ?marketing solution? for U.S. small businesses. Depending on your definition, that category could include anywhere from 10 million to 17 million or so entities. Like many others, MerchantCircle takes aim at the yellow pages services market and hopes to lure local advertisers with a range of cost-effective offerings: a rich, structured landing page, blog, newsletters, online couponing and search-marketing. There are two packages: $29 per month and $99 per month, beyond a limited free offering. The site is not a consumer destination, but a hosted platform intended to help businesses be found... - 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.... - 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.... - 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.... - 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.... - 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....
Other Things We Read, Didn't Blog But You Might Want To Read...
(Note: as I was away last week, there's a longer-than-normal list as I cleared out some things from my feeds and news sources)
- Google Deal Might Help Dell Talks With Microsoft, InfomationWeek
- To Recoup Click-through Losses, Redirect, MediaPost
- Web Search: Microsoft Announces Winners of Academic Web Search Research Awards, ResourceShelf
- Newspaper JV Topix.net Debuts Craigslist Rival, Micro Persuasion
- Nerdfight! WordPress founder vs. Freewebs president, Valleywag (a fight over which free content hosting service has more search spam)
- Real-Time Synonyms Search, Google Blogoscoped
- Who's Really Running Google?, Forbes
- Bulls And Bears Discuss Yahoo's Future, Wall Street Journal
- Google Sets Sights On Display, Financial Times
- Tiscali working with Microsoft on TV services, set top box, AFX News
- Earth to Google PR, Jon Udell
- Rojo Launches Nooz for Myspace, TechCrunch
- How eBay Makes Regulations Disappear, New York Times
- Google Earth for accidents?, The Advertiser-Tribune (Ohio)
- Digg - Still Rigged?, SEO BlackHat
- One Month Away: Free Access to Thousands of eBooks via The World eBook Fair, ResourceShelf
- Linking and the new Google search rank algorithm, Pandia
- Rojo Has Blog Search, Too, TechCrunch
- Disco Loser ***NOW LIVE***: SEL's First Viral Video, Search Engine Lowdown (take on Garrett French, one afro wig, add Subway commercial....)
- The Baidu way to search, MarketWatch
- Google Unlikely to Make Own Web Browser, Associated Press
- Why I think ClickFraud is far greater than imagined, Blog Maverick (Mark Cuban states fairly obvious points in an over-simplistic manner)
- Going Places: Accelerating Search in Academic Research, MSN Search Weblog
- The Other Blog Search Engine (Gnoos) That Launched Yesterday, TechCrunch
- On Searchblog, and Trying to Do Too Much, Battelle's Searchblog
- Henry Blodget Interviews Andrew Goodman, Traffick
- Vivisimo: the search engine company from Pittsburgh, Silicon Valley Watcher
- Two more Gmail languages (Arabic & Hebrew), Official Google Blog
- SEM At Any Price?, ClickZ
- Super Awesome, Super Bad Moustache!!! Low Reserve!, BuyMyMustache.com (tragically, the opportunity to buy a famed mustache that's been in front of many SEO campaigns and on Broadway was nixed by eBay)
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