July 2008: Search Engine Land’s Most Popular Stories

Jul 31, 2008 at 5:00pm ET by Danny Sullivan

Below are Search Engine Land's 10 most popular stories from July 2008: 1) Cuil Launches -- Can This Search Start-Up Really Best Google? - Can any start-up search engine "be the next Google?" Many have wondered this, and today's launch of Cuil (pronounced "cool") may provide the best test case since Google itself overtook more established search engines. Cuil provides what appears to be a comprehensive index of the web, offers a unique display presentation, and emerges at a time when people might be ready to embrace a quality "underdog" service. The big question [...]

Filed in: Most Popular Stories

SearchCap: The Day In Search, July 31, 2008

Jul 31, 2008 at 4:03pm 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: Del.licio.us Now Delicious.com, With ImprovementsDelicious has now relaunched under Delicious.com with some new functionality. The old Delicious was at del.icio.us and should soon redirect to the new dot com address. Along with the domain change, the Delicious site has been redesigned to aid newcomers on using the site. Here are before and after screen... Google Tests Related Search Phrases Inline With Search ResultsAaron Wall noticed Google is testing [...]

Filed in: SearchCap

Del.icio.us Now Delicious.com, With Improvements

Jul 31, 2008 at 2:15pm ET by Barry Schwartz

Delicious has now relaunched under Delicious.com with some new functionality. The old Delicious was at del.icio.us and should soon redirect to the new dot com address. Along with the domain change, the Delicious site has been redesigned to aid newcomers on using the site. Here are before and after screen captures: The old de.licio.us: The new Delicious.com: Other improvements include: Speed improvements make the pages load much faster then the old version.The search engine has been "overhauled" to be much faster and smarter. The search feature will now search within one of your tags [...]

Filed in: Yahoo: Delicious

Google Tests Related Search Phrases Inline With Search Results

Jul 31, 2008 at 12:32pm ET by Barry Schwartz

Aaron Wall noticed Google is testing a new location for "related" search results. This time, the location appears to be directly under each individual search result's URL. Here is a screen shot of it in action, from Aaron's blog: Aaron said he was able to see it by searching for link building while using the Opera browser. It is also interesting to speculate how Google determines to show which related phrases for each result. If you notice, Aaron's seobook.com result shows a related phrase for get more links and if you search in Google for that, seobook.com does rank in the number one [...]

Filed in: Google: User Interface

Britain Clears The Way For Google Street Views; Google Argues No “Complete Privacy” In US StreetView Court Case

Jul 31, 2008 at 9:02am ET by Barry Schwartz

Watchdog clears Google's street cameras from The Guardian reports Britain's Information Commissioner's Office has officially given their approval over the privacy risks with the Street Views option in Google Maps. Meanwhile in the US, Google is arguing in a court case against StreetView that there is no "complete privacy." Google Street Views launched in Europe earlier this month but sparked privacy concerns. The watchdog group has said they have no privacy concerns with the service after reviewing the safeguards Google has put in place. The commissioner's office released a statement: We [...]

Filed in: Google: Maps & Local

Do The Google Webmaster Support Reps Really Work?

Jul 31, 2008 at 8:59am ET by Barry Schwartz

Maile posted a Google blog post named A day in the life of webmaster support. The blog post basically takes you through a typical day at Google for a Google Webmaster Trends Analysts. Here is the video -- it is about 7 minutes long and is fun to watch: [...]

Filed in: Google: Webmaster Central

Report: Google To Develop A Venture-Capital Unit

Jul 31, 2008 at 8:45am ET by Barry Schwartz

Google to Extend Reach With Venture-Capital Arm from the Wall Street Journal reports Google is in the early stages of putting together a corporate venture-capital unit within Google. Google's senior vice president of corporate development and chief legal officer, David Drummond, is reported to be leading up the new unit. Google has hired William Maris, a 33-year-old entrepreneur, to help set up the venture-capital arm. Google has been well-known for buying many tech companies in the past and incorporating those companies into the Google culture. It is expected that by creating a an offici [...]

Filed in: Google: Business Issues

How To Get New Web Sites To Rank Quickly

Jul 31, 2008 at 8:18am ET by Aaron Wall

What is the difference between an unremarkable, no value added, thin ecommerce site, and a top ranked site? In some industries the difference is simply site age. Sites that were around a few years ago had fewer competitors, so it was easier for them to rank. As they aged they got trusted more, and some of those top rankings lead to many self-reinforcing links. If your site is brand new and you want to compete against established sites directly on their most important keywords then you need to be good at public relations, have a better brand strategy, or have some remarkable feature that mak [...]

Filed in: 100% Organic, SEO: General

Is Google Universal Search A Walled Garden?

Jul 31, 2008 at 7:43am ET by Sherwood Stranieri

Although Google Universal Search (GUS) is still very much in flux, it's been a part of the SEO landscape for a while now. In that time, there have been some good studies about how often GUS presents video results, and some research into how it ranks videos versus text pages. One aspect of GUS that's been mentioned anecdotally is its preference for videos hosted by other Google properties: YouTube and Google Video. A few explanations have been offered for this behavior: 1) Google Video and YouTube have the largest archive of videos on the Web, so the odds of these two sites having a re [...]

Filed in: Search Engines: Video Search Engines, Video Search

Report: Newspapers, Yellow Pages Battle For Local Online Advertising Revenues

Jul 31, 2008 at 7:31am ET by Greg Sterling

A new report from analyst firm Borrell Associates contains fairly dire revenue projections for both local newspapers and print yellow pages ($5 billion in projected print revenue losses in five years). The newspaper angle is picked up today by the Wall Street Journal and PaidContent, which both lay out some of the numbers. The report is called "Say Goodbye to Yellow Pages." Yet it's not as severe on the directory industry as that title would suggest. The report contains numerous projections of revenues and their various sources and discusses numbers of sales reps and so on. Borrell has alwa [...]

Filed in: Search Marketing: Local Search Marketing

A Small Business Marketing Success Story: K9cuisine.com

Jul 31, 2008 at 7:05am ET by Matt McGee

Being small is hard enough. But being small and in retail? That's like having two strikes against you before the game even begins. From setting up relationships with banks, to finding trustworthy suppliers, to building a loyal customer base, being a small retailer is a challenge many businesses can't meet. And if you're an online-only small retailer? Well, that adds a whole new set of pros and cons into the mix. K9cuisine.com is one such business that's so far been able to meet all the challenges of being a small, internet-only retailer. The nine-employee company sells premium pet foods and [...]

Filed in: Small Is Beautiful

SearchCap: The Day In Search, July 30, 2008

Jul 30, 2008 at 5:38pm 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: Google Now Notifies Of "Search Customization" & Gives Searchers Control Google is now showing "search customization" messages to inform searchers when their search results have been modified from "normal" due to a searcher's geographic location, previous query or web surfing and search history. It's a nice move to help searchers know what exactly is going on "under the hood"... YouTube Sued By Italian Broadcaster MediasetI [...]

Filed in: SearchCap

Google Now Notifies Of “Search Customization” & Gives Searchers Control

Jul 30, 2008 at 4:33pm ET by Danny Sullivan

Google is now showing "search customization" messages to inform searchers when their search results have been modified from "normal" due to a searcher's geographic location, previous query or web surfing and search history. It's a nice move to help searchers know what exactly is going on "under the hood" at Google and override it if the wrong choices are being made. I'd like to see more of it. What's Normal? There was a time when everyone saw exactly the same search results at the major search engines. Over time, this has changed. In particular, geographic targe [...]

Filed in: Google: Search Customization, Google: Web History & Search History, Google: Web Search, Search Features: General

YouTube Sued By Italian Broadcaster Mediaset

Jul 30, 2008 at 3:49pm ET by Greg Sterling

In a factually similar claim to the current Viacom litigation, Google/YouTube was sued by Italian media company and broadcaster Mediaset, which is owned by Italy's Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. The company is seeking a minimum of EUR 500 million for copyright violations and hypothetical, lost ad revenue. According to Reuters: Mediaset claims to have found "at least 4,643 videos and clips owned by us, equivalent to more than 325 hours of transmission without having rights" on YouTube in a simple analysis June 10. The company argued the infringement was "equal to the loss of 315,672 days [...]

Filed in: Google: Legal, Google: YouTube & Video, Legal: Copyright

Live Search Adds Home Page “Hotspots”

Jul 30, 2008 at 3:28pm ET by Barry Schwartz

Microsoft just announced the official U.S. launch of their new home page. The home page was seen in test mode a few months back, but now it is officially live. The home page contains a background image which contains "hotspots" used to show off some of the search queries available at Live Search. The home page background images are suppose to change over time and thus generate different query "hotspots" for the end users to play with. Here is a picture of the new home page, as I see it now: If you look when the page loads, you will see hotspots fade in and out. If you hover your mouse [...]

Filed in: Microsoft: Bing

How Cuil Is The SEO Industry?

Jul 30, 2008 at 10:36am ET by Barry Schwartz

Philipp Lenssen's The World According to Cuil blog post inspired me to take snapshots of how Cuil, the new search engine, matches up the names of our industry to pictures. Here's Danny Sullivan's Wikipedia article, but showing a picture of Danny Sullivan the race car driver: This is my, Barry Schwartz's, search blog, but this is a picture of the psychologist: A search for Greg Sterling (yes, an editor here), shows a picture of Chris Sherman (an editor here): Vanessa Fox, the avatar? Okay, now for some funny ones. Rand Fishkin looking like Google's Matt Cutts: Tamar Weinberg l [...]

Filed in: Search Engines: Cuil

Google Slightly Updates Google Merchant Search

Jul 30, 2008 at 9:24am ET by Barry Schwartz

Loren Baker covered a small update to Google's Merchant Search, which we outed back in May. Currently, Google Merchant Search is available in the UK and allows you to compare loan providers. When I covered it originally, it wasn't available to everyone, but now it appears to be live. Conduct a search for secured loans and you will see an enhanced AdWords ad for www.google.co.uk/MerchantSearchBeta. Here is a screen capture: As you can see, you can select the loan amount directly in the Google AdWords ad: After selecting the amount and clicking "compare lenders," you will be taken to [...]

Filed in: Google: AdWords, Google: Web Search

Total Search Marketing, Part 2

Jul 30, 2008 at 8:30am ET by Paul Bruemmer

In the first installment of this series, Total Search Marketing, Part 1, I wrote about the eConsultancy research showing that natural search (SEO) was the most frequently used online marketing tactic for lead generation. Yet, most marketers put the bulk of their search marketing budget into paid search. Many of these marketers felt their company wasn't exploiting search marketing as effectively as it could be. Because it's important for in-house search teams to be effective in all search tactics, we emphasized the need for "total search marketing," covering organic natural search, paid searc [...]

Filed in: In House

SMX Sao Paulo Next Week

Jul 30, 2008 at 8:00am ET by Search Engine Land

The first Search Marketing Expo conference in Brazil takes place next Thursday and Friday, August 7-8 in Sao Paulo. Reserve your spot by registering today! The SMX Sao Paulo agenda includes programming for search marketers of all skill levels, from novice to advanced. Session topics include link building, landing page optimization, usability, and branding benefits of search campaigns. The program will be conducted in Portuguese. Speakers are both native Brazilians and international speakers, including: Dr. Barney Pell, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Powerset (a Microsoft company) Sus [...]

Filed in: SEM Industry: Conferences, SMX & SMN Alerts

Marchex Launches Platform And Tools That Seek To Better Connect Online Search And Offline Buying

Jul 30, 2008 at 7:55am ET by Greg Sterling

One of the reasons that "local search" has struggled in some quarters has been the challenge of tracking the internet's influence on in-store or local transactions. This is a theme I heard raised by large retailers at a ShopLocal partner event a couple of weeks ago and one that came up several times in various contexts at SMX Local-Mobile. Marchex is seeking to address that challenge with the integration of the company's various advertiser-facing assets and technologies in a single toolset that offers enhanced tracking capabilities. The company is calling this a next-generation local advertis [...]

Filed in: Search Marketing: Landing Pages, Search Marketing: Local Search Marketing

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