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September 2005

Clusty Celebrates Its First Birthday

It was a year ago today when Chris and I published our introduction to Vivisimo's new metasearch/dynamic clustering product for the consumer market named Clusty, yes, Clusty. Since then, I've posted about Clusty offering a government search, job search (with Indeed.com), and its blog search capabilities. Also since its 2004 debut, Clusty began providing access to cached copies of pages via the MSN Cache and The Wayback Machine. Finally, Clusty's clustering capabilities received an honorable mention in the Best Search Feature category during our 2005 Search Engine Watch Search Awards. This press release from Clusty looks back at some of the reactions the name, not the technology, received a year ago today. A Happy B-Day to everyone at the Clusty HQ in Pittsburgh!

Posted by Gary Price on September 30, 2005, 9:41 PM | Permalink

Google Promotes Site-Targeted Advertising With Landing Page Test

Pam Parker's: Google Tests 'Advertise' Link, Landing Page, reports on another test at Google. This time, viewers of Google advertising on "select" Google Network sites will see the text link, "Advertise on this site" next to the AdSense ads.

If a user clicks the link, they're taken to a Google hosted landing page where they can learn about purchasing site-targeted advertising on that specific site. Another link on the landing page takes the user to an AdWords sign-up page. More about the test along with the usual "we're always testing things" comment from Google in this Clickz article and this page from Google that explains the "advertise on this site" page.

Postscript: AskDaveTaylor has more including a screen cap of the landing page.

Posted by Gary Price on September 30, 2005, 6:38 PM | Permalink

Google Plans AdWords Commercial Developer Program

Google will soon be offering enhanced access to its AdWords API, along with membership in a newly formed AdWords Developer Council, to commercial developers who have pushed up against the limits of the existing program.

Google has provided free access to its AdWords API since January. It's most often used by AdWords customers who handle multiple accounts, such as agencies and search marketing firms. API access allows developers to extend AdWords functionality to do things such as automatically generating keywords, ad text or custom reports, or integrate with other databases, such as inventory control systems.

The catch has always been that Google limits the use of this API according to a quota that's assigned based on the number of clients you manage and your total account spend. Use your quota for the month and your access is shut off until the beginning of the next month.

The new Commercial Developer Program is intended to address the needs of developers who exceed their monthly quotas. For an additional fee, developers will be able to increase their monthly quotas, and will also be provided with priority level developer support. They will also become members of the AdWords Developer Council, a group created to share best practices and meet regularly with Google engineers involved in the AdWords program.

Developers will be able to sign up for the new program in December, and the program will go live in January. Google isn't publicly disclosing the pricing structure of the new developer program, a practice it says is common.

For more information on the Google AdWords API, see the AdWords API FAQ.

Posted by Chris Sherman on September 30, 2005, 6:00 PM | Permalink

Local Matters Goes After Local Search Tech Market

The eWeek article, MapQuest Founder Chases Local Search Crown, offers a look at a new local search technology player, Local Matters, and its founder Perry Evans.

Evans was also the founder of MapQuest and a co-founder of Jabber, IM technology. We first blogged about Local Matters in May. The company plans to license its local search technology platform to providers of Yellow Pages.

By returning search results for small businesses that do not have Web sites, Evans argues that his company can outperform local search services from Google Inc., Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp., America Online Inc. and Amazon.com's A9 engine..."Local search is a booming business, but Google and Yahoo are offering a very limited experience. The content they provide is not pervasive about local business and that gives us a big advantage. There's no better place to find local business data than the Yellow Pages," Evans said.

The article goes on to say that Local Matters will offer mobile search (via SMS) and the ability to "shuttle" results to wireless devices. This sounds similar to how you can quickly send results from Yahoo Local to a mobile phone. Perry Evans also tells eWeek that future versions of the Local Matters platform will include the use of "widget" technology like what's seen from Apple and Yahoo's Konfabulator.

We're already playing with widgets quite a bit and we think we can do something there to present personal local lists on demand. That's an exciting area for us."

Postscript: For more about Perry Evans and Local Matters check out this interview he did with Adena Schutzberg and Joe Francica in Directions Magazine. We've also learned that Evans will be the keynote speaker at the Location Intelligence Conference in April.

Posted by Gary Price on September 30, 2005, 3:01 PM | Permalink

Listen Online: Search Execs and Others Speak During Advertising Week 2005

I'm not sure how much longer (my suggestion, head to the site soon) these presentations from Advertising Week 2005 (it ends today) will be available for listening online and/or downloading but several of the talks and panels, including one from Google, might be of interest to SEW Blog readers. Registration is free and fast at: http://www.infinityradio.com/advertisingweek/register.php. After you've registered, simply review the lists of presentations by date. Here are a few talks that might be of special interest.

Thursday, September 29th

+ 12 pm, Mike Kelly, President AOL Media Networks

Wednesday, September 28th

+ 9 am, David Verklin, CEO Carat Americas

+ 9 am, Google: Building Brands in the Consideration Economy

Tuesday, September 27th

+ 9 am, Wenda Harris Millard, Chief Sales Officer, Yahoo

+ 12 pm, Dan Rosenzweig, COO, Yahoo

Posted by Gary Price on September 30, 2005, 2:47 PM | Permalink

MTV VMA Results

Rafat over at PaidContent.org is reporting that MTV's video music awards generated 13 million unique streams since the original event. We wrote about the company's cross-platform plans for the awards last month.

Posted by Pamela Parker on September 30, 2005, 12:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Trying to Find the Mobile Searcher

Ben Charny's eWeek article: Mobile Search Struggles to Find an Audience, reports on why some say that mobile search is having problems finding users.

The most oft-cited reason here for search's cell phone failure is the phone itself. Typing in any information, like a Web address or a search inquiry, using a phone's cramped keypad is a chore many people aren't willing to put up with. Handset makers have tried to ease the thumb strain using any number of innovations, such as adding miniature QWERTY keyboards, or software, to complete words as they are typed. But it has obviously not been enough.

Yes, I'm a frequent mobile searcher with my Treo 650 that has a mobile browswer and a QWERETY keyboard. When I go out and do demos about mobile search in general (not just what's available on a Treo), the response I get is what I often here when it comes to other forms of web searching.

+ I had no idea that I could do "that" on my phone!

+ You mean I can get addresses, maps, weather, sports scores, and more on my mobile phone?

+ I can search for info on my regular computer and then send the info to my phone as a text message.

+ I don't have a mobile browser, I guess I'm out of luck.

How can people use a service if they don't know about it? How can they take advantage of an SMS search tool like 4info.net if they don't know it's out there and more importantly, what it can offer them?

Of course, these are the early days of mobile search (and I'm still very bullish), but it's going to take search service providers doing more to get the word out not only on paper but with live demonstrations to not only the "classic" early adopters but to other groups who might find the services useful. In other words, get to potential users by going directly to them not wait for the technology to slowly move into the mainstream. Right now, medical and legal professionals are increasingly becoming big users of mobile search. Heck, the National Library of Medicine has offered a mobile versions of their PubMed database for years.

I also think the move that we're seeing in "regular" web search from only providing lists links to answers to actually returning a specific answer to a factual query (Who won the academy award...?, What is the population of Chicago?, Where is Timbuktu located?) also lends itself perfectly to the mobile searcher.

So, where is the money in all of this? Who's going to pay for it? How can you get ads into a very small amount of space. As I said at Search Engine Strategies one model that should be looked at is branding answers and databases. For example, if you're searching for sports facts, that type of query might be branded by a certain company. Let's call it, "Nike's Mobile Sports Search." Searching for movie facts? What about the, "Netflix Mobile Movie Search?" You get the idea. A local search could be branded by a local company or merchant. You might also include a line preceding a mobile search answer like, "this info is provided by xxx company."

Have you ever heard of Guinness beer? Of course, you have. (-: Have you ever seen, searched, or read Guinness World Records. Well, this classic reference resource began as a branded tool to settle bar bets by the brewery.

Why can't companies/services do the same and brand mobile search tools?

