SearchCap: The Day In Search, June 30, 2008

Jun 30, 2008 at 4:15pm ET by Barry Schwartz

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Yahoo Search June 2008 Index UpdateYahoo has warned us of an up and coming Yahoo Search index update. Priyank Garg & Sharad Verma of Yahoo Search said, Yahoo will "be rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the next few days, but expect the update will be completed soon." The... Search Biz: Yahoo Morale Okay, Musical Chairs At Google, Microsoft, Marc Andreessen Joins Facebook Board & Tech Giants Fight "Patent Trol [...]

Filed in: SearchCap

Yahoo Search June 2008 Index Update

Jun 30, 2008 at 4:00pm ET by Barry Schwartz

Yahoo has warned us of an up and coming Yahoo Search index update. Priyank Garg & Sharad Verma of Yahoo Search said Yahoo will "be rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the next few days, but expect the update will be completed soon." The last Yahoo update was just about a month ago and Yahoo typically conducts updates monthly. I have not seen any discussion on fluctuations at Yahoo Search within the forums yet. Yahoo does explain we may see "some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index" during this update. [...]

Filed in: Yahoo: SEO, Yahoo: Search

Search Biz: Yahoo Morale OK, Musical Chairs At Google, Microsoft, Marc Andreessen Joins Facebook Board, & Tech Giants Fight “Patent Trolls”

Jun 30, 2008 at 3:19pm ET by Greg Sterling

Lots of action for SearchBiz today; let's start with Yahoo. Fortune reprints a purported Yahoo employee email that is very upbeat and flies in the face of the gloom and doom analysis going on in the blogs. Meanwhile, TechCrunch reports on another executive loss at the company, while Carl "proxy fight" Icahn uses his blog to officially say nothing about Yahoo and the upcoming fight for control of the Yahoo board. Yahoo for its part is lobbying shareholders to retain its current slate of directors, who Icahn wants to replace. Yahoo says that Icahn has no plan to run the company. Indeed, his pl [...]

Filed in: Search Biz

Yahoo Officially Discontinued The Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool

Jun 30, 2008 at 3:08pm ET by Barry Schwartz

I reported at the Search Engine Roundtable that the Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool no longer takes you to the tool; instead, it redirects you to the Yahoo Search Marketing landing page. I emailed Yahoo for a statement, and they have confirmed that they have decommissioned the tool. There are tools you can use within the Yahoo Search Marketing console that you can use instead, but it requires that you login. The Overture tool has been plagued with issues for a long time. Overture's tool, to me, is a historic SEM tool that will forever be remembered amongst SEMs - it is a bit sad to me to [...]

Filed in: Search Marketing: Search Term Research, Yahoo: Search Ads

Google Blocks Anti-Obama Blogs Flagged Incorrectly As Spam

Jun 30, 2008 at 2:34pm ET by Danny Sullivan

My day started reading about how Google was reportedly censoring anti-Barack Obama blogs by shutting them down on Google-owned Blogger. I quickly did some debunking in a comment on our Sphinn site -- but still, Google probably needs to do more to ensure its Blogger spam reporting tools aren't being abused -- especially given how it says these "can't be manipulated by angry mobs." Right now, it looks like they can. NewsBusters has the best write-up of the charges I've seen, covering how a number of anti-Obama blogs received emails recently from Google saying they were unable to pub [...]

Filed in: Google: Blogger, Google: Web Search

Matt Cutts On SEO Tips & Fighting Spam

Jun 30, 2008 at 8:18am ET by Barry Schwartz

Google's Matt Cutts has recently provided some advice on SEO and explained how Google combats spam. Matt recently was interviewed by Jefferson Graham of USA Today. The article was named Google's Cutts: Good directions drive traffic to your website. The article covers five topics of SEO: keyword phrases, title tags, links, blogs, and Google Webmaster Tools. You can see a video of the interview, which spotlights Matt wearing the "We ♥ Webmasters" t-shirt. Over the weekend, Matt posted a blog post at the Google Blog that goes through some of the techniques Google uses to fight search [...]

