I was messing around with the Ask.com interface on my Mac and decided to compare some results between my Mac browser and Internet Explorer for PC. I noticed that Ask.com is now displaying five sponsored results for many keyword searches. The organic results are now below the fold, like they once were before dropping Jeeves.
Matt Cutts of Google posted a blog entry asking SEOs how they want Google to handle the NOINDEX meta tag. If you use the NOINDEX meta tag now, Google won’t show the page in any way in the Google index — not even a “link only” listing. Matt asks SEOs if this is what they […]
Yahoo Sued Again for Assisting the Persecution of Chinese Dissidents from the Epoch Times reports Yahoo is being sued once again for allegedly leaking personal information and aiding the Chinese Communist Party in Internet censorship and the persecution of dissidents. The China Democratic Party, China Social Democratic Party and the New People’s Party filed suit […]
Yesterday, I kept noticing Twitters of YouTube problems. Soon after, the BBC reported YouTube outage blamed on Pakistan. It appears that the recent Pakistan ban of YouTube not only caused Pakistan ISPs to block YouTube, but also spread worldwide and stopped users from even the United States from accessing YouTube. How so? The two-hour YouTube […]
Google takes UK’s top brand spot from the BBC reports Google took the BBC’s top spot in a Superbrands survey of the top brand in the UK. In fact, Google is the only company established after 1990 that is found within the top 50 brands in this survey. Microsoft secured the second position of this […]
Hackers turn Google into vulnerability scanner from Techworld reports a group of hackers named Cult of the Dead Cow (CDC) launched a search tool powered by Google to help see if your sites are vulnerable to a hacking attempt. The tool is named Goolag, and by typing in a domain name it may return site […]
height=”100″ hspace=”5″ vspace=”3″ width=”100″> Last Monday, in a SEL post discussing the click quality by engine, I mentioned in passing an 89% drop-off between ‘phrases tested’ and ‘phrases actively generating good clicks’. Specifically, we posted 176,903 terms en route to discovering 20,152 active good terms for a client. Today I’ll revisit that drop-off and analyze […]
In a few hours, I’m jumping on a plane and heading out to our SMX West search marketing conference, which hits Silicon Valley from Feb. 26-28. My journey will hopefully be much easier than Mike McDonald’s. To kick off his WebProNews video coverage of the show, he’s got a spoof of being kidnapped for answers. […]
This afternoon, Kevin Johnson, president of Microsoft Platforms & Services Division, issued an email to Microsoft employees (that was released via its PR firm). The letter has a tone of confidence that assumes a deal with Yahoo will ultimately take place. It reiterates what Microsoft believes to be the benefits of that deal and looks […]
Over the past ten to twelve years, various SEM practitioners have brought up the need for industry standards. I started asking the question in 1998, and others have brought it up since, but the industry seems to have a laissez faire attitude. Albeit, we’ve seen some standardization steps taken by the search engines themselves. Google, […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
The latest X Prize is the Google-funded Lunar X Prize, which was announced in September, 2007. It seeks to award $20 million to the first scientific team that can land a privately funded robot on the moon and meet a number of other criteria (explore terrain and relay results back to Earth). The runner up […]
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.
Previewing the teams involved in the Google-sponsored Lunar X prize, Google co-founder Sergey Brin told the Associated Press following the event that he found the prospect of Microsoft owning Yahoo “unnerving.” Meanwhile, Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, according to Charles Cooper at CNET, is “girding for the certainty of a coming proxy war with Microsoft.”
AllThingD’s Kara Swisher does a wide ranging video interview with former Ask CEO Jim Lanzone. Among other things, Swisher and Lanzone discuss “the future of search” (at only the very highest level, however).
Microsoft runs prize campaign for Live Search users from NewMediaAge reports that Microsoft is running another search and win promotion. This time the contest is based in the UK, in partnership with Virgin. It is named the Big Snap Search. Users can go to bigsnapsearch.com and search. At the top of the search results page, […]
EU: Search Engines Under EU Rules from the Associated Press reports that European data privacy regulators said search engines outside the EU have to comply with the EU’s privacy regulations.
