IndustryHighlights from the SEW Blog: July 5, 2006

Highlights from the SEW Blog: July 5, 2006

Featured posts from the Search Engine Watch blog, as well as our customary search headlines from around the web.

Featured posts from the Search Engine Watch blog, as well as our customary search headlines from around the web. If you’re not familiar with our blog, click on any of the links below, or visit the blog’s home page at http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/.

From The SEW Blog…

  • Specialty Search Roundup #5
    Another week has passed which means it’s time for a look at a few new or updated specialty search tools that they have posted about on ResourceShelf. Btw, ResourceShelf has a new RSS feed URL. They are now at: http://www.resourceshelf.com/feed In a post about Vivisimo clustering technology now being made available for mobile searchers in Japan, we include links to a few other tools (all free) powered by Vivisimo including: + BiometaCluster (Life Sciences Meta Search and Clustering) + ClusterMed (Dynamic Clustering of PubMed) and a few others….
  • GooglePlex Irvine To Revolutionize Radio Advertising
    Zachary Applegate posted his visit to the GooglePlex Irvine at SEOMoz, where he describes the demonstration given to him by Google. The demo, Zach coined, “Google AdSense Audio,” a method of “dynamically generate and change commercial content according to demographic and what is currently going on in the geographic area of radio stations.” Zach explains that Google is entering this market to enable those with “$200 budgets to break into radio advertising.” We first reported that Google was potentially entering this area, back when Google bought dMarc Broadcasting, the SEOMoz blog has screen captures of the technology and the…
  • MSN Search To Officially Not Use Yahoo Search Marketing For Sponsored Search July 1
    I reported over the Search Engine Roundtable that Yahoo’s and MSN’s relationship is coming to an official end this month. The official Yahoo announcement can be seen here and it states, “MSN’s U.S. search distribution agreement with Yahoo Search Marketing ends this month, and Yahoo Sponsored Search listings will no longer appear in MSN’s U.S. search results.” MSN has been displaying mostly Microsoft adCenter ads on their search results pages for a couple months now. So the transition has been pretty gradual for advertisers and searchers….
  • Ask.com Removes “Legacy Filters” To Enable Pedophilia Keyword Search
    About a week ago we covered a story that Ask.com was blocking search terms such as laws against pedophilia and preventing child pornography, amongst others. Philipp notes that Ask.com has removed the “legacy filters” to enable those types of searches. In fact, for the search on preventing child pornography, you get a special “smart answer” for “Child Abuse Resources.”…
  • Changes for the Yahoo Publisher Network
    The Yahoo Publisher Network has made a series of changes to their interface and support documents which seem to be appealing to the new publishers. They have also added a new “RPC” column to reporting, meaning publishers can see their average earning per click….
  • Google Knocks Off Apple On The Wired 40
    The Wired 40 was just released and Google has secured the top spot, at number one this year. They have bumped off Apple, who last year ranked number one. Wired commented on Google with the following; Less cuddly but more profitable than ever, the monster from Mountain View has rivals but no peers. Is it a search engine? A media company? A software provider? Who cares? Microsoft, for one. Get ready for the grudge match of the decade. Wired is a huge Apple fan and supporter, as far as I know. For them to hand over the spot to Google,…
  • Yahoo Gains Market Share In China, Google Loses Share
    TMCnet.com reports that Google has slipped back to third place with 13.2% share in China. Yahoo is in second place with 21.1% market share and Baidu with 43.9%. TMCnet sources this information from the Beijing Modern Business Daily on page 1 from the Tuesday, June 27, 2006 edition. I do not have the previous market share figures for search share in China….
  • Another Microsoft Executive Leaves To Join Google
    CNN Money reports that another Microsoft executive has left the company this month. A 15 year veteran, general manager for platform evangelism at Microsoft, Vic Gundotra, has left Microsoft to join Google. This news comes after shocking news that Microsoft VP Martin Taylor has departed from Microsoft. Vic Gundotra has a non-compete that will not allow him to work for Google for at least one year. During that time Gundotra will be working on his “charitable endeavors.”…
  • Yahoo Settles Clickfraud Lawsuit
    A California judge has approved Yahoo’s proposed settlement of a class action click fraud case brought against the company by Checkmate Strategic Group in June 2005. Yahoo believes the settlement will cover all click fraud claims that have been filed against Yahoo, including a suit filed by Lane’s Gifts and Collectibles in Arkansas last year against both Yahoo and Google. The terms of the settlement include a cash payment of $4.95 million to plaintiffs’ counsel and a provision that will allow advertisers to file a claim for Yahoo to investigate potentially fraudulent clicks back through January 2004. Yahoo will pay…
  • Google Book Search Wins Victory In German Challenge
    I wrote earlier this month of a French lawsuit becoming the third one I knew about filed against Google over its book scanning project. Turns out, there was a fourth one — based out of Germany. But now we’re back to three, as Google has just announced that the German one has been withdrawn….
  • Google Loses French Lawsuit Over Vuitton Trademark
    I just got word that Google lost the French lawsuit we reported on Monday involving the Louis Vuitton trademark. I do not have any more details at the moment, only that they lost. I will try to update this entry when I have more information. Postscript: I was just sent this information from Bloomberg news. “Google Inc. must pay LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton SA 300,000 euros ($375,800) for breaching copyright rules with its advertising service, a French Appellate court ruled.”…
  • Google and Yahoo Come to the Aid of Craigslist