Posted by Gary Price on September 30, 2005, 10:36 AM | Permalink

Feedster Plans Self-Serve RSS Ad Program

According to a Media Daily News article: Feedster to Release New RSS Ad Product, placing advertising in Feedster RSS feeds will become even easier in the next few weeks when the RSS search tool launches a new, "self-service" program (aka AdSense like) as compared to the RSS ad program Feedster currently provides.

The Media Daily News also reports that Feedster will release a "feed-profiling tool" later this year.

The product, Redlitz said, will profile a blogger's feeds using Feedster's index--and will deliver ads based on the overall content of the feed over time, not individual posts. For example, a blogger who writes about politics 80 percent of the time would still receive politically relevant ads the other 20 percent of the time when he blogs about, say, his cat.

Just a thought. For many RSS users the lack of advertising, to this point, is a reason I frequently hear as one of the reasons they like it so much. I wonder if increased advertising, any advertising for that matter, will stop current users from using RSS and slow its growth and acceptance with people who haven't tried it.

Posted by Gary Price on September 30, 2005, 10:23 AM | Permalink

Yahoo Site Explorer Live: New Way To See All Your Pages, Links

Promised over a month ago, Yahoo Site Explorer is now reality. Yahoo gives the heads-up to everyone here on its Yahoo Search Blog, and how it will show you all pages within a domain, within a particular directory of a domain, all inbound links to a domain and the ability to bulk submit (which was already live earlier and explained more in our earlier post). You can also access through a new Site Explorer API or export data for further analysis. More details also on the help page.

If you're a Search Engine Watch member, I do a through exploration of Site Explorer in this article in the members area. Check it out! Or hey, help support the site and the blog by becoming an SEW member! Below, a summary of my wish list items and observations from that members' article:

You can see all pages from all domains, one domain, or a directory/section within a domain
You can NOT pattern match to find all URLs from a domain, unfortunately
You can see all links to a specific page or a domain
You can NOT exclude your own links, very unfortunately
You can export data, but only the first 50 items, unfortunately
Search commands such as link: aren't supported, and I hope that might come
You can get a feed of your top pages, but I want a feed of backlinks to inform me of new ones that are found. Site owners deserve just as much fun as blog owners in knowing about new links to them.

Want to comment or discuss? Visit our Search Engine Watch Forums thread, Yahoo Site Explorer Now Live!

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 29, 2005, 8:46 PM | Permalink

MSN Shopping Adds Search Refinements for Hundreds of Product Categories

Just up on the MSN Shopping Insider is a post about some new and useful features that have gone live at MSN Shopping. Now, it's possible to focus and refine a shopping search using attributes that are specific to the product category your searching in. This has been possible with MSN Shopping in the past with categories like televisions and computers but as of today these types of refinements are available in more than 300 categories. For example, if you're searching for flowers, you can now focus your flower search by type (roses, lillies, etc), arrangement type (bouquet, vase, planter, etc.) flower color, and seller. Of course, you can also focus by price range. If you're searching for a diamonds, you can refine by color, carat, clarity, cut and price. Little to no learning curve to use these refinements. A good example of keeping it simple.

I didn't check all 300 categories (-:, but I did look at other shopping engines to see what refinements they offer shopping for diamonds.

+ Shopzilla also allows to refine by stone shape, carat, cut, color, clarity, and price range.
+ Shopping.com allows a searcher to refine a search for diamonds by clarity, carat, and price. Very similar to MSN Shopping.
+ PriceGrabber offers a carat refinement.
+ Yahoo Shopping, refine by price.
+ Become.com, refine by price.
+ Froogle, refine by price and store

Posted by Gary Price on September 29, 2005, 8:31 PM | Permalink

Daily SearchCast, Sept. 29, 2005: Google Partners With NASA, Google Calendar Coming?, Who Pays For Google's House Ads, SEO Ranking Factors, Debunking Urban Myths, Roll Your Own Search Engine & More!

Today's search podcast covers more on Google's partnership with NASA for office space and data, more signs of a potential Google Calendar, whether site owners should get paid for carrying Google house ads, a list of nearly 100 factors to rank web pages, finding out the truth behind urban myths, a new way to create your own search engine and more!

Tune-in by listening to this MP3 file, listening via WebmasterRadio at 11:30am Eastern and repeated at 2pm Eastern Tuesday through Friday, via our Odeo channel or through iTunes via this link (or use alternative iTunes instructions explained here). Below are links with more information about the stories that were discussed.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 29, 2005, 3:38 PM | Permalink

Search Pulling From Banner Ad Spend

An article in New Media Age UK titled: Long-time advertisers are abandoning banner ads in favour of search, includes comments about how firms that have been the "backbone" of Net advertising for years are moving into search marketing.

Eric Abensur from Wanadoo UK and Giles Ivey from AOL both say that big-volume advertisers are switching their spending from display ads and banners into search.

Media agency Unique Digital says it has been seeing this from finance, retail and travel brands, with some putting up to 20% of their budgets into search. "It's primarily advertisers that are looking for a direct response," said the agency's media director Martin Kelly. "Search is an easy win, but it's not a long-term solution."

While Abensur and Ivey are postive about large companies moving from banners to search spending, Phil Macauley, head of planning and strategy at Yahoo Europe, says:

Direct response advertisers are increasing their media spend online as a whole, both in branded advertising and sponsored search. But they're moving it away from other media, rather than moving budgets around within online."

Posted by Gary Price on September 29, 2005, 2:49 PM | Permalink

Infospace & Seekport Announce Partnership as InfoSpace President Leaves Company

Netimperative reports that European engine Seekport and Infospace will partner. The partnership will have Infospace providing paid listings on Seekport results pages.

This has been a busy week for InfoSpace news. On Monday, we blogged about a new mobile search tool that InfoSpace plans to launch in October. Then, on Tuesday, we learned that Kathleen Rae, president and chief operating officer of InfoSpace, will be retiring from the company.

Posted by Gary Price on September 29, 2005, 2:24 PM | Permalink

Preview New Saved Searches & Clip Feature At AOL Search

While I was looking at the AOL Search home page this afternoon, I noticed some text (near the bottom the page) that invited me "preview new features" as AOL continues to enhance its search site. So, what did I find?

After clicking the preview url (http://aolsearcht.aol.com/aolcom/webhome) I arrived at a page that allowed me to save my searches. Look for the green box and scissors icon on the right side of the page. Clicking this green box took me to another page where I could turn off the feature and erase everything (searches are saved for 30 days) or sort my past clips and searches by when it was saved or what I searched for.

Web search results page also allow you to easily clip and save results. For example, I searched for "Search Engine Watch" and was allowed to clip results (note how the scissors icon moves from result to result). Clicking the icon saves a copy of the result link and snippet. It does not save the full text of the underlying page. It's also possible to clip and save sponsored links. You you can "clip" up to 25 results per search.

I was not asked to sign-in with my AOL ID to preview. However, I would imagine that in the future, signing-in will allow me to view my saved results and searches on any computer. Make sure to take the proper safety precautions if you share your computer with others.

A final note, this time on image searching.

When you run an image search, here's a set of thumbnail results for "Golden Gate Bridge" the image(s) you clicks appears along with the full page of where the image appears embedded on the page directly below the selected image.

Remember, this is a preview and not all features work with all search types. Still, it's good to see AOL continuing to improve their web search offerings. Kudos. Given the ephemeral nature of the web, I would love to see AOL begin offering what others (Filangy, Yahoo, etc) offer and begin locally caching copies of pages viewed by the searcher for future reference and use.

Posted by Gary Price on September 29, 2005, 1:47 PM | Permalink

Listings Hijacked At MSN, With A Little Help From Google

Google 302 and MSN from Dave Naylor is chock full of badness on the parts of both Google and MSN, showing how Google redirections are causing it to hijack listings in MSN's search results. Dave gives you the short rundown. Here's the spelled out version, and thanks for his help in assembling it.

