Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Canada’s Yellow Pages Group Acquires Enquiro Canada’s Yellow Pages Group has acquired the well-known search marketing agency Enquiro and folded it into a new entity known as Mediative. As explained in […]
On the heels of a formal privacy complaint by former FTC employee Chris Soghoian targeting Google’s embedding of search queries in page URLs, a new class action lawsuit takes aim at the same thing. It seeks monetary damages and an injunction against Google’s alleged sharing of searches with third parties. Google Said To Share User […]
Don’t like Google Street View taking pictures of your house? “Just move,” joked Google CEO Eric Schmidt, in a CNN interview on Friday. A controversial joke, no doubt — one made even more controversial for later seeming to disappear from the interview. Don’t blame Google, the company says. It didn’t ask for the quote to […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Google Demands Speed—Do You Need A Content Delivery Network? With Google upping the ante on speed of delivery as a factor in relevance ranking, even medium to smaller sites may now […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Google Making Location More Obvious, Prominent I’m not seeing it exactly but Google has said the company is making location more “transparent” or more obvious to users so that they can […]
Yahoo to Offer Media Links from the Wall Street Journal reports Yahoo will create a similar tool to Facebook connect for their media publishers, web developers and other websites to integrate with. Yahoo would not comment on the new system, but the purpose behind it is to help Yahoo better track users around the web, […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Time To Think Carefully About Which Country Hosts Your URL Shortener In my “how to choose a URL shortener” article last year, I warned that the country domain that a shortener […]
Most of you have seen the recent and now semi-infamous quote from Google CEO Eric Schmidt about how Google goes right “up to” what it considers a taboo boundary — “the creepy line” — but not beyond: “There is what I call the creepy line,” he said at an event at the Newseum. “The Google […]
I missed Facebook’s press conference yesterday about the new Facebook Groups feature that promises that you can share comments, photos and other information more tightly among only people you trust. But I learned about the feature firsthand soon enough, when I found myself added to a group without being asked. And that was worrisome. Robert […]
In a bid to give users more tools and control over the sharing of information (and perhaps preempt Google) Facebook introduced a new way to create and communicate with small private groups of people. Through an API this same functionality will be extended to publishers and third party developers like Facebook Connect is today. The […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Will Your Inhouse Social Program Win Awards? Recently I decided to delve deeper into social media than I ever have. Trying to wrap my head around the actual value behind social, […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Schmidt: Forcing Carriers To Provide “Clean” Android Would Violate Principle Of Open Source One of the disturbing things about the Skyhook Wireless lawsuit against Google is the allegation that Google made […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Google Maps Aggregates Midterm Election Forecasts Google has joined forces with a handful of political web sites to track forecasts for the upcoming U.S. mid-term elections. Those forecasts are available now […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: The New Twitter & Search, An Illustrated Guide Twitter’s rolling out a new design to users that makes the site more interactive and shows more information than before. What’s new for […]
The unconfirmed “Google Me” appears not to be a product per se rather a placeholder for a broader social strategy. According to reports coming out of Google Zeitgeist (Danny’s there so he can expand on this) Google is going to integrate a “social layer” into more and more of its products over time. According to […]
Like it or not, lots of people search for nude celebrities on Google. But with Google’s new Google Instant Search, those inclined to seek celebs in the buff have to figure out their queries without any help from Google. The same is true for those interested in nude beaches, famous nude artwork or “innocent” topics […]
On December 20th, a federal judge in the Bay Area will be asked to approve an $8.5 million settlement between Google and several Gmail users who sued earlier this year over the way Google Buzz was launched in February. If it’s approved, the case will become a class action, Gmail users in the U.S. will […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Google Forcing Some Searchers Into 20 Search Results For some searchers, Google seems to be forcing them into 20 or more search results on a page. By default, Google shows searchers […]
A busy day for Google on the legal front continues with news that the company has agreed to $8.5 million in payments to settle a federal lawsuit surrounding Google Buzz and privacy. According to AFP, court documents filed today show that seven plaintiffs will get no more than $2,500 each, lawyers that filed the case […]
I’m at Facebook HQ in Palo Alto where CEO Mark Zuckerberg is on stage in a jam-packed room that more resembles a wedding or luau than a press conference. He’s now announcing Facebook Places. He says Facebook Places seeks to accomplish three goals. Helping people share where they are See who’s around you See what’s […]
As we mentioned last week, Google is now allowing German residents to opt-out of having buildings shown in Google Street View Germany. The removal request page begins by saying that it’s “a pity” that the user wants to make a building unrecognizable in Street View.
