IndustryThe Search Engine Report – Number 119

The Search Engine Report - Number 119

Search Engine Watch editor-in-chief Danny Sullivan recaps top search engine stories from October 2006.

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In This Issue
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+ Upcoming Search Engine Strategies Events
+ Renewing With SES & My Last Month With SEW
+ Top Stories
+ More From The Search Engine Watch Blog
+ Our Search Newsletters & Feeds
+ About The Newsletter

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Upcoming Search Engine Strategies Events
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I’m very happy to announce that Netscape general manager Jason Calacanis will be doing keynote conversation with me for SES Chicago 2006. This will happen from 9-9:45am on Tuesday, December 5.

Just over a year ago, Jason sold the Weblogs Inc. blog network to AOL. Since then, he’s been revitalizing the Netscape brand by transforming it into a social news site. Detractors have called Netscape a Digg clone and got incensed when he offered to steal away top Digg contributors with cash. Undeterred, he said spreading the wealth would benefit everyone. That includes perhaps rewarding bloggers with links rather than cash for finding stories.

Is the rise of social media just a bubble or the beginning of a massive change on how we consume media? Will citizen journalists put professional publications out of business? Often controversial, always outspoken, Jason will share thoughts on these and other issues during the SES Chicago 2006 show.

In addition to Jason’s keynote, there will be over 70 sessions covering search marketing, including an evening keynote that I’ll be doing covering the year’s events in search. See the SES Chicago 2006 web site for full details. Aside from Chicago, here are other upcoming SES events:

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Renewing With SES & My Last Month At SEW
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As readers know, I announced I was leaving Search Engine Watch and the Search Engine Strategies conference series earlier this year. I left it open that there was a slight chance I might be staying on. Since that time, Incisive Media diligently worked to come up with a solution for me to stay part of the SES shows in the United States for another year.

News On My Plans For Next Year on my personal blog has more details. In short, I’ll be chairing the SES NY 2007 show as normal, co-chairing the SES San Jose 2007 event and participating in the SES Chicago 2007 conference. Aside from SES, I also expect to do events on my own.

As for Search Engine Watch, this remains my last month, with November 30 my last day with the site. I’ll be doing my usual day of blogging, plus I’ll be sending out my last email newsletter to readers of the monthly Search Engine Report or the twice-monthly Search Engine Update. I’ll save my farewells for that!

Post-Search Engine Watch, I will be continuing to write about search engines via a new search blog that I’m starting. I’ll have more news about that later this month, and the best place to stay tuned for now is to keep up with my personal blog, Daggle.

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Top Stories
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Below is a recap of major articles from our daily SearchDay newsletter and important Search Engine Watch Blog postings since the last newsletter. Want to receive these stories daily or via RSS/feed? See the Search Engine Watch Newsletters & Web Feeds page for sign-up instructions.

=== Nov. 7, 2006 ===

Australia’s Proposed Copyright Rules Would Make Search Engines Impossible, Warns Google – Google has warned Australia that if they pass a new copyright law that it will set the country back to “the pre-Internet era.” See also:

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AdWords Landing Page Quality Score Coming To AdSense Network – Google has made changes that better take into account landing page quality to determine how much an advertiser pays. See also:

=== Nov. 6, 2006 ===

Windows Live Local Gets “Virtual Earth” 3-D Cities – Windows Live has gained photorealistic 3-D imagery for the “urban core” of 15 U.S. cities: San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, Boston, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Detroit, Phoenix, Houston, Baltimore, Atlanta, Denver, Dallas and Fort Worth. See also:

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Google Wins Right To Buy YouTube In Antitrust Review – Google has won the right to buy YouTube after antitrust authorities reviewed the documents by the Federal Trade Commission. See also:

=== Nov. 2, 2006 ===

Yahoo Slurp Adds Wildcard Support For Robots.txt – The Yahoo Search Blog announced that Yahoo’s web crawler, aka Yahoo Slurp, now supports wildcards in the robots.txt file. See also:

=== Nov. 1, 2006 ===

A Closer Look at Yahoo Shortcuts – Continuing our four-part series on the special information sections creeping into general search results, today we take a look at Yahoo Shortcuts. See also:

=== Oct. 31, 2006 ===

Ask.com’s Revenue Increases 62 Percent – IAC posted Q3 earning results, and part of that included results for Ask.com. Bloomberg reports that Ask.com’s revenue increased 62-percent but at a cost of $2.1 million. The $2.1 million more than doubled from their previous operating cost. See also:

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Rampant Malpractice Among Health Searchers – Although most internet users turn to general-purpose search engines to find health related information, the majority don’t bother to check the source and date of the information they find, according to a new study from the Pew Internet Project.