Look at this search result at MSN UK for batman animated bean bag.
See how the first result is for this page at Kids UK?
Now look at the URL MSN UK lists for that page:

http://groups.google.co.uk/froogle_url?q=
http://www.kidsuk.co.uk/shop/catalog/
Batman-Bedding-p-1-c-1288.html
%3Fsource%3Dfroogle&fr=AJrr2tQq23-_SJjef
Mma5wwNUyhA6FBUGEdlEBymj9jJAAAAAAAAAAA
See the bold part? That shows that MSN believes this page is hosted at groups.google.co.uk.
What's happening is over at Froogle UK, all links you click on there are redirected out of Google and to the destination sites, but...
Google is using 302 temporary redirection, which is causing MSN to let it "hijack" these listings.
To be clear, MSN is NOT listing a Google page, even though the page has a Google URL. Look at the cached copy of that page, and you can see that it is the same page as at Kids UK. But Google has control over the URL in MSN's results.
In other words, should Google lose its mind, it could at any point send MSN a cloaked version of the Kids UK page and likely maintain the ranking while showing human visitors something else entirely. Kids UK is not in control of that listing on MSN, even though it currently leads to the Kids UK site. It's been hijacked by Google! If Google were using a 301 redirection, however, this shouldn't be happening.
Side point. If this is a Froogle UK thing, why does that URL say GROUPS.google.co.uk? Google UK has some domain madness going on. Visit the home page. Click the Froogle link to get this page. Now click the Groups link to reach this page. Notice now how even though you are in Google Groups, the the froogle.co.uk domain is what shows in your address bar. That shouldn't be happening. Other mix-ups like this are leading to the confusion.
Hey! What's MSN doing crawling Froogle anyway? The robots.txt file there should be keeping it out, right? Sure. But if some site has made copies of Froogle results, scraped the content as fodder for a fake blog or something else to attract traffic, MSN might crawl that and thus see the Froogle redirections.

Overall, a nice demonstration of why MSN needs to consider how it handles redirection. My Revisiting Hijacking & Redirects: Moving To A Solution story gives you more background on the hijacking situation as it especially has impacted Google.

I also wrote that story as a lead in for our Indexing Summit 2 session as SES San Jose that was held last month, to see if we could get a standard solution to handing redirection and eliminate these type of problems. I was planning to finally write up what happened at that session next week, and I still will, promise. But here's the summary:

Yahoo: We have a solution (as described in my article) that seems to work.
Google: Matt Cutts wants to use the Yahoo solution but the engineer overseeing how redirections are handled says they've solved it another way. Matt said if you still see it happening, report it to Google, and then he's got some ammunition to say "I told you so" and get the Yahoo solution going. It's been reported at least once already. Bacon polenta on Matt's blog explains that and more important, gives updated instructions on how to report a hijacking in Google's listings.
Ask Jeeves: Thinks it has a handle on the situation and doesn't need to follow the Yahoo solution.
MSN: Didn't take part in the summit.

Want to discuss or comment? Visit our forum thread, Google Hijacks Batman Room Decor Listing At MSN!

Postscript: I was incorrect on the robots.txt banning. The robots.txt file for Google Groups wouldn't have prevented MSN from crawling Froogle results that can be accessed under that domain. More in the forum thread above.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 29, 2005, 1:42 PM | Permalink

MSN Search MyCroft Plugin Now Available for Firefox

If you're a Firefox user who wants to have easier access to the MSN Search database, a post on MSN Search's WebLog points out that a new MSN Search "Mycroft" search plugin for Firefox is now available. Actually, a number of MSN Search plugins are available for various versions of the MSN database.

Posted by Gary Price on September 29, 2005, 1:11 PM | Permalink

Tax Assessor Wants Google To Pay Property Taxes Even Though New Facility Will Be on Federal Land

We've blogged several items about the new Googleplex and Google/NASA relationship that's we be built on NASA Ames property in Mountain View. One story even has Google's Peter Norvig saying that he woild love to see Google Mars and Google Moon. Note to Peter: Google already has these "space" domains already registered.

So, why am I mentioning the Google/NASA story again? Property taxes, that's why?

According to a San Jose Mercury News article: Assessor will try to make Google pay property taxes, the Santa Clara County Assessor wants Google to still pay property taxes even though NASA Ames is located on federal propery.

As part of the deal, Google plans to build hundreds of new homes and carve out roads on a stretch of the 213-acre research campus. In 2002, Mountain View cleared the research park's bid for 4.2 million square feet of new construction, including up to 2,000 homes for any new tenant. "Obviously if they are building enough housing for workers, that's wonderful," said Mountain View City Councilman Greg Perry. But Perry was wistful that the company decided to duck inside the federal borders and deny the city property tax revenue. By building on federal land, Google would avoid potentially millions of dollars in annual property taxes.

Of course, many are thrilled by Google's recent announcement. However, Lee Stone, a negotiator for Ames Federal Employees Union, is not so sure about the deal to bring Google to Ames.

``I fear this could be just about a real estate deal and avoiding the regulatory problems of building in the Bay Area and a moneymaking deal for Ames,'' Stone said. ``Unless there's a bona fide intellectual interaction between the government and Google, then I would be disappointed.''

Posted by Gary Price on September 29, 2005, 12:24 PM | Permalink

Broadband Adoption in U.S. Homes Continues to Increase

Some new numbers just released from Nielsen//NetRatings report that the adoption of broadband in U.S. homes continues to increase.

According to Nielsen//NetRatings the number of Americans with broadband access at home reached 42 percent of the U.S. population in August, increasing 16 percent since the beginning of this year.

In January 2005, 103.8 million Americans had broadband access; by August, that figure had grown to 120.8 million. These figures were compiled from the Nielsen//NetRatings panel and report the connection speeds of those with Internet access at home.

The news brief goes on to say:

in August 2005, the percent of active U.S. Internet users connecting online via broadband from home reached an all-time high, at 61.3 percent, compared with 51.4 percent of active Internet users in August last year...In contrast, fewer Internet surfers are using a narrowband connection to go online. Among at-home Internet users, those using a narrowband connection have decreased by 10 percent since August last year, from 60.6 million to 54.3 million in August 2005. Currently, 38.7 percent of active Internet users continue to rely on a narrowband connection, compared with 48.6 percent in August 2004.

Posted by Gary Price on September 29, 2005, 11:35 AM | Permalink

SEO Still A Low Priority for Many Marketers When Compared with Paid Search

A brief Media Daily article titled: Marketers Slow To Embrace Optimization, Say Search Experts, reports on a panel of heavy hitters that took place at the OMMA East conference yesterday in New York. The audience was told that they need to both opitimize their web sites for web crawlers and also run cost-per-click campaigns.

Gord Hotchkiss from Enquiro told the audience that still SEO remains a low priority as compared to paid search for many marketers.

Quotes

"Search marketing can be done as a stand-alone strategy," said Hotchkiss, referring to paid campaigns. "But we don't recommend that." - Gord Hotchkiss

"A lot of people still see SEO as sort of 'black magic." - Alan Boughen, mOne

Often marketing departments and the IT departments are not coordinating to get the job done. "Sometimes you'll get brought in by the marketing folks and they won't even consult the IT department," he said. "It comes down to organizational commitment." - Rob Murray, iProspect

Also on the panel were Chris Copeland, Outrider and Jeremy Cornfeldt, Carat Fusion.

Posted by Gary Price on September 29, 2005, 11:00 AM | Permalink

New Patent Apps from Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft

If your the type who enjoys reviewing newly published patent applications, Barry over at Search Engine Roundtable lists a bunch of newly published apps that were posted on Cre8asite earlier today. The list includes applications from Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. Remember, a patent app is NOT the same thing as an awarded patent. I do my best to explain the differences in this post that also includes more Yahoo patent apps and applications. Although I haven't updated the list in a while, it includes a lengthy list of search-related patents and patent applications from Microsoft. Want more? Browse my ResourcShelfPLUS site where I posted patent and patent apps (from many companies) before coming to work here at SEW.

Posted by Gary Price on September 29, 2005, 10:40 AM | Permalink

Don't Overlook B2B Search Engines for Search Marketing Opportunities

Sites specializing in business-to-business search may seem like fallow fields for search marketing efforts, but in fact the opposite is true. Business verticals can offer tightly targeted traffic, high click-through rates leading to high conversion rates for those search marketers savvy enough to take advantage of what they offer. Guest writer Greg Jarboe reports on a recent Search Engine Strategies panel featuring reps from some of the more prominent B2B engines in today's SearchDay article, Meet The B2B Search Engines.

Posted by Chris Sherman on September 29, 2005, 10:10 AM | Permalink

AltaVista's Former Engineering Director At Microsoft

AltaVista's former director of engineering Don Dodge turns up now working at Microsoft. Robert Scoble talks with him a bit about the old days here. Don's got a blog you can tune into over here.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 29, 2005, 7:49 AM | Permalink

And Debunking Urban SEO Myths!

Speaking of debunking urban myths, how about those of the SEO world? I just posted about a list of things that may (or may not) influence how a page will rank in search engines. But what convinces people of the truth behind a particular factor? Cause and Effect - Not Always Easy to Determine from Scottie Claiborne over at Search Engine Guide looks at how you can end up assuming something is working a certain way for all the wrong reasons, plus gives some basic tips on how to test correctly.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 29, 2005, 7:46 AM | Permalink

Debunking Urban Myths

Did you hear about the killer dolphins that got loose from a naval facility in the wake of Hurricane Katrina? Apparently, an urban myth. How do you track down if something's a myth or not? Shirl Kennedy over at Gary's other site, ResourceShelf, give you a fresh rundown on urban myth debunking tools here.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 29, 2005, 7:41 AM | Permalink

Google WiFi In New York's Bryant Park

Google Wi-Fi in NYC, spotted via Russell Shaw, shows Google backing wifi in New York's Bryant Park. Another stepping stone down the GoogleNet path? It looks more like Google's putting up the money to make it "Provided by Google," as it says on the sign, rather than "Powered By Google."

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 29, 2005, 7:38 AM | Permalink

Google House Ads In AdSense On Non-Google Sites

I wrote earlier of issues some have with Google running house ads for its own products in Google search results. Selling Their Own Dog Food from Andrew Goodman looks at the flipside, Google house ads running in AdSense ads on sites outside of Google. "I wonder if publishers get paid for these clicks?," he asks. Good question -- I'll see if I can find out. It seems like they should.

Postscript: Chris Ridings writes to say, nope, Google doesn't pay for those ads. See section 11 of the AdSense terms:

Google shall not be liable for any payment based on....(d) Google advertisements for its own products and/or services;

Postscript 2: Jen Slegg emailed me and also posts on her blog that publishers ARE PAID for these ads, according to what Google tells her. Andrew's also posted a follow-up saying he's been told the same.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 29, 2005, 7:33 AM | Permalink

Rundown On Search Ranking Factors

Search rankings aren't all about PageRank. Even Google will tell you they have many, many "signals" that are measured to rank a page. The same is true for other search engines -- and has been a fact of SEO life for years and years. But what are all these signals and factors? Some are known, some are speculated on, and some change all the time. Search Engine Ranking Factors now up from Rand Fishkin at SEOmoz is a diligent rundown on factors that could influence how well a page does.

Rand stresses that exactly what is used and how important is impossible to know. That's crucial to remember. I skimmed his list, and some of the stuff makes a lot of sense that I'd agree with. Have good title tags, absolutely. Have good use of the terms you want to be found for in the body copy.

Other things, I'm not so much in agreement with. I don't think external links are crucial for a page to do well, but that's my view and experience. Keyword use in the URL is a extremely minor factor to me -- I'd give it half a box or even less, if that was an option. He also stresses too much to me the idea about links coming in to your TLD or your root domain.

Search engines by and large still say they are (and seem to be) operating under the notion of looking at pages individually. They don't really seem to try and understand what your entire site is "about," though Yahoo did say about a year ago that having many links at your root domain could help boost your internal pages.

It would be fun to see all the factors listed so that a community of SEOs could rate how important they are deemed to be. Overall, it's fun to look down and certainly will give you plenty to think about. But you'll also realize how difficult it will be to get exactly every piece "right."

In fact, you won't. You'll get many things wrong. So how do you win? I still fall back on making sure you have some of the best content you can offer, built in search engine friendly manner. Build it -- and don't put up search engine barriers -- and for many people the traffic will indeed flow.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 29, 2005, 7:27 AM | Permalink

Google Partners With NASA For Expansion Space, Space Data & Supercomputing Talent

Google, NASA sign `a very big deal' from the San Jose Mercury News gives the rundown on the aforementioned plans by Google to expand onto NASA's Ames facility in Mountain View. It's not just getting more space. It's also about collaborating with NASA scientists and getting NASA data, as well. So literally, the sky's not the limit, for Google.

In particular, Google will get access to scientists behind to supercomputing technology that NASA has developed, the article says. Google also gets more access to NASA space data and images, additional fodder for Google Maps and Google Earth, no doubt.

"We already have Google Earth....We'd like to have Google Mars and Google Moon," Google's Peter Norvig is quoted as saying.

NASA Takes Google on Journey Into Space is the official press release from Google with more details, and the NASA version is here.

Postscript from Gary: Google already owns many of the domains that they might need for outer space exploration. See this collection of domains that Google registered a few months ago including GoogleMoon, GoogleMars, and GoogleNeptune.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 29, 2005, 7:14 AM | Permalink

A List of Domain Names Registered by Google

I'm a list fanatic. Many years ago, I started compiling a web-based lists of lists while I worked as a librarian at George Washington University. That compilation remains online and under the management of my friend, Trip Wyckoff. A new list that I've been compiling over the past few weeks offers a look at many of the domain names that are registered to Google Inc. I used various sources to compile the list.

This is not a 100% comprehensive list. Repeating, this is not a 100% comprehensive list. The primary focus of the list is on the .com, .org, .net, .biz and .info domains but it's very likely that some of the domains that Google has registered are not included. In fact, it's also a strong possibility that some domains are registered to domain "holding" companies that we just don't know about and/or haven't discovered yet.

Nevertheless, I think what follows is an interesting list and one I hope to update in the future. You'll also notice that many of these names come from acquisitions that Google has made over the years. I hope this list is not only useful but also fun for all of the Google geeks out there.

Now, click here to access a list of domains registered (with a few exceptions) to Google Inc.

Posted by Gary Price on September 28, 2005, 10:09 PM | Permalink

A Google Calendar and Some Domain Name Research

As someone who watches Google domain names closely, I learned about this post on the Google Addiction Blog that points out that GCalendar.com (an online Google calendar?) is a domain name that's currently registered to Data Docket, an Idaho company that often "holds" domains in their name (so nosy researcher types (-: don't get clued in) to new Google services until the service or search tool is just about ready for launch. I've seen the Data Docket many times in the past.

Here's a recent example of Data Docket's involvement with Google, specifically, Google Earth. Before Google Earth was officially released, the domain name was registered to Data Docket. On May 31st, the domain was transferred to Google Inc. (and Google domain servers) just a few weeks before Google Earth launched.

So, does this mean that a Google has plans to release an online calendar program very soon? Who knows? Let's watch and see if GCalendar's registration moves to Google sometime soon. That said, I don't think many would be surprised if/when they do offer some form of online calendar.

A few more facts. The GCalendar.com domain has been registered since 2004. However, it hasn't always been registered to Data Docket. Using a WHOIS History database I was able to track down the following:

GCalendar was first registered in April, 2004

In September, 2004, the WHOIS History database shows GCalendar was registred to Guido Pantnella in Walnut Creek, CA.

On October 6, 2004, the domain was transferred to Trout & Zimmer, a Burbank, CA firm that helps companies register/acquire domains.

On July 7, 2005, the domain was transferred to Data Docket.

Finally, what do we know, at least for now, about Data Docket? Not much. We do know that is is a registered corporation in Utah. You can see for yourself here by entering Data Docket into the "Business Entity" field in in this Idaho public records database.

Caveat:
I'm sure as more and more people become aware of a Data Docket/Google relationship, I would expect see Google having another company "hold" domain names until they're ready for launch. Oh well!

Postscript: In case you're wondering, GCalendar.net is also registered to Data Docket. GCalendar.org is registered to Trout & Zimmer, another organization mentioned in this report.

