Search Month: August 2008 Search News, In Review

Sep 3, 2008 at 4:51pm ET by Danny Sullivan

Search Month is a monthly newsletter that recaps stories covered on Search Engine Land over the past month. It’s also available by feed here. Below, news about Search Engine Land itself, then our 10 most popular stories from August 2008, then a major story for various search topics along with other stories related to those topics covered during August.

==============================
Search Engine Land News
==============================

REGISTER FOR SMX EAST & SAVE! Our SMX East search marketing conference comes to New York from October 6-8 with a range of sessions covering all aspects of search marketing plus two killer keynotes from Click author Bill Tancer and Google’s North America president of advertising and commerce Tim Armstrong. Don’t miss out. Register early to get early bird pricing. See the links below for more information about the event:

MORE SMX SHOWS! Aside from the shows above, here are other SMX events on the calendar, for those doing forward planning:

Industrial Strength: New Column! Last month saw the launch of Industrial Strength, our newest Search Engine Land column. Industrial Strength is written by search marketers responsible for managing SEO for huge websites and running massive search advertising campaigns. Topics range from handling technical challenges to working with multiple key stakeholders and getting everyone to play nice together. Check it out along with our list of many other columns!

SMX & SEARCH ENGINE LAND SOCIAL OPTIONS! Remember, a good way to keep up on all of our events is by reading the SMX Blog. You can also socialize in a variety of ways:

========================================
Top 10 Most Popular Stories: August 2008
========================================

1) Google’s Email, Gmail, Having Major Issues – It is not uncommon for Gmail (Google Email) users to complain about outages and issues with sending and receiving email. But right now, there are hundreds of Gmail users complaining that Gmail is down or simply not sending or receiving emails. A current search at Twitter on Gmail will return hundreds of messages with Gmail complaints. I am personally receiving a "Temporary Error (502)" and was receiving other weird errors when trying the Gmail interface. Some are reporting that Gmail is working fine through POP and IMAP protocols, but just not via the web interface.

===================

2) 6 Common Website Mistakes That Are Costing You Money – As I’m reviewing company websites to prepare for our August SEO Training Class, I’m struck by how often I see the same website mistakes. Since we’ve been offering the SEO classes over the past 7 months, we’ve reviewed over 40 websites. In each class of 6 online marketers, there’s never a dearth of problems to point out to them. I’m not talking about minor glitches here, but stuff that prevents the website from reaching its full potential with the search engines. In other words, as long as these problems exist, they’re not going to be able to gain all the targeted search engine traffic that they could be. To put it into terms that anyone can relate to–the company is basically losing money every day they don’t fix their website. Here are 6 common website mistakes that could be costing you money.

===================

3) Olympics Logos From Google, Yahoo & Ask.com – Today is the day that the 2008 Summer Olympics kick off in Beijing. Here are the logos from Google, Yahoo and Ask.com for the special day:

===================

4) Search & Internet Explorer 8 – After finally getting the new Internet Explorer 8 beta installed (demands to upgrade Windows, verify Windows, sigh), I spent some time playing with the new search functionality and checking to see if Microsoft was going to try to stack the deck in its favor with the new browser. So far, it remains pretty even handed. Indeed, so far, Microsoft seems kind of lame given that there are some cool search features you’re hard pressed to locate. Let’s take a tour.

===================

5) Google Adds Olympics One Box Results – I was chatting with Danny about the Yahoo Olympics Shortcut on the Daily SearchCast and Danny noticed that a search for beach volleyball olympics on Google returns a Google OneBox result.

===================

6) Google Insights For Search Launches – Google has launched Google Insights for Search, a tool that helps advertisers and marketers understand searcher behavior. The tool offers a comprehensive set of statistics based on search volume and patters. You can compare seasonal trends, geographic distributions, and category-specific searches, and you can group all these variables together to get extremely specific. In addition, Google allows you see "rising searches" overall or in a specific filter that you have set up. Overall, this seems to be a huge extension to Google Trends, Google Ad Planner, and the tools available within AdWords to advertisers. I will share some examples with you below, in order to help you understand the powerful set of features Google Insights for Search can offer you.

