In this week’s Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have and more.
Three new SEO tools came out this week that are worth a look. Dave Naylor released a robots.txt builder tool, while SEOmoz released term targeting and crawl test tools. Some more about the tools, below:
It’s official. Stephen Colbert is the Greatest Living American, or at least now ranks tops for that phrase at Google. It’s all come from the latest Google bombing campaign sparked off in part by Stephen himself. The backstory on this, plus the “I thought Google bombing didn’t work anymore” angle, all below. Jonah Stein […]
Google draws privacy complaint to FTC from News.com reports three organizations are going to file a joint complaint today with the Federal Trade Commission over Google’s proposed acquisition of DoubleClick. The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), along with the Center for Digital Democracy (CDD) and the U.S. Public Interest Research Groups (U.S. PIRG) are all […]
The Paid Links Economy from Philipp Lenssen at Google Blogoscoped is a nice, thoughtful follow-up to last week’s paid links debate that erupted after Google’s Matt Cutts featured a new way to report paid links. There’s plenty of the history of link buying and assorted comments, though Philipp’s article doesn’t really leave you with any […]
Yesterday, Click Forenics released its quarterly Click Fraud Index showing a purported increase in click fraud from 14.2 percent in Q4 ’06 to 14.8 percent in Q1. By contrast, Google argues that “click fraud” constitutes less than 0.02 percent of all clicks. Chris Sherman earlier summarized the Click Forensics findings. Click Forensics’ CEO Tom Cuthbert […]
This week’s announcement of Google’s new AdWords Preferred Cost Bidding may have been a whimper compared to the bang of its DoubleClick acquisition news. But the two events may be related in a way that could spell trouble ahead for the paid search bid management companies like Atlas, Omniture, KeyWordMax, etc. Preferred Cost Bidding allows […]
Google announced that they have acquired Marratech‘s video conferencing software (not the company, just its software).
StumbleUpon, a search service that displays recommended sites for users based on interest profiles, has released StumbleThru, a service that searches for content from some of the most popular sites on the web, including Flickr, MySpace, Wikipedia, YouTube, BBC, CNN, and Physorg. This makes it easy to discover new content on these sites that has […]
Google’s Search History feature, which was switched on as a default option for many Google searchers in February, has now been renamed Web History to reflect how it has expanded to track what Google users do as they surf the web. It’s a huge move for Google and raises anew privacy issues. Below, a detailed […]
Google announced first quarter earnings for 2007 showed revenues of $3.66 billion, an increase of 63% compared to the first quarter of 2006 — and an increase in profits of 69%. You can see the financial tables for the first quarter of 2007, plus the earnings call is archived, and a full transcript will be […]
Events are an important but historically neglected area of local search, previously the almost exclusive province of newspapers and printed weeklies. Now there are a range of startups and more established sites providing local events information. They include Socializr, Attendio, Eventful, Zvents, Citysearch, AOL Cityguide, Heyletsgo, Jambase, the various ticket sites and Yahoo’s Upcoming, among […]
In my story about Google’s new content removal tools, I highlighted the fact that anyone can potentially wipe out the cached copy of a page, even if they aren’t the page’s author. To illustrate this, I was going to use as an example how the official George W. Bush page’s cached copy could get nixed. […]
Soon, Google will quietly begin changing the way it blends news results and standard web search results, co-mingling links to news sources and web pages if your search terms are relevant to current news events. The new format will replace OneBox news links that have normally appeared at the top of a search result page, […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web:
Click Forensics, the company that maintains the Click Fraud Index, a network that monitors and reports on data gathered from more than 3,500 online advertisers and their agencies, has released its most recent quarterly report on click fraud. The company found that the overall industry average click fraud rate was 14.8 percent for Q1 2007 […]
Google might be receiving a letter from the European Union’s Article 29 Data Protection Working Party relating to the company’s data retention policies. What’s in the letter — if there are concerns, requests, demands — is unknown at this point. No one yet seems to have a copy of the actual letter, not even Google.
Chinese couple sues Yahoo for man’s imprisonment from Reuters reports that Wang Xiaoning and his wife Yu Ling have sued Yahoo in the U.S. District Court for Northern California for allegedly helping the Chinese government prosecute Wang Xiaoning. The filing said that Xiaoning was in custody, he was “subjected to torture and cruel, inhuman or […]
Experian has acquired Hitwise for about $240 million. Experian posted and Hitwise posted their respective press releases on the announcement.