Postscript: Google Addiction is now reporting that calendar.google.com now points to Google.

Posted by Gary Price on September 28, 2005, 5:35 PM | Permalink

Yahoo Maps Japan Begins Adding User Info

Yahoo begins updating online map based on user tips, from Japan Today, reports that Yahoo Maps Japan has begun allowing users to submit local information for inclusion on maps. Worth noting is that user submitted info will be verified before it's added to the service. service.

"To submit local information, users first have to access the website and select a particular area, and then send in-depth information only locals would know, such as "a convenience store has opened" or "the name of the building has changed." Based on those submissions, Alps employees will visit the area to verify information before they update the map, which will be done once a month.

Posted by Gary Price on September 28, 2005, 4:09 PM | Permalink

Winners of Yahoo Video Search Yammys Revealed

May we have the envelope please!

About a month ago Danny blogged about the The Yammy Video Search Awards from Yahoo that would honor the best in original online video. Yammy winners would receive a number of prizes (including a plasma TV for the grand prize winner).

This afternoon winners of the Yahoo Yammys were announced.

The winning video is titled "Twinkle Toes" and was directed by Marty Putz. It can be viewed online along with other audience favorities.

Posted by Gary Price on September 28, 2005, 3:49 PM | Permalink

Lots of Job Resumes Appear at Google China; Chef Position is Still Open

After Dr. Kai-Fu Lee officially began his job (at least for the time being) last week at the head of Google efforts in China, Google received more than 1000 resumes for 50 positions at their soon to be built research facility in .CN. In fact, all of the resumes were received in a five hour period. The InfoWorld article: Google gets 1,000 resumes for 50 jobs in China, has more including word that Lee is looking to hire employees for a variety of positions including product managers, software developers, wireless developers, and of course, a chef.

Posted by Gary Price on September 28, 2005, 3:09 PM | Permalink

Daily SearchCast, Sept. 28, 2005: Google Moving To NASA (Offices), Dropping Euro Commissions, Yahoo Preps Tools On Search Buzz, Releases Desktop Search From Beta, A Search Marketer On The Apprentice & More!

Today's search podcast covers Google expected to expand offices to the NASA Ames site, removing commissions for European advertisers and unifying logons, while Yahoo is prepping new tools to measure search buzz and releasing its desktop search tool. Plus, a search marketer on The Apprentice and more!

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 28, 2005, 2:24 PM | Permalink

Roll Your Own Search Engine With Rollyo (Beta)

For the past few weeks I've had the chance to test out and create several focused and targeted search engines (based URLS I specified) with Rollyo, a new search tool released to the public today in an early beta by Dave Pell of Davenetics fame. As John notes, the public beta just went up, so fair game to talk about it! I think it's an exciting idea and one that you'll want to check out for yourself.

What is Rollyo?
In a nutshell, Rollyo allows the user to take up to 25 urls and create a search tool (what Rollyo calls a Searchroll), that search ONLY these domains. The database your pulling sites and content from is powered by Yahoo. Of course, you can edit and modify your Searchroll at any time.

Sure, you could head to Yahoo, Google, Gigablast, Ask, MSN and others and as an advanced searcher string together long query strings limiting your search with the site: command. However, most people AREN'T advanced searchers and even those who are might not have the time to create such a query.

What Rollyo does is make all of this MUCH easier. All the user has to do is enter up to 25 urls that contain material(s) of interest and click. It's that simple. There are no limitations about what you can create a specialized/target search tool about.

Here's a simple example. A user might want to create a focused search (aka Searchroll) about meteorology/weather.
With Rollyo, all they have to do is find* and enter the urls of a site or sites of that focus on the topic.
+ www.noaa.gov
+ www.wildwildweather.com
+ ggweather.com/
+ www.worldweather.org
+ www.weatheronline.co.uk/

* Non-commercial web directories like the Librarians' Index to the Internet (http://www.lii.org) , RDN (http://rdn.ac.uk) , and Infomine (http://infomine.ucr.edu) are great places to begin.

Then, the Rollyo allows you to name your focused search database (Searchroll), let's call ours Weather Search' and now, when the click search, they're only searching the content in domains they listed.

Very cool and very easy!

Even better, it's possible to share your Rollyo "Searchrolls" with friends and colleagues. I think that a tool like this, because of its easy of use, has a strong future in both the workplace and in schools.

Strengths
Even folksonomy enthusiasts will be happy since it's possible to "tag" your Searchrolls for better retrieval. All rolls can be marked public so they can be seen by all Rollyo users.

Weaknesses
Remember, today is just the first day of the Rollyo public beta and it still needs work to make it an even more useful service. Here are a few things I would love to see in future releases.

The ability to be able to limit your search to a specific part of a web domain. For example, Rollyo searches entire sites such as www.cnn.com or support.apple.com, but not parts of sites, such as www.cnn.com/politics/. The ability to limit to parts of sites would make Rollyo MUCH more powerful. In some cases, it would also be useful to be able to enter only a specific page into a SearchRoll.

The chance to use other databases (verticals) alongh with the Yahoo web database. Remember, if the page hasn't been crawled by Yahoo, Rollyo will not find it.

A date next to each Rollyo/Yahoo results listing the last time the page was crawled. Also, a direct link to the Yahoo cached version of each page on Rollyo results page. Links to The Wayback Machine would also be useful (Yahoo now provides these).

Documentation about how to use of some Yahoo's advanced search features with Rollyo like limiting your search to words in the title of a document.

Bottom Line
I've very bullish on Rollyo and will be monitoring the site for changes and enhancements. I've been wanting something like this for a long time. Kudos to Dave Pell and his team.

Postscript:
Hey, that's cool. I just noticed a demo Searchroll I created is listed on the Rollyo home page.

Posted by Gary Price on September 28, 2005, 1:10 PM | Permalink

Interactive best practices, Yahoo!-style

You would expect a company like Yahoo! to know a thing or two about online advertising. Marketers in attendance at today's OMMA East conference were given a glimpse inside Yahoo!'s marketing machine with a keynote address from CMO Cammie Dunaway.

Dunaway shared her "Interactive Marketing 101"-style best practices:
* Match the creative to your target
* Connect emotionally
* Communicate a clear benefit
* Support your brand's personality
* Use meaningful interactivity
* Use rich media
* Integrate the customer experience
* Utilize promotional capabilities

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on September 28, 2005, 12:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Export or Backup Your Gmail Contacts List with Just a Few Clicks

I noticed a small addition to the Gmail Whats New page in the past day or so that points out that its now VERY easy to export your Gmail contacts list offline (its always good to have a backup) or to use with another email reader. Simply login to your Gmail account, click your Contacts list (left column) and then look for the Export link located on the right side of the page. Your contact list is made available as a .CSV file. Additional instructions and info can be found here.

Posted by Gary Price on September 28, 2005, 12:01 PM | Permalink

Google Changing Agency Commission Payments In Europe

Many search marketers in the US are unaware that in Europe, both Google and Yahoo offer agency commissions. Today, Google has announced plans to restructure that practice. The Google press release on the move hasn't yet been posted in the Google press release area, so I've reprinted what I was sent below. The longer edition of this post for Search Engine Watch members has more information on the move, including:

The new program opens across Europe from January 2006 to any qualified third party agency (at least five clients, two Google certified professionals on staff).
Google does NOT consider the new program to be paying commission but rather having a "best practice funding element."
Payments will be tied to business brought in or grown and tiered to a maximum of 12 percent
Yes, search marketing firms are eligible.

For more, see the members' version of this post (or become a member and help support the site and this blog!).

See also the Agency Commission Or Discount Offered On Search Ads? thread in our Search Engine Watch Forums for discussions of payments in Europe and how they don't happen in the US.

