Ecommerce

Q&A With Jimmy Wales On Search Wikia

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 […]

Google

Fury Over Google’s Self Promotion & Wishing For Perspective

It feels like a bad week to be Google. Honestly, if there’s a tipping point, the freak-out that they’ve become the evil company they said they didn’t want to be seems to have arrived. Goodness knows there’s plenty to be concerned about with Google, as with any large powerful company. The entire Google could become […]

Google

Of Disappearing Sex Blogs & Google Updates

Last week, Barry Schwartz reported there seemed to be a Google update going, based on forum activity he was seeing. Google’s Matt Cutts quickly followed up with a short refresher on the difference between algorithm updates, data refreshes and index updates. The purpose was to explain that any changes some people were seeing were likely […]

Google Ads

Google Pushes Forward With Newspaper Ads

Google Set To Expand Newspaper Ad Program at the Washington Post reports that Google’s newspaper tests were a success according to the company. They want to expand the tests in the coming months. The pilot results were triple in volume of ads sold, compared to what they expected. FYI, the first ad test was deemed […]

Ecommerce

Google Jet Spotted At Christchurch Airport, New Zealand

Stuff.co.nz reports that the Google Jet was reportedly spotted at Christchurch airport in New Zealand yesterday afternoon, complete with a nice picture of the plane. They do not know who was on the plane owned by Google’s founders. Reportedly, the plane’s tail number was blocked out so that it cannot be tracked by the public […]

Ecommerce

Yahoo Removes Message Boards: What Is To Come?

This morning, I was searching for a specific Yahoo message board and came up with nothing, so I assumed it was not there. Then I see that Slashdot reported the message boards have been removed. Yahoo informs us that they are “working on new ways for readers to comment on the news and participate in […]

PPC

Defending SEO, Yet Again!

SEM and SEO, Rocket Science, or Just Plain Science? (Part 1) from Kevin Lee at ClickZ has Kevin jumping formally into the "SEO is easy versus SEO is rocket science debate" and digging a hole even deeper for himself, as far as I’m concerned. Sorry, Kevin. Kevin writes: To recap the roots of the controversy, […]

SEO

Google’s Not So Top Terms & Top US Gainers For 2006

Last week, I wrote The Lies Of Top Search Terms Of The Year covering how the top terms of 2006 from Google turned out not to be the top terms at all in raw popularity. I caught up with Google at the end of that week to talk about this more but didn’t have a […]

Google

PhraseRank, Not PageRank, To Fight Search Spam

Can indexing phrases from pages be an effective approach in identifying and filtering keyword stuffed pages, and honeypot pages aimed at attracting visitors solely to have them click upon ads? A new patent application published yesterday and assigned to Google, Detecting spam documents in a phrase based information retrieval system, presents a reasonable argument in […]

SEO

YellowPages.com Adds ‘Send to Mobile’

Joining Yahoo Local, Windows Live Local, Google Maps, and IAC-owned Citysearch and AskCity, YellowPages.com announced a new “send to mobile” feature. The listing and contact details are sent via text to the user’s mobile phone. Here’s a result for the search “Plumbers, New York.” (Send to mobile is on the upper right of each ad.)

Google

Google Blog Search Passes Technorati In Visits

Hitwise reports that Google Blog Search has passed Technorati in visits this week. Hitwise explains that when Google added a link from Google News to Google Blog Search in October, the traffic for Google Blog Search spiked by 168%. Hitwise reports that currently about 60% of Google Blog Search traffic comes from Google News referrals.

Content

Patent Filing for Google Mobile Search Provides Indexing Clues

Mobile search has its own rules, and if you want your pages indexed for people searching with handhelds, it may help to take a look at some of the patent applications that have come out lately from Microsoft and Google on the topic. Microsoft provided some details about what they are looking for in a […]

Google

How Google Sitelinks May Work, From Patent Application

Back in September, Vanessa Fox at the Official Google Blog shared with us a little information about sitelinks, the groups of links to internal pages that sometimes appear under the top result on a search results page. She also pointed to a page on Google’s Webmaster Help Center that provides some more details. A patent […]

SEO

Yahoo To Open New Research Center In Bangalore

The Business Standard reports that Yahoo is to open a new research center in Bangalore, India. The research center is to focus on hiring “mentors and partners” for the existing research and development center in Bangalore, that currently employees 700 individuals. The head of Yahoo Research, Prabhakar Raghavan, said; “We have initiated the process of […]

SEO

New Mobile Flight Status Tracker By FlightStats

Gary Price reports that FlightStats has added a mobile flight tracking site at https://mobile.flightstats.com/. So for all you holiday season travelers, bookmark this address on your mobile device (I did), to check flight status, departures and arrivals, flight arrivals, airline & airport information, security wait times and more.

