SMX® - Search Marketing Expo & Conference series
Beu sent me a link to the Search Engine Rap Battle. Basically rappers go out it, mocking each other, as if they are Google, Yahoo and MSN. Google vs. MSN, MSN vs. Yahoo and Yahoo vs. Google. You can check out the videos and vote for the winner at searchenginerapbattle.com.
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
Look Who’s Coming… Join your peers at SMX East – search marketers, representing all skill levels, from more than 600 companies looking to get up to speed and stay ahead the ever-changing world of search. Look Who’s Speaking… Learn from and network with the search marketing community’s most well known experts and practitioners. Get the […]
Anti-abortion groups to buy ads on Google from the TimesOnline reports that Google is now accepting “pro-life” search ads. In the past, Google did not allow anti-abortion groups to advertise against abortion-related keywords. Google stopped that practice a couple days ago after agreeing that the policy it may breach UK’s Equalities Act of 2006. The […]
True story. I was sitting at one of my computers, a bit flustered because I was trying to solve yet another CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) browser incompatibility, and I received the following email: I would be pleased to buy some text links on your website. Let me know if you are interested so we can […]
Microsoft has announced they released a new Live Search Maps India plus new imagery to Virtual Earth.
Yahoo has announced they are testing a new home page in the US, UK, France and India. The new homepage contains information from both Yahoo and non-Yahoo properties, such as AOL Mail and Gmail data. They will also keep the “Featured” section more up to date with “timely content from across the Web” and adding […]
Advertising spending is down across the board and the financial markets are in a crisis not seen since the Depression. Layoffs are happening or appear to be impending at a number of high-profile tech companies, including HP, eBay and Yahoo. Yet Google appears to be navigating through these difficult economic waters as though it were […]
About a year ago, Yahoo created a music artist shortcut to make it easier to find quick details about artists, such as videos, photos, sample song tracks and even their official website links, directly from the search results page. Now, in partnership with online music service Rhapsody, Yahoo music shortcut results allow you to play […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
Powerset, the semantic search engine that Microsoft purchased in July, has been collaborating with Microsoft’s Live Search team on several projects designed to be released within 30 days. Microsoft is currently testing them on a small, randomly selected audience. The projects include:
One of the best pieces of advice I ever got from a seasoned Google AdWords mentor was to "not try and serve two masters within a single campaign." If your campaigns are like most, they have a fixed budget and are ROI driven. In this situation, we are constantly trying to ratchet down the cost […]
Thegood news: eMarketer projects 17.4 percent growth in US internet ad spending this year compared to last year. The bad news: the amount estimated to be spent this year was downgraded by a billion dollars ($24.9B vs. $25.9B). Should we be worried? Not really, because internet ad spending will likely continue to grow at the […]
Google has upgraded Google Maps for Mobile with more precise location awareness (My Location) and now brought StreetView into mobile. The new version of Google Maps (for BlackBerry and most Java phones) provides an option to see the StreetView image of the selected address or business. It also offers walking directions, in addition to standard […]
Last week Google confirmed that it had made its first Korean acquisition, a popular blogging platform called TNC, which has approximately 400,000 users, including a majority of Korea’s top bloggers (per VentureBeat). The site’s founder and CEO Chang-Won Kim said that he thought Google bought the company to boost its “minor” market share in Korea, […]
Live Search September 2008 Update Underway from the Search Engine Roundtable reports discussion at WebmasterWorld that Live Search is undergoing a major index and ranking update. The Live Search results seem to have changed, and webmasters and SEOs are taking notice. I personally noticed referral increases and drops from Live Search on some of the […]
We have covered many but far from all of the Yahoo employees who have left the company over the course of the years. I wanted to add two more to the list of those who joined the “Yahoo Exodus.” TechCrunch has news on two people leaving Yahoo. The first is Yahoo’s project manager of the […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
The emergence of social media has been a game-changer for newspapers and magazines. On the one hand, they have seen their print numbers continue to drop as more and more people turn to the internet to get their news and information. On the other hand, they (the smart ones) have seen that by embracing social […]
Michael Gray noticed that Google News is continuously indexing old stories on some sites as new stories. Yes, this is the exact issue that influenced United Airlines stock price drop just a week ago. Google blamed the Tribune for the article not containing a date, which is a fair accusation. But As Michael shows, Google […]
