Below, a recap of
stories posted today to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with other items we’ve spotted but not blogged
separately:
Today From The SEW Blog…
- Daily
SearchCast, May 19, 2006: What Parts Of Google Get The Most Traffic, Get Your
Google Collector Cards & More!
Today’s search podcast covers how Google web search remains what generates
most of Google’s traffic, new unofficial Google collector cards spotlighting
prominent employees and more! SearchReturn editor Detlev Johnson sat in for
Danny Sullivan, who is away this week. Tune-in by listening to this MP3 file,
listening via WebmasterRadio at 11:30am Eastern and repeated at 2pm Eastern
Tuesday through Friday, via our Odeo channel or through iTunes via this link
(or use alternative iTunes instructions explained here) or though our Yahoo
Podcasts channel. Need more help tuning in live or finding the chat room? See
the Daily SearchCast FAQ. Below… - Search
Headlines & Links: May 18, 2006
Below, a recap of stories posted yesterday to the Search Engine Watch Blog,
along with other items we’ve spotted but not blogged separately:… - Building
Better Search Interfaces: A Workshop About Exploratory Searches
When someone uses a search engine to try to locate information about a subject
which they know very little about, a simple search interface isn’t very
helpful. These types of endeavors have been referred to by information
scientists as exploratory search activities, where the target of the search is
mostly undefined. Gary Price, at Resource Shelf, pointed earlier today to a
paper from a University of Maryland workshop held last year, which brought
together researchers from the “fields of Information Seeking (IS), Information
Retrieval (IR), Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Information Visualization
(IV)” to take a closer look at how to… - Get Our
Search News At The Top Of Google & Other New Subscribed Links
I wrote earlier of our new Google subscribed link that allows you to get
search headlines from us at the top of your searches at Google. Haven’t tried
these yet? Check them out! Right now, for example, a search on the term “google”
would have given you these headlines (as shown in the blue box): My previous
post, Get Your SEW Subscribed Link For Google & Resources On Making Them,
explains more about the terms that trigger our news headlines on Google. Want
to sign-up? It’s easy, fast and free. Just click here to subscribe….
Microsoft’s Ecommerce Initiatives
This is a long overdue post to clear up confusion around Microsoft’s multiple
shopping sites which include MSN Shopping, Windows Live Shopping Beta, and
Windows Live Product Search Beta. The Marketplaces & Shopping team at
Microsoft also runs Windows Marketplace and Windows Live Expo but in this
post, I’m just covering the general ecommerce initiatives. MSN Shopping =
Microsoft’s core shopping comparison engine. MSN Shopping covers over 7,000
merchants and 33 million products. The beauty of a shopping comparison engine
like MSN Shopping is in its ability to normalize product pages – put simply,
item clustering (I’m borrowing that term…- Google
In Trouble Over Porn Again; This Time In Korea
Vnunet.com reports that Google is in trouble with Korean government officials
over exposing children to pornographic content in South Korea. It seems like
since Google pulls a snippet of content from the page it indexes on the search
results page, and since that content contains “obscene” language, Google
itself is “showing search results that contain sex-related keywords.” No word
from Google on this as of yet. Yesterday we reported Google being in trouble
with Brazil over child pornography allegations…. - Google’s
Main Search Accounts For 80% of Google’s Traffic
Bill Tancer from Hitwise has posted a detailed breakdown of the percentage
market share of the top twenty Google properties. Google.com holds almost 80%
of the share, followed by Google Image Search with almost 10%, then Gmail with
about 5.5%, followed by Google News with 1.5% and the others are all under 1%.
Bill also explains the trends show that “some of the latest Google offerings
have yet to capture significant market share in their category,” such as
Google Finance. There are some interesting stats to chew on by Bill Tancer…. - Google
Maps Australia and New Zealand
Finally, Australia gets mapped by Google Maps. Not only did Australia get
street level views, so did New Zealand. So if you are ever in Sydney, you
should be able to find your way to Canterbury, New Zealand. Spotted via
Philipp Lenssen, who also noted this past April that Google mapped in detail
Europe…. - Google
Reader For Mobile Phones
The Google Reader Blog announced that you can now use Google’s RSS reader,
Google Reader, on your mobile device. To access your RSS subscriptions at
Google Reader on your phone or mobile device, go to https://www.google.com/reader/m…. - Google
Collector’s Cards
Philipp Lenssen has been creating Google Collector’s Cards. So far he has
posted three, including; + Larry Page Collector?s Card + Eric Schmidt
Collector?s Card + Marissa Mayer Collector?s Card + Sergey Brin Collector?s
Card + Matt Cutts Collector?s Card Guess who will be coming next… :)… - Search
Forums Roundup: May 19, 2006
Today’s SearchDay, Search Engine Forums Spotlight, features our weekly links
to this week’s hot topics from search engine forums across the web: Matt Cutts
On Big Daddy: Major Message To SEOs – PPC Analytics Is Only Wishful Thinking –
Yahoo: Where to Start with Link SEO – Microsoft’s Ballmer: 5 years to catch
Google, Yahoo, and more….
Other Things We Read, Didn’t Blog But You Might Want To Read…
- Is
Google God?, Time (Sez Douglas Coupland, “Not so much Google itself, but
the way you feel after using it really intensely for a long time. Suddenly you
know the answer to everything.” Give me some time Doug to show you some
queries. There’s plenty they still don’t know!)
Whither Pay-Per-Call?, MediaPost
Think Organic, Act Paid, ClickZ
Google searching for users’ trust [for mobile search], InfoWorld
Yahoo! Health gets healthy looking makeover, Unofficial Yahoo Blog- Yahoo:
‘Searches more sophisticated and specific’, ZDNet
Alibaba CEO: EBay Is Beat In China; Baidu, Google Are Next, Dow Jones- Semel outlines
Yahoo plans for catching Google, Financial Times
AOL – From :-) to :-( – The Economist
Web U: Ten Steps to More Link Juice, OMMA
Yahoo Embraces Man Over Machine, MarketWatch- Riya heading into
Web search [for more images], Between The Lines
Yahoo sees no boost from ad system before 2007, Reuters