===================

7) Looking For The Paris Hilton Campaign Video — How’d The Search Engines Do? – As much as I’ve enjoyed comedians poking fun at John McCain’s ad that uses Paris Hilton to mock Barack Obama, even better is a new fake ad where Paris Hilton herself takes on McCain. People are clearly turning to the web to find it – Google Trends shows plenty of people seeking it in a variety of ways. A quick look at that below, how easily (or not) the video can be found on search engines, and the video itself.

===================

8) 3,000+ Hours Of Olympic Video: Can Search Engine Users Find It? – During the 2008 Beijing Olympics, NBCOlympics.com is streaming 2,200 hours of exclusive live Olympic video, as well as over 3,000 hours of replays. This content is housed exclusively on the NBC site. Users can search NBCOlympics.com to watch their favorite highlights or catch something they may have missed. But can hungry Olympic video fans find their way to this mass of popular NBC content? Like the number of gold medals Michael Phelps will win, this remains to be seen.

===================

9) Google.com Finally Gets Google Suggest Feature – After being in testing for literally years, Google Suggest is finally coming to Google.com. This is the feature where as you start to type in the search box, related searches automatically appear below where you are typing.

===================

10) Googler Asks, "Marry Me" Via Google Maps – The Google Earth Blog reports that Googler Michael Weiss-Malik has proposed to his girlfriend, Leslie, via Google Maps. They documented everything on their new web site, MarryMeLeslie.com, but here is a picture of the proposal using an embeddable Google Map: View Larger Map

============================
Ask.com
============================

Ask Kids Relaunches With Cute Kids Features – A few days ago, Ask.com relaunched Ask Kids, their search flavored for children. The Ask.com blog just wrote about the launch last night. Ask.com said the Ask Kids site was "built from the ground-up, with our own search technology." It seems like Ask.com added a "very strict" list of which sites are allowed in the Ask Kids index and which are not allowed. They claim it is the "most comprehensive, kid-friendly search available today." See also:

============================
AOL
============================

MapQuest Introduces New (Beta) Look, Features – AOL’s MapQuest remains the top brand in online mapping and is still the most visited mapping site, despite recent gains by Google Maps. However, as the "incumbent" MapQuest has been somewhat resistant to experimentation and slower to adopt new features. But this morning the site is launching what promises to be the first of many changes in the coming months that will make it more dynamic, more visually interesting and content rich. See also:

============================
B2B
============================

Using Search Engines To Reach Business Executives – Many B2B marketers are frustrated by their inability to reach executive-level decision makers. Recent research indicates they needn’t look further than the internet. Let’s explore how marketers can utilize search engines to easily and cost-effectively reach executives online.

============================
Business & Revenues
============================

comScore: Google Has 81% Share In India – We all know that Google dominates search market share in the United States, but Google really dominates in India. A recent comScore release says that Google search share in India is 81.4%, with over 1 billion searches conducted in June. Yahoo follows with 9.4 percent or 117 million searches, then Ask.com’s properties with 1.9 percent or 24 million search, and then Microsoft’s properties with 1.7 percent or 22 million searches in June in India.

============================
Google: AdSense
============================

Save Time & Money Buying Your Targeted CPM From Google – With the launch of AdWords new keywords plus placements targeting, you have better control in buying both CPC and CPM ads via Google than in the previous days of the content network. See also:

============================
Google: AdWords
============================

Google AdWords Now With Real Time Quality Score, First Page Bid & More – The Google AdWords blog announced three major changes happening to the AdWords marketplace. First, Google will now calculate the quality score of your keywords at the time of the search query. Second, Google has removed the "minimum bid" metric and replaced it with "first page bid." Finally, Google will no longer mark search ads as "inactive for search." Google said they will be rolling out these changes to a "very small segment of advertisers within the next day or two." Google will be watching how this impacts those advertisers and will then decide when to launch this on a broader scale. Let me explain what these changes means in greater detail. See also:

============================
Google: Business Issues
============================

Whither DART Search? – Google is such an enormous entity by now that it carries a real risk of the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing. Overall, though, the company does a pretty good job of keeping its initiatives in sync. But if Googlers are always needing to meet other Googlers for the first time, imagine the effort of digesting a large company in the digital ad space whose founding predated Google’s by two years, and which brings to the table a variety of legacy technologies and platforms along with its own corporate culture. Googlers, meet DoubleClickers! See also:

