Search Month: May 2007 Search News, In Review

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Jun. 11, 2007 at 3:49pm Eastern by Danny Sullivan

Search Month: May 2007 Search News, In Review

Search Month is a monthly newsletter that recaps stories covered on Search Engine Land over the past month. It's also available by feed here. Below, news about Search Engine Land itself, then our 10 most popular stories from May 2007, then a major story for various search topics along with other stories related to those topics since our last monthly newsletter through today (May 6 through June 11). Apologies on the week delay with this month's edition!

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Search Engine Land News
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Last month was huge for Search Engine Land and our parent company, Third Door Media, with lots of developments!

Search Engine Land gained new individual "Lands," guides to particular aspects of search and search marketing. You can reach these via the new "Land" buttons or tabs now at the top of each page in the site. In addition, you can now subscribe to any of our search columns via email. To sign-up, just use our new columns page. Two new columns, "Brand Aid" and "Search Illustrated," were also added last month.

Our first conference -- SMX Advanced -- was held last week in Seattle and sold out. It generated great buzz from attendees, and we're looking forward to making it even better next year. But first, we have a range of other SMX events coming up, including new ones happening in Europe and our big "SMX West" show that will happen next February in California.

More about the SMX shows and changes to Search Engine Land are covered in the posts below:

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Top 10 Most Popular Stories: May 2007
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Google 2.0: Google Universal Search - Google is undertaking the most radical change to its search results ever, introducing a "Universal Search" system that will blend listings from its news, video, images, local and book search engines among those it gathers from crawling web pages.

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Google's New Navigational Links: An Illustrated Guide - After months of testing, Google is rolling out new ways to navigate within its search results and between different Google properties. Here's an illustrated guide to the old and new.

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Google Says Stephen Colbert Is No Longer The Greatest Living American - Sadness, Colbert fans! Last month, I reported in Google Declares Stephen Colbert As Greatest Living American how Stephen Colbert had defied Google's link bombing defenses and rose to be the greatest living American, according to a search for those words at Google. Today, it is no longer so. Google has dissed Colbert.

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iGoogle, Personalized Search And You - Yesterday was "Google Personalization Day." We spent roughly two hours touring the history of personalized search at Google, the genesis of these products and getting a glimpse of where it all might be going.

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Class Action Suit Filed Against Yahoo Over "Defective" Search Ad Platform - Lerach Coughlin, a law firm with a reputation for going after companies who have allegedly engaged in financial shenanigans, has filed a class action lawsuit against Yahoo, charging "Yahoo and certain of its officers and directors with violations of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934." Essentially, the suit claims that Yahoo's search advertising technology was "operationally defective" and that Yahoo officials misled both advertisers and investors about the company's advertising capabilities, especially when compared with competitors.

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Google & Dell's Revenue-Generating URL Error Pages Drawing Fire - Last year, Google signed a landmark deal to become the default search engine on new Dell computers, plus to bundle Google software. Now, people are noting anew that a consequence of the deal seems to be pushing Dell users to search results dominated by Google ads, rather than editorial listings.

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Google Meme: Hot Trends Added To Google Trends - Google has launched a meme-like feature to Google Trends. The Google Trends home page now has a section named "Hot Trends," which shows the hottest queries for the day. You can also look back historically and see the hottest queries for that day.

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Goodbye Yahoo Photos; Yahoo Loves Flickr More - Yahoo is to close its popular Yahoo Photos service completely in the coming months, telling people to either switch to Flickr or leave to a number of other competing photo sharing services.

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Yahoo Supports New Robots-Nocontent Tag To Block Indexing Within A Page - For over a decade, search engines have supported standards allowing you to prevent pages from being spidered or included within a search index. Today, Yahoo now supports a new twist -- a way to flag that part of your page shouldn't be included in an index. It's called the robots-nocontent tag.

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Google Searchology Day: Recap Of Announcements - It's Searchology Day today at Google, where the company is devoting time to look at the past, present and future of search at Google.

