How do you help encourage the growth of a widgets or gadgets ecosystem? Being big is a good, natural start. It has helped people flock to develop Facebook applications or Yahoo Widgets or Google Gadgets, just for exposure to the traffic at these places. But Google wants to encourage with more than traffic. Now it's offering cold hard cash. Google Gadget Ventures is a new pilot program that will pay developers either $5,000 or $100,000 to create Google Gadgets that prove popular with users. "We've seen lots of people develop great applications for gadgets that we wouldn't have thought of [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Mobile | Google: Gadgets

Got a Google Gadget? Google's now reporting how many users make use of it, in addition to the pageviews figures it started posting earlier this year. The new user stats can be found via Google's Homepage Content Directory. There you'll see gadgets that can be added to your iGoogle personalized homepage, with the number of users shown directly under the gadget's name, as can be seen highlighted in the screenshot below: Click through to the gadget's home page, and you'll get both users and pageviews, such as shown below: Users are the number of logged-in Google users making use of th [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Mobile | Google: Gadgets | Google: iGoogle | Google: Reader

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Wired Mag Waxes Wordy About Maps & LocalFirst, for map and online mapping lovers, there is the piece, Google Maps Is Changing the Way We See the World, an interesting survey of the history of the mapping at Google, mashups, mapping APIs, Google's acquisition of Keyhole (now Google Earth) and user-generated content on maps (My Maps). Then... Internal Microsoft Email Compares Life At Google Vs. MicrosoftSlashdot linked to a blog post that has an internal [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Other | SearchCap

First, for map and online mapping lovers, there is the Wired piece, Google Maps Is Changing the Way We See the World, an interesting survey of the history of the mapping at Google, mashups, mapping APIs, Google's acquisition of Keyhole (now Google Earth) and user-generated content on maps (My Maps). Then there is the tiresome (though some will find it thrilling) Bruce Sterling (no relation) piece, courtesy of the Urban Mapping blog, Dispatches From the Hyperlocal Future, about user-generated content, geotagging, RFID, mobile devices, and location-based information delivery. At a high level it [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Local | Google: Maps & Local | Search Engines: Maps & Local Search Engines

Slashdot linked to a blog post that has what's said to be an internal Microsoft email with a comparison of working at Google versus working at Microsoft. The email is an interview between an ex-Google employee who Microsoft hired. Here are my top hits from this email: He compares Google employees to kids who have everything taken care of for them, from food to laundry. Since these kids "don’t have a life yet," this is perfect for them and they can be on email 24/7. "Google doesn’t seem to think that private offices are valuable for technical staff. They’re wrong." On management; [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Industry | Google: Employees | Microsoft: Employees

The Google Custom Search Engine blog announced the launch of the new APIs for Google Custom Search Engines. The new APIs enable you to better manage the linked CSE feature. In short, instead of you managing all the criteria on Google's console, you can manage it via your own tool by using this API. The API documentation can be found here. Eric Enge wrote a very clear explanation on how this works, with examples. [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Content | Google: APIs | Google: Custom Search Engine

It happens to many companies: their Wikipedia page evolves and starts reporting bad stats, inaccuracies, legal stories you thought were water under the bridge and more. Wikipedia is a web 2.0 success story, and almost always ranks on page one in Google search results for your brand. Anyone can make changes, and there is little you can do to keep the public from adding, expanding and telling your story, their way. While you can’t make it disappear, you there are things you can do to mitigate the visibility of any negative content on your company’s Wikipedia page. Wikipedia is a free-for [...]

Related Topics: Brand Aid | Channel: SEO | Search Engines: Wikipedia | Search Marketing: Branding | Search Marketing: Public Relations

SEMPO has announced their third training course, Advanced Search Advertising, is now live. Advanced Search Advertising consists of 13 lessons: An Evolving Opportunity, PPC Models, Keywords & Campaign, Copywriting for Ads, Bidding & Ranking, Landing Pages, Success Metrics, PPC Program Specifics, Reporting & Analytics, I.P. - Click Fraud - SPAM, Alternative PPC Search Engines, Feeds & Feed Advertising and Branding & Campaign. This course costs $2,250 and you can sign up over here. The two other courses include "Fundamentals of Search Marketing" and "Advanced Search Engine Optimization." "Adv [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Industry | SEM Industry: Organizations

AT&T's YellowPages.com, which was recently named the fastest growing Internet yellow pages site by comScore, has been testing a beta site with a dramatically improved design and user experience. Here's the new beta site. Almost everything on the new site, which has some glitches still, is a substantial improvement. Compare, for example, "Japanese restaurants, San Francisco" on the current site vs. the beta site. The new site also features improved refinements and navigation, including by zip and neighborhood. Among the other upgrades, mapping and personalization features have been improved [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Consumer | Search Engines: Maps & Local Search Engines

Hitwise sent me some data on the search volume for the term "iPhone." As many of you know, Apple is releasing the iPhone this Friday, and the press and craze over this product is unprecedented. Just take a glance at the coverage at Techmeme and you can see, the news reports are overwhelming, to say the least. I thought it would be interesting to show you some of the search volume trends we have seen for the term "iPhone". Hitwise told us that searches for "iphone" have increased 583 percent over the past four weeks, leading up to the June 29th launch. With that, visits to Apple's iPhone [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Search & Society: General | Stats: Hitwise | Stats: Search Behavior

