Last week, Google seemingly caught up with Bing in the war over status updates from social sites, announcing a deal to get real time information from Facebook. In reality, Bing’s receiving more complete information. Both Google and Bing have coveted the “status updates” that users make on social sites like Twitter and Facebook. Our What […]
On the Twitter blog today, Chief Scientist Abdur released a summary chart of the most popular trending topics on the social platform during 2009: Microsoft’s Windows 7 did make the Top 10 Technology searches, but no such luck for Bing. In addition to the major news events of the year like the Iran Election (a […]
Europe has generally emerged as a much more forceful player in anti-trust law than regulators in the US (despite their tough rhetoric). Some people believe, in fact, that in Microsoft’s case Europe has treated the company with a very heavy hand and turned it into the equivalent of a cash machine, imposing billions in fines. […]
The mercurial Barry Diller, CEO of IAC, decided apparently that he didn’t want to sell Ask. During the Q3 earnings call Reuters reported that Diller said the following: “We’ve been asked a lot whether we’re open to consolidating transactions in the area of search. The answer is yes,” Diller said. “And, it is unlikely that […]
CNet News reports that spammers and scammers are exploiting Google Doodles. As you can imagine, there are many people who click on the Google Doodle from the Google home page. Clicking on the logo will trigger a search result in Google. If you look at Google Hot Trends for yesterday, you will see that the […]
Google Operating System noticed that Google’s Search suggestions got smarter. Google Suggest, as you type, shows you search suggestions to help you complete your query. But what if you want to refine that query? Google will show you refinements to the search suggestions with the single addition of a letter, even in the middle of […]
Perhaps the biggest challenge for an e-commerce SEO is that all e-commerce sites are conceptually identical. Virtually any site consists of products organized into categories, a shopping cart, and a checkout page. Accordingly, search marketing success for e-commerce sites is predicated less on innovation than possessing an expert understanding of factors that impact search marketing […]
George sat in a white lab room, next to an MRI machine that was vibrating softly to a U2 song. No, that was his iPhone. George twitched and slapped at his pocket to silence it. The blonde woman in the dark blue suit turned and frowned at him. “Did you bring your paperwork?” she asked. […]
As the old saying goes, you never get a second chance to make a first impression, and your website is no exception. To ensure that your site creates a positive impression, you need to keep it well maintained. Considering that a website is one of the most important marketing tools, marketers should be mindful that […]
Many webmasters will be happy to know that Google has announced its support for using the rel=”canonical” link element across different domains. This is important news because when the canonical tag (as it’s become known) was introduced by all three search engines during our SMX West Conference this past February, they only supported its use […]
Microsoft’s new Bing iPhone app — that’s right, you heard it correctly — is an accomplishment on many levels. Microsoft has come a long way in acknowledging the importance of the iPhone platform. And the app itself offers a terrific overall mobile search experience, particularly in maps and local. It’s available this evening in the […]
Ratings and reviews have long been important to local search. Quantity used to be all that mattered – businesses with more reviews and ratings could rank higher than those without, even if the reviews were unfavorable. Google has joined Bing (and Yahoo to a lesser degree) with today’s announcement that it’s emphasizing the content and […]
There’s a new post on the Bing Search blog that talks at length about Bing’s search history features, introduces a couple new features, and seems to ding Google a couple times along the way over its recent privacy-related stumbles. Bing has added its existing search history controls — “Clear all,” “See all,” and “Turn off” […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Yahoo Showing Local Results On Non-Local Queries Following in others’ footsteps, Yahoo says it’s now showing its local shortcut on certain queries that don’t include a local modifier. When you search […]
Following in others’ footsteps, Yahoo says it’s now showing its local shortcut on certain queries that don’t include a local modifier. When you search for the name of a business, or a local business category, Yahoo will show the local shortcut if it believes the search has local intent. For me, typing “pizza” into Yahoo’s […]
What is it about your website (or your organization) that is truly linkable? What’s the most effective way to structure a link building campaign? What is the most effective first task for a link builder? By creating an inventory of link building assets, you lay the foundation for a sustainable link building campaign, whether you’re […]
The Google home page is featuring a logo for the 150th birthday of L. L. Zamenhof. L. L. Zamenhof is known for inventing a constructed language designed for international communication known as Esperanto. According to Wikipedia, Esperanto is used by 100,000 and 2 million speakers for over a century and has 1,000 native speakers but […]
Does local hosting matter for rankings internationally? Will it be even more significant after page load speed becomes part of the Google algorithm? Is there a one-size-fits-all solution?
If you’ve been around me you’ve probably heard me say this, but it bears repeating: As soon as you, the marketer, pay for a search click, someone will want to know what you got for it. This means that you will need effective ways to both optimize and report out results on your campaign. This […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: URL Shorteners Come To Google & Facebook Google announced a new URL shortening service Goo.gl. It doesn’t replace Bit.ly and others because it only works right now with the Google Toolbar […]
Google announced a new URL shortening service Goo.gl. It doesn’t replace Bit.ly and others because it only works right now with the Google Toolbar (and Feedburner) and you can’t directly access it as you might one of the established tools: Google URL shortener is not a stand-alone service; you can’t use it to shorten links […]
Google is testing a new interface for their Image Search feature. The interface allows you to see an infinite number of image results in the search results, simply by scrolling. This works similar to how Bing Image Search currently works, where you do not have to use the pagination to see more results. Instead, the […]
We’re more than two years in with street-level photography, although Google was the only game in town for most of that time among the majors. There were also less-well-known independents such as Everyscape and MapJack. Then two weeks ago, Bing made a big splash with a very enhanced Silverlight version of Bing Maps and national […]
As everyone knows by now the weekend saw an explosion of interest, speculation and posting around the “Nexus One,” the so-called “Google Phone” predicted first in an article by TheStreet in October and then further exposed by TechCrunch. I wrote two posts this weekend as the story evolved:
Google has a fun little search easter egg for the new year. If you go to Google, make sure the search box is empty and click on the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button, you will see large numbers counting down under the search box. It is a countdown to new years, which is 1521557 seconds or […]
Google Operating System noticed that Google Video added two search filters to the search options side bar. One option is to filter for videos that are slideshows and the other is to filter for videos that are cartoons. Here is a picture of those new search filters: I am not sure how good these filters […]
My cat, Walter, runs under the bed when he hears footsteps—even if it’s only the mailman. Being risk-averse to that degree doesn’t make Walter a rational maximizer, so he’d probably make a poor tournament player in bridge or poker. But it does make him a survivor. Natural selection works on the principle of “better,” not […]
To many of us, 2009 couldn’t end soon enough. But today we have fresh optimism about what’s in store for 2010. I sense a cautious sense of hope with everyone I’ve spoken with that the prospects for next year are stronger for local search providers and our advertisers.
Somebody (not a Google employee) contacted me just a few minutes ago saying he’d read my Google Phone At Large post and wanted to fill me in. He said he had a chance recently to hold and use the phone, which is an HTC-manufactured device, as all the discussion in the past 36 hours and […]
TechCrunch is reporting, based on a range of Tweets and chatter, that many Google employees were given an unlocked HTC handset running Android 2.1 as a holiday gift. “It’s beautiful . . . Like an iPhone on beautifying steroids” wax the rapturous Tweets. NOTE: See our follow-up piece, More Detail On Google Phone From A […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Furor Over Google CEO’s Comments On Privacy One of the big themes of the week is privacy. Facebook just did a major overhaul of its privacy settings to promote more public […]
One of the big themes of the week is privacy. Facebook just did a major overhaul of its privacy settings to promote more public dissemination of user information and updates. There was an immediate outcry from some quarters as the site was a bit aggressive in setting users’ defaults to “everyone.” In addition, Yahoo got called […]
Google announced they added universal search results directly in Google Suggest and a “quick scroll” feature as a Chrome extension. Here is a picture of weather results, a form on Universal Search, directly in the Google Search box: I personally do not see it yet, but I am sure it will show up soon. The […]
Historically, in the SEM industry, one has mentioned landing pages in conjunction with Paid Advertising and other forms of controlled click traffic. SEO has always been a more nebulous and mysterious practice; and one page, optimized for a few keywords, could show for literally hundreds of different long-tail queries. The plan was to make this […]
The previous $50 price tag was probably a serious miscalculation (pun intended) by the folks at Wolfram Alpha, when they launched their iPhone app. Pricing is an art, not a science. However, for a limited time only (the remainder of the year) they have decided to put it on sale for $19.99. There was an […]
According to a report on Wednesday, Yahoo is in the process of identifying as many as 400 engineers who may be headed to Microsoft after US government regulators do their anti-trust review and clear the companies’ search deal. The formal agreement between the two companies closed at the end of last week. The 400 engineer […]
Over at the Search Engine Roundtable I reported that Google said they will be adding a “trustworthy” indicator to the new site performance report in Google Webmaster Tools. The reason behind adding this is because of the complaints and questions coming in from webmasters on the accuracy of such reports. As I explained, a Google […]
According to ad network Chitika, Bing users are demonstrating a willingness to click on ads more often than Google users. This is consistent with similar data the company released in July of this year that showed Bing outperforming Google with click-through rates (CTR). The data come from a sample of well over 100 million impressions […]
The Holy Grail for any self-respecting AdWords campaign manager must be confirmation that the ad positions they are targeting with their AdWords campaigns provide the best possible return on ad spend (RoAS). Having an answer (based on concrete data) when a client/boss/sales manager/curious business partner inevitably questions your carefully crafted position/bid strategy, is surely gold-dust […]
Wow. Asa Dotzler, community coordinator for Firefox marketing projects, is urging the world to add Bing to Firefox and dump Google, over comments Google CEO Eric Schmidt made about privacy. Does this mean Bing will finally be allowed into Firefox as a default choice for users?