Topic: Paris

SEO

Too Late For Thanksgiving & Too Early For Diwali

So global search marketers, should you be studying major religious festivals to understand their impact on your peaks and troughs — after all they may explain why your seasonal patterns globally don’t match what you’re used to. Making notes of the major festivals which will take place during your campaign year in the markets you are targeting can help.

Google Voice + Gmail = Free Voice Calls For Those In US

Google’s holding a small press gathering today at 9:30am in its San Francisco offices. Topic? The ability to place phone calls using Google Voice integrated within Gmail. Anyone with a US Gmail account will get this rolling out today and over the next few days, along with the ability to make free calls to numbers […]

Track “Le Tour” (de France) On Bing Maps

The world of sport is still largely focused on the World Cup, now in its semi-final round. However biking enthusiasts know that the Tour de France has started and is already in its second stage. Bing has introduced a “Map App” that provides a wealth of information about “Le Tour,” including stats and standings by […]

Liveblog: Steve Ballmer Keynote At SMX West

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer makes his first address to the search marketing community today at SMX West in Santa Clara. Danny Sullivan will sit down with Ballmer for a “fireside chat” that will also include time for Q&A from members of the audience. NOTE: Microsoft has now posted a video and a transcript of the […]

SEO

Google Airs TV Ad During Super Bowl – But Why?

Perhaps yesterday’s tweet by Google CEO Eric Schmidt put it best. Hell has indeed frozen over. Google has run its first major television ad, during the Super Bowl, no less. Below, the ad, how it has been received, how it compares to other search engine commercials from rivals and some questions about why market leader […]

Google Adds Photos To Some Location-Based Search Results

Google has announced a minor change to its search results page for some geographic-based queries. To fill in the white space that used to appear next to the small map, Google is now pulling in user-contributed photos from its Panoramio photo-sharing site. (Marketers: This is another reason to start using Panoramio if you’re not already.) […]

Yahoo: We’re Moving From Web Of Pages To Web Of Objects

Yahoo held a search event today in San Francisco at which the company connected the dots among a number of search initiatives that it has rolled out over the past couple of years: Search Assist, BOSS, Search Monkey, Search Pad and oneSearch. There was no announcement but a provocative reframing of all these efforts. The […]

Google Maps Adds User Photos To Street View

Google has added geo-tagged Panoramio photos to StreetView images. According to the Google LatLong Blog it’s done automatically: Google’s image-matching algorithms will analyze them at some point to see if they are also a good match for a Street View location. Google has offered images on Maps for some time, but not directly integrated into StreetView […]

Privacy Critics Don’t Give Google Enough ‘Latitude’

Since it launched a couple days ago there have been several predictable responses from persistent Google critics who regard the new location-aware Latitude service on Google Maps as a threat to privacy. The phrases “tracking,” “stalking” and “Big Brother” popped up in a range of articles in mainstream news outlets. Those stories were quickly written […]

Virtual Earth’s First 2009 Imagery Update

The Virtual Earth Blog announced their first 2009 imagery update, including about 100TB of new images. The major updates include the new Digital Globe satellite imagery they recently licensed and “bird’s eye” photos of Paris, France. There are literally tons of updates to the imagery, from satellite to bird’s eye to orthos. For the full […]

Google Latitude Turns Maps (For Mobile) Into Social Tool

Google Latitude is now live, a new service from Google that allows you to send your location to Google Maps and share it with friends via many mobile phones (not the iPhone yet, but that’s coming). Some might call the just-launched Google Latitude (part of a new version of Google Maps for Mobile) “son of […]

YouTube Adding Geographic Search

Tired of searching for “Paris” (France) on YouTube and mostly seeing video of Paris Hilton? A new geographic search feature (reported first by NewTeeVee) should take care of that. Video uploading users have been able to geotag videos on YouTube but not easily search for video by location. By contrast, Google Earth allows searching for […]

Funny Microsoft Live Search TV Ads That Should Be Aired

Two weeks ago, I attended a Microsoft event in London to talk about its progress in search. One of the highlights were these fake, hokey TV ads they showed us in between breaks. I loved them. They’re especially funny if you know Britain, but anyone should get a chuckle out of them. Videos are below, […]

SEO

Upcoming Search Marketing Conferences: March-June 2008

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:

Publicis & Google In Technology, Media-Planning Partnership

Paris-based Publicis Groupe is one of the four largest ad agencies in the world, with a portfolio of subsidiary brands that includes Leo Burnett Worldwide and Saatchi & Saatchi, among many others. In late 2006, the firm also bought online ad agency Digitas. Reuters is reporting that Publicis and Google are “combining their expertise to […]

Flickr Adds Places, Redesigns Map Explorer

Flickr, which previously offered users the ability to search for photos by location or see photos clustered and arrayed on a map, is going further down this path. The company is revamping Flickr’s map explorer and introducing a new service called “Places.” Places are pages dedicated to, well, specific places featuring maps and other information […]

Google Office Gains New Enterprise Credibility

Capgemini Backs Google’s Software Push from the Associated Press covers how Paris-based tech and business consultancy CapGemini is going to start recommending and installing Google Apps on enterprise desktops, a move viewed as a big boost for Google’s “office” application aspirations. CapGemini also works with Microsoft and IBM and “influences the type of software used […]

Yahoo Search Adds Travel Shortcuts

The Yahoo Search Blog has announced that they have added new Yahoo Travel shortcuts. If you search on a travel destination, such as Jerusalem, up comes a shortcut box with travel related information. It looks like this:

Google Images Quietly Adds Face Filter

Google Operating System reports that Google has added the ability to restrict your Google Image search by faces. To do so, just append “&imgtype=face” after your search string. For example, a search on paris returns results of Paris, France, the Eiffel Tower, Paris Hilton and others. A search on paris but with “&imgtype=face” appended to […]

Google Launches ‘Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR)’

As promised at its “Searchology” event last week, Google has launched cross-language information retrieval (CLIR). It’s now been added as a new feature to Google Translate and went live yesterday. As Chris Sherman previously wrote, Google is playing a bit of catch-up with this initiative; Yahoo has been doing this on a more limited basis […]

SEO

Yahoo Maps Get A Makeover

Although Microsoft might disagree, Yahoo was really the company that kicked off the dynamic mapping arms race back in March of 2004 with the introduction of a feature called “SmartView” ( a version of it still exists on Yahoo Maps “dial-up” presentation). SmartView enabled users of Yahoo Maps to conduct map-based searches using category buttons […]

SEO

Nokia Jumps Into Mobile Ads With “Nokia Ad Service” Program

Nokia announced they will be entering the mobile ad space with a program for advertisers, Nokia Ad Service, plus a “white label” Nokia Advertising Connector a program for others who want to run mobile ad programs. This move positions Nokia against other mobile ad providers, such as Google, Yahoo and others. ZDNet takes a look […]

More Google Q&A Spam

Nathan Weinberg spotted Google Q&A spam yesterday for a search on how tall is paris. The results led to an adult site (I saw it myself yesterday), but have now been plugged. This is not the first time Google had issues with spam in the Google Q&A feature. First report was September 2006, which was […]