Filed in: Google: SEO, Google: Web Search, SEO: General, SEO: Spamming

Competitors Taking Action Against Competitors For Search Ad Trademark Infringement

Jun 30, 2008 at 8:05am ET by Barry Schwartz

Search ads trigger trademark lawsuit from rival from News.com reports on another search ad trademark lawsuit. This one differs in that the plaintiff is not suing a search engine, but rather suing his competitor. NameSafe sued LifeLock for allegedly allowing one of their resellers to show search ads with NameSafe's trademarks within the ad copy. The ads were triggered on a search for [namesafe], and the ads contained "Namesafe" in the title of the ad. Namesafe is not objecting to buying the keyword [namesafe] but rather using the trademark in the ad text. Most search ad trademark policies [...]

Filed in: Legal: Trademarks

Google Pushing Into TV, Original Content Distribution

Jun 30, 2008 at 8:03am ET by Greg Sterling

One could liken Google to a house that keeps expanding, with new room additions every few months. Google's house is already the largest on the block and it seems to keep getting bigger. Two related moves represent further expansion. The first is the announcement last week of the Google Media Server, which conveys content from PC to TV. The second is a move to distribute original "TV" content online via AdSense. In the category of PC to TV, Google is not really doing anything novel. There are a range of efforts already in the market (SlingMedia, TiVo, Apple TV, Hulu, among others) to manage t [...]

Filed in: Google: AdSense, Google: TV

Don’t Let Machines Write Your Keyword Lists

Jun 30, 2008 at 7:42am ET by George Michie

As anyone who has seen the Terminator or Matrix movies can attest, if machines rule the world humans are in deep trouble. Similarly, if you allow machines to control the PPC keyword creation process you are guaranteed to both leave opportunity on the table and flush money down the toilet. The reason is simple: language is really hard. The best language software in the world, Google's, is awful with language. My last SEL post related to bid management in PPC; the AdSense ad running next to it was for a contracting firm looking to bid on construction projects. Consider the following [...]

Filed in: Paid Search

SearchCap: The Day In Search, June 27, 2008

Jun 27, 2008 at 3:24pm ET by Barry Schwartz

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Test The New iGoogle, Google's Personalized Home PageGoogle Operating System reported that Google said they are launching the new iGoogle design, named "canvas view," to a limited set of users. What is new in this version and design?... Google Improves Search For Blackberry DevicesGoogle has brought more of "universal search" to the Blackberry and enhanced its display and presentation of search results in several ways.... Search In Pictures: Yahoo Vo [...]

Filed in: SearchCap

Test The New iGoogle, Google’s Personalized Home Page

Jun 27, 2008 at 10:26am ET by Barry Schwartz

Google Operating System reported that Google said they are launching the new iGoogle design, named "canvas view," to a limited set of users. What is new in this version and design? Left-hand navigation with expandable tabs A canvas view for Google Gadgets, kind of looks like a Google Reader view (screen cap here) Google Chat added to iGoogle Those are the major changes. To read about them in more detail, see this Google document. [...]

Filed in: Google: iGoogle

Google Improves Search For Blackberry Devices

Jun 27, 2008 at 10:21am ET by Greg Sterling

Google has brought more of "universal search" to the Blackberry and enhanced its display and presentation of search results in several ways. According to the Google Mobile Blog, the new and improved Blackberry search results feature: --Improved comprehensiveness: Our mobile search now incorporates results from Product Search, Blog Search, News archives search, and more. --Blended results: Instead of showing you web, image, local, and news results in separate sections, we now combine them to improve relevance. We've also made it easier for you to focus your search on any one of these catego [...]

Filed in: Google: Mobile

Search In Pictures: Yahoo Volleyball & Casinos, Pamela Fox of Google, & Ask Productivity

Jun 27, 2008 at 9:45am ET by Barry Schwartz

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. Yahoo had a fun picnic: Check out this Google birthday present box: Is this real? Yahoo Interns at a Casino. Hmm... Gambling, kind of funny. Meet Pamela Fox, the Google Maps Engineer and API guru (also, nice lab coat): This is what goes on at Ask.com meetings? [...]

