PublicRoutes.com, a service that helps you find directions from any point in several U.S. cities by subway, walking, driving or taking the bus, has added a translation feature that offers directions in 14 languages, and a feature called MyPublicRoutes, a personalization feature that remembers specific locations entered by users. PublicRoutes.com is available for New York, […]
BBC in talks on Google link-up at the Guardian Unlimited reports that the BBC and Google Video are in deep discussions to work together. Under this agreement, Google will make some of BBC’s content available through Google Video and possibly, Google’s YouTube – much as how they do it with the NHL and other producers. […]
Travel search engine Farecast officially launched its Fare Guard service, protecting flyers from volatile airfare prices. The service allows travelers to basically purchase an insurance policy on a flight for $10 ($3 until February 1), thus locking in the published rate.
Google Operating Systems reports that Google has added your sponsored link click activity to Google Search History. For example, I looked at my search history and limited it to just sponsored links, and I noticed I search for “gift dad” and clicked on an ad, yes my dad and father-in-law’s birthdays are coming up. Here […]
Via Techmeme, Google plots e-books coup at the Times Online reports that Google is looking to make books more accessible to users. They hope to “allow readers to download entire books to their computers in a format that they could read on screen or on mobile devices such as a Blackberry.” Google’s director of Google […]
Carsten at Search Engine Journal reports that the English Wikipedia has decided to add the nofollow attribute back to the English Wikipedia space. The decision came from the founder, Jimbo Wales, partially, if not completely, based on a discussion of a new SEO contest, where editors are warned of an onslaught spam, from SEOs and […]
Google Blacklist Contained Confidential Information at Techcrunch reports that Google’s phishing blacklist, which is publicly available for anyone to see, had confidential information enclosed. Such information included “usernames and passwords of individuals, including credentials for accounts at banks and other financial institutions.” Google has quietly removed the information that may put users at risk, but […]
Google’s Next Ad Frontier May Be Inside Videogames at the Wall Street Journal shows reports that Google is in talks with Adscape Media, an in-game advertising company. This shows that Google is interested in placing ads within video games such as PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo and other game console units. Since most of the new game […]
The Yahoo Search Blog officially confirmed the recent speculations of an index update taking place. Priyank Garg of Yahoo says, that Yahoo is “in the process of rolling out some changes to our search results. As usual, you may be seeing some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages that are […]
How do you define "link popularity?" I talk daily with SEO/SEM firms, content creators, interactive agencies, marketing firms, ad agencies, PR firms, and with other consultants. It’s amazing how varied people’s beliefs are with regards to link popularity, but as different as they are, all share a common purpose. Search ranking. I rarely have a conversation related to […]
A quick heads-up for our SearchCap newsletter readers and also to anyone who visiting Search Engine Land. Next week the Social Search: New Marketing Opportunities webcast from our sister site Search Marketing Now will be taking place with Search Engine Land executive editor Chris Sherman. The webcast happens Thursday, January 25 at 1pm Eastern. Chris […]
Last month, I covered a number of ways that browsers and search engines are working together to protect surfers from phishing sites. These are sites pretending to be run by someone else, such as bank, in hopes of catching your personal log-in information. This week while doing my banking, I got to see a phishing […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web:
Furl, a personal web-page clipping and sharing service that I reviewed several years ago, has a streamlined new look, and is also faster. Looksmart has also made it easier to create and find topics to help you organized your cache of saved web pages, and has improved the browser buttons and toolbar used to save […]
Google Plans N.C. Data Center by Forbes confirms Google has selected North Carolina over South Carolina as the location for their huge data center. Yesterday, we wrote how the Carolina’s are bidding against each other to win Google’s business. Google will be spending about $600 million on their new data center and should employee 210 […]
Yahoo Real Estate has introduced a new Schools Search service that lets you search for U.S. schools by city and state or zip code. Results are plotted on a map, and you can sort by school district, distance from a specific location, grade level, or school type (public, private, charter). You can also plot nearby […]
CIO reports that Microsoft, Google, along with Yahoo will be developing a code of conduct with the coalition of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to “promote freedom of expression and privacy rights.” This move is to help the companies’ ventures into China and help paint a better picture for the search giants in the public view.
