The 10e20 blog complies a list of the sites they know are banned from Digg.com. There has been a recent wave of Digg bans, and reportedly, once your banned, you cannot get back in. Here is a current list of banned sites as per 10e20’s post.
Google Data Refresh – Rankings Fluctuations Before Christmas by Ben Pfeiffer at the Search Engine Roundtable notes a very possible Google update is taking place. He references a WebmasterWorld thread that is currently three pages deep. Most in the thread believe that this is a true update and based on some of the comments at […]
In Google sticks to solo plans from the Shanghai Daily, Google said it won’t work with a local partner in China to gain marketshare. Google’s vice president of China operations, Kai-fu Lee said that they “have confidence in our current approach” in China. Currently, Baidu has 50 percent share in China, compared to Google’s 16 […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web:
Nathan Weinberg reports that searches on Christmas, Hanukkah, or Kwanzaa bring up a special holiday divider between the organic results and the AdWords results on the right. Google did the same thing last year, but last years candy cane has been replaced by Christmas trees. Also make sure to track Google’s holiday logo doodles.
I’ve been making up a Google wish list to update from my earlier one this year. Pandia just came out their own wish list, as did David Wallace more generally. And for whatever reason, it came to me. I want an interactive Matt Cutts to provide Google webmaster assistance. Think Ms Dewey meets Matt Cutts. […]
Earlier this week, Google dropped some support for the SOAP API, finally making a formal announcement about it here. New sign-ups aren’t allowed, but the API calls will continue to be served. Why did they drop sign-ups? Google doesn’t explain, and so others are speculating. Techdirt feels they did this for business reasons over technical […]
Chunghwa Telecom, Google Sign Agreement from the Associated Press reports Taiwan’s Chunghwa Telecom has signed a mobile deal with Google. Google will provide mobile web search services to Chunghwa’s user base starting this January. According to the story, Chunghwa Telecom is the largest phone company by revenue in Taiwan, with 840,000 3G users and is […]
Reuters reports Yahoo China has won a lawsuit brought against Qihoo search engine for unfair competition. The lawsuit first came to light back in September. The court found that “Qihoo’s 360safe software prompted users to de-install the Yahoo Toolbar by making users believe the toolbar was malware — software that users download unknowingly and is […]
Over the years, I’ve done many introduction to search marketing sessions where I talk about the value of having good, descriptive pages. Those let you tap into the search tail, the "onesies and twosies" terms, as I’ve called them, that might come up only once in a month. Add all those up, and they can […]
Threadwatch points to a PC Advisor report that the euro search engine project Quaero between France and Germany is now being split up. France will continue developing Quaero to help counter American-based search giants like Google and Yahoo. Germany is to start their own search technology project called Theseus. The German Federal Ministry of Economics […]
Yahoo’s Delicious has rolled out a new Tagometer allowing people to better bookmark your pages plus see how they have been tagged. In addition, it shows the number of others who have save a page — reminiscent of Digg’s Digg Count button.
Like Greg Boser, I saw the articles and counter-articles emerge from Did-It’s swing at search engine optimization back in October, rolled my eyes and moved on. The argument’s been done before, done to death. But Greg’s got his back up now, and he provides an excellent read in The Half-Truths of Talking Frogs. I’ll highlight […]
Some processes covered in patents granted last week by the US Patent and Trademark Office: Microsoft reranking results based upon redundancy of information, Ask reranking pages based upon affinities between searchers, Hewlett-Packard creating queries for searchers to investigate from scanned documents, and; Exalead forming dynamic query refinements from words found in documents located within search […]
Loren Barker’s Search Engine Journal is running his annual Search Blog Awards contest. You can vote for your favorite blog over here. The categories available for you to vote for include:
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web:
Google Book-Scanning Efforts Spark Debate from the Associated Press is an excellent look how the rivalry between Google’s library scanning project and that of the Open Content Alliance — backed by Yahoo and Microsoft — is getting more heated. Google pretty much comes off as the evil company trying to lock up books for its […]
Now that Blogger is officially out with a new version, I guess Google’s ready to get behind the service in a big way. The screenshot above shows a new promotional “tip” I just got in my web search results. I’ve never seen anything like that before for Blogger nor that I can recall for any other […]
I wanted to make some time and dive deep into the issue of why all those top search terms from the various search engines don’t match. Others have thankfully been doing that. The short answer, as I’ve written before, is that they are all heavily filtered. That’s why you don’t see popular terms like […]
Barry Diller keeps talking about Ask as the “glue” of his empire and more specifically about the importance of local. Ask and the new AskCity are thus in the hot seat. ClickZ has a piece today about the forthcoming introduction of financial and real estate data into AskCity.