============================
Google: Maps & Local
============================

More Google StreetView Privacy Controversy – CNET rekindles the Google StreetView trespassing controversy that we’ve written about a couple of times in the past (here and here). Google has said publicly and in email comments to us that its policy is to photograph public roads and stay off private property. The CNET article effectively argues that Google is willfully violating and disrespecting those property rights and expectations. See also:

============================
Google: Mobile
============================

Report: Verizon May Opt For Google To Provide Mobile Search Front – The Wall Street Journal reports that Google and Verizon are close to a deal. The deal would make Google the default search provided for Verizon mobile devices. In the past, Verizon and other mobile carriers were reluctant to let Google or other search companies invade this space, but that might be over with. The Wall Street Journal says Verizon wants Google to create a new search platform that would be a one-stop shop. In exchange, Google would share the ad revenue with Verizon under this platform. The details of the deal are not complete yet and as soon as we have more information, we will update you. See also:

============================
Google: SEO Issues
============================

FindLaw Hit By Long Arm Of The Google Law Over Paid Links – Toolbar PageRank penalties are nothing new to the SEO world, we see them all the time. But when Todd Friesen broke the news that FindLaw.com is marketing a new advertising service to sell links that will "help you increase your company’s visibility, rank and penetration within natural search results on major search engines such as Google," as the FindLaw email said, the legal industry was somewhat shocked. Back in October 2007, we reported that Google officially said that selling or buying links can hurt your PageRank and/or rankings in Google. We then saw the sledge hammer hit and sites noticed that their Toolbar PageRank scores dropped drastically. But even with all this publicity and all the official Google documentation, FindLaw.com managed to send out an email marketing blast to sell text links that are marketed to increase a site’s rankings. What happened? FindLaw.com noticed that their Toolbar PageRank score dropped from a 7 to a 5. See also:

============================
Google: Searching
============================

Google Now Searching For Synonyms – Blink, and you might have missed it. Google’s now doing synonym searching. It’s something they quietly noted in a past Google blog post and one that comes up again today in a post that covers how Google uses experiments to improve the search interface. See also:

============================
Google: YouTube & Google Video
============================

YouTube Changes Their Minds On Streaming Video: They Won’t Do It – Earlier this year, we reported that YouTube said they will be providing live streaming features by the end of 2008. According to a new report at Silicon Alley Insider, YouTube now says they will not be releasing live streaming this year and likely not even next year. A source told Silicon Alley Insider that Google was "never really seriously considered a live video service." The reason Google is against providing live stream was over hardware, software costs, and bandwidth fees. Reportedly, after the founder of YouTube told Sarah Meyers that they will be launching live streams, Google discussed it internally and decided to hold off on it. See also:

============================
Google: Other
============================

Google Reader Improves Friends Sharing Feature – The Google Reader Blog announced they have added a few features to improve the flexibility of sharing your feeds with your friends. With the new feature, you can now manage your "Friends list" in Google Reader, separate from your Gmail chat contacts. See also:

============================
In House SEM
============================

How To Adopt A Pro-SEO Culture At Your Company – The most successful SEO programs aren’t solely the result of a great SEO team. They happen because the entire company incorporates SEO into their portion of a given project, and everyone recognizes when it’s time to bring in the SEO to discussions. Establishing this level of SEO buy-in throughout the organization is neither a fast nor easy task, but it’s very realistic and the ROI on this level of SEO engagement from the entire company is through the roof. See also:

============================
Link Building
============================

Link Development Realities Versus What We Tell Our Clients – This week I’m seeking some feedback for a future column with a working title of "Link Development Realities Versus What We Tell Our Clients" The idea for this column came from a client conference call I participated in this past week. As the call progressed, it became more and more evident that several of the participants in the call did not, to put this gently, have a clue what they were doing. I was in a situation where refuting what the call participants were telling everyone could easily make them look bad in front of co-workers, managers, etc. See also:

