Today is the birthday of Samuel Morse, the inventor of Morse code. Today, Google is sending out a message to everyone that it is his birthday. The logo is getting a lot of buzz and people are asking for more information about it. Here is a picture of the logo: Supposedly, the logo is slightly off, in terms of morse code. I am not a morse code professional, but from the comments I have at the Search Engine Roundtable this morning, some experts are a little upset it is not in a single line. However, it does look a lot nicer this way. You can convert the morse code using a morse code [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Consumer | Google: Logos

When's Microsoft's new search brand launching? Perhaps at our SMX Advanced search marketing conference on June 2, based on a "countdown clock" someone spotted at the Microsoft campus. The LiveSide Blog reports a visitor noticed a countdown clock at Building 88, where the Live Search team works at Microsoft's headquarters. The clock says "Countdown to Kumo," with the timer ending at 4pm on Tuesday, June 2nd. That coincides with the SMX Advanced show in Seattle, which runs June 2 to 3. Also, Microsoft's Dr. Qi Lu -- who heads the company's search efforts -- will be keynoting at the show. [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Industry | Features: Analysis | Microsoft: Bing | Microsoft: Business Issues | Top News

The Early Bird Rate for Search Marketing Expo – SMX Advanced expires at the end of the day on Friday, May 1st. Save on your All Access ticket by registering now! Advanced features one-of-a-kind sessions for experienced search engine marketers. Look at the agenda. See what to expect – read conference chair Danny Sullivan’s preview. Check out the latest networking opportunities – with more on the way. Advanced sells out because capacity is limited. Over half of all tickets are already gone! Don’t miss out on your one chance to attend SMX Advanced this year. Join us June 2- [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Other | SEM Industry: Conferences | SMX & DMD Alerts

Steve Rubel reports that Google has released a new iGoogle Gadget named What's Popular. The gadget looks like a small little Digg clone to me. Here is a screen capture: As you can see, you can mark up or down a story and it shows the number of "pops" next to the story, plus when it was first added. You can even submit your own stories and keep track of your submissions and "my pops." If you maximize the gadget, you can further filter the stories. Here is a screen capture: I wonder if this will catch on? We remember when AOL turned Netscape into a Digg clone and it failed. [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social | Google: Gadgets | Search Engines: Digg | Top News

AT&T which has publicly advocated on behalf of relatively stringent rules and opt-in requirements around behavioral targeting (BT) appears to have been working with BT firm Audience Science (formerly Revenue Science). Wendy Davis at MediaPost has written two related stories on the issue. Here's her summary of the apparent contradiction between AT&T's public position and its behavior: While many marketers work with online behavioral targeting companies, AT&T's apparent relationship with Audience Science is striking because the telecom has publicly said that behavioral advertising - [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Industry | Legal: General | Legal: Privacy

Over the weekend, there seemed to be a lot of activity on people coming and going at search companies. I figured I sum up some of those moves in a short post here. Former Googler Douglas Bowman, who resigned from Google due to Google being too data centric has taken a job at Twitter, according to TechCrunch. Priti Choksi, a director of strategic partner development at Google has moved to Facebook, according to VentureBeat. Well-known Greg Linden is Leaving Microsoft after Microsoft has "dismantled" Live Labs. Brad Williams, Yahoo Inc.'s head of communications has left the company. Rumo [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Industry | Google: Employees | Microsoft: Employees | Search Biz | Yahoo: Employees

The focus of the paid search world, if you measure it by tweets, blog posts and conference sessions, has turned squarely to Google's AdWords Quality Score over the past few months. Google first introduced Quality Score years ago, but changes they rolled out in August of 2008 recently increased visibility of the score in the AdWords interface and via their API, and a great new video by Google Chief Economist Hal Varian has pushed the discussion to a fever pitch. Part of the appeal clearly is the fact that it's a numeric value judgement Google is making about our keywords and account conf [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Google: AdWords | Paid Search

Publishing many web sites can be a very challenging process. There are times when organizations have a larger main site and decide to operate one or more smaller sites (aka microsites) as well. Other organizations publish a number of microsites without having a larger site at all. Whether publishing microsites are in violation of the search engine webmaster guidelines depends on the details of the implementation and the reasons for doing it. Let's look at a few of the reasons why people do it, and map out the likely search engine viewpoint on them: SERP domination.. As most of our reader [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Industrial Strength

After covering search for 13 years, I'm more than a little jaded. I've seen any number of search start-ups promise to revolutionize how we search. None of them have in the huge way they've promised, other than Google -- and it's a special case. Over the past few weeks, I've been watching Wolfram Alpha walk the same hype path so many have followed before. So I thought I'd offer a little advice, for what it's worth. Here's how to set your search service up for a disappointing fall. 1) Fail to brief those in the know: First I heard of Wolfram Alpha was on Techmeme back in March. The com [...]