Vanessa Fox of Google Webmaster Central announced an upgrade to their anchor text reports. Anchor text reporting was added last month, as Danny’s Google Now Reporting Anchor Text Phrases article covers. In that, he had some wish list items. The new features include some of those and other changes:
Judy’s Book, which has gone through a very interesting and very public change in its business model – from local directory with reviews to shopping site – has now launched a search engine for deals and coupons: CouponLooker.com. It seeks to be an aggregator of deals online to enable people to find them more quickly […]
An online business owner basically has two choices when it comes to their website marketing efforts. They can outsource it or they can do it in-house. Both of these options bring a number of secondary options to choose from and its up to the business owner to do what is best for his or her […]
QueryCat is a search engine that is designed to search frequently asked questions, and they claim to have the largest database of these, by using the Alexa web crawler. They have apparently indexed over 2 million questions and answers (though this information isn’t on the website) which is a fair number. I tried lots of […]
Judge won’t dismiss Google trademark suit from Reuters reports that the long-standing lawsuit over keywords linked to trademarked terms filed by American Blinds against Google will continue to trial. Google’s request for summary judgment has been denied. Google’s won in two similar suits within the US. Courtesy of Gary Price, you can get a copy […]
Back in December 2002, Google launched its long expected product and shopping search engine. It was called Froogle, a combination of “frugal” and “Google.” Just over four years later, Froogle is finally losing its cutesy name for something more descriptive — to become Google Product Search. It will also gain a cleaner interface, as well. […]
The blogosphere is abuzz with rumors that eBay is acquiring StumbleUpon, but they’re “just rumors,” Garrett Camp, one of StumbleUpon’s founders just told me on the phone. “There have been rumors before and that’s what they are now,” Camp said. Of course, if the company is in play, Camp would likely be bound by non-disclosure […]
Google is rolling out two features today that subtly but meaningfully enhance the level of personalization offered to anyone with a Google account. And while they’re tied to your search behavior, they don’t directly alter the standard search results you see, even if you’ve enabled personalization by searching while signed in to Google account. The […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web:
Lee Odden spotted Google testing this very unusual user interface. In short, some of his searches are displaying Google results that are grouped by category. I used Lee’s screen capture and cropped it a bit to fit here.
Rumor after rumor after rumor keeps appearing that Google is to release its own mobile phone, the Gphone. In April 2007, we originally compiled all these Google Phone rumors into a timeline view. Since then, we’ve continued to update the list, so that the confused, perplexed or just plain curious can keep track of what’s […]
Google has developed one of the most complete local databases online and it is continuing to seek to enhance that information with third party deals. The latest such deal will integrate classifieds, business listings and coupons from Southern CA-based PennySaver, which is published by Harte-Hanks.
A reader sent us a screen capture of Google News now showing a link to add news searches to Google Reader.
Via Google Blogoscoped, another round of the Google services navigation testing, where Google has put the “Other Searches” links normally above the search box at the top of the page. This type of placement was first spotted last month on both the Google home page and on search results pages. The latest version changes the […]
Yahoo has renewed their search partnership with United Online, the company behind brands like NetZero, Juno and Bluelight. The multi-year exclusive deal, will allow Yahoo to continue to provide sponsored search and web search results to United Online’s brands. The full press release is available over here.
Last night Yahoo posted (PDF) their 2007 first quarter earnings. Yahoo showed a decline in their profits by 11 percent. Revenue was up about 9 percent, excluding certain payments to partners. However, MarketWatch notes “the revenue Yahoo generates for every search using its Internet search engine dipped in the quarter by about 7%, contributing to […]
Although corporate brands are vitally important in driving B2B sales, B2B brands are often reliant on channel partners to sell products and services to end users. And while manufacturers and others offer traditional co-branding marketing tools, they often fail miserably at driving traffic to distributors, dealers, and other channel partners through B2B search marketing. Channel […]
Google has rolled out new tools to help people quickly get content removed from its search engine. Those targeted at site owners allow for speedy removal of pages and cached copies of pages. Other tools allow those to request the removal of images or links to pages with personal information about themselves, in the right […]
Building on their existing alliance, Yahoo and PayPal today announced that Yahoo Sponsored Search results will feature a blue shopping cart icon linking to merchants that accept PayPal Express Checkout as a method of payment. Participating merchants’ search listings on Yahoo will be enhanced with the shopping cart icon, pointing consumers to a bright orange […]
Google adds presentation software to Google Docs from Reuters has Google CEO Eric Schmidt confirming the rumors that Google will be rolling out presentation software within the Google Docs suite.
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web: