SearchCap: The Day In Search, October 31, 2008

Oct 31, 2008 at 3:22pm 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 2001 Search: Party’s OverTonight is your last chance to search through a 2001 version of Google's index. On Thursday, Google added this warning to the search page: "Google 2001 will no longer be available after tomorrow." The 2001 search was put online as part of Google's recent 10th birthday celebration, and was never planned to be a permanent feature. Search In Pictures: Yahoo’s Astronaut, Android Sleeps & Google’s [...]

Filed in: SearchCap

Google 2001 Search: Party’s Over

Oct 31, 2008 at 2:30pm ET by Matt McGee

Tonight is your last chance to search through a 2001 version of Google's index. On Thursday, Google added this warning to the search page: "Google 2001 will no longer be available after tomorrow." The 2001 search was put online as part of Google's recent 10th birthday celebration, and was never planned to be a permanent feature. [...]

Filed in: Google: General, Google: Other, Google: Web History & Search History, Google: Web Search

Search In Pictures: Yahoo’s Astronaut, Android Sleeps & Google’s Factory Farm

Oct 31, 2008 at 12:00pm 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's Astronaut: Android is sleeping: Yahoo dresses up for Halloween: The "Google Factory Farm"? Google Maps ads in NYC Subways: [...]

Filed in: Search In Pictures

Google, Yahoo Prepare To Abandon Paid Search Deal?

Oct 31, 2008 at 9:03am ET by Greg Sterling

Despite public pronouncements of confidence by Google and Yahoo about the future of their paid search deal, which was partly set up to fend off Microsoft and hostile Yahoo shareholders who wanted a Microsoft takeover, the emerging consensus is that it's not going to happen. The Wall Street Journal this morning reports that the parties are not coming to terms and the US Justice Department wants concessions that the search engines don't like. According to the WSJ: The two companies met Thursday with the Justice Department, part of a series of meetings to address the concerns of regulators. Whil [...]

Filed in: Google & Yahoo Ad Deal, Google: Business Issues, Legal: General, Top News, Yahoo: Business Issues, Yahoo: Partnerships

Google Now Allowing Ads For Beer

Oct 31, 2008 at 8:46am ET by Barry Schwartz

Taylor Pratt discovered a very quiet change made to Google AdWords policy for handling alcohol ads. Now, Google is allowing search ads for beer, wine and champagne to show up on Google.com. Google's policy says they allow these ads, "since we consider beer, wine, and champagne to be products intended for the sale and consumption by adults, ads promoting these products will be given a Non-FamilySafe status." Why did Google make this change? Why did Google first have a ban on beer, wine and champagne ads and now remove that restriction? Why now? Google sent me this statement: The Goog [...]

Filed in: Google: AdWords

Google Updates AdWords Quality Score To Be “Fairer”

Oct 31, 2008 at 8:35am ET by Barry Schwartz

The Google AdWords Blog announced that two new changes to the quality score is coming in the next few days. The first change is to make the quality score calculation score an ad's CTR based on the ad's position. The second change is to help enable certain ads to be promoted to the top position. Google is updating and improving how they normalize the CTR for when they look at an ad's position on the page. They will use fresher and more updated data to provide a better metric for their quality score. Google said this should make the quality score more accurate, allow ads to "compete fa [...]

Filed in: Google: AdWords

Spooky Search Engines On Halloween

Oct 31, 2008 at 8:25am ET by Barry Schwartz

Google, Yahoo, Live, Ask, DogPile and many more are celebrating Halloween with special spooky logos or themes. Below you will find the logos and themes I spotted throughout the search industry. Google seems to have totally 'geeked out' the fear in Halloween by adding spooky thoughts to their robots.txt file: User-agent: zombies Disallow: /brains Without further ado, here are the logos and themes I found throughout the industry: Google's Halloween Logo: Yahoo's Halloween Logo: DogPile's Halloween Logo: Live.com's Halloween Theme: Ask.com's Halloween Theme: [...]

