EU OKs German Online Search-Engine Grant from Forbes reports Theseus, a German search research project, has received a $165 million grant from the European Union. Theseus aims to develop an advanced multimedia search engine. The EU will allow German subsidy of the project through 2011. We covered news in the past about this search project […]
When you make the decision to build an in-house team to manage the search marketing function for your company, the biggest challenge that you’ll face is where to actually find the first person that will be the one to create and mold your in-house team. Do you want to hire an experienced search marketing person, […]
Ask.com announced that they will be launching "AskEraser" in the near future, a feature to allow you to erase your search history. Ask also said it will be implementing a new 18 month data retention policy, where searches will be disassociated from IP addresses or cookies that might possibly be used to link them back […]
The Yahoo Search Blog announced that they are currently rolling out a web search update. Priyank Garg’s “weather report” said: We’ve been rolling out some changes to our fresh web data and crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the last few days. We expect the update will be completed by the weekend. You may see […]
Here’s the Microsoft earnings release: “Microsoft Corp. today announced revenue of $13.37 billion for the quarter ended June 30, 2007, a 13% increase over the same period of the prior year.” Online Services Business is the category where search and other ad revenues are reported. Here’s what the release shows: OSB revenue increased driven primarily […]
Earlier this month, we started the Google Free Friday series, designed to open readers’ eyes to search engines beyond Google. AOL happened on schedule, then I had to move Ask.com to this past Monday, as I got behind in writing as we launched our Sphinn social news and sharing site. Microsoft’s day was supposed to […]
Google just reported Q2 revenues: “Google reported revenues of $3.87 billion for the quarter ended June 30, 2007, representing a 58% increase over second quarter 2006 revenues of $2.46 billion and a 6% increase over first quarter 2007 revenues of $3.66 billion.” Revenues were somewhat short of high-end Wall Street expectations and shares were down […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
Local search destination Local.com, which recently announced two local and mobile search patents, has acquired PremierGuide for approximately $2 million. PremierGuide is a white label provider of local search functionality and listings to third party publisher sites (newspapers and local TV affiliates) and has a large roster of clients. I have some additional detail on […]
I admit it. I am a search engine geek. Because I have a passion for understanding search usability, one of my particular interests is duplicate content filtering. If you want to really irritate searchers, present the same content to them in all or most of the top 10 positions in search results. In the past, […]
Immersive 3-D mapping site Everyscape, which will formally launch this fall, has announced “The People’s World Project” which seeks to involve the community in voting for the next cities that EveryScape builds out. The company plans to launch with photorealistic, 3-D environments for 10 US metropolitan areas, five of which will be chosen by the […]
News.com reports on a positive but cautious response from the European Union to Google’s previous announcement that it would reduce its data/cookie retention time to two years. A prominent member of the EU’s Article 29 Data Protection Working Party told ZDNet that there would be discussion regarding whether Google had “gone far enough.” Microsoft and […]
The Google News Blog announced they have expanded the Google News help section for publishers. The new help section has a wealth of information for those interesting in submitting content to Google News, as well as troubleshooting documents on issues with content already in Google News. I should also note that Google News has a […]
Google Stops “Related Links” Service from Google Blogoscoped reports that Google has stopped their Related Links product without telling anyone. Google told Philipp Lenssen that they shut down Related Links on April 30th. They said they decided to pull out the most “compelling functionalities of Related Links and integrated them into new and improved products, […]
It’s tough to be a small business in today’s fast paced world. Small businesses not only have to know their core industry inside out, but now they have the additional burden of being proficient in online marketing. Since many small businesses have limited staff, most people within these companies wear multiple hats, from CEO to […]
The Click Fraud Network released (press release) figures for the second quarter of this year, showing click fraud has increase to 15.8% from 14.8% in the previous quarter or 14.1% from Q2 2006. One of the reasons for the increase, according to The Click Fraud Network, is a noticeable increase in botnets, parked domain sites […]
Congress to Examine Google-DoubleClick Deal from the New York Times reports that Google’s executives will be called on to testify in from of the U.S. House and Senate committees over the DoubleClick acquisition. There has been a lot of opposition to this acquisition, leading to an FTC filing asking for a closer investigation into the […]
The Google Webmaster Central service has gained a new “Message Center” area that will initially be use to notify site owners of official spam penalty problems and eventually used to communicate about other issues related to site inclusion at Google. You’ll find the message center when you log into Google Webmaster Central, from the Dashboard […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
Microsoft’s acquisition of aQuantive was recently approved by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Yahoo completed its acquisition of ad exchange Right Media after a green light from the FTC. That just leaves Google-DoubleClick as the last major acquisition on the regulatory table. Now a telecom consultant, Scott Cleland, president of Precusor LLC, has […]