Yahoo Denies Violating Belgian Copyright Law at the Wall Street Journal gives us insight into how Yahoo will be handling the legal threat by Belgian newspapers to sue Yahoo over violating copyright laws. Yahoo has claimed that they did not violate any copyright laws for “publishing snippets and links” to their newspapers. Yahoo released a […]
In Search of… Better Ways to Search at the Wall Street Journal goes through the different ways search engines like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Ask.com use “spin off” sites to test new features. We have reported about all these in the past, but the article offers a nice overview of many of the methods search […]
AsiaMedia reports that Google has partnered with Cite Publishing Holding Group to bring Chinese books to Google Book Search. The service will enable users to search and read up to 20% of a book on their computer. The initial launch will be about 1,000 books, but they hope to have 3,000 book titles in Google […]
Gary Price reports that Yahoo has launched a new site, named Yahoo Personal Finance. News.com explains that this new sub-site offers “free tools and how-to guides for tax planning, budgeting, real estate planning, and saving for college and retirement.” Gary explains they offer additional tools such as: financial calculators for mortgages, budgeting, and more. They […]
Thanks everyone for all the great feedback on improving comments at Search Engine Land, after my post yesterday. I’m taking them all on board, and feel free to add more. In the meantime, we’ve brought up a feed of all comments posted to the site plus tweaked the main site feed to be a bit […]
I’m going to Berlin to speak at a travel conference in March, which meant booking a flight. With a British Airways strike looming, I wanted an alternative to fly from my closest airport — London Heathrow — to Berlin. But no one but BA seems to fly to Berlin from Heathrow, according to Expedia UK. […]
Google has created the Librarian Central Blog just in time for ALA Midwinter. The decision to create the weblog arose from their request for suggestions from librarians on how to improve the Google Librarian Newsletter, the two common ones being ‘make it a blog’ and ‘give us more current information’. The new weblog provides access […]
Philipp Lenssen reports that Google is now promoting via AdWords their own Audio Ads product. A Google search on audio ads brings back an ad from Google, leading to https://www.google.com/ads/audioads/index.html.
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web:
ResourceShelf and O’Reilly Radar discuss a new offering from Yahoo Research Berkeley, in California: TagMaps. TagMaps are something like the word “tag clouds” meeting maps and Flickr. There are currently three offered, as described from the TagMaps site: World Explorer: “Explorer is based on photos users upload to the Flickr website. The World Explorer engine […]
Via Search Engine Journal, JP Morgan released a report named Google Checkout vs. PayPal (PDF). The report shows that Google Checkout has potential but PayPal is still dominating the field. Here are the key points, as per the report: Surveyed about 1,100 online buyers in 2006 Google Checkout Adoption hits 6% in first year Google […]
To say there’s a lot going on with mobile right now is to state something more than obvious. The carriers, the handset makers and the mobile content providers are in what amounts to a frenzy of competition and business development as they try and position themselves for what they see as the next really big […]
Caldwell tries to land Google at the Citizen Times and Bidding War for Google: It’s Expensive, But What Is the Alternative? by the Local Tech Wire document how North Carolina is offering major tax breaks to Google in order to encourage Google to build a massive data center in their state. The Google data center […]
TheAge reports that Copiepresse, Belgium’s French-speaking newspapers, are now threatening to sue Yahoo for violating copyright laws. The group does not want Yahoo giving web users archived access to newspaper articles that the newspapers would otherwise charge for. It will be interesting to watch how Yahoo handles this.
Way back in 2005 we started talking about linkbait, a term that was coined on Threadwatch which I owned and ran at the time. Linkbait was used to describe viral, linkable content designed to attract thousands of links. Shortly after that, I wrote The Art of Linkbaiting. It has been much cited over the last […]
I love that people can comment at Search Engine Land directly within stories. I not only want comments — I want people to contribute links as well. I thought it would be useful to talk more about this, plus get feedback from readers on how we can improve the commenting system going forward.
Google AdSense updated their program policies today. While most of it was simply clarifying or officially making changes to policies (such as images next to ad units) they also made one major change to publishers who also use ad networks or in-house advertising with ad units that resemble AdSense ad units, or those who do […]
Clickz columnist Ryan Naraine wrote up some of his thoughts about a Google patent application (Allocating advertising space in a network of displays) that would enable advertising upon electronic displays and billboards in shopping centers and other places, in his article Google Patent Filing Hints at Digital Billboard Ad Network. While New Scientist wrote about […]
Boxxet is a new service which combines aspects of computer automation with community and social commentary and ranking systems to create “box sets” of web based content for specific topics. It’s an interesting idea—sort of a multimedia directory of links to web, news and blog content, photos, forums, online bookmarks and “stuff,” products available for […]
Yahoo is now allowing users to vote for their favorite questions at Yahoo Answers by adding a star next to interesting or high-quality questions. Similar to Flickr’s “Interestingness
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web:
Eric Ward mentioned link baiting in his Link Week column this week, which first got me thinking, is it better to say linkbait or link bait? To answer, I did some searches, which in turn brought up some good articles on the topic. And now another good one has come out from Todd Malicoat. So […]
Since the advent of the Google and Yahoo (and more recently Virtual Earth) mapping APIs there are hundreds of developers and entrepreneurs who have built interesting and useful mashups. But how does one find them? Of course you could search on Google, Yahoo or Microsoft Live or look at some of the worthy blogs devoted […]