Postscript: Here's additional info Google has sent (press release comes after that):

From 1st January 2006 there will be no agency commission i.e. All advertisers will be on a level playing field.
The Google European third party programme is a drive to empower 3rd parties in the delivery of best practice within the field of search marketing.
The best practice funding element is a criteria-based scheme which aims to provide investment for third parties from Google in order to drive their search marketing capabilities forward and grow the industry.
The scheme is optional and does not involve any discounting of the Google advertising model - a deliberate move aimed at achieving transparency and integrity for the adwords auction model.
The criteria for qualification are not solely financially based and include mandatory adoption of our My Client Centre. Third parties must also meet Google Advertising Professional quota requirements in order to qualify.

Here's the Google press release:

London - September 28, 2005 - Google Inc. today announced that it has introduced a new program aimed at empowering third parties and delivering continued value to advertisers of all sizes. This new industry program will be available to all qualifying third parties across Europe from January 2006.

Under the new Google European Third Party program, Google will deliver training, tools and support to third parties, enabling them to deliver more value to their clients. By reconfiguring the previous practice of giving agency discounts and introducing best practice funding, this new program will level the playing field, allowing advertisers of all sizes to fairly compete in Google's auctions based advertising platform.

"Google's new program empowers third parties to more efficiently and effectively serve their clients. Third parties are critical to the success of advertisers and to Google and we have designed an approach that favours both," says Nikesh Arora, Vice President of European Operations at Google. "We firmly believe that it is important to preserve the integrity of the channel in terms of marketing effectiveness and advertiser perception. By fostering greater equality across Google's auction model, advertisers of all sizes can more effectively compete against each other," he concludes.

The core elements that Google will now provide its third parties are:

Tools to increase third party efficiency and effectiveness

Training and market research

Process enhancements such as wholesale upgrades to our commercial processes to ensure that our processes are aligned to our third party business models

Extended service and technical support

A quarterly best practice funding program for investment in training and platforms which aims to provide financial support for those third parties who fulfill our quality and investment scale criteria

Designed to boost the quality of search marketing operations, and safeguard the integrity of the channel, this program encourages third parties to deliver quality advertising results for users thereby improving marketing effectiveness, clients ROI and advertiser perception.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 28, 2005, 9:38 AM | Permalink

BitTorrent Looking To Work With Publishers

Looking for video content? I mean, not just looking but also wanting to download it? BitTorrent is a popular way for many seeking to get the latest television program or film. BitTorrent's Grab at Respectability from BusinessWeek looks at how the service wants to move on by raising capital and turning into a distribution network for publishers, rather than for those sharing published works.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 28, 2005, 9:04 AM | Permalink

Search Marketer A Candidate On The Apprentice

Member Promediacorp (Avi Wilensky) at our SEW Forums dropped me a note to say one of the contestants on the current series of The Apprentice: Martha Stewart hails from the world of SEO. The contestant is David Karandish, who is described on The Apprentice site as "owner and creator of an internet advertising company." His company is over here, where SEO is the first solution listed. Aaron at SEO Book jokes "please take note to how & when he spams the show with product placement, keyword density, and the like." But seriously, it will be interesting to see if SEO and search marketing gets a nod as the show progresses.

Postscript: David writes with word of his blog, which you'll find here. So far, only one brief entry about the show, but keep an eye on it.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 28, 2005, 8:48 AM | Permalink

Google AdWords Logins Shifting To Google Accounts

Google's been doing some consolidation of having people sign-in for various services through a common Google Accounts login. Dave Naylor noted this happening for Orkut users last week, and now Andrew Goodman finds it happening to Google AdWords advertisers.

Andrew doesn't like it, as he discusses in our forum thread, Google AdWords Advertisers must have Google Accounts to log in? Neither does Nick and gang over at Threadwatch. Nathan at InsideGoogle feels its a good thing.

As for me, I said in our forum thread I find it mostly positive. I don't want to have to remember a billion different passwords at Google. But to Andrew's main complaint, that he doesn't want his business activities (AdWords, AdSense) also mixed with an account of personal stuff (Web Search, Personalized Home Page), that I agree.

I suspect you might be able to have two different accounts, as long has you have two different email addresses. Overall, I like options. I like the option to have a combined account or the option to have two separate accounts, personal and work.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 28, 2005, 8:38 AM | Permalink

Branding & Search Panel Highlights

OMMA Conference Track: Maximizing Brand Advertising Via Search from SearchViews gives you a few highlights from a panel at OMMA this week about branding and search

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 28, 2005, 8:31 AM | Permalink

Better Yahoo Tools Coming To Measure Search Buzz - And Watch Google, Too!

Yahoo! Testing New Branding Metrics for Search at ClickZ covers how Yahoo is helping more advertisers tap into tools to measure brand reach and buzz through search, a sign that tracking search buzz is finally getting some needed, renewed attention.

Many are familiar with Yahoo Buzz, the consumer-facing service that shows what's hot in search. Not so well known is another version that advertisers and others can tap into. Yahoo has had that product for years. It's not new, as the story suggests. Instead, it sounds like it's being given a revamp in preparation for wider positioning. A new "Search Share Of Voice" tool is also planned.

It's long overdue for greater outreach like this. As we've had more and more "word-of-mouth" tools designed to measure blog buzz, it's seemed forgotten that search engines have access to much more broad web buzz based on what wide, everyday audiences are looking for and writing about.

FYI, Google's got a similar tools it developed to help CurrentTV do Google Zeitgeist segments. I asked Google a couple of weeks ago whether these tools might be rolled out for others to use, when talking about them. It's something Google has in mind, but there were no immediate plans to do so. So we watch and see!

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 28, 2005, 8:25 AM | Permalink

Yahoo Desktop Search Out Of Beta, Gets LiveWords Contextual Search

Desktop Search Goes Live! at the Yahoo Search Blog covers how a new LiveWords button has been added to Yahoo Desktop Search as part of that product coming out of beta. Select a chunk of text, and then LiveWords automatically tries to find matches related to the context of that search.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 28, 2005, 8:14 AM | Permalink

Google Going To NASA -- NASA Ames, That Is

Silicon Beat said earlier this week (and Gary last month) that Google was to open a research center at NASA Ames in Mountain View, California. Now it's more official. Google expected to build campus at NASA Ames 1 million-square-foot complex envisioned as heart of Valley from the San Francisco Chronicle has more details now, with a news conference scheduled for 4:30pm Pacific Time today about the move. It's not clear whether the location is designed to help tie into the space interests of Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin or simply that NASA has a lot of land, and Google needs space to expand. I'll I know is that I love the big WWII blimp hangars near by at Moffett Field, reminding me of the ones in Tustin at home in Orange County! I've got a print of them hanging on my wall right now :)

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 28, 2005, 8:09 AM | Permalink

Google Seeking Classified Ad Feeds

Classified Intelligence reports briefly in a press release that Google is looking to include listings from classified advertising web sites in its search results. Via Threadwatch, Paid Content gives a little more detail on the Classified Intelligence news, that Google is looking to take in direct feeds of classified content. For some perspective, many of these listings will already be within Google's regular web search results (and Yahoo's, and MSN's, and Ask's).

However, taking in feeds would allow Google to do make it easier for searchers to sort and filter in various ways, just as feeds have helped with that on Froogle. Even with without direct feeds, you can still do a lot of mining of the web to build classified listings through crawling. Oodle is just one example of that.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 28, 2005, 8:01 AM | Permalink

Yahoo Paid Inclusion Redirection & Hijacking Confusion

Paid Inclusion Making Yahoo Results Seem Hijacked? looks at the confusing situation one of our forum moderators Jeff Martin found when looking at some listings in Yahoo. They redirected through Business.com until winding up at sites that had nothing to do with that B2B search engine. Jeff also describes more here. What's up? I posted my thoughts in the forum thread. To me, it looks like Yahoo is taking a paid inclusion feed from Business.com -- hence why the click redirects through Business.com before hitting the destination sites. In other words, buy some listings in Business.com, and those are distributed also through Yahoo. That's a long-time tactic. LookSmart long did the same.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 28, 2005, 7:33 AM | Permalink

A Snapshot of the Search Marketing Industry

A new study by Jupiter Research and iProspect looks at several aspects of the search marketing industry, and draws some interesting conclusions about how well search marketers are performing, the effectiveness of organic vs. paid search marketing campaigns, and obstacles encountered in implementing search engine optimization techniques on client web sites, among other findings. See today's SearchDay article, How are Search Marketers Performing?, for more on the new research.