I love big sites. They are like sprawling mansions in a state of renewal and dilapidation at the same time. New kitchen, old bath. Sub-zero inside, rotten wood outside. The longer a site has been around, and the bigger that site is, the more likely it is that site will have already attracted hundreds if […]
Google’s next blog post regarding web search is about search evaluation, basically how Google measures quality. Scott Huffman, an Engineering Director who is responsible for leading search evaluation, wrote the blog post. In short, he explained that the evaluation process is comprised of two main elements: (1) Human evaluators, actual people around the world trained […]
Google Maps spam has been a major issue for a long time but it seems Google has taken a step to fight back. Mike Blumenthal reported that Google has added an official document named Local Business Center Guidelines. These guidelines are similar to the webmaster guidelines for web search and now also even includes a […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
New mobile search data has just been released by comScore’s M:Metrics unit. Generally the data show mobile search penetration growing and frequency increasing. The market share data show Google as the dominant mobile search engine across six countries, with the US market being most competitive. The U.K. saw the greatest percentage of mobile users accessing […]
There are several different payment options you can use to pay your ever-growing paid search bills. Each method has its own risk and reward, so it’s best to consider your options against your business model. Please note, Microsoft adCenter is similar to Yahoo in billing, but they also have many options, and it’s worth […]
One of the first things most local search marketers have on their to do lists is getting their listings to appear in a Google Onebox at the top of Google’s search results. To be in the box, you usually need to be in Google’s top local search results. And one of the major factors that […]
The AdWords Blog announced that the new real-time quality score algorithm will be live within days. This means that Google will now calculate the quality score of your keywords at the time of the search query. Second, Google has removed the “minimum bid” metric and replaced it with “first page bid.” Finally, Google will no […]
You have probably heard the phrase “information architecture” but may not have given it much thought. That’s a mistake! In today’s article I am going to talk about why SEOs should care about the concept. The Information Architecture Institute defines “information architecture as the art and science of organizing and labeling websites, intranets, online communities […]
Last week the Association of National Advertisers sent a letter on behalf of its 400 member companies to the US Justice Department (DOJ) asking the government to block the pending Google-Yahoo search advertising deal. Then there were reports that the DOJ had hired attorney Sandy Litvack, its chief antitrust attorney under former US President Jimmy […]
Yahoo hosted Hack Day this weekend, the Yahoo Yodel Anecdotal blog has four blog posts on the event: The hackers are back “6 PM Food, Beer & Games” Talkin’ about Girl Talk Highlights from Open Hack Day The event looked incredibly fun! I just wanted to highlight the demo’s that took place that involved search. […]
Stuck in Google’s Doghouse from the New York Times profiles the story of Dan Savage’s Sourcetool.com and how it was hit by Google’s AdWords quality score algorithm. The article discusses the practice of arbitrageur in the search ad game. Savage used AdWords to drive traffic to Sourcetool.com and then monetized that traffic through AdSense. The […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
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, “Q&A With Google’s Insights for Search Senior Product Manager” and this week’s free tips and tools.
The adCenter blog announced that they have added a fourth ad to the top ad location in the Live Search results. This brings the number of search ads displayed on the page from 8 to 9, and pushes the organic search results down by one ad position. Here is a screen shot of what you […]
Yahoo had a press day yesterday designed in part to pump up the media about the company’s prospects and progress post the Microsoft-fiasco. As someone who’s been positive about Yahoo, I oddly found the day leaving me less reassured, not more. In the end, ironically it might have been the Open! Open! Open! mantra that […]
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.
Last November, Google introduced its My Location feature in Google Maps for Mobile. It uses cell tower IDs to triangulate the location of the phone and then identifies that location on the Google Maps interface. With a bit less precision, it essentially does the same thing that GPS does: eliminate the need to enter a […]
In the last column, I looked at how Pirolli and Card theorized that we humans adapted our ancestral foraging strategies to retrieve information in a hypertext environment. The theory was first proposed in 1994, in a pre-Google era (although search engines were beginning to make their presence felt). If we look at the basic tenets […]
This week, we’ve seen a lot of coverage of Google’s 10th anniversary, yet most writers have spent little time covering Google’s really early days, when the company was just a scrappy startup with a handful of employees. Here’s a great interview with Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin from January 1999, by Karsten Lemm, […]