The Inside AdSense Blog announced that they have added corner styles as a method of customizing your AdSense ads. Corner styles currently come in three styles, the default square, slightly rounded, and rounded corners. Here are images of all three: [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Display | Google: AdSense

MySpace, Chasing YouTube, Upgrades Its Offerings from the New York Times reports that MySpace will be launching MySpace TV tomorrow, to better compete against Google's YouTube. MySpace TV will be an independent site and will not require a user to have a MySpace ID. There will be integration between MySpace and MySpace TV, enabling MySpace users to display their videos easily within their profiles. MySpace TV will highlight "professional material," the New York Times reports, as opposed to homemade videos. MySpace has made deals with Sony for five-minute clips of '80s sitcoms such as "Diff [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Video | Google: YouTube & Video | Search Engines: Video Search Engines

Chris Tolles announced that he would be taking over the roll of CEO at Topix. Rich Skrenta, the former CEO of Topix, will be a member of the board and an advisor. Why the change? Chris explains that Rich wasn't having "as much fun" as he did in the past. Chris explained that Topix needs to focus on "tweaking" and marketing aspects, all of which are not at the top of Rich's fun list. So instead, Rich and Chris decided to make this management change. Topix reached the top 20 most visited news and info sites in March 2007 according to Hitwise. [...]

Related Topics: Business Issues: General | Channel: Industry | Search Engines: News Search Engines

If you can believe it, Marchex has simultaneously launched more than 100,000 local and vertical search sites representing over a billion pages. The move is probably unprecedented outside of a search index. In May 2006, Marchex acquired local search site OpenList and has used its technology assets and methodology to enable this launch. Before this acquisition, its domain portfolio business was essentially a collection of links to advertisers. Now sites like Cuisine.com or BayAreaHotels.com or 10013.com, among scores of others, are real sites with navigation, search, user-generated content and [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Consumer | Search Engines: Maps & Local Search Engines

Every in-house SEO program follows a typical life cycle that has for main phases: Courtship, Honeymoon, Reality and Synergy. The duration of time it takes to get from Courtship to Synergy varies with each company, and it can also very for each division within a company. Today’s in-house article will give you an overview of the in-house SEO life cycle so that you can predict the road ahead, minimize the severity of the Reality Phase and sail into Synergy as soon as possible. The four phases of an in-house SEO life cycle Courtship Phase. Your company wants to find the best candidate to s [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Search | In House Search Marketing

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Flickr User Names Now Linked Within Yahoo Image SearchLoren Baker reported that Yahoo Image Search is now hyperlinking the usernames of Flickr accounts for images found within Flickr. For example, a Yahoo Image search for danny sullivan returns many images, and many from Flickr. The Yahoo Image Search results that are from Flickr have a hyperlink to the... Search Illustrated: The Power Of Link Baiting Link Baiting is the latest in a procession of strat [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Other | SearchCap

Yahoo Image Search now contains photos from Yahoo's Flickr photo sharing service, ironically catching Yahoo up to Google, Microsoft and Ask.com -- all of which already included Flickr photos in their respective image search engines. Yahoo blogged about the change: Now when you use Yahoo! Image Search, in addition to the billions of images we crawl from the Web, you've got access to over 300 million images from the amazing community of photographers on Flickr. As noted in both the Yahoo post and Search Engine Journal's story on the integration, Flickr photos shown in Yahoo Image Search ha [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Consumer | Search Engines: Photo & Image Search | Yahoo: Images | Yahoo: Search

Link Baiting is the latest in a procession of strategies search marketers have concocted over the years to ease the often laborious but absolutely necessary process of getting other web sites to link to your pages. Search Engine Land contributing writer Nick Wilson is often credited with coining the phrase linkbaiting, and SEL columnists write about the topic frequently. There's also an excellent roundup of linkbait resources at The Enormous Linkbait list. But linkbaiting can get complicated, so today's Search Illustrated graphic illustrates the benefits of the approach in a simple, straig [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Other | Infographics | Search Illustrated

Google Blogoscoped reports that Google News has added a link to the left bar that enables you to view an image version of Google News. I suspect Google found out that a picture, really does, tells a thousand words. If you mouse over an image, the news on the right hand side scrolls to focus in on the news related to that picture. Here is a screen capture of the image version of Google News. There is also a text version of Google News, if images are not your thing. Google's Gabriel Stricker sent me some more information about this: Google News Image Version allows users a better way to [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Content | Google: News

An Ingenio sponsored survey conducted by Harris Interactive, released today, captured a broad range of user attitudes and behaviors toward mobile phones and mobile advertising. The survey polled just over 4,000 adults in the US. Among other things, it confirmed that more people own mobile phones than landlines and that users were most receptive to the equivalent of paid-search ads vs. other types of mobile advertising. Below are some of the highlights from the survey findings. Forty-nine percent of mobile phone owners currently use their phones for more than just making and receiving phone [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Search Ads: Mobile Search | Search Marketing: Mobile | Stats: General | Stats: Search Behavior