Posted by Chris Sherman on September 28, 2005, 12:28 AM | Permalink

Dynamically Search and Browse RSS News Headlines

Last week I authored a SearchDay article about Surfwax making their dynamic search navigation technology, LookAhead, available to any webmaster to license and use on their site(s). LookAhead can potentially help the searcher focus a news or RSS search with very little effort before clicking the search button. In other words, dynamic search navigation can save search time and provide them with better results with very little effort.

Now, Surfwax, the providers of LookAhead are offering a free RSS search tool that demonstrates the technology. Heres how it works.

+ Go to http://lookahead.surfwax.com/rss-index.html and begin entering terms hat might be of interest to you.
+ As you enter terms, the TITLES of potentially useful posts will begin appearing in a box directly below the search box. The list also contains the source of the post and the time it was posted.
+ Now, click the title/headline and you?ll be taken DIRECTLY to the article or blog post. That's right, now search results page to review.
+ Remember, your search terms are ?rotated,? so you?ll see useful headlines regardless of what order you enter your search terms.

Users are encouraged to suggest feeds for the service to crawl. We?ve also learned that a larger index will be released very soon.

Here?s a list of just a few other services that provide similar types of services:

+ WikiWax from Surfwax
+ News Accumulator from Surfwax
+ Snap Suggest from Snap.com
+ Pinpoint Shopping from AOL
+ Google Suggest

Posted by Gary Price on September 27, 2005, 4:51 PM | Permalink

Daily SearchCast, Sept. 27, 2005: Google Claim To Be Most Comprehensive But Backing Away From Counts, Searchers Loving The First Result, Detecting Phishing Sites, Search Spending On The Rise, Google's New Remove Feature & More!

Today's search podcast covers Google's claim to be most comprehensive but dropping index size as proof of that, plus Google's second birthday this month, Google talking to CNET again, searchers loving to click on the first result, ways to detect phishing sites, search spending continuing to rise, Google and Yahoo making programming moves, how to remove results you don't like from Google and Yahoo and more!

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 27, 2005, 2:52 PM | Permalink

One Strong Cuppa Joe

Consummate campaigner Juan Valdez, along with the GEICO Gecko, took home the "top icon" title, winning the surely very scientific popularity poll conducted in conjunction with Advertising Week. Top slogans were GE's "Imagination at work" and Hallmark's "When you care enough to send the very best."

Posted by Pamela Parker on September 27, 2005, 2:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Down the Rabbit Hole with Microsoft

Bloggers (and presumably gamers) are abuzz over a European-targeted Web site to promote Microsoft's Xbox 360. Site visitors follow a pair of white rabbits through a series of surreal Flash adventures. One lets users take a quiz to win a trip to "Origen," described as "a wonderful magical place where all of your gaming fantasies come true."

[via Threadwatch]

Posted by Pamela Parker on September 27, 2005, 12:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

What's An Ad Agency? What's A Search Agency?

Ad/Search Agency Convergence from Hollis Thomases at ClickZ looks at when an ad agency is NOT also and SEM firm or more to the point, how they can't be when paid search is making up so much of online ad spend.

The slant seems more on the pure-play SEM firms suggesting that ad agencies can't do well in the search world. From my experience, that's not just a marketing pitch by the firms. It's often the reality. But it depends on the ad firm you're talking about.

A pure play creative ad shop? Search is going to be weird, strange and not really what they do. If they need it, they're far more likely to outsource to someone else to do it.

In the end, you're going to continue to have a spectrum of agencies -- SEMs that focus just on search and everything to do with search (feeds, local, shopping, web, and free and organic listings in all of those), interactive agencies that do search along with other buys, traditional agencies that may or may not take on some interactive roles.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 27, 2005, 11:23 AM | Permalink

Google After Madison Avenue

Search 'N' Sell from the New York Post is a relatively short look at how Google is cozying up to major ad agencies, holding more than 100 training sessions to help them understand search marketing better. Agencies are also given support teams so they can call around the clock with questions. Google's also taking part in this week's Advertising Week in New York apparently doing little last year.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 27, 2005, 11:09 AM | Permalink

Linking Neighborhoods, Illustrated

Threadwatch points over to the Picture of Link Neighborhoods post at Jim Boykin's new SEO blog, where he posts a nice illustration (PDF) of how search engines use links to determine what sites are important -- and not.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 27, 2005, 10:50 AM | Permalink

Delete Those Emails With SEO Pitches!

Ineffective SEO E-Mail Campaigns at ClickZ from Shari Thurow is a nice, fresh reminder of all those pitches you get for SEO services via email that you can safely delete. No, you almost certainly don't need to worry that they are kindly informing you that you aren't ranking for a particular term!

Shari doesn't get into it, but warnings that you aren't "found" on a search engine our that your listing may be in "trouble" or "vulnerable" can almost certainly be ignored, as well. In fact, rather than list and dissect everything, just remember this. I'd say 99.9 percent of the unsolicited email you get pitching you on search marketing services or alerting you to some type of SEO problem can get deleted.

Good SEM firms are in high demand and aren't going to be cold-calling you by phone or via email. The ones that do, I'd be wary of them and certainly wouldn't lose sleep worrying if something they claim is a problem with your site really is.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 27, 2005, 10:39 AM | Permalink

TrustWatch & MSN Offer Anti-Phishing Tools To Searchers & Surfers

TrustWatch is a new Ask Jeeves-powered search engine designed to give you a green, yellow or red light warning on whether to trust pages listed in its results. It follows on the release of an anti-phishing add-on for users of the MSN Search toolbar.

At TrustWatch, the warnings are to help you know if you are reaching a fake site or one that's "phishing" for you to reveal personal information.

For example, imagine you were trying to reach the Bank Of America site. It's possible that someone might create a site that looks like the real BofA site and ranks well for a search on the company's name. A good search engine shouldn't let this happen, but it still can occur. Even more likely, it can happen if you search using a slight misspelling.

TrustWatch places colored rating icons next to each listing. Green means the listing has been verified as real and trustworthy by a third party. Yellow means there's been no verification, but neither has the site been reported on a blacklist. Red means someone has reported a site as disreputable and that you shouldn't trust it.

Run a web site and want to be trusted? GeoTrust, the company behind TrustWatch, will conveniently sell you a site identity seal for $49 per year. You can also get a trust rating from one of the other companies that it lists, including TRUSTe. I wish the page TrustWatch lists with these organizations made it exceptionally clear exactly which products each of these companies are selling are acceptable, especially what the lowest cost options are.

I can understand that site owners probably should pay to be rated. Someone's got to do the reviewing. But it shouldn't be super expensive. Plus, non-profits and governmental groups should get a break. Of course, I see the US White House site is considered trusted, and I'm betting they didn't pay for a review.

Want to know if something is trustworthy as you surf the web? There's a TrustWatch toolbar you can install that lights up to let you know if a site is trusted when you visit it.

That brings me over to news from earlier this month. Microsoft has a Phishing Filter Add-In for its MSN Search Toolbar. Like TrustWatch's, it's only for Internet Explorer, unfortunately. It will block sites that are on known phishing lists and warn you of sites that it suspect may be phishing based on scanning for common characteristics.

Having these features in toolbars is great, of course. In fact, I'm guessing we'll see Ask Jeeves down the line add TrustWatch-powered warnings to its toolbar since it's partnering to provide TrustWatch with search results. But it would be nice to see anti-phishing warnings in the results of the major search engines, as well.

I mean, the Ask Jeeves blog today is what alerted me and others to the new TrustWatch service. Rather than have Ask Jeeves point me elsewhere, I obviously want them to put these features into their own search results. Same, too, with MSN. Give phishing warnings in the search results, as well as in the toolbar. And let's see Google and Yahoo do the same.

Want to discuss? Visit our forum thread, Ask.com Powers TrustWatch - GeoTrust's Secure Engine.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 27, 2005, 10:26 AM | Permalink

Time For Results Counts / Number Of Matches To Go?