============================
Local Search & Maps
============================

Local Shopping Coming To A Mobile Phone Near You – For some time I’ve tried to argue that product search is part of "local search," because 90 percent or more of all products searched for online are purchased in physical stores. This is a neglected part of the local search story, which has heretofore largely been about "plumbers and pizza." But the internet is fundamentally a research tool that drives offline transactions. E-commerce is, relatively speaking, a niche phenomenon. That’s why mobile applications such as TheFind’s new iPhone app or Slifter and others are significant: they help bridge the gap between the internet and physical stores. They also help make this online-offline connection more transparent to brands, retailers and agencies. See also:

============================
Local SEM
============================     

Forming Good Title Tags for Local Businesses – If you’re looking for a quick improvement in your local business site’s rankings and don’t have a lot of time, you can’t go wrong with making some simple improvements to your homepage title tag. The text within the title tags is one of the top signals used by Google, Yahoo! and other search engines to decide what keywords are relevant to a page, and it’s also one of the most frequently neglected parts of a site design. If you have a good title tag, you can rank at the top of the search results for users seeking your business — and a bad title can leave you in the dark. Below are a few details on how to make better titles and get your pages to rank higher. See also:

============================
Microsoft: adCenter
============================

Live Search Maps Offer Local Ads – The Virtual Earth blog wrote about how Live Search Maps can have sponsored ads, as icons or logos, embedded directly in the local results. This is a feature Google had at least since August 2006 and Google Earth had since February 2007.

============================
Microsoft: Business Issues
============================

Microsoft To Take Another Run At Yahoo In 2009? - If absurdist playwright Samuel Beckett were still alive, he might be tempted to write a drama about the Microsoft and Yahoo non-merger that seems to keep generating news and speculation. Better yet, maybe living playwright David Mamet will take a crack at some point. The latest justification for writing yet another post about whether or not Microsoft will take another run at Yahoo is an eWeek piece in which Eric Jackson, who runs Ironfire Capital, a Yahoo investor, argues that Microsoft still needs Yahoo and predicts another acquisition attempt. See also:

============================
Microsoft: Search
============================

Microsoft’s Photosyth Opens To The Public – Microsoft’s Photosyth is transforming from a Microsoft Live Labs experiment, featured on the BBC’s "How We Built Britain" television series and in select other rarefied contexts, to a what can only be described as "totally cool" consumer application. See also:

============================
Microsoft: SEO Issues
============================

Live Search Webmaster Center Gains Crawl Error And Backlinks Reports – Today, the Microsoft Live Search Webmaster Center is launching its first major update since its initial debut last fall. The Live Search Webmaster Center is Microsoft’s hub for their communication with site owners, and the tools portion of that center now has new crawl issues reports, backlinks data, and download functionality. The Webmaster Center was first announced at Searchification in September and launched in November 2007 with a blog, discussion forum, and set of tools that give site owners insight into Microsoft’s crawl and indexing of their sites. Below, more details about what’s launched today and how site owners can use the new data.

============================
Paid Search & Contextual
============================

Switching Gears With Paid Search: 6 Steps To Redefining Success For A Branding Campaign - Sweat glistened down his chiseled, tan face. Clad in his trademark gold jersey and black sunglasses, the icon finally put the finish line where it belongs… behind him. Yet despite the obvious missing hardware—his bike—and his dismal 488th place finish, the seven-time winner of the Tour de France considered the race a success. He had his reasons. Believe it or not, search marketers have a lot to learn from Lance Armstrong. For once, the above race wasn’t about the win. Instead, the fierce competitor laced-up to run the Boston Marathon for another reason entirely: Awareness for Livestrong, his non-profit foundation for cancer survivors. In the process, not only did he shift gears—from acquisition to branding—he also took the time to redefine success. Similarly, search marketers looking to leverage paid search for branding purposes would be wise to do the same. See also:

============================
Searching
============================

Pew: Daily Search Usage Approaching Email Levels – According to a new report from The Pew Internet & American Life Project, daily use of search engines is growing and starting to approach email usage levels. New research conducted by telephone among 2,251 US adults, age 18 and older, found that 49 percent of internet users use a search engine on a typical day, compared with 60 percent for email. In 2002, Pew’s data showed that about 30 percent of people online used search daily. See also:

============================
Search Marketing Industry
============================

What Are Search Blogs Talking About? – Lee Odden wrote Word Visualization on Search Marketing Blogs, where he used a tool named Wordle to show what the search blogs are actually talking about. Wordle forms a tag cloud of the most used words and phrases on a particular blog. The neat part is that Wordle allows you to select different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. So what are we talking about? See also:

============================
Search Marketing Tactics
============================

Search Marketing & The US Presidental Race, Case Study: Sarah Palin – After reading yesterday about how savvy both US presidential campaigns seem to think they are about search marketing, I decided I’m going to take a closer look at watching them. In particular, I noticed yesterday that both seemed pretty lame when it came to tapping into rising queries that you can spot on Google Trends. That’s what I’m going to be watching in particular over the coming weeks — and today’s a good start. Google Trends is lighting up with searches for McCain’s vice presidential pick, Alaska governor Sarah Palin. How are the campaigns responding? Not so well. See also:

============================
SEO / Natural / Unpaid Search
============================

Redirects: Good, Bad & Conditional – Whenever you make changes to a web site, one of the most important considerations should be how to use "redirects" to alert the search engine to your changes to avoid having a negative impact on your search rankings. Whether you’re moving pages around, switching CMS platforms, or just wanting to avoid duplicate content and PageRank dilution, you’ll want to employ redirects so as not to squander any link juice (PageRank) that your site has acquired. There are multiple ways of redirecting, and it’s important you get it right if you want the SEO benefit without risk of falling outside search engine guidelines (such as is the case with "conditional redirects"). See also:

============================
Small Business
============================

Small Businesses, Conversion Rates, and Online Video: A Good Mix? – Can using online video adverting get your small business to quintuple traditional search engine marketing conversion rates? How about increase them sixteen-fold? While it would be irresponsible for anyone to promise results like these, there are some very interesting early indications in the marketplace about the benefits that integrating effective online video advertising can have on a search engine marketing campaign. Our column last month generated a fair bit of buzz when we reported some stats from a recent FindLaw piece of research: That consumers typically visit an average of 4.8 web sites before deciding which attorney to select, but that when lawyers added video to their respective web sites, this number decreased fairly substantially, to 1.8.

============================
Social Media
============================

Social Media Marketing ROI – Metrics And Analysis – When I attended South by Southwest 2008, I had the pleasure of attending a panel where four somewhat lost panelists were (with difficulty) trying to come up with metrics to measure success from a social media marketing campaign. I was a little annoyed when they concluded that there were no metrics available right now, and that someone would have to come up with a new way of measuring social media success. While many people argue that the current metrics are no longer applicable, here’s a look at how we can adapt the currently available methodologies and apply them to social media marketing campaigns. See also:

============================
Video Search
============================

The Case For Speech-to-Text Analysis In Multimedia Content Discovery – There have been several recent announcements surrounding the application of speech-to-text analysis in consumer search settings. Google announced its Political Gadget, enabling visitors to search the spoken word of content within YouTube Presidential candidate’s channels. Adobe plans to include speech-to-text features in future versions of its video authoring applications, such as Premier. Sites such as WEEI and FOX Sports have been using similar tools to power search and publishing applications for their multimedia archives for some time (disclaimer: my company provides enabling technology to WEEI and FOX Sports). Why all of the interest around speech-to-text? See also:

============================
Yahoo: Business Issues
============================

Yahoo Survives Annual Meeting, Re-Elects Board, Microsoft Cries Foul – Perhaps we’re coming to the point where we’ll no longer be writing about Microsoft and Yahoo and their failed courtship. We’ll see. Today Yahoo survived its long-anticipated shareholder meeting. It’s detailed in this CNET blog post. At the conclusion of the meeting, Yahoo issued a statement that its slate of directors was elected, following the settlement of the Carl Icahn proxy challenge. See also:

============================
Yahoo: Paid Search
============================

Yahoo Introduces Contextual Display Ad Targeting To RightMedia Exchange – Yahoo has partnered with LucidMedia to bring contextual display ad targeting capabilities to the company’s RightMedia ad exchange. Advertisers will be able to contextually target display ads according to 63 vertical ad categories that RightMedia has established for the program. They include things like automotive, careers & jobs, clothing & apparel, finance, sports & recreation, and so on. Yahoo acquired RightMedia in early 2007 for more than $700 million. See also:

============================
Yahoo: Local & Mobile
============================

Yahoo Maps Now With Better Search Integration & New Features – Yahoo announced that they have added some features to Yahoo Maps. The main improvements include better local search integration, usability enhancements, and printable view changes. See also:

============================
Yahoo: Searching
============================

Yahoo Buzz Opens All Publishers & Web Sites – Yahoo Buzz is now open to all publishers and web sites. Yahoo announced that any Yahoo user can now "buzz up" any content from any publisher on the Web. Yahoo Buzz launched in February of this year as a Digg competitor. It was locked down to about 100 publishers and grew to over 400 since then. Yahoo said they have over 5 million users that have participated in the site. But now, any user can submit any web page on the web.

============================
Yahoo: SEO
============================

Yahoo! SearchMonkey Becomes More Mainstream – Earlier this year, when I wrote about Yahoo! SearchMonkey, which enables developers to build search result enhancements based on semantic web data, I was skeptical that it would fulfill Yahoo!’s stated aims of encouraging wider use of semantic web standards. While I agreed with Yahoo! that site owners need a reason to adopt these standards, I didn’t know that SearchMonkey would be that reason. The enhanced listings weren’t turned on for searchers by default and searchers are notorious for never customizing their search experience. If searchers never see the listings, where’s the motivation? Tonight, site owners may have found some of that motivation. Yahoo! has turned several SearchMonkey enhanced listings on by default. This shows their willingness to experiment with the search experience. It also encourages SearchMonkey developers by showing that Yahoo! supports and is continuing to evolve the program. And it also indicates that Yahoo! may continue making more enhancements the default, which should motivate site owners to look a bit closer at the semantic web. Below, more details about what searchers are now seeing by default in Yahoo! results. See also:

============================
Fun, Weird Stuff & Other Things
============================

Search In Pictures: Mandi Perkins at Yahoo, Google Dance & Yahoo Safari – 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. See also:


Danny Sullivan is editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land. He’s a widely cited authority on search engines and search marketing issues who has covered the space since 1996. Danny also oversees Search Engine Land’s SMX: Search Marketing Expo conference series, maintains a personal blog called Daggle and microblogs on Twitter as @dannysullivan.

See more articles by Danny Sullivan >

Share, Bookmark & Discuss This Article
More:

Keep Updated: News Via Email | News Via RSS Feed | News Via Twitter

See more stories like this in the Members Library! Check out the Search Month sections of the Members Library where this story is filed. Members also get access to exclusive video content, a members-only weekly & monthly newsletter, plus more. Check out all the benefits!

Comments are closed.

RECENT COMMENTS

  • dian said " I haven't tried that yet but if it is the way Mazter is saying I think it won't going to do any good"
  • dian said " It really helps me a lot. The methods step by step explained the important factors easily and all th"
  • T Campbell said " Ah, that's SPIDER-Man, said the comics guy."

See All »

FREE DAILY SEARCH NEWS RECAP!

Stay on top of all the search news with our daily summary, the SearchCap newsletter. View a sample ›

STAY CURRENT THROUGHOUT THE DAY

RSS Feeds

The Search Engine Land feed keeps you informed as news happens. SEE ALL FEEDS »

Upcoming Search Engine Land Conferences

Advertise With Us »

Search Engine Land produces SMX, the Search Marketing Expo conference series. SMX events deliver the most comprehensive educational and networking experiences - whether you're just starting in search marketing or you're a seasoned expert.


SMX Web Site » | SMX Difference » | SMX News »


Join us at an upcoming SMX event:

Search Marketing Now Learn more about search marketing with our free online webcasts and webinars from our sister site, Search Marketing Now. Upcoming online events include:


See more webcast topics »

TRACK US SOCIALLY
Upcoming Search Engine Land Conferences

Get Your Search Engine Land
Premium Membership!

Become a premium member today and receive:

  • Express commenting privileges & photo.
  • Exclusive videos & newsletters.
  • Discounts to our SMX conferences.
  • Access to "How To" & Other Archives.

Learn More

Upcoming Search Engine Land Conferences
En Espanol|Contact|Members Info|RSS Feeds|Email Subscriptions|Privacy|Advertise
Add to GoogleAdd to My Yahoo!Add to BloglinesAdd to NetvibesAdd to Windows Live