News.com reports that a wireless hacker was sentenced to 15 months in prison due to the help of some Google searches. The wireless hacker conducted searches for keyword phrases on “how to broadcast interference over wifi 2.4 GHZ,” “interference over wifi 2.4 Ghz,” “wireless networks 2.4 interference,” and “make device interfere wireless network.” The court […]
Google Steps More Boldly Into PayPal’s Territory by the New York Times shows how Google Checkout has really stepped things up this holiday season. The article covers how Google is giving merchants huge incentives to promote Google Checkout on their online stores. One merchant sent out a promotion to customers, telling them they get $10 […]
When I posted Enquisite’s search engine popularity stats yesterday, I almost went into a riff about how site owner traffic stats are often so different from what the major measuring services report. Google almost always comes out much, much higher when you look at site traffic referral sources (as with Enquisite’s stats). I did get […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web:
The Read Write Web blog first spotted Ask.com testing a new interface they named Ask X. The new interface sports a steel background for the home page with more goodies inside. A search on Ask X for barry schwartz shows a three column pane interface. On the left hand side is the search box, where […]
Convera, an enterprise search company, commissioned an online survey of 1,000 U.S. “professionals” in publishing, advertising, marketing, healthcare, finance and government. The survey sought to determine work-related search behavior and corresponding satisfaction levels. While sponsored research must always be regarded with a critical eye, the results are worth noting:
Yahoo! Shortcuts must be working for searchers and for Yahoo! Starting last week, I noticed Yahoo prompting me a lot more to search for retailer coupons, flights from city to city and movie showtimes – all which trigger a Yahoo Shortcut. While shortcuts have been around for a while, this is the first time I […]
Google has dropped support for the Google SOAP Search API as of December 5, encouraging people to make use of the AJAX Search API in its place.
I discussed Quintura in November – if you recall it’s a search engine that provides searchers with a tag cloud, which if they mouse over the tags it will display results. Well, today they launched Quintura for kids as a beta release. It works along the same lines as the adult version, with a search […]
Enquisite is a search ranking tool that works in part by gathering in your traffic details. That means they take in data from a variety of web sites and so can see general traffic patterns. They’ve just posted search referral data for November and part of December, putting Google far above anyone else in terms […]
Reminder! Our sister site Search Marketing Now is holding its first free webinar today. How to Find the Right Search Marketing Partner is led by Chris Sherman and starts at 1pm Eastern time. The webcast is free to attend. You’ll find more information and registration info here.
Philipp Lenssen reports that Google Maps has added a very useful feature to Google Maps. You can now plot multiple destinations for your trip. For example, I plotted a trip from my office, to a 100 Broadway, NY, NY and then to 14 Avenue R, Brooklyn, NY. Small feature, but very useful feature, that almost […]
I reported at Search Engine Roundtable that Google is now showing related searches at the bottom of the search results page. An example query working now is for michael jordan, scroll down to the bottom of the page and you might see the “Searches related to: michael jordan” area. If not, I have a screen […]
Australian court rules against MP3 link site from News.com covers how an Australian court has decided that linking to some content can be illegal, in the right circumstances. In the right circumstances! That part is important. It’s easy to read the headline and come away thinking that search engines (or anyone, potentially) are going to […]
I got a press release today from Polar Rose, a new company promising to bring facial recognition technology to those seeking images from across the web. In other words, want to find all the pictures of Bill Clinton? Polar Rose says it will make it happen through a browser plug-in that works with existing photo […]
YouTube brings out media giants’ competitive claws from the International Herald Tribune takes a look at how YouTube is threatening the large media companies, such as NBC, News Corp., Viacom and CBS. As YouTube continues to grow, especially with the $1.65 billion acquisition by Google, these media companies are now having second thoughts about distributing […]
MarketWatch reports that Google does not have enough airtime inventory to run the test audio ad campaigns they want to run in 2007. Reportedly, Google is currently in negotiations with CBS, to buy some of their ad time. Jordan Rohan of RBC Capital Markets said that without enough ad inventory, Google won’t be able to […]
Ad and image placement: a policy clarification from the official Google Inside AdSense blog covers issues about placing images next to AdSense units, something that seems to have grown in popularity as a means of encouraging clicks. In short — don’t. Google doesn’t want images to appear related to AdSense links: We ask that publishers […]
What are people looking for when they type “Google” into Google? What do they want to see when they use “eBay” as a query? How does a Google or Yahoo learn from their log files, and other user information? What does it tell them about user intent? In an interview posted earlier today with Luke […]
On Friday, Google Webmaster Central had a post about linking that I’m watching generate all types of new worries of what’s allowed or not allowed. I’ll do the freak out, then a summary of it, then try to push the reset button by revisiting my golden rules on linking.