Notice a bug in the Google web search results? If so, Matt Cutts wants you to report them to him on his blog. There is one big rule, Matt said: I only want to see specific queries that seem to show bugs, and the more concisely you can explain something, the better. I’ll probably keep […]
The Inside AdWords blog announced that they have improved the Google AdWords Preview Tool. Google launched the preview tool in September 2006. Back then, you had to manually add location attributes and values to the URL of the preview tool to see ads within that location. Now Google is offering several different drop down menus […]
Apps vs. Office: Google Ups the Ante from BusinessWeek reports that Google is planning a corporate version of YouTube to host training and employee communications videos. It also looks at Google’s move to generate revenue by offering applications for the corporate market. Garett Rogers of Googling Google picked up on the YouTube aspect and looks […]
Have you ever checked out what people are saying about your brand on blogs and on photo-sharing sites such as Yahoo’s Flickr or Google’s Picasa? Have you also taken the time to monitor what people are saying about your employees? You owe it to your employees to look out for their reputation online when it […]
Google announced that they have expanded their Print Ads program both on the advertiser and publisher side. They have expanded their newspaper base from 50 papers now to 225 newspapers representing 32 of the top 35 DMAs and a combined circulation of almost 30 million, according to Google. Plus, Google has expanded the number of […]
Much is written about engineering landing pages for PPC campaigns, but all too often little thought goes into creating the right landing pages for SEO, even less so for B2B SEO. Obviously, for any given query you can’t dictate to the search engines the exact page to which a particular organic search engine result points, […]
It appears that Ask.com is now implementing support for the Sitemaps protocol that they got behind back in April. One of our readers commented here notifying us that Ask.com added a pinging service for autodiscovery. Checking further, I found the details on how to ping Ask.com is its Webmaster Help documents. In addition, try this […]
Yahoo released its Q2 earnings a little while ago. What they show is low double-digit growth in certain revenue categories, but also decreases in selected areas (e.g., operating income, free cash flow). Revenue and operating cash flow described as consistent with the “midpoint of guidance.” Here’s the earnings release (PDF file). Below are some additional […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
The Inside AdSense blog announced that they have launched a new feature named “Site Authentication.” The Site Authentication feature enables you to give the AdSense crawler access to your password protected pages. All you need to do is provide AdSense with a username and password. Then the AdSense crawler will gain access to those protected […]
MIT’s Technology Review published an interview with Google Director of Research Peter Norvig that explores his (and presumably Google’s) thinking about problems in search and “next-generation” search functionality that Google is working on. There’s nothing strikingly new in the interview but it’s an interesting overview and window into some of the current projects.
Hi. It’s mid-July, so as typically happens to me every year at this time, my left brain has gone on vacation. It’ll be back before too long as I work on a column about finding more click volume for your campaign when it just doesn’t seem possible. In the meantime, the right brain (“you can […]
I am a Wikipedia administrator, and I specialize in complex investigations. When Jonathan Hochman suggested I write an article for Search Engine Land, he mentioned that this publication and its readers regard Wikipedia as a search engine. It probably comes as no surprise that my spine stiffens at that concept, but media professionals and Wikipedia […]
Last week we reported that Google was to add an “Unavailable After” META Tag. Since then, we’ve spoke to Dan Crow of Google, who provided more information on how to use it, as well information on a new way to send robots blocking info within HTTP headers.
Taking the temperature on Google Health from News.com has Vince Kuraitis, principal and founder of healthcare consultants Better Health Technologies, predicting that Google will develop a personal health record.
China’s YouTube Adds Ads reports that Tudou.com, known as the YouTube of China, has announced they will be adding an advertising platform that will allow advertisers to place ads in their videos. The ads are going to be brand advertisements and can be targeted based on specific location and behavioral requirements. We know Google is […]
What’s the best way to optimize a web site? What best practices should be followed for a search advertising campaign? There are no “absolute” answers to these and other questions that often arise when search marketers are explaining approaches and processes to clients. Multi-pronged tactics often work best, and they vary depending on the type […]
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Google is preparing to launch a more structured mobile search capability and index for mobile content that may also include social networking features. According to the article: Google Inc. is developing a new search service for cellphones that will help consumers find and buy ringtones, games and other […]
Google has announced a beefed-up version of Google Custom Search, a site search product aimed at small and medium sized businesses. The new service is hosted by Google and offers all of the same functionality of the free Google Custom Search product, with a few key differences:
Ask Sponsored Listings is going to be added to Microsoft Office Live’s adManager Beta search advertising service. This is reportedly the first time in five years that two of the top five search engines have joined together to offer search engine ads to advertisers. This will enable those using Microsoft’s adManager to easily advertise on […]