Filed in: Ask: General, Google: Logos, Microsoft: Other, SEM Industry: General, Yahoo: General

The Secret Influence Of Search Behavior

Oct 31, 2008 at 7:12am ET by Kim Krause Berg

Did you know that Rachel Ray grounds up toasted pumpkin seeds, adds some herbs and uses the mixture to coat chicken?  Me neither.  One day, after my daughter mentioned this to me, I started thinking about how people’s eating habits are changing everywhere.  More fast food restaurants serve healthier, lower fat meals. Today’s families use different herbs to prepare food than their parents’ generation.  In my house, you may find your salad has apple, pineapple or oranges in it. A few years ago, I would never have had the idea to do that to a salad.  Nor would there have been print [...]

Filed in: Just Behave

Finding The Sweet Spot

Oct 30, 2008 at 11:40pm ET by Palore

Many of our customers are companies who sell online marketing services to small businesses. When they come to us for sales leads, they usually know exactly what they want - what profile of businesses they‘re looking for and from which sites they'd like us to get the leads. Nevertheless, we do have customers who come to us asking we point them in the right direction - they want to know what the top categories of SMBs advertising online are, or in other words where the sweet spot is. While there are many lists and reports out there, such as this YPA's Top 10 IYP Headings, we wanted to provi [...]

Filed in: Small Is Beautiful

Google Using OCR To Index Scanned Documents

Oct 30, 2008 at 7:14pm ET by Matt McGee

It used to be that, if you hoped Google would index a PDF file, you had to create a PDF that was text-based, not image-based; Googlebot couldn't recognize the content of scanned or image-based documents. According to an announcement today, that's no longer the case. Google says it's now using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology to read any scanned documents that it finds in PDF format: This Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology lets us convert a picture (of a thousand words) into a thousand words -- words that can be searched and indexed, so that these valuable documen [...]

Filed in: Google: SEO, Google: Web Search, Top News

SearchCap: The Day In Search, October 30, 2008

Oct 30, 2008 at 5:01pm 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: Tools of the SEO Trade In SEO, success is as much about your toolkit as it is about your skillset. Without great tools at your disposal, your ability to get the job done is really hampered. At SMX East this month I presented some of my favorite tools on the "Tools, Glorious Tools" panel. (Download my Powerpoint.) What I came to realize from gauging the audience's reaction to my presentation was that many of the tools I presented were new to much of t [...]

Filed in: SearchCap

Tools of the SEO Trade

Oct 30, 2008 at 4:50pm ET by Stephan Spencer

In SEO, success is as much about your toolkit as it is about your skillset. Without great tools at your disposal, your ability to get the job done is really hampered. At SMX East this month I presented some of my favorite tools on the "Tools, Glorious Tools" panel. (Download my Powerpoint.) What I came to realize from gauging the audience's reaction to my presentation was that many of the tools I presented were new to much of the audience. That surprised me. This stuff isn't exactly a government secret. There are blog posts about them, and many are free or inexpensive. Sure, there are p [...]

Filed in: 100% Organic, How To: SEO, SEM Tools

What Does Search Activity Say About The Election?

Oct 30, 2008 at 4:11pm ET by Matt McGee

With less than a week to go until U.S. voters choose a new president, Yahoo is sharing what it knows about White House-related search activity. Here are some highlights from Yahoo's blog post today, which taps into data from Yahoo Buzz: During the past week, Barack Obama has been the subject of more than twice as many queries as John McCain. A week ago, there were six times as many searches about Cindy McCain compared to Michelle Obama. Geographically, on a queries per capita basis, John McCain is getting most of his search interest from Washington, DC, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, [...]

Filed in: Stats: Search Behavior, Yahoo: Buzz, Yahoo: Search

Google Local Business Hijacking: Microsoft Acquires Yahoo, Becomes Escort Service

Oct 30, 2008 at 2:16pm ET by Danny Sullivan

Mike Blumenthal has been diligently covering how local listings can be hijacked in Google Maps. He's also been frustrated that Google doesn't seem to be fixing the local hijacking problem. So, to illustrate the problem, he's posted how he took over Microsoft's business listing -- turning it into Microsoft Escort Service -- and how those from Apple, IBM, Coca-Cola, GM among others are also vulnerable. This came out of an email conversation Mike and I had earlier this week, about whether Google is doing enough to police the community editing that allows [...]