Content

Question & Answer Search Engines Ranked

Via Slashdot, What’s the Best Q&A Site? from MIT Technology Review tests several question and answer search engine services. They reviewed and ranked AnswerBag, Askville, Live QnA, Wondir, Yahoo Answers and Yedda. So how did they rank? Out of a total 12 points, Yahoo Answers scored 11 points, coming out tops.

PPC

Top 101 Search Stories Of 2006

Chris Winfield over at 10e20 has compiled a list of the top 101 stories in the search industry for the past year. He orders the stories in descending priority order, and most of the stories link to external sources. Here are the top five: (5) Google & Yahoo & Microsoft supporting the Sitemaps.org protocol (4) […]

Content

Google To Invest In China Based Video Download Site

Google to invest in Chinese video Web site at the Chicago Tribune describes that within a month, we will learn more about a Google investment in Shenzhen Xunlei Network Technology Ltd. Xunlei is a Chinese video download company and Google may be hoping that their investment will help them grow market share in China. The […]

Content

Using Google Code Search To Find Vulnerable Sites

ShoeMoney wrote a detailed write up on how hackers can easily use Google Code Search to quickly find sites that are vulnerable to being hacked. ShoeMoney shows XSS exploits, SQL injection exploits and more. ShoeMoney wasn’t the first to spot this. SEO Egghead wrote about some examples on October 5th. Is Google to blame? I […]

Google

Behind The Google iPod Shuffle

As many of you know, Google (as other search engines) gave out holiday gifts, including a digital picture frame, a iPod Shuffle and other schwag. One person who got the iPod Shuffle gave us a behind the scenes look at the gift, literally. On the back of the iPod Shuffle, the engraved message reads “ooGleg […]

Apple

Google #4 On BusinessWeek’s Tech Hot Growth 50

Last Friday, BusinessWeek release the Tech Hot Growth 50 for 2006. Google ranked number four on the list, behind Amkor Technology (1), Apple (2), and AT&T (3); Google (GOOG), meanwhile, has claimed billions in advertising dollars by devising the technology to put information from around the Web at anyone’s disposal in a matter of seconds. […]

Google News

Google News Mobile Now Customizable

Via Nathan Weinberg, Steve Rubel finds that you can now customize the news on your Google Mobile News page. A new link that reads “» Customize this page” takes you to a page where you can add keyword specific searches to your mobile news page, you can also add or remove news categories on that […]

Ecommerce

MySupermarket Comparison Site

MySupermarket is one of those sites that you sometimes look at and immediately think ‘I’ll be coming back here on a regular basis’. The concept is very simple – you choose one of 4 UK supermarkets from Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda and Ocado and you shop for your groceries. All the groceries are shown in illustrated […]

Content

Google Testing Video Ads “In Stream”

AdWeek reports that Google is testing video ads at Beet.tv for AllState. The reports indicate that about a week ago, Beet.tv has 15 second Google ads for AllState in their videos. The ads linked to www.allstate.com/google with a special landing page for those users. The ads “were sold at $15 per thousand views, with the […]

Advertising

How Microsoft’s Behavioral Targeting Works

Microsoft Ad Push Is All About You at the Wall Street Journal has a nice overview of how Microsoft’s behavioral targeting ad software works, nothing ground breaking, but a nice overview. I’ll quote a piece of the article for you: Here’s how it works: If someone types in “compare car prices” on Live Search, Microsoft’s […]

SEO

Google Partners With China Mobile To Launch Mobile Search

Forbes reports that China Mobile and Google will be launching a mobile search service in 2007. The details are very fuzzy right now, all we know is that a China Mobile representative said something to the effect that they “begun developing their joint mobile search product for launch in 2007.” This comes a week after […]

PPC

Is Panama The Answer To Yahoo’s Problems?

Why Yahoo’s Panama Won’t Be Enough at BusinessWeek looks at Yahoo’s troubles over the past year and wonders if Yahoo’s new ad platform, code named Panama, the answer to those problems. As we wrote in the past, Panama has boosted Yahoo’s 2007 outlook with some analysts. But should it? That is the question BusinessWeek asks. […]

Content

Judge Dismisses Google AdSense & AutoLink Toolbar Lawsuits

Judge dismisses lawsuit against Google at BusinessWeek covers a patent infringement case against Google over AdSense and Google Toolbar’s AutoLink feature being tossed out. The case was brought by HyperPhrase Inc. against Google. The judge dismissed the infringement claims, calling the AdSense claims “nonsense” and finding that AutoLink “performs a completely different function in a […]

Ecommerce

Wikipedia Founder To Launch Wikiasari Search Engine Early 2007

Founder of Wikipedia plans search engine to rival Google by The Times unveils a new search engine named Wikiasari. The new search engine has investment backing from Amazon and others of over $4 million in capital. The “exclusive screen capture” Techcrunch has nothing to do with this new engine, according to the Wikia group. But […]

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