Related Topics: Blekko | Channel: SEO | Features: Analysis | Google: SEO | Search Engines: Other Search Engines | Top News | Wolfram Alpha

A search for swine flu at Yahoo returns two indented results under the main results. As far as I know, Yahoo has only shown a single indented results under the main result. I am not sure if this is some type of bug or if Yahoo has decided to show more results from the same domain in certain cases. Here is a screen capture: Hat tip to Tom, a Search Engine Land reader for notifying us about this. [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | SEO: Host Crowding & Clustering | Yahoo: Search

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 Brings ‘My Location’ To The DesktopKnowing where a searcher is when s/he conducts a search is one of the big promises and opportunities in mobile search. Advertisers want the precise targeting, and it’s also a convenience for the user who doesn’t need to indicate a location when looking for products and services. There are already several tools and services that [...] Search In Pictures: Danielle Bux @ Ask, Yahoo Ur [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Other | SearchCap

Knowing where a searcher is when s/he conducts a search is one of the big promises and opportunities in mobile search. Advertisers want the precise targeting, and it's also a convenience for the user who doesn't need to indicate a location when looking for products and services. There are already several tools and services that include location as part of the mobile search experience, but Google has added location-based web searching on the desktop via a new, beta version of the Google Toolbar. The new toolbar includes Google's "My Location" technology, which was introduced in 2007 for mobi [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: Labs | Google: Maps & Local | Google: Mobile | Google: Toolbar | Top News

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. The Yahoo Mobile Car: Danielle Bux Working with Ask.com's Butler: José Luis Fuertes, Vinton Cerf y William Loughboroug at WWW 2009 y W4A 2009 (also Tim Bernes-Lee was there): Vanessa Fox & Nathan Buggia at L.A. Web Dev & Search Meetup: "Sometimes When I Am Alone, I Google Myself" T-Shirt: Yahoo Urinals: [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Other | Search In Pictures

Yesterday Microsoft announced earnings. Though the company had  $13.65 billion in revenue, it saw its first YoY revenue decline since becoming a public company. The bruising headline is: Microsoft Profit Falls for First Time in 23 Years. Below are two charts of interest, the first showing division revenues and the second focused on online business services in particular. Regarding the latter, there was an overall 14 percent decline in online business services revenue, while online ad revenues dropped 16 percent -- hit by weakness in online display advertising. There are a millio [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Industry | Features: Analysis | Microsoft: Business Issues | Microsoft: General

Yelp has partly been successful because it was so focused on the consumer. Other competing local sites, such as Cox's Kudzu or most of the internet yellow pages sites, among others, have for a long time tried to strike more balance between businesses and consumers. For example, they have allowed business owners to respond or comment on consumer reviews, whereas Yelp created a mechanism for business owners and users to communicate behind the scenes but not directly on the site. (A new local venture from Sears, yes Sears, called ServiceLive allows businesses to actually review consumers. And Cit [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Industry | Legal: General | Search Engines: Maps & Local Search Engines | Top News

I’ve been exploring and researching the relationship between computers and people. More specifically, I’m fascinated by web sites and how, or if, they affect us emotionally, mentally, physically and spiritually. As a web site designer, what special power do you hold in your artistic hands? As a blogger, what kind of reaction are you seeking from readers? As a well branded company, are there in-house human instabilities that can be sensed by your online consumers? A change in perspective Over the past dozen years, we’ve learned that a secret to a web site’s long-term success is [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Content | Search & Usability

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 Optimizes Product Search For iPhones, AndroidGoogle has upgraded product search for mobile, on Android and iPhone devices, to allow users to get price, product specs and reviews information on their handsets. Google posted about it here. Users can either navigate directly to Google Shopping on their smartphone handsets (under the “more” pull-down) and enter a query or do the same in [...] Google Keyword Tool Showing Local vs. [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Other | SearchCap

Google has upgraded product search for mobile, on Android and iPhone devices, to allow users to get price, product specs and reviews information on their handsets. Google posted about it here. Users can either navigate directly to Google Shopping on their smartphone handsets (under the "more" pull-down) and enter a query or do the same in the main mobile search box and then scroll to the "Shopping Results" on the main SERP. Either way you are sent into a new, optimized mobile shopping experience. Under an "options" pull-down in the upper right of the mobile screen, you can sort by price, ra [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Retail | Google: Mobile | Google: Product Search | Search Engines: Mobile Search Engines | Search Engines: Shopping Search Engines

The Site Visibility blog noticed Google has updated their keyword suggestion tool to show local search volume in addition to global search volume. As you can see from the screen capture below, there are two columns, one for local and one for global. The local column shows search volume data "specific to your targeted country and language as well as your selection from the Match Type drop-down menu." While the global column "includes traffic in all countries and languages and is specific to your selection from the Match Type drop-down menu." For all my tests, either the local column h [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Google: AdWords | SEM Tools | Top News

The Google AdSense blog announced they are testing a new beta feature that gives publishers control over the ads they can filter. This filter allows advertisers to pick specific categories of ads that they want to block. For example, if you have a site about education and you specifically do not want to show any ads about religion and/or ads that are sexually suggestive, with this tool, you can exclude religion ads. Here is a screen capture of the available categories you can exclude: Notice how on the right column, it shows you how much revenue you made (as a percentage of total i [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Display | Google: AdSense