    As many people already know, Craigslist is being sued under federal housing discrimination law for allowing the posting of allegedly discriminatory ads seeking certain types or classes of roommates and tenants (e.g., based on religious affiliation or sexual preference). Legally you can’t post those kinds of ads in the newspaper and the newspaper that runs them is liable for housing discrimination. For those interested, here’s a copy of the complaint (pdf format) against Craigslist….
  • FeedBurner CEO, Dick Costolo, Interviewed By Business 2.0 Magazine
    CNN Money has an Business 2.0 interview with Dick Costolo, FeedBurner’s CEO. The article discusses the challenge FeedBurner had raising capital for such a new technology, RSS. It also discusses their recent success and future challenges (RSS ads, Google, etc.). Read the article named Redefining the RSS feed….
  • Some Funny & Crazy Yahoo Videos On YouTube
    Loren Baker posted some of the funniest and craziest videos he found on YouTube related to Yahoo. If you have time to only watch one video, I recommend watching the first one. Pretty funny stuff. Other videos include, Tom Cruise’s Yahoo visit, David Filo and Jerry Yang commercial, “Yahoo Cubicle Craziness,” and some others. Check them out at Search Engine Journal….
  • Dell To Use Google Earth To Provide Enhanced Tech Support
    The Detroit News reports that Dell is going to use Google Earth as a tool to enhanced their technical support services. The new tech support service, to be released today, is named “Platinum Plus.” Platinum Plus subscribers will be given access to “Google Earth Pro to see in real-time how the Round Rock company is responding to technical support issues around the globe.” Dell and Google have some recent past positive relationships this just adds to that list….
  • New Search Patent Applications: June 27, 2006 – Searching Amongst Malicious Web Sites
    Microsoft’s patent applications from the end of last week include ways for search engines to scan malicious web sites, clustering queries for more relevant searches, and extracting feature and formatting information from pages. IBM introduces a new query dependent page ranking algorithm, and a way to preload the URLs of a site into your history file before you’ve ever visited. Xerox searches for more meaningful snippets, Alcatel takes the PC out of search, and replaces it with TV, and British Telecommunications describes a way to make user profiles more helpful in returning search results….
  • Microsoft Demographics Prediction Tool Interactive Review
    We posted about Microsoft Center Labs once again, but this time I wanted to show you, my eight-minute review of the demographics prediction tool at the lab. I created a movie of my running through the tool and uploaded it to YouTube. Now, before you watch the video, keep in mind that the percentages I discussed in the video may be determined as a “confidence” ratio and not a simple flat percentage — you will see what I mean. In any case, there is no way that google.com has predominantly a female audience, with a confidence ratio of 1.00 and.
  • Image Database To Fight Online Child Porn
    The AP reports that AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft, EarthLink, NetZero and Juno are teaming up to fight child pornography. They are pooling together $1 million to build a database of pornographic images of children and software to match the image database with similar matches on their own networks. So Yahoo may scan email attachments, Yahoo Groups images and other places in the Yahoo network where images may be. If any of the images match an image in the database, it can be flagged and sent to the authorities. The exact details of the software and how it will be used have…
  • Still No Results Found For A Google Search on Amazon.com
    John Battelle asked why Google was/is returning no results for a search on [amazon.com” at 9am (PST, I think) yesterday. At the time, I felt it wasn’t a huge deal, these things happen on occasion at Google, normally not for such a large brand, but it happens, nevertheless. What is a bit surprising is that Google is obviously aware of the issue, based on John telling us Google contacted him with a confirmation of the issue, but Google has yet to fix the issue, almost a day later. LeeAnn Prescott at the HitWise blog provides some value statistical insight into…
  • Follow-Up: School Couldn’t Reach Google Until Injunction Filed
    Catawba County Schools in North Carolina obtained an injunction to remove private material from Google because it had no luck getting action from the search engine after trying other routes, the district tells me. The school district also stressed that it didn’t claim that Google had somehow hacked into its servers. Here’s what Catawba County School’s chief technology officer Judith Ray emailed me about the situation:…
  • Cost-Per-Keyword Drops In Q1
    MediaPost reports that the cost-per-keyword has dropped from around $30 in the first quarter of 2006 to “the yearly high of $59 last December.” The data comes from a DoubleClick study, which also shows that the “cost-per-keyword was nearly unchanged from the first three months of 2005 to this year’s first quarter.” The number of clicks (up 24%) and number of keywords did rise from the year-over-year data….
  • MSN Talks Spam Defenses; Takes Weekends Off From Indexing
    This morning I uncovered two threads at WebmasterWorld that provide information on MSN from spam defense to when search indexes get updated. The first is named MSN Asks Webmasters, What is Spam? where MSNdude provides some insights into how MSN determines what is spam, what are junk pages and determining the “hierarchy of spam.” The second is named MSN Won’t Do a Search Index Update on Fridays, Saturdays or Sundays where we see MSNdude posting that normally MSN will not conduct a search index update on Saturdays and Sundays, and also they are unlikely to conduct an update on Fridays,…
  • France’s Géoportail Mapping Site: La Demande C’est Fantastique!
    The French answer to Google Earth, the indirectly government funded Geoportail, launched Friday and was immediately overwhelmed with visits from eager French citoyens (citizens) and other curious would-be users. After several visits to the site this weekend, I was still unable to get in to see anything. Each time I tried I encountered this message: “Vous etes incroyablement nombreux a vous connecter au Geoportail, portail des territoires et des citoyens depuis sa mise en ligne.” In my broken French it roughly translates: “An incredible number of you have connected to Geoportail, portal of the territories and the citizens, since the…

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