Google’s Home Page Promotes Motorola / Verizon Droid Phone

Nov 6, 2009 at 2:21pm ET by Matt McGee   

Google really wants you to buy a Motorola Droid, the hot new phone that just hit stores today. In fact, Google is so enamored that it’s advertising the Droid on its homepage: “The Droid is on sale now. Learn more.” Clicking the “learn more” link leads to this “mobile partners” page that touts the Google search [...]

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Twitter Finally Begins Adding Search Relevancy Features

Nov 6, 2009 at 9:28am ET by Barry Schwartz   

The Twitter Blog has a short blog post mentioning that they have added technology “to show higher quality results for trend queries by returning tweets that are more useful.” Clearly, this is Twitter’s first step in improving Twitter Search by adding relevancy and search quality factors to the search algorithm. Currently, Twitter Search [...]

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Search Month European Edition, October 2009

Nov 6, 2009 at 6:34am ET by Bas van den Beld   

In Search Month European Edition we bring you a monthly update of European search news, with related links to full coverage. Here’s what happened in October. Yandex and Google dominate in Russia. Numbers show the Russian search market is dominated by Yandex and Google. Both giants account for 96% of all search traffic in Russia in [...]

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How Google & Yahoo Make Money Off A Twitter Typo Domain

Nov 5, 2009 at 2:57pm ET by Danny Sullivan   

Like many people, I misspelled a domain name today when I was trying to visit a web site. I typed Twiter.com (with one T) rather than Twitter.com. I wasn’t surprised to land on a site with ads, as is common when entering typos. I was surprised that both Google and Yahoo were making money off [...]

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Google Dashboard Offers New Privacy Controls

Nov 5, 2009 at 5:15am ET by Matt McGee   

Google has launched a new privacy dashboard — technically just called Google Dashboard — that gives users quicker access to, and more control over, the personal information stored in Google’s databases. The dashboard is a one-stop shop for managing this data and the settings that are associated with the Google products you use when [...]

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Google Gets Into The Shopping Cart Business With Commerce Search

Nov 5, 2009 at 1:25am ET by Matt McGee   

Google has just announced a new enterprise search service called Commerce Search. The name might remind you of Froogle, but this is not that kind of commerce/product search. With Commerce Search, Google has created what is essentially a shopping cart solution for online retailers.

Commerce Search, as Google describes it, promises to improve an e-commerce web [...]

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Build Your Own Google News Home Page With Custom Sections

Nov 4, 2009 at 4:41pm ET by Matt McGee   

Google News has made it easier to customize its home page with the creation of a Custom Sections Directory that includes material created both by Google and by Google News users.

The directory includes sections such as “Mobile Technology,” “Google,” “Social Networking,” “Apple Inc.” and “NFL.” You can browse the directory by category (Business, Science, Sports, [...]

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MSN Introduces Dramatically Improved Redesign, Portal Drives Nearly 50% Of Bing Queries

Nov 4, 2009 at 12:36am ET by Greg Sterling   

Billed as the first major redesign in a decade, Microsoft has introduced a dramatic new look and feel for the MSN portal. The redesign simplifies and cleans up most elements on the site. Among other things, it makes video more central, incorporates Facebook and Twitter, creates a dedicated new local area and emphasizes search. MSN, which [...]

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Google Adds “Page Preview” To Search Options

Nov 3, 2009 at 9:51am ET by Barry Schwartz   

Google Operating System noticed Google has added a new search option named “page preview.” If you go to Google, search on something and click on “show options,” you can then look towards the button on the left hand side and click on “page previews.” For example, here is a view of a search [...]

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Google, Yahoo, Bing Bury GeoCities.com, But Some Zombie Sites Are Still Alive

Nov 2, 2009 at 3:01pm ET by Matt McGee   

Although some GeoCities web sites are still online, all three major search engines have removed the domain from their search indices. As of this morning, a site:geocities.com search on Google, Yahoo, and Bing shows that geocities.com is dead and buried.

Yahoo announced earlier this year that GeoCities — a free web hosting service that it bought [...]