=== Oct. 30, 2006 ===

The 100th Birthday of the Press Release – The press release turned 100-years-old over the weekend. As search marketers debate over the future of the online press release, we can learn some important lessons from the early history of public relations.

=== Oct. 26, 2006 ===

AOL Enhances Search with FullView Results – AOL has rolled out a slick new search interface that automatically integrates Google-powered web search results with multimedia, local or other content from AOL and its partners.

=== Oct. 25, 2006 ===

Yahoo Updates Toolbar and Bookmarks – Yahoo is releasing a new version of its toolbar with a powerful new bookmarking feature that integrates seamlessly with Yahoo web search.

=== Oct. 24, 2006 ===

Google Launches Custom Search Engine Service – Want your own Google-flavored specialized search engine for your web site or blog? With Google’s new Custom Search Engine service, it takes just minutes to set up your own unique search engine. See also:

=== Oct. 19, 2006 ===

Google Releases 2006 3rd Quarter Results – Google has released their earnings for the third quarter of 2006. Profits almost doubled and revenue increase seventy-percent. See also:

=== Oct. 19, 2006 ===

Searching Via Internet Explorer 7 & The Battle To Be The Default Search Engine – Now that Internet Explorer 7 has been released in final format, I wanted to look at how search is being handled within the browser. There’s been lots of discussion and worries about this in the past. Speculation time is over; reality is here. In this article, how the IE7 search box works, how you can change it and how Google and Yahoo’s toolbars behave within it to try and maintain their default status, once gained. See also: Google Asks Microsoft To Give Users A Choice In Europe

=== Oct. 19, 2006 ===

Click Fraud Dropping Amongst Google & Yahoo – A new Click Fraud Index study that shows the click fraud rate dropping from 12.8 percent to 11.9 percent in the 3rd quarter amongst top-tier PPC engines. See also:

=== Oct. 18, 2006 ===

Why Don’t External Site Popularity Estimates Add Up? – A twofer today on whether you can trust the web metrics that are reported out there, one an article from BusinessWeek while the other is a big study from SEOmoz based on data gathered from a variety of search blogs. More details in this article, with lots of comments from me along the way. See also:

=== Oct. 17, 2006 ===

Google Webmaster Tools Gain Crawl Charts, Enhanced Crawl Rate & Image Labeler Support – Google Webmaster Tools has gained visual charts to show Googlebot’s crawling activity, expanded crawl rate support, inclusion in the image search labeling program and number of URLs submitted. I talked with the Google Webmaster Central team earlier this week, and here are a few more details on some of the features. See also:

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Yahoo Releases New “Panama” Search Advertising System Early – Yahoo’s long-anticipated next-generation search advertising platform, Panama, has now gone live. See also:

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Teaching People to Search Like Pros – In a new book, veteran instructor Greg Notess showcases the strategies and methods he uses to teach people not just to search, but to maximize their information sleuthing skills.

=== Oct. 12, 2006 ===

Ask Mobile Search Launches – Ask.com has launched a mobile search product at m.ask.com or mobile.ask.com. Ask Mobile is optimized for mobile devices and uses Skweezer throughout to improve readability and download speed on your mobile device. See also:

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The Ongoing Struggle of Free vs. Fee – How can traditional information industry companies survive in the world of free web content? How can they appeal to

=== Oct. 6, 2006 ===

Google Calls Operational Pause On Products & Yes, New Rollouts Were Hurting Search – Sergey Brin is leading an attitude change of “features, not products” to get Googlers to improve what they already have rather than push out new stuff. See also:

=== Oct. 5, 2006 ===

Google Won Keyword Trademark Lawsuit: Rescuecom v. Google – Google won a major sponsored keyword trademark case against Rescuecom. See also:

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Hello Natural Language Search, My Old Over-Hyped Search Friend – This is a rant. It’s a rant from over 10 years of watching people trot out natural language search as the “killer” solution to the current state of search, something that’s happening once again with Powerset. That’s a search engine you can’t even use at the moment, but the hype will no doubt continue. To counteract that, my thoughts on and some history about natural language search. See also:

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More From The SEW Blog
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Below are posts from the Search Engine Watch Blog since the last newsletter and not mentioned above. Want to keep up on daily news from the blog? Visit the home page or subscribe to the blog feed. Note that references to “I” may becoming from any of the Search Engine Watch staff who post to the blog.

=== Nov. 7, 2006 ===

Text Link Ads Aquired By MediaWhiz – Text Link Ads has been acquired by MediaWhiz as of yesterday.