Over the past several weeks I have explored some of the issues involved with categorization of businesses in Google Maps on my blog, Understanding Google Maps. In Part 1, I detailed the more than year-long history of small business frustration. In Part 2, I provided some background on the early research and the difficulty with […]
As I said in my last column, disambiguating intent is the holy grail of search. John Battelle called search the “database of intentions.” While technically correct, right now those intentions are only vaguely understood. The breadth and complexity of a concept is squeezed into the restrictive container of a keyword query, so the quest for […]
Doing your forward planning for the year? Google’s Matt Cutts is, and this week, he posted where he’s speaking over the next few weeks. In a similar vein, I thought it would be nice to list some of the upcoming search marketing events happening in the coming months:
For years, US President George W. Bush was tops on Google for searches on miserable failure until last year’s Googlebomb "fix" solved his problem on Google. But Bush is back, sort of. People are spotting that Bush’s official White House page is ranking tops for who is a failure on Google. A new Googlebomb? If […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
Starting out with my first website in 1996, I hadn’t realized that one of the most important pages that I had put on the site was a contact page. With a copy of “Learn HTML in 2 Weeks” at my side and a design that reflected my limited skills, I wasn’t aware of my limitations, […]
SES London has now wrapped up by now. I have found some coverage for the day, but if I missed anything, please Sphinn the thread below and add more coverage that way. Here is what I found for day three:
The Quintura Blog repeats a rumor that Google may be poised to buy the Ukrainian portal Bigmir.net, the leading Ukrainian destination site with 2.5 million users. Quintura speculates the deal might be worth $100 million and says online advertising in the Ukraine was worth an estimated $12 million in 2007. If it were true, Google […]
The very long awaited Google Health may be about to launch. The New York Times and CNN have reports this morning that Google and the Cleveland Clinic are announcing a pilot program that reportedly will involve the creation of personal health profiles on Google for anywhere between 1,500 and 10,000 patients. These profiles will include […]
Ask.com has announced that they have added site statistics from Compete.com to the binoculars feature in the search results. Now, instead of just getting a site preview, you also get estimated visitor stats, site rank, a line chart to plot this data over time, and a link to a more detailed report over at Compete.com. […]
As expected, Google announced another push to get advertisers and publishers to utilize video ads. Yes, Google did a pilot video ad program back in May 2007 and then another video ad push in October 2007. But from these, Google said they’ve learned much and have made changes to the new program. Google said they […]
Google says ISP glitch exposes Gmail data in Kuwait from News.com has confirmed reports that a Gmail user in Kuwait has inadvertently accessed about 30 Gmail accounts that were not his. Supposedly, he also accessed an email that had “keycodes for some embassy gate.” Whose fault is this? Not Google! A Kuwaiti ISP was having […]
We have been covering how Google may provide internet access to those users who don’t have it yet for a while now. While the Submarine Cable Negotiator job at Google was pretty interesting, I think this new story may be even more interesting. Floating a New Idea For Going Wireless, Parachute Included from the Wall […]
There’s been a lot of buzz and chatter about the promise of online video advertising during the past year, accelerating considerably in just the past week, since the New York Times reported that Google is testing video ads on its search results page. Forrester Research recently released a report predicting online video advertising spend will […]
The adCenter blog announced the launch of the Microsoft adExcellence program for UK advertisers today. In December 2007, Microsoft launched the program from US advertisers but today they rolled it out for UK advertisers. It provides advertisers “free training to help you become a Microsoft adCenter expert,” says the adCenter blog. Once you are confident […]
Over the years I’ve seen quite a few Requests for Proposal from companies seeking to buy SEO services. If your RFP is not written well, it hinders the SEO firm’s ability to understand and define your needs and to scope and price your project. This in turn leads to a disconnect in expectations for both […]
Newspond is a news aggregation site that boasts “No editors. No voting. Just an AI news engine.” Presumably, the lack of voting distinguishes it from sites like Digg and the lack of editing from the Mahalo-like and maybe Slashdot? Does this mean it’s like Ask’s recent news aggregation entry BigNews but with fewer categories? Or […]
You’ve been tasked with building an in-house search marketing team, and now you’re wondering where to start. It’s a daunting task, to be sure. Do you start by rousting the programmers to get the content management system (CMS) into shape? Do you grab a credit card and start up a paid search campaign? Do you […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
CNET reports on Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates’ speech at Stanford University yesterday in which he said that it wasn’t the advertisers, the brand, or the traffic so much as the engineers that Microsoft wanted in the Yahoo acquisition. Of course, others in the company, including perhaps CEO Steve Ballmer, would say that the brand, advertiser […]
Day two of SES London is now complete. Here is the coverage of the conference that I found through my daily travels of the world wide search web.
Lee Odden posted a ten-minute interview with Google’s Adam Lasnik. Adam is well-known for being one of the many Googlers who work on Webmaster communication. In this interview, Lee asked Adam questions on: Google compliant Flash and JavaScript capabilities Duplicate content issues and if there are penalties Using the nofollow to “sculpt PageRank” Best way […]
As the Yahoo Search Blog explains, open-source Apache Hadoop is now at the center of Yahoo’s search index: We are now using Hadoop to process the Webmap — the application which produces the index from the billions of pages crawled by Yahoo! Search … Our implementation of a Hadoop-based Webmap is part of a larger […]