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Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to Keynote SMX West – March 2-4, 2010 in Santa Clara, CA

Nov 2, 2009 at 9:22am ET by Search Engine Land   

The dates are set and registration is live! Search Marketing Expo – SMX West happens March 2-4, 2010 at the Santa Clara Convention Center. Get exceptional content, invaluable connections and essential conveniences that make SMX conferences famous. SMX West will begin with a fireside chat between Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of SearchEngineLand.com [...]

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Google’s Fading Home Page Tests Continue

Nov 2, 2009 at 9:10am ET by Barry Schwartz   

On October 6th, we reported on Google’s fading home page, which just showed the user a Google logo and a search box. Then after a gradual amount of time, the search boxes and other various links and navigational elements faded in. Since then, Google has seemed to test two alternatives to this new home page [...]

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Halloween ‘09 From Google, Yahoo, Bing & Others

Oct 31, 2009 at 8:11pm ET by Barry Schwartz   

Today is Halloween and the search engines have logos up for the special day. Before I post the logos, here are some posts from others in the community on Halloween. Matt Cutts of Google had a holy costume. Google Blogoscoped noticed Google added trick or treat to their robots.txt file. Bing has [...]

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Outside.in Expands Its Hyperlocal Search Capabilities

Oct 30, 2009 at 2:26pm ET by Matt McGee   

While real-time search gets all the attention these days, there’s also increased interest in hyperlocal search. Where real-time search answers What’s happening right now?, hyperlocal search answers the question, What’s happening right here? It’s like local search on steroids, you could say. Outside.in has, for several years, been somewhat like a clearinghouse of hyperlocal information and [...]

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Google’s Additional Discovery Method: RSS and Atom Feeds

Oct 30, 2009 at 2:24am ET by Vanessa Fox   

For years, Google’s discovery of web pages was solely based on links. If a page had no links to it, Googlebot had no way of knowing about it and therefore, would never index it. Along the way, Google provided an option for submitting individual pages, but that wasn’t really a viable option for site owners [...]

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Google Launches Comparison Ads, Starting With Mortgages

Oct 29, 2009 at 5:24pm ET by Danny Sullivan   

Google’s now officially announced “Comparison Ads,” starting with a way for mortgage advertisers to have their products compared against each other but which may expand to other products in the future. “If you’re looking for a mortgage, you really care about a specific offer. You want to know the APR and based on [...]

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Google Music Search 2.0 Launches With Musical “OneBox”

Oct 28, 2009 at 7:00pm ET by Matt McGee   

Saying that it wants to bring music fans “closer to your favorite artists,” Google has added a new Music Search OneBox to its search results. The new OneBox includes content from partner sites such as MySpace, Pandora, Lala and others, and lets searchers listen to song clips right from Google’s search results page. Searchers should [...]

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Live Blogging Yahoo Investor Day 2009

Oct 28, 2009 at 11:08am ET by Danny Sullivan   

It’s Yahoo Investor Day, where Yahoo is briefing institutional investors and financial analysts on the company. I’m here for the morning portion, and I’ll be live blogging out of it. You can also watch the live web cast here. Bartz Welcomes Carol Bartz, CEO, on stage. Saying thing they have great opportunity. Lots to fix. Low return. [...]

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Disruptamundo: Google Adds Turn-by-Turn Navigation To Mobile Maps

Oct 28, 2009 at 9:59am ET by Greg Sterling   

I hate the word “disruptive,” as it’s often used in the internet world, because it’s something of a cliche. But I use it here because the new Navigation for Google Maps for Mobile will in fact be — disruptive. On Monday we covered Google Navigation, the then rumor, asking “Will A Free Google GPS Sink The [...]

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DMOZ: A Solid Directory Or The Great Pumpkin Of Search?

Oct 27, 2009 at 8:36am ET by Debra Mastaler   

Love it or hate it, the Open Directory Project (ODP or “DMOZ”) always seems to creep into the conversation when we’re discussing links and/or SEO. Check any forum, social news or answer site and you’ll see a wide variety of opinions on the 11 year old directory and how it’s managed. When talking about the DMOZ [...]

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