SearchCap: The Day In Search, June 30, 2008
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
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?
Google has brought more of “universal search” to the Blackberry and enhanced its display and presentation of search results in several ways.
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.
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.
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 – […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
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 […]
According to comScore, U.S. Internet users watched 11.5 billion online videos in March, 2008. The average viewer watched nearly three hours of video online. These statistics make video an attractive means for advertisers to reach their audience, and in turn, a potential windfall for online video hosts such as YouTube and Google. So far, however, […]
Back in March, after Ask.com seemed to be pulling away from search to some people, I wrote that Ask "killed the search engine," was no longer an innovator in search, and couldn’t expect to compete against Google. Recently, I spoke with Ask.com CEO Jim Safka, who hoped to change my mind. He failed to do […]
A few years ago, I wrote a three-part article series about the different levels of SEO skills: beginner, intermediate, and advanced. I placed copywriters at the beginner level, information architects and interface designers at the intermediate level, and web developers and programmers at the advanced level. At the time, I was pretty confident at the […]
Google has finally filled the CFO spot being vacated by George Reyes, the outgoing CFO who has been with the company since roughly 2002 (pre-IPO). The new CFO (and SVP) is Patrick Pichette, who was President of Operations at Bell Canada.
Rob Snell, likely the first search marketer to testify before the US Congress, has done his duty. He emailed me, “We ran over the allotted time by 15 minutes or so, but they let us keep talking.” So I guess Congress likes SEM, they really like it. Below, you can watch a video of his […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
B2B sites tend to be more difficult for visitors to find what they’re looking for. Perhaps it’s because things don’t always fit neatly into more intuitive consumer categories. Perhaps it’s because B2B sites are often laden with so much diverse information. While site owners can engineer enhanced usability, better optimize and structure content, or create […]
Privacy is dead, get used to it. In the effort to rescue display advertising from its historically dismal performance and so-called “banner blindness,” behavioral targeting (BT) was born a few years ago with Tacoda. It has both increased in popularity and infamy since that time. Consumers prefer more “relevant” ads but they also dislike being […]
Well, sort of. If you’re a developer you can get that information on the Android site. But if you’re interested in the history of Android, how much Google may have paid for the platform, and its hypothetical outlook, you can read this long Wired article. (You can also read my short riff on it in […]
Google has posted the official blog post summarizing last week’s live chat event. Yes, we did post the unofficial version on Thursday night, but now we have the official version live for viewing. Q&A Transcript available via Google Groups John’s Personalized Search Presentation via Google Presentations Maile’s Case Sensitivity in Web Search via Google Presentations […]
Earlier today TechCrunch reported that Yahoo and Microsoft were in acquisition talks again. However, Silicon Alley Insider says that’s incorrect and it’s only about search. But that doesn’t make much sense either given the recent rejection of that very proposal by Yahoo, unless the terms now being discussed are substantially different than before. CNBC says […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
Wildfires, again, in my home state of California. People are looking for maps of where they are at, so here are some resources: NOTE: For the latest fires, see this fire maps section of Search Engine Land, where any updates are listed. California Fires 2008 is an excellent map pinpointing fires across the state. Just […]
Have you ever written a blog post or an article and after publishing it, gotten an email telling you that one of your links is broken? It happens to all of us once in a while. But what happens to the links that slip through the cracks and remain broken? They become unused link juice […]
Google Maps recently introduced a new user interface for the Local Business Center. There were some issues with the upgrade and Carter Maslan, Google’s Director of Product Management for Local, agreed to answer some of my questions about the process in a phone conversation. Below, selected excerpts from our conversation:
About two seconds after Google Trends For Websites came out, people started noticing that one company’s websites oddly had no data available — Google’s own. Google will tell you all about the traffic to competitors like Yahoo and Microsoft but gives away nothing about itself. The same is true for the newly-released Google Ad Planner […]
Google has launched Google Ad Planner as an invite-only beta. It’s designed to allow advertisers to identify sites with demographics they’re interested in — even sites that aren’t part of Google’s advertising network.
There’s an interesting analogy to the 15th and 16th Centuries when European explorers (or colonialists) were out sailing and mapping the globe. The world was not entirely known and mapped at that time. So it is today on the Internet. While many areas are highly developed and well documented in online mapping, there are others […]
Finding adult images on Google by doing an ordinary web search is not all that uncommon these days. In fact, I reported one such as in March and another case this morning at the Search Engine Roundtable. What I also noticed this morning was a new feature to “report images” to Google that are found […]
What’s Obscene? Google Could Have an Answer from the New York Times documents a case that is underway in the US legal system where Google Trends was brought in to determine the morality of what is sexually explicit content. The case is about a Florida-based porn web site that the state wants to prove is […]