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Analytics
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Detailed Comparison & Review Of Web Analytics Software Underway - StoneTemple Consulting is in the process of conducting a 2007 Web Analytics Shootout where they are comparing five different web analytics packages. The software packages included in the comparison are Clicktracks, Google Analytics, IndexTools, Unica Affinium NetInsight, and WebSideStory HX Analytics. Most people have their own preference, but what I am hoping to see come from the final report is an objective answer on the most valuable analytics package on the market. However, you can currently see a lot of data from the interim report. See also:

Google Analytics Launches New Version With New UI & Features

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AOL
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AOL Buys Third Screen Media Ad Network - Seemingly in parallel with the land grab going on online, mobile M&A is heating up. Earlier this month, Microsoft acquired EU ad firm ScreenTonic and prior to that voice services and directory provider Tellme. Today, mobile ad network Third Screen Media went to AOL and will become a subsidiary of Advertising.com. See also:

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Ask.com
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Ask Relaunches: Now "Ask 3D" - Chris Sherman once compared Ask.com to Apple. Ask CEO Jim Lanzone remarked to me that he liked the comparison because it spoke to quality and innovativeness. Indeed, among the top-tier search engines Ask has arguably been the most innovative. In one sense it has to be. Without that effort it might lose hold on the roughly 5 percent search market share it currently has. But the site has never gotten the notice and usage that Lanzone feels is justified. That may change with the introduction of the new Ask -– "Ask 3D." The company is touting the release as a "major leap forward" for search. A bold three-panel interface (taken from the experimental Ask X) integrates more multimedia content, including images, videos, music files, as well as more structured text-based content. It also offers a battery of impressive features – new and existing – to bring more context and help to search results.

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Ask: Mobile
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Forty-Eight Hours With Ask Mobile - On Friday I received a briefing on Ask Mobile (with GPS) and a demo phone with the application pre-installed. I now have three mobile devices that I'm carrying: a traditional cellphone, a Windows Mobile device and the Ask Mobile demo phone. It's quite a challenge to physically manage all these devices as I walk and drive around. I've been testing Ask Mobile casually beside Google Maps for Windows Mobile, Microsoft's Live Search/Local Mobile application and WAP-based Yahoo oneSearch, which just rolled out yesterday to a broad range of Asian countries. This post offers some preliminary reactions to Ask Mobile based on an initial weekend of testing. One big caveat: I haven't been able to test the sharing and social features, which are potentially most compelling aspect of the service, because Ask Mobile is not integrated with my contacts. (Almost anything in the application can be shared with your contacts.)

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B2B
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A New Place To Face-to-Face: B2B Social Networking - I recently saw a study by the market research firm, Keller Fay Group which was sponsored by experiential marketing agency Jack Morton Worldwide that concluded that word of mouth is the #1 influence on business purchase decisions and is best leveraged through face-to-face marketing efforts. The study's conclusion was based on the fact that 50% of the respondents polled reported that they were highly likely to buy a product or service based on word of mouth; while 49% passed on what they've heard to others. The study goes on to say that "Business decision-makers most value communication channels that provide two-way dialog." See also:

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Business & Revenues
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WPP Grabs 24/7 Real Media For $649 Million - UK based global advertising firm WPP has acquired the publicly traded 24/7 Real Media for a whopping $649 million. The company was previously being looked at by Microsoft (for $1 billion) according to rumor. It follows on the heels of several high-profile acquisitions, including Yahoo's intended purchase of Right Media and Google's planned acquisition of DoubleClick. On a smaller scale ad firm Interpublic bought SEM Reprise Media last month. WPP already has investments in VideoEgg, mobile search firm JumpTap and Spot Runner. See also:

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Click Fraud
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Billable Click Fraud Is 10% to 15%, Says Fair Isaac - Fair Isaac Claims Pay-Per-Click Fraud Is 10% to 15% from InformationWeek says Fair Isaac is going to report today that it has found the click fraud rate of billed paid search and contextual advertising to be 10 to 15 percent, though the figures are based on what the Associated Press characterized as being a "handful" of web sites. The rate is much higher than what Google has reported and closer to the 14.8 percent rate the Click Fraud Index recently found. However, the definition of "billed" could be crucial.

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Google: AdSense
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Google AdSense Says Don't Worry About Accidental Clicks, No One Will Notice - Accidents happen from the Google Inside AdSense blog today caught my eye. Apparently, lots of publishers accidentally click on their ads and write in to Google to say sorry. Don't worry, says Google, "chances are we've already detected your clicks on your ads and discounted them." Bull. Seriously, bull. Here's an example. Over on my personal blog Daggle, I have AdSense ads. If I accidentally click on one of those ads, how does Google know that it was me the blog owner that did that and thus automatically issues a credit? See also:

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Google: AdWords
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Things You Can't Advertise On Google: Guns, Booze & Now Essay Writing - Google will no longer accept ads for essay writing services. This ban on essay writing ads comes after many complaints over the integrity of university degrees. The BBC reports that universities "warmly welcomed" this ban. See also:

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Google: Acquisitions
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Google Confirms Acquisition Of FeedBurner - The Google Blog has confirmed the rumors upon rumors that they have acquired FeedBurner. Google said they have acquired them to give "AdWords advertisers broader distribution to an even wider audience of users." See also:

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Google: Book Search
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Google Book Search Expands - Although Google currently has a wealth of books in their Google Book Search database, this isn't enough either for them or us, so they've taken steps to improve the situation. If you now do a search, you'll find references to millions of books that they haven't yet digitized. You can then click on an "About the Book" page where you can find basic book information such as author, title, publication date, and where possible, reviews and web references. See also:

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Google: Business Issues
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Google Gets A Tag Line: "Search, Ads & Apps" - To my knowledge, Google never had a tag line. Yesterday, it announced it had gained one: "Search, Ads & Apps." But wasn't the tag line "Don't Be Evil?" Or wasn't it something about organizing the world's information? Come along, and I'll try to sort it out. See also:

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Google: Maps
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Google Street View Raises Privacy Questions: Amusing To Some, Upsetting To Others - Privacy is back – or at least the issue is back. A range events, announcements and investigations over the past several months have put privacy back in the headlines. And today the links are coming in showing funny, revealing or potentially embarrassing photos of people on Google's new Street View photography. See also:

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Google: Mobile
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Google Provides More Hints On Mobile Phone Rumors - Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO, revealed more information on Google's mobile phone plans. While Schmidt did not confirm rumors to build their own phone, it is believed that Google is building a mobile phone operating system. Schmidt said, "the new model of these phones is going to be person-to-person," when talking about the types of applications Google is working on for mobile devices. See also:

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Google: News Search
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Revealing The Sources Of Google News - American journalists and news reporters never reveal their sources. Google News follows suit, nowhere providing a list of the more than 4,500 English language news sources it claims to track. However, Henk van Ess, an investigative journalist from the Netherlands, offers a service that reveals the names of 1,256 news sources used by Google News in the US. This service is called Google News Report. It fetches the headlines from Google News on a schedule, but only headlines on the home page are fetched. See also:

Google Denies New UK News Search Deal

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Google: SEO Issues
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Insight Into Google's Search Quality Efforts - "Google Keeps Tweaking Its Search Engine" from the New York Times has some deep insight into the workings of Google's search quality team. See also:

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Google: Searching
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Google Experimental: Opt-In To Google User Interface Experiments - Google is constantly testing new user interface layouts that are presented to a randomly selected group of searchers. Each experiment sparks off a round of screenshots and sometimes hacks on how others can try out what's new. Now Google is making it easy for those who want to live their search lives on the edge. Google Experimental is a new service that allows you to opt-in to interface tests. See also:

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Google: TV, Video & Radio Ads
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Google Releases Audio Ads To Public While eBay Begins Radio Ad Auction Push - Google announced they have completed their audio ad test and is now in the process of rolling out audio ads to all US advertisers. See also:

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Google: Universal Search
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Google: Video & YouTube
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YouTube Adds Related Videos To Embedded Players - The YouTube blog announced that they have now added related views to videos embedded on external sites. We saw hints of this coming when we saw YouTube testing a new player. So view the related videos, just mouse over the video as it is playing on your browser. You will then see a Mac dock genie like affect in the video, that shows related videos. If you do not want related videos to show up, you can simply add rel=0 to the URL parameter of the code. Examples can be found at the YouTube blog.

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Google: Other Products
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Google Gears Brings Offline Web Applications To Life - Today at Google Developer Day 2007, Google released Google Gears. Google Gears is a browser extension that will help developers create offline web applications in the open source framework. Gears is powered by JavaScript APIs enabling data storage, application caching, and multi-threading technologies for offline browsing and application use. Google Reader is the first online application to offer "Gears-enabled offline capabilities," Google told me. So you would load up Google Reader while you are online, it will download your feeds. See also:

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Link Building
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Foundational Links Don't Split, Crack Or Get Dugg Up - A lot of business owners I work with understand they need inbound links but aren't sure how to get started or prioritize their efforts. I suggest they begin by establishing a base of links from authority sites that work toward building their business reputations. I refer to these as foundational links and believe they are the cornerstone to all SEO and marketing efforts. See also:

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Local Search & Maps
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Taking Care Of Business By Taking Care Of The Customer: Five Tips For Local Search - Keep the needs of consumers at the forefront. In my last couple “Locals Only” columns, I’ve mentioned the importance of this in passing, and this month I’m dedicating this space to expanding on this notion and offering specific tips. Much of what is said and written about the emergence and growth of local search focuses on the financial potential, advertising opportunities, commercial applications, etc. Obviously, none of the bullish financial projections matter if there is not a vibrant and growing base of satisfied and engaged customers. And to build that, you need to understand your customer. See also:

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Microsoft: adCenter
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Microsoft To Offer adCenter Accreditation - Microsoft will soon be offering individual and agency level accreditation programs for adCenter advertisers. I am not sure of the exact date, but I expect it some time in 2007. Both Yahoo and Google offer accreditation programs for their advertisers. See also:

Microsoft Thinking Of Testing Mouse Over Image Ads In Live.com Search Results

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Microsoft: Book Search
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Microsoft Adds In-Copyright Books & New Features To Live Search Books - Today Microsoft announced that they have added in-copyright books to Live Search Books. Microsoft said they have only included books that their publishing partners have given permission to include. In addition, Live Search Books upgraded their design to enable two pane browsing of books. On the left pane are book details with "search inside the book" features, while on the right pane is the book itself. Microsoft says this "makes it easy to scan and preview search results."

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Microsoft: Business Issues
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Microsoft To Acquire Online Marketing Firm aQuantive For $6 Billion - A day after 24/7 Real Media was acquired by WPP, Microsoft announced plans buy digital ad firm aQuantive, which owns Atlas and Avenue A | Razorfish, for $6 billion in cash. It is apparently the biggest acquisition in Microsoft's history. See also:

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Microsoft: Live Search
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Imagine Live Search - Microsoft's Test Site Launches - Imagine Live Search is a new experimental search engine from Windows Live. Like those from Ask (Ask X), Google (SearchMash) and Yahoo (Alpha), it provides a mixture of results all on the same page. Below is a look at Microsoft's new test bed search engine, Imagine Live Search, as well as a comparison to the other test bed search engines from the other providers. See also:

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Microsoft: Maps & Local
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Microsoft Virtual Earth Expands 3-D Coverage To Include New York - When Microsoft debuted Live Search Maps/Virtual Earth in 3-D last November there were many "oohs" and "aahs" but there was also the question: "Where's New York?" It was not among the original 3-D cities that the Virtual Earth team rolled out. Now that omission has been rectified with the launch this morning of New York and a range of other U.S. cities and Ottawa, Canada. See also:

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Mobile Search
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Virgin Mobile USA To Offer JumpTap Local Search - Virgin Mobile USA, which has been working since December with private-label mobile search provider JumpTap, announced that it would add now add local mobile search. Users will be able to type a query and their zip, city or state to get local information. See also:

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Paid Search & Contextual
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Direct Navigation And Domain Empires - Business 2.0 has a fairly comprehensive cover story about domain portfolios and "direct navigation." It starts off with a profile of Vancouver entrepreneur Kevin Ham ("The Man Who Owns the Internet"), who operates a $300 million domain "empire" but goes on to discuss others who have become wealthy from domain speculation, parking and domain portfolio ownership. The ads on Ham's domains are served by Yahoo. See also:

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Privacy & Security
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Google Bad On Privacy? Maybe It's Privacy International's Report That Sucks - It's a bad privacy day for Google, with Privacy International first accusing the company of having the worst privacy performance of any internet service company in a study it has just released and then accusing Google of conducting a smear campaign against it. But if you actually read the report, Privacy International itself comes off bad for putting out a haphazard condemnation of Google. See also:

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Searching
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Mahalo Launches With Human-Crafted Search Results - Mahalo, the expected people-powered search engine backed by Jason Calacanis, has now gone live in an early "Alpha" test release. In Mahalo, human editors have crafted the top search results for popular queries. For example, search for [paris hotels], and human editors at Mahalo have assembled a page that lists actual hotels in Paris rather than hotel aggregation/booking sites that you see at Google. See also:

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Search Marketing Industry
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IAB: Search Continues To Lead Online Ad Spending - The IAB released its full-year 2006 Internet Advertising Revenue Report (here, PDF file) today. U.S. Internet ad spending was worth a total of $16.9 billion, with search accounting for 40 percent or around $6.8 billion, "up 31 percent from the $5.1 billion reported in 2005." See also:

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SEO & SEM
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13 Tips For Getting Page One Search Rankings - How do you get what you want on page one for your brand phrases? When facing negative content at the top of the SERPs, it’s a challenge many companies want to conquer very quickly. The good news is that it is doable; it’s just that not many people talk about how to do it. If you have unfavorable content ranking for your brand, the best approach is to just get the favorable sites on the Internet to outrank the unfavorable site, pushing the unfavorable down to page two. How do you do this? You merely need to give the favorable sites a nudge, by increasing their link popularity. See also:

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Small Business SEM
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11 Steps to Developing a Web Literacy - The Web reaches out to embrace businesses online, even if the owners of those businesses hesitate at the attempt. There are many that haven't taken the step of placing themselves on the internet, and yet they are there, even without a Web site. They may appear in business directories, with name and address and phone number taken from telephone service provider information. A customer may have shared their thoughts and impressions about the company in a review site. A forum discussion may focus on the goods or services offered by the business. For those of us working on the Web everyday, it may be hard to recall the days when we sent our first email, or created our earliest forum profile, or typed our first query into a search engine search box. Yet there are many business owners who haven't perceived a need to have a homepage, or contemplated the notion of looking up their business name in Google or Yahoo. See also:

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Social Media
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eBay Buys StumbleUpon - As expected, eBay has purchased StumbleUpon for about $75 million. “StumbleUpon is a great fit within our goal of pioneering new communities based on commerce and sustained by trust,” said Michael Buhr, senior director, eBay. “StumbleUpon’s downloadable toolbar provides an engaging and unique experience to its users, but it is the similarities in our approaches to the concept of community that make it such a compelling addition to eBay.” See also:

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Video & Image Search
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Exalead Adds Image Search, Facial Recognition Capabilities - Exalead, a search engine that's popular among librarians and information professionals thanks to its array of advanced search capabilities, has added an image search function for more than 1 billion images on the web. Included in the image search tool is the ability to drill down on human faces, thanks to integration of LTU Technologies' leading facial recognition software. Image search functions include: See also:

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Wikipedia
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George Washington Did What According To Wikipedia??? - Many have joked about how Wikipedia seems to rank at the top of practically any Google search that you do. Often, that's a good thing, as Wikipedia has lots of great information. But a search on george washington today shows a downside. Someone edited the start of the Wikipedia entry about the first US president to be less than flattering. Google spidered the entry, and that material was used to form the description of Washington's Wikipedia page, as shown below. See also:

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Yahoo: Business Issues
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Yahoo Share Holders Asks To Vote Against CEO's Salary - Two independent proxy advisory firms are asking to shareholders to vote against the reelection of three of the board members who are responsible for approving Yahoo CEO Terry Semel's $71 million compensation package. See also:

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Yahoo: Closures
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Yahoo Closing Webjay - Odd. Just a year and a half after buying music playlist sharing site Webjay, Yahoo is closing the service. See also:

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Yahoo: Paid Search
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Yahoo Search Marketing Begins Quality-Based Pricing - The next phase of Yahoo's new search marketing platform, aka Panama, has been announced today with quality-based pricing. The new quality-based pricing will impact both the search network and the content network. Now, an advertiser's cost may be discounted based on several factors, including "publisher conversion rates, traffic source and implementation type," Yahoo told me. See also:

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Yahoo: SEO Issues
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Yahoo Finalizes Slurps Move To New Address - The Yahoo Search Blog announced the transition of Yahoo Slurp, Yahoo's web crawler, from inktomisearch.com to crawl.yahoo.net is now complete. The IP addresses and the user-agent are remaining the same but the DNS lookup is different, it is now crawl.yahoo.net. This does not apply to other Yahoo crawlers, including Yahoo China, Yahoo Shopping, Yahoo Travel and other Yahoo crawlers that have their own user agents. See also:

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Yahoo: Maps & Local
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Yahoo Creates Home Values Meta Search - Zestimates from Zillow have proven to be a tremendous hit with the public, although they've been criticized for being too high or too low in some cases. Now Yahoo has taken Zillow's home valuation data (they've had a partnership for several months) and combined it with similar data from other providers, eppraisal.com and reply.com, in a new and improved Home Values section of Yahoo Real Estate. See also:

Yahoo Maps Get A Makeover

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Yahoo: Other
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Yahoo Travel Adds Personalization, New Maps - Yahoo Travel has redesigned and added a range of features, including personalization and new mapping tools to the site. It's also seeking to more deeply integrate travel properties FareChase (its fares and rates "meta search" engine) and Trip Planner (its user-generated content site) into Travel. Flickr is also well represented throughout the redesign. I'm not going to be able to capture every nuance or aspect of the upgrade and all the new features, but I'll highlight the main ones. See also:

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Fun Stuff & Other Things
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"Natalie Portman" Most Searched For Star Wars Term - For the 30 year anniversary of Star Wars, Lycos has compiled a list of the top search terms related to Star Wars, used by those at the Lycos site. Leading the list overall is Natalie Portman. Portman also tops the "real people" list, while the top Star Wars character is Oola. See also:

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