Filed in: Search In Pictures

SEM News, Conversion Tracking Tools, & A Close-Up Look At SearchREv

Jun 27, 2008 at 8:35am ET by Josh Dreller

In The Trenches is a weekly spotlight of tips, tricks, and news about the tools search engine marketing professionals use to give them a leg up on the competition. Today: News from the search engines, today's in-depth look, "Tracking Your Conversions on the Engines," and this week's free tips and tools. News from the search engines Google AdWords: Google's great offline search management tool, AdWords Editor, has been updated to version 6.0. You can check out all of their release notes here and download the tool here. Important: As Google notes, "Before you upgrade, be sure to export a [...]

Filed in: In The Trenches

Google Searchers Love The iPhone

Jun 27, 2008 at 8:22am ET by Barry Schwartz

comScore released statistics that showed the Google searcher is practically in love with the Apple iPhone. In fact, they found that 1.3 million searchers conducted 6.9 million searches for iPhone-related search terms in April 2008 alone. Of those 6.9 million searches, 88.4 percent came from Google, which is 33 percent higher than Google's market share would account for. The top ten iphone-related searches include: IPHONE with 1,488,000 searches IPHONE UPDATE with 151,000 searches IPHONE WEB APPS with 118,000 searches IPHONE MMS with 101,000 searches IPHONE 2.0 with 75,000 searches IPHONE [...]

Filed in: Google: Web Search, Stats: Search Behavior, Stats: comScore

Human Hardware: The Paradox Of Choice

Jun 27, 2008 at 7:10am ET by Gord Hotchkiss

In the last few years, there have been two best selling books published that seem diametrically and philosophically opposed: The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz and The Long Tail by Chris Anderson. Both explore the explosion of choice that we have in our modern world and how we might be equipped to navigate through these choices. Today, I want to look at the value of choices in human hardware terms and how this impacts our interactions with search. Choices, Choices Everywhere First, let’s begin with Schwartz’s theory. Schwartz begins with a fundamental dogma of western industrializ [...]

Filed in: Just Behave

Search Biz: Yahoo Reorgs Again, Google Not Slowing Down At 10, Microsoft Buying Powerset?

Jun 26, 2008 at 5:17pm ET by Greg Sterling

There are two views of the just-announced Yahoo reorganization. An upbeat assessment sees it as an instrumental step toward realizing Yahoo's broad platform ambitions; a more skeptical perspective sees it as yet another run at streamlining the organization in the wake of the upheavals of the failed Microsoft acquisition bid and the departures of key executives. The truth is probably out there and somewhere in between. According to the press materials, the company is reorganizing largely into three new groups: The company is creating three new teams that will report to President Sue Decker. [...]

Filed in: Search Biz

Google Looking At Multiple Previous Queries To Tailor Search Ads

Jun 26, 2008 at 4:59pm ET by Barry Schwartz

Saul Hansell from the New York Times reported on an interesting discovery that uncovered that Google may look at more than just your previous query to tailor the ads you see on the search page. Now, Google may look back several past queries to tailor your search ads. Yes, this is a major difference - let me explain how. Obtaining the previous query of a searcher is technically different than obtaining a query conducted five searches ago. Pulling the latest query does not require cookies to be assigned and tracked for that search. But to track a query from five searches ago, you will need [...]

Filed in: Google: AdWords

SearchCap: The Day In Search, June 26, 2008

Jun 26, 2008 at 4:12pm ET by Barry Schwartz

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Visual Search The Future? Spare Me The Eye Candy About two years ago, I wrote an article called Why Search Sucks & You Won't Fix It The Way You Think. In it, I explained various ways people have tried to make search "visual" and why those have largely failed. That's mainly because "list view" or "10 blue links"... Online Video Ads: What Small Business Advertisers Need To Watch ForAccording to comScore, U.S. Internet u [...]

Filed in: SearchCap

Visual Search The Future? Spare Me The Eye Candy

Jun 26, 2008 at 2:29pm ET by Danny Sullivan

About two years ago, I wrote an article called Why Search Sucks & You Won't Fix It The Way You Think. In it, I explained various ways people have tried to make search "visual" and why those have largely failed. That's mainly because "list view" or "10 blue links" still works for lots of search activities. But visual search has picked up some attention recently with new players coming in. Is visual search the future, where we'll be flying through our results Minority Report-style? Maybe in several years, but for now, I still see a lot of eye candy and no real b [...]

Filed in: Search Engines: Experimental, Search Engines: Other Search Engines, Search Features: Query Refinement

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