In the face of resistance from several European countries and agencies, Google says it will launch Street View in Germany before the end of the year. The road-based photo-mapping tool will be available in 20 of Germany’s biggest cities by November, the AP reports. One thing unique to this launch is that Google will let […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Street Slide: Microsoft’s Next Killer Maps App? At the SIGGRAPH 2010 event this week in Los Angeles, Microsoft researchers showed off a next-generation tool for browsing street-level imagery. It’s called Street […]
Facebook Questions is the latest in a long line of question-and-answer services online but, as Danny Sullivan mentioned in his news article earlier, it’s the only one with a community of 500 million users behind it. For comparison’s sake, Yahoo Answers, the recognized leader in the Q&A space, announced in late 2009 that it had […]
With lots of mapping news today, we’re combining it all into a single round up, which focuses largely on Google. The company decided, after suspending, examining and “scrubbing” its Street View equipment in Europe and elsewhere, to resume collecting imagery and related data in several countries: Having spoken to the relevant regulators, we have decided […]
The Manchester Evening News reported that a UK mother was incredibly upset with Google after finding her 3-year-old son naked on Street View imagery within Google Maps. The image has been removed, but when it was there, the license plate and faces were blurred out, but not the little boy. An hour after Google was […]
Let’s take “Google Me” seriously as a social networking site, successor to Orkut and overall Facebook challenger. As everyone by now knows Digg’s Kevin Rose started a wave of coverage when he asserted over the weekend, in a Twitter post now removed, that Google was working on a Facebook competitor. Yesterday I asked Google for […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: And Now, Google Itself Runs Oil Spill Ads We’ve covered earlier how both BP and legal firms are advertising on Google. Now Google itself is targeting oil spill related terms to […]
I’m at TWTRCON today, where Martha Stewart is being interviewed during a keynote conversation by David Pogue of the New York Times.
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Location History, “Footstreams” & Aggregated Check-in Data Will Transform LBS Google recently announced a Location History dashboard that allows users to see where they’ve been, based on their Latitude activity: Today […]
The Pew Research Center has released a deep study today that paints an interesting picture of how U.S. adults use the Internet — search engines, in particular — to track their online reputations. One of the primary takeaways that contradicts previous research is that more than half of adult Internet users have “Googled” themselves. The […]
Facebook is holding a special press conference today, where it will be discussing the new “simplied” privacy settings that the company has developed in hopes of easing recent concerns over privacy. I’ll be live blogging the news. NOTE: See Drill (Down), Baby, Drill: Facebook’s New “Simple” Privacy Settings Still Pretty Complex, our story after this […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Live Matrix Wants To Be Your Guide To The Live Web If you’re looking for something to do, there are several event search engines you might use: Upcoming.org and Zvents are […]
One of the most important online marketing tools is the referrer string. Little known to most web surfers, this is effectively the Caller ID of the internet. It allows web site owners and marketers to know where visitors came from. It’s crucial marketing data, and data that might be going away. What’s The Referrer? When […]
Google has announced the launch of a browser plugin that lets users avoid being tracked by Google Analytics. The company warned two months ago, in the midst of loud privacy-related complaints, that it was working on such a tool. Google says the plugin will work in the following browsers: Internet Explorer, versions 7 and 8 […]
Google has released a report that shows its economic contributions to local economies in the US. Timed to coincide with National Small Business Week this is something of a “charm offensive” and effort to burnish Google’s recently tarnished corporate image: Google’s not just a search engine. We’ve also helped hundreds of businesses in every U.S. […]
It’s been a little while since we’ve done a Search Biz column. So it’s time to dust off the old snark machine and get right into it. First up there’s a very entertaining post on some new, unsealed records from the YouTube-Viacom litigation featuring a range of colorful expletives as both sides insult one another […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Google Launches Encrypted Web Search Want to keep your searches from being seen when using open WiFi or other networks? Google’s introduced a new “secure” encrypted version of its search. Anyone […]
Jason Calacanis plans to commit “Facebook suicide” today and become the latest in a line of prominent tech people to delete their accounts. I considered doing the same back in December but have hung in there. That’s not due to gaining more faith in Facebook. Instead, I shifted to sharing via a fan page. You […]
At a press briefing at the Google I/O developers conference today, Google cofounder Sergey Brin didn’t mince words about his company’s accidental collection of wifi data. “We screwed up,” he said. He was asked about the incident, where last week Google admitted it accidentally gathered data from private wifi networks around the world over the […]