SearchCap: The Day In Search, March 4, 2009
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.
In light of the current economy, Vertive, Inc., is banking on now being the right time to launch a new search engine for coupons and deals. It’s called Offers.com, and it enters an already crowded space of coupons/deals sites. Offers.com provides coupons and deals from more than 1,000 merchants, and classifies them by product or […]
One of the requirements of class-action lawsuits is notification of potential class members. Most of the members of a class never know that a lawsuit has taken place on their behalf (e.g., bank X credit card holders). So the courts require attorneys to tell class members of the suit and settlement terms and allow them […]
About two years ago, Greg Sterling wrote a piece on Searching for Earthquakes. Since then, I believe Ask.com was the only search engine providing a “smart answer” for earthquake data. Ask.com continues to offer the smart answer, but recently, Google added their own. Google Operating System reports Google has added an Earthquake OneBox result for […]
SEMPO‘s Board of Directors has elected new officers to oversee the organization. The new officers include Jeffrey Pruitt, formerly SEMPO president and executive vice president of corporate partnerships, iCrossing, who was elected chairman. Sara Holoubek, corporate strategy consultant, was elected president. Ron Jones, president and CEO of Symetri Internet Marketing, was elected vice president of […]
Would you like to have a heads-up any time your competitors are about ready to launch a new product? In many cases you can get good advance warning with clever use of search. There are specific competitive intelligence tactics that make this relatively straightforward. But first, take a step back and think about the things […]
Large companies with many divisions have many SEO opportunities, yet also many challenges. One of the first things I do when consulting with companies on how to implement enterprise-level SEO is to identify who needs to do what. But that doesn’t always work out, because not everyone has the aptitude for SEO. Yesterday I spoke […]
Ok, so I’m really passionate about looking for ways to improve conversion rates – I admit it. I’m kind of a conversion junkie. But sometimes I make the mistake of getting so focused on conversions that I can lose site of the bigger picture. I end up only staring at the trees right in front […]
Do you Twitter it rather than Google it? I’m running a poll to try and understand how Twitter may be changing search habits. Please participate! More and more people have been talking and writing about how they are turning to Twitter to get answers. Search engines like Google have, of course, long been the dominant […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
Cuil, the search engine that launched to great hype last year and seems to have disappeared since then, announced changes to its design, content, and backend today. When Cuil launched last summer, the site’s design was one of its primary distinguishing features — it used a three-column layout that gave equal weight to a variety […]
Why in the world would someone who earns a living building links write that you need to stop hiring other people to build your links and start doing it yourself? Because that’s what’s in your best interest. If you hope to survive this down economy, and thrive long term once things improve, now is a […]
eMarketer’s latest report named Search Marketing Trends: Back to Basics says that in the realm of search marketing budgets, SEO budgets will increase in the next five years, while paid search budgets will decline relative to the overall marketing budgets for companies. MediaPost reports the growth for SEO campaigns will increase from 17.7% in 2009 […]
Like many people, I got a chuckle out of Jon Stewart’s recent send-up of Twitter on the Daily Show. If you haven’t seen it, the clip is below. I also thought it went nicely with the clip from Stephen Colbert on Wikipedia from back in 2006. So enjoy the double feature. Now if we can […]
MapQuest has beefed up its business locator tool. A scrolling vertical bar now appears on the upper right of every map allowing users to populate any map quickly and simply with different categories of businesses or, in the case of advertisers, with specific brand locations. Here’s what happens when you click the logo for Holiday […]
The Google Maps Mania Blog reports that Twitter in conjunction with Google Maps has helped locate a couple lost skiers. The blog post said, “group of technology entrepreneurs on a skiing vacation in Verbier in the Alps lost two of their party.” Alex Hoye used Twitter to send out the request, then found Jason based […]
Images are one of the most popular forms of social media news content for a variety of reasons. This form of media is easily consumed, transfers information quickly, usually requires less reading and can project a great deal of information (many times more so than text). People are busy and not willing to give away […]
Like many others, I saw the mention that came out on LiveSide earlier today about Microsoft’s new search interface and potential “Kumo” brand change. Now we, along with others, have received an internal memo about the changes along with some further screenshots Before jumping in, let’s talk about the brand change. I’ve lost track of […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
Yahoo is celebrating its 14th birthday today with a trip down memory lane in the form of a short photo essay on the company blog. Here’s one of the photos — a shot of the Yahoo home page in 1995: There’s also a shot of co-founders Jerry Yang and David Filo which, perhaps accidentally, serves […]
A new tool takes us one small step closer to bringing real-time search, i.e., Twitter search results, to the Google interface. It’s called Twitter Search Results on Google, and it adds the most recent five tweets for your search query above Google’s regular search results, like this: (The tool is actually a Greasemonkey script for […]
Our twice sold-old SMX Advanced search marketing conference returns to Seattle this coming June 2 & 3. I’ll be producing the agenda to go up later this month. As part of that, I’m now accepting session ideas for the show — topics on advanced SEO, advanced PPC and ideas for our search marketing business track. […]
When the Yahoo-Newspaper consortium was announced in early 2007 both Yahoo and the newspaper industry were stronger and in better shape than they are today. (That’s certainly true for newspapers.) Since that time Yahoo has suffered through the MicroHoo episode, gone through a couple reorgs, laid off a meaningful chunk of its workforce and gained […]
A couple weeks ago, Yahoo announced they will be going forward with rich ads in Yahoo search. Back then, we only saw a few examples in the raw Yahoo Search results, and they were for mostly video ads. I received a heads up from Gary Price that Yahoo is now showing image ads on Yahoo […]
Dan Sharp at the Search Engine War blog noticed Google testing a new type of Sitelinks format. Google Sitelinks are the links you find under some of the Google search results. Typically, they are listed out in two columns and four rows, directly under the display URL. To see it in action, try this query. […]
The thumbprint of social media on search engine optimization is evolving. It used to be that the big rage was figuring out how to develop link bait that had a strong chance of making the front page of Digg, Reddit, or other similar social news sites. The results were good, mostly in terms of getting […]
The display URL is an often overlooked element of ad copy. It’s most common usage is to signal to a searcher where the ad click leads. However, the display URL is also a quality score factor and has different editorial requirements than the rest of your ad. The display URL is also a prime candidate […]
Video search and SEO services provider EveryZing has introduced MediaCloud, an online service that automatically generates search-friendly metadata for video, audio and other rich media content. One of the big problems with rich media is that without accompanying metadata that describes the contents, video and audio files are essentially “invisible” to search engines. MediaCloud seeks […]
Myspace has quickly become the go-to site for many businesses that can not afford websites to create some kind of online presence. The ability to quickly create a profile, gather friends and customize the page by placing your logo on the page has attracted a lot of businesses. Of course search marketers were quick to […]
The latest SEO talk this week has been all about Google’s algorithm changes that presumably favor big brands, but Microsoft Live Search has been experimenting with changes of its own that seemingly would help big brands the most (although ironically, big brands may not like it all that much). Today, I came across some interesting […]
If you needed evidence that we’re living in the age of Google, look no farther than France. Ville d’Eu (more commonly known as simply “EU”) is thinking of changing its name in order to rank more easily in Google. Search for [EU], says the mayor, and information about the town is drowned out by results […]
I had the privilege of meeting with the Google Israel team in their Tel Aviv office. Eyal Miller, the manager of the technology sector of Google Israel was kind enough to give me the office tour and introduce me to the people. As some of you know, Google has two offices in Israel. One in […]