Filed in: Features: General, Google: Maps & Local, Top News

What’s Ahead For Search Marketing In 2009

Oct 30, 2008 at 1:52pm ET by Chris Sherman

It's an understatement to say that we live in uncertain times, and that any data that can help us strategize, plan or even to some extent predict what's ahead is worth its weight in... well, let's just say this kind of information is invaluable. That makes the Marketing Sherpa 2009 Search Marketing Benchmark Guide very timely for just about everyone involved in our industry. The Guide is packed with data, analysis, charts, graphs and all manner of other useful info. This is the fifth annual Search Marketing Benchmark Guide that Marketing Sherpa has produced, but its unlike any of the others [...]

Filed in: Bookshelf, Stats: General

Google’s New Metric For YouTube Ads: Brain Waves

Oct 30, 2008 at 1:40pm ET by Bob Heyman

The news came across the wire recently that Google has ventured into new territory to sell the value of their ad space and ad targeting on YouTube. Rather than the standard metrics of clicks and conversions Google is selling a new kind of metric—brain waves. YouTube has recently been pushing overlay ads which appear in the lower portion of the window while the video is playing. Since these ads are often used for branding purpose looking at click thru measurements would not give a true picture of their impact upon the advertisers brand messaging. To prove the efficacy of these ads, Go [...]

Filed in: Google: YouTube & Video, Video Search

Local Search Marketing Tips for B2B Marketers

Oct 30, 2008 at 12:53pm ET by Julie Shumaker

B2B marketers establish conversions - or desired actions - throughout their customers' buying process. These actions may take place online, on the phone, or live at a specific location. Regardless, many occur at the local level. Local search enables marketers to capitalize on these interactions and differentiate your firm based upon one very important factor - geographic proximity. Below are four tips to help B2B marketers reach prospects at the local level. Test local PPC advertising Devising a well-laid plan for your search advertising program is a crucial step. Are you e [...]

Filed in: How To: SEO, Search Marketing: Local Search Marketing, Strictly Business

New iPhone Report From comScore: Everything You Wanted To Know And Then Some

Oct 30, 2008 at 10:44am ET by Greg Sterling

To use a variation on a familiar phrase, the iPhone changes everything. Indeed it has; and everything you ever wanted to know about iPhone adoption and usage is contained in a new report from comScore ("All about the iPhone"). The headline on the press release is about lower-income groups adopting the device for a broad range of activities (music, games, video and internet). Based on behavioral data from a sample of roughly 100,000 iPhone users in the US and Western Europe, the report goes into a great deal more than that. Below I do a quick "dive" into a couple of the search-related findings. [...]

Filed in: Search Engines: Mobile Search Engines, Stats: comScore

Presentations & Q&A Sessions From Google’s Third Chat Session

Oct 30, 2008 at 8:51am ET by Barry Schwartz

Google hosted its third webmaster chat event last Wednesday. The event had three presentations from Googlers and plenty of question and answer time between webmasters and Google employees. The Google Webmaster Central blog has announced that they have posted a recap of the live chat session. Below you will find the presentations from John, Jonathan and Maile of Google. You can also read the comprehensive Q&A session over here. John's slides on "Frightening Webmastering Myths": Jonathan's slides on "Using the Not Found errors report in Webmaster Tools": Maile's slides on "W [...]

Filed in: Google: SEO, Google: Webmaster Central

SearchCap: The Day In Search, October 29, 2008

Oct 29, 2008 at 5:03pm 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: The “Bible” Of Search Engine MarketingIt’s common for comprehensive books written by respected authorities to be tagged as the “bible” of a particular topic or industry. My vote for that distinctive title in our industry goes to Search Engine Marketing, Inc. by Mike Moran and Bill Hunt. Both Mike and Bill are longtime search marketing veterans who were [...] Bookshelf: New Column From Search Engine LandOur newest Search [...]

Filed in: SearchCap

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