As Danny mentions, it's good to see the total size war go away for at least the time being. Danny also points out this page from Google that lays out there thoughts on comprehensiveness. A couple of quick comments, including wondering if the results counts that every search engine shows should now go away.

From the page:

The basic test for search engine comprehensiveness is whether you can find uncommon information. Popular queries return millions of results, but even the most obsessive searcher isn't about to surf a few million pages, or even a tiny fraction of them; in most of these cases, you'll either quickly find what you're looking for or refine your search to be more focused.

Perhaps it's time to take a look at the usefulness (asides from their marketing value and likely the reason they don't point out this fact) of the page estimates that Google and others provide at the top of results pages.

Just how accurate are they? What are they telling the typical searcher? It would be useful if all search companies (not only Google) would let the public (including many journalists) know that they're just estimates and often far from accurate.

Yes, some people will refine (if they know how, do they?) their searches. However, don't forget that even if you wanted to view all of the results, you couldn't. Most web engines will only show the first 1000 results.

Are the estimates on web results pages going to be the next battleground? I wonder how many people even noticed the total that Google used to list on their home page vs. the estimates they see each and every time they run a search?

Didn't Google Just Have A Birthday?

No, you aren't losing your minds. Just earlier this month, Search Engine Watch and a wave of other sites wished Google a happy 7th birthday on September 7. What's going on with Google having another 7th birthday today?

The wishes earlier this month were sparked by this page from Google's Help Center. It's now gone, but here's what it said:

Google's official birthday is September 7, 1998. If Google were a person, it would have started elementary school late last summer (around August 19), and today it would have just finished the first grade. In other words, we're just getting started. To discover more about Google's history, please visit http://www.google.com/intl/en/corporate/history.html. To learn about our mission, please see http://www.google.com/intl/en/corporate/index.html

For the time being, you can see a cached copy of the page yourself here.

So what's the deal? How does Google get to have two birthdays in the same month? Google's Marissa Mayer told me when I asked her about this earlier this week that Google internally has often celebrated the birthday on various different days in September over the years. It's now settling on Sept. 27. Google the Virgo becomes Google the Libra!

Honestly, it's hard to not have a cynical eye that settling on this date was also a convenient news peg to hang the new size announcement. But now that there's this new official date, I guess there's no going back from it.

For those unaware, Queen Elisabeth II has both her "real" birthday and an official one that the United Kingdom celebrates. The Netherlands does the same thing, as other countries no doubt do, as well. It's sort of like how Lincoln's and Washington's birthdays used to be holidays of their own in the US, until it was more convenient to have an official Presidents' Day holiday always happening right against the weekend.

So as Gray Hat News points out in is humourous The Queen of Search Engines post, whatever Google's real birthday was, we've not got a new official/observed one to follow.

Want to discuss or comment? Visit our forum thread, Happy 7th Birthday Google?

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 27, 2005, 9:46 AM | Permalink

CNET Off Double Not-So-Secret Probation With Google

I mentioned this in my earlier post, but it deserves better play. Google's talking with CNET again. Google stopped talking with the news organization in a dispute over whether CNET crossed a privacy bounds in reporting on privacy issues, when it used examples of information about Google CEO Eric Schmidt. More background on the dispute in our Google Not Happy With CNET post and our Google Blacklists News.com forum thread. Schmidt himself spoke with CNET's News.com for its article over today's size announcement. Glad to see that Google has changed its mind over what I and many others felt was a bad policy. You can see the positive reaction flowing in already elsewhere, such as from Dave Winer and Steve Gillmour.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 27, 2005, 9:04 AM | Permalink

Roundup Of Google Size Announcement Coverage

Yesterday was pretty much spent by me writing my story about Google claiming to be most comprehensive search engine but also dropping any page count from its home page. That story, if you missed it, is up here: End Of Size Wars? Google Says Most Comprehensive But Drops Home Page Count. Now that I've emerged from my writing cocoon, here's a roundup of what others are saying on the subject:

We wanted something special for our birthday is the post on Google's blog telling the world it is 1,000 times larger than when it started in September 1998, three times larger than any other search engine, but no mention of the actual count or that the count has been removed from the home page. Instead, Google asks readers to "see for yourself" how effective the new index is.

The post also points at a new Sizing Up Search Engines page where Google explains that it could prove the number of unique documents it has but doesn't. Instead, it tells readers "you can prove it yourself" and advises them to search for uncommon information as a test.
Google Announces New Index Size, Shifts Focus from Counting from John Battelle covers how he also sees the index wars as over "at least in terms of raw counting" and how it shifts the debate "back to relevance, where honestly, it really belongs." Absolutely!
The end of the index size wars (we hope) from Charlene Li is pleased like John, like me, like Phil Bradley and no doubt many, many others that we're getting away from "mine is bigger than yours" comparisons, though she sees the obvious irony of Google still saying its bigger as part of the pullback.

She also asks, "How long do you think it will be before some journalist does some math and writes that Google's index has 60 billion documents? Hopefully, never." Well, she's effectively a journalist on her blog, so never just became reality. But of course someone was to publish the simple math, if not her.

The point is, when both Google and Yahoo themselves tell you that their counts aren't comparable, then it doesn't matter what the number is that either releases. It's like Google saying it has "60 billion GoogleTons of pages" and Yahoo saying it has "20 billion YahooTons of pages." What's the conversion rate for GoogleTons into YahooTons? We don't know. And if you don't have that common metric, then you can't compare the figures.
Google: No, really ours is the biggest, you'll just have to trust us on that ok? from Nick over at Threadwatch sees Google taking a "slap" at Yahoo over the issue of duplicated entries. That's ironic, too, since if you read my story, I showed an example where Google has three duplicated entries in one example -- all of which are counted. It's another reason why I'm glad we're getting away from counts.

Nick also wonders if rather than a pullback from the index wars, we're seeing an escalation. I say a pullback, Nick. Yahoo's already making statements that it agrees users should judge for themselves. I'd expect that they'll later further say they consider themselves to be most comprehensive and take the Google line that users can verify this for themselves. As long as we don't see actual count figures come back as "proof" of comprehensiveness, we may move along for a bit.
Google: Mystery index from Jean Véronis who's done some great watching of search engine counts notes that the Google claim meshes with his estimate of where the index was going.
Google says size matters less, drops search boasts from Reuters has a basic overview of the move by Google.
Google to take down front-page boast about index size from the Associated Press provides another overview with the idea that verification is left to a user "taste test."
How Many Pages in Google? Take a Guess from the New York Times also has the "taste test" idea and gets Google CEO Eric Schmidt "not to rule out" the idea that a prize might be given for the best guess at its size.
Google touts size of its search index has Google ending the CNET news blackout, with Google CEO Eric Schmidt doing a phone interview on the announcement along with the Yahoo statement others are also being given:

"We congratulate Google on removing the index size number from its home page and for recognizing it is a meaningless number," Yahoo said in a statement. "As we've said in the past, what matters is that consumers find what they are looking for, and we invite Google users to compare their results to Yahoo search at http://search.yahoo.com."

Open Letter To Google Chief Eric Schmidt is from WebmasterWorld member reseller who has issues with Google's claims of being larger in terms of "unduplicated" pages. My story above gives examples of how some duplicate pages are already in Google. The complaint in partiular covers the fact that while duplicate pages exist, de-duplication efforts may also remove the original documents from Google, rather than mirrors.

I may add further links as I see unique stuff flow in.

Want to discuss? Visit the Google Drops The Home Page Count thread in our Search Engine Watch Forums.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 27, 2005, 8:57 AM | Permalink

Google Claims To Be Most Comprehensive - But Helps Defuse Size Wars By Dropping Home Page Count

Today's SearchDay article Google Says Now Biggest, Most Comprehensive - But Size Wars Defused By Dropped Home Page Count covers the latest chapter in the dispute over search engine size that started with last month's claim by Yahoo to have outdistanced Google in index size.

Google now says it is three times larger than its closest competitor (ie, Yahoo) and is the most comprehensive search engine available. However, it's not offering proof of that through an actual count. Indeed, Google is dropping the famous number of web pages it is "searching" from its home page.