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Use Of AdWords In US Senate Campaigns – The Rimm-Kaufman Group conducted a small study on how the US Senate candidates and campaigns used Google AdWords this weekend to “swing Senate races” in the last minute hustle and bustle. See also:

=== Nov. 6, 2006 ===

Google Confirms Small Test With Newspaper Ads – Google will once again testing placing ads for advertisers in newspapers. See also:

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ChaCha Search: Take Two – When “human-powered” search engine ChaCha launched in September it was a great idea with very flawed execution. Today, the site has gone from “alpha” to “beta” based on lessons learned during the alpha period. And it appears from casual searching there have been some significant improvements.

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Topix.net Gains $15 Million Investment From Newspaper Parents – News aggregator and search engine Topix.net announced a new round of funding in which its newspaper owners, Gannett, Tribune Co. and McClatchy, have invested $15 million in the site to help further develop it.

=== Nov. 3, 2006 ===

See And Find With Quintura Quintura is the latest in the line of visual search engines such as Kartoo, Mooter and WebBrain. Quintura basically takes your search term, runs a search and then translates the results into a tag cloud effect on the screen.

=== Nov. 2, 2006 ===

Yahoo Launches Yahoo Food – Yahoo launched food.yahoo.com that contains “recipes, advice from regional celebrity chefs, video cooking guides and easy-to-use Web tools.”

=== Nov. 1, 2006 ===

The Interestingness of Social Networks – Interestingness is a great name for a ranking algorithm. It’s what Yahoo’s photo-based social network Flickr uses to show which images the community finds the most “interesting” — one Yahoo seeks to patent.

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100 Million Sites = Search Wins – The Internet has now crossed a significant milestone; there are 100 million operating websites.

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Zotspot Wants To Share The Search Wealth – Zotspot is a general-purpose engine that officially launched yesterday. Like a number of others before it, the idea here is to “reward” users for searching.

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New adCenter Blog & adCenter Lab Features – There is a new location for the adCenter blog, and adCenter labs released updates for some of the tools.

=== Oct. 31, 2006 ===

Google Buys Wiki Maker, JotSpot – Google has bought JotSpot, a Wiki maker software solution. See also:

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Smarter Launches Visual Search – Smarter.com today launched visual color search for clothing. See also: Become Adds Color Search.

=== Oct. 30, 2006 ===

Yahoo To Buy AOL? Sell To Microsoft? Merge With eBay? Or Keep Status Quo? – Fortune reports that rumors are spreading that Yahoo is in talks with Time Warner about buying AOL.

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Google Appeals Federal Judge’s Orkut Ruling – The International Herald Tribune reports that Google has appealed a federal judge’s order to hand over the IP address information to Brazilian authorities.

=== Oct. 28, 2006 ===

Mazda ‘Craves’ Clicks From Honda – Mazda’s once again crashing in on another car maker’s search marketing parade.

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Windows Live Mobile Now Live – Windows Live Mobile is now live at http://mobile.live.com/.

=== Oct. 27, 2006 ===

Google AdSense For Audio Coming Soon – Blogs are buzzing on recent “credible” sources saying that Google is going to be releasing AdSense for Audio. See also Google To Partner With Clear Channel Communications?

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Search Engine Forums Spotlight – Links to the week’s topics from search engine forums across the web: NYT calls Google Bombing a ‘campaign tactic’ – Googling With Google Is Good, But Very Bad Elsewhere – Coming Soon: Yahoo Directory Tag, With ‘No’ Option – Did-it President Takes a Shot at SEO – What Does Your Holiday SEM Campaign Look Like? and more.

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Competitive Intelligence & Link Searches – Rand over at SEOMoz has a great write up on Long List of Link Searches where he goes through a sample client and how he would approach the competitive intelligence aspect of the SEO research.

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Google Enhanced Google Alerts & Adds Blog Search Alerts – Google has added Google Blog Search email alerts to the Google Alerts system.

=== Oct. 26, 2006 ===

Googling Google And Searching Yahoo – There is a strange feeling of deja vue with the Official Google blog entry ‘Do you “Google”?’ as we’re once again looking at the way in which the word can be used.

=== Oct. 25, 2006 ===

Next Up For Sale, Digg.com – Techcrunch reports that Digg.com is looking to sell the property for $150 million. Digg’s recent discussions to sell included negotiations with News Corp, and some other non-disclosed bidders. The word is that Digg wants “at least $150 million” but no one is willing to pay that much to them.

=== Oct. 24, 2006 ===

President George Bush Uses Google Maps To Get Away – President George Bush said he uses Google Maps.

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Google News Adds Link To Google Blog Search – Google News has added a link on the top right of the home page to Google Blog Search. Also, if you do a search on anything at Google News, such as [google custom search engine” you will see at the bottom of the results, “New! More ways to find the latest on google custom search engine:” and a link to “Search blogs.”

=== Oct. 23, 2006 ===

SpaceShipOne Replica Lands At GooglePlex – Google has acquired a replica version of SpaceShipOne. The replica is to be housed at building 43 at the GooglePlex.

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Google Finance Adds Compare, Timeline & More Features – Google Finance has added personalized chart settings that include News Flags, Dividends, Splits, or Volume on your chart and Zoom levels. See also: Yahoo Finance Adds New Web 2.0 Stock Charts

=== Oct. 22, 2006 ===

Grayboxx: A Better Local Search Engine? – A new San Francisco-Bay Area startup called Grayboxx is making claims it will greatly improve local search.

=== Oct. 20, 2006 ===

WebFetchPro UK Metasearch – WebFetch Pro is a multi/meta search engine creted by InfoSpace and it promises to give you the ‘best search results available on the Web’.

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Search Engine Forums Spotlight – Links to the week’s topics from search engine forums across the web: Link Building Vs. Brand Building – Yahoo Sales Up, Profits Down – Google AdWords Landing Page Website Optimizer – Live Search’s LinkFromDomain Command – Conversion Tracking Revisited, and more.

=== Oct. 19, 2006 ===

Verizon Announces SuperPages Spin Off, To Be Called “Idearc” – Ending several months of speculation Verizon announced yesterday that its SuperPages unit would be spun off as a separate company, to be called, somewhat awkwardly, “Idearc Inc.”

=== Oct. 18, 2006 ===

Yahoo Buzz Publishes Top 20 Misspelled Searches – Yahoo Buzz released the top twenty misspelled keywords on Yahoo Search.

=== Oct. 17, 2006 ===

Google To Install Solar Panels To Help Power The Googleplex – Google’s next ambitious project is to install solar panels on the rooftops of the Googleplex to help power the company on sunny days.

=== Oct. 13, 2006 ===

Search Engine Forums Spotlight – Links to the week’s topics from search engine forums across the web: Google To Acquire YouTube for $1.65 Billion – Yahoo PPC Management Crash – SEO: What Skills Are Crucial? – Hired An SEO Company & Now Feel Ripped Off – When Are SEO Firms Going To Offer Link Baiting Services? and more.

=== Oct. 11, 2006 ===

Url.com – Results Ranked By Users – The ability to rank or rate results delivered by search engines is slowly becoming more commonplace, and I’m noticing that one or two multi/meta search engines are either incorporating this functionality into search or indeed making a specific feature of it, such as the new URL.com. See also: ResultR – One Search Many Useful Results.

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Cool New Real Estate Tools – The real estate vertical is one of the most interesting online segments for several reasons. Among them are the tools that have been developed amid intensifying competition.

=== Oct. 9, 2006 ===

Coke Counters Bad PR With Search Ads – Coca-Cola Counters Critics With Search Ads from MediaPost covers how Coke is using search marketing to get the word out about a court victory where it was accused by a Colombian trade union of intimidating and assassinating union leaders. See also: Honda’s New ‘Crave’ Campaign Missing Search?

=== Oct. 6, 2006 ===

Hitwise: ‘Social Local Search’ Growing Fast – Hitwise’s LeeAnn Prescott, who presented at SES Local, has posted some of the data she showed at the conference. In this particular example, what she compared was traffic to traditional yellow pages sites vs. directory sites that incorporated user-generated content. See also: Free Local Search White Paper From TeleMapics.

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Search Engine Forums Spotlight – Links to the week’s topics from search engine forums across the web: Google Gadgets Now For Your Website – Is SEO a Game of Outsmarting Search Engines? – Relevant Domain Names – Business Week Article On Click Fraud, and more.

=== Oct. 4, 2006 ===

Your Name Here On Google’s Home Page – Custom Google is a way to get the Google home page showing whatever words you want in place of the Google logo — but using the Google logo’s style.

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Yahoo Travel Upgrades Maps, Adds More Features – Earlier this week Yahoo upgraded its Travel Guides with more dynamic mapping (including satellite and hybrid maps), more community features and the addition of a “My Travel Module,” not unlike the recent introduction of “My Local” on Yahoo Local.

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Clusty Labs & Clusty Cloud Creator – Given that Clusty has just had a birthday they’re celebrating by introducing the Clusty Labs. If you’re familiar with Google Labs you’ll know exactly where they’re going with this. There’s not a great deal there are the moment however; a one stop site about Benjamin Franklin (Clusty Ben) Shakespeare Searched and something new – the Clusty Cloud Creator (I wonder if they could have managed any more alliteration?)

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Our Search Newsletters & Feeds
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About The Search Engine Report
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The Search Engine Report is a monthly newsletter that covers developments with search engines and changes to the Search Engine Watch web site, https://www.searchenginewatch.com/. You may pass this newsletter on to others, as long either part is sent in its entirety. Please note that long URLs may break into two lines in some mail readers. Cut and paste, should this occur.

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