When Google launched the Official Google Blog back in 2004, it started as sort of a ho-hum event. There wasn't anything particularly gripping, and some wondered if the company should be more edgy with its posts. Since then, Google has launched more than 70 additional official blogs over the years. Some have gotten edgy; a few even have comments, but most important, they've turned into an essential communications vehicle for the company. A few weeks ago, I sat down with Karen Wickre, who aside from her formal title at Google of senior manager, global communications & public affairs, is wh [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Industry | Google: Marketing | Q&A Land

Seth Godin is widely known as one of the foremost advocates of "permission marketing," promotional campaigns that don't rely on interrupting the attention of your customers, but rather engage them and even turn them into enthusiastic advocates that volunteer time and effort to help you promote your products or services. Godin doesn't shy away from controversy. He's tweaked the noses of other well-known pundits, and in recent years has also blasted search marketers, accusing them of a variety of sins. But Godin is no stranger to search: Yoyodyne, an interactive direct marketing company he [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social | Q&A Land | Search Engines: Social Search Engines | SEM Industry: General

Search engines are great tools to help you find things you suspect exist on the web, but they leave a lot to be desired when it comes to discovering the unexpected or unknown. Sure, you may find something really cool after doing the result-page/back-button tango for a while, but that's an inefficient approach. Enter StumbleUpon, a service that lets you "channel surf" the internet, displaying sites that others have "stumbled upon" and recommended. StumbleUpon is a hybrid: Part directory of human selected sites, part search engine (the millions of pages recommended by "stumblers" have been [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social | Q&A Land | StumbleUpon

Exalead is one of those great search engines that most people haven't heard of. And that's a shame, because it offers some really powerful and unique features that most information professionals love. Exalead is also the name of an enterprise search company, co-founded by today's Q&A participant, François Bourdoncle. Working on web technologies from the very early days, he co-founded Exalead in 2000 with the goal of revolutionizing the search engine software market by providing users with a unified technology platform to access information in the enterprise. Exalead.com, the web search [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Consumer | Q&A Land | Search Engines: Outside USA

Reed Elsevier is one of the largest, most influential publishers in the world, a powerhouse in the science and medical, legal, education and business markets. But the company also has a major online presence, with more than 1,000 web sites in just its business group. Last year, Reed Business decided to leverage this significant online presence by creating Zibb, a business-to-business search engine that allows users to search across all of Reed Business' web sites. But Zibb goes beyond that—Reed also indexes billions of other business-related URLs from all over the web, including com [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Consumer | Q&A Land | Search Engines: B2B Engines | Site & Enterprise Search

Over the past decade, I've seen a lot of search tools that were supposed to transform my life. Few of them have. But Techmeme was one of those. When it kicked off back in September 2005, I wrote a review, gave it a preliminary thumbs-up and soon found myself addicted. It has become my newspaper, my front page guide to what's going in the blogosphere relating to tech. I met Techmeme creator Gabe Rivera in person for the first time last August, during the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose. I roped him into being on the Meet The Blog & Feed Search Engines panel at the [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Consumer | Q&A Land | Search Engines: Blog Search Engines | Search Engines: News Search Engines

One of my resolutions in starting Search Engine Land was to spend more time doing Q&As with people. There's no better way to ensure I do that than to start a column. So I'm happy to announce that Q&A Land becomes the second column offered by Search Engine Land. Unlike Link Week, which started this week and runs on Mondays, Q&A Land is a "floating" column. It will happen once per week, but the actual day might change. I won't be doing Q&A Land alone. Chris Sherman will also be writing for it, and from time-to-time we may have other guest authors. And yes, we'll have [...]

Related Topics: About Search Engine Land | Channel: Other | Columns | Q&A Land

News came out earlier this week that Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales had a new project in mind, to build a community-driven "Google-killer" search engine. I've just finished talking with Jimmy about his plans. Here's a rundown on his vision and what may come as his Search Wikia project grows over the course of the next year or two. Note that in the Q&A, I've had to recreate my questions as best I remember asking them. I was focused more on getting down Jimmy's responses. Q. Since the news emerged, there's been some confusion about Amazon and Wikipedia in relation to Search Wiki [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Consumer | Q&A Land | Search Engines: Search Wikia | Search Features: Query Refinement