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.
Google Web Site Categories Explored
Social Patterns writes a detailed explanation of what he feels determines a site’s Google Web categories. What I define as a Web category are the “quick links” (yahoo calls them) you find under results such as this one. The Web categories attempt to break down the site’s main structure, with links to the main areas of the site under the main search result listing. The questions are; what determines which sites deserve these links? Which types of keywords trigger the results? And how does Google determine what to add as a web category link?
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Ask.com Appoints Jim Lanzone CEO
Just days after Ask.com chief Steve Berkowitz jumped ship to Microsoft’s MSN, IAC/InterActive Corp. has appointed Vice President of Product Management Jim Lanzone as CEO. Congratulations, Jim!
From the press release announcing the move:
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AdSense Launches Text Ad Referrals, Site-Flavored Search and New Image Ad Sizes
The Google AdSense team has made some new additions to the program over the past few days. The first is a new text link referral program to go along with their image referral ad program. This is a surprising addition because many thought AdSense would never allow text link referrals, but it is worth noting that publishers cannot customize the text in the links, and it is generated by an AdSense script, not a simple html link as with most referral programs.
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Ask.com Chief Steve Berkowitz Jumps Ship To Microsoft’s MSN
Steve Berkowitz, head of Ask.com and the man who has helped steered that service to new successes, has been hired by Microsoft to run its online business group.
Steve will be senior vice president of MSN’s Online Business Group. Microsoft says:
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Marketing to Hispanics Part II Released
Nacho Hernandez from iHispanic released part II of his Marketing to Hispanics report, the first part we discussed here. I have pulled out some of the highlights of part two, with Nacho’s help.
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Matt Cutts Provides More Information On Google’s Crawl Caching Proxy
In response to the new caching techniques Jennifer reported last week, Matt Cutts posted a more detailed explanation of what is called “crawl caching proxy.” In short, Google may use all of its spiders, GoogleBot (Web search spider), AdSense spider, News spider, blog search spider and so on for caching purpose. So when all of these spiders crawl your pages, they are stored in what is called a “crawl caching proxy.” The “crawl caching proxy” is then used for retrieving a page’s cache. My understanding is that when you conduct a search at Google.com, you may see a cache retrieved by the AdSense bot, from within the “crawl caching proxy.”
Google Local Goes Back To Being Google Maps
Google gave us the heads-up about this earlier this week, that Google Local was going to be renamed Google Maps. Now it’s happened. Either URL you use, https://local.google.com/ or https://maps.google.com/ comes back with the Google Maps name.
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eBay Wants To Team Up With Yahoo And/Or Microsoft To Compete Against Google?
A Wall Street Journal article reports that eBay is in talks with both Yahoo and Microsoft to see which one (or possibly both) is a “worthy ally” to compete against the all-mighty Google. Currently eBay spends a ton on Google AdWords, pretty much any search you do on Google, you get an ad for eBay in the sponsored results. Google also is a heavy indexer of eBay content in the organic results. This all leads to tons of referrals to eBay’s content from Google. The issue is, Google is now competing with eBay on several fronts, including a PayPal alternative, online auction service and Google’s other services such as Froogle and Base together lead to a huge competing e-commerce portal. Hence the need for eBay to make some changes in the future. The article at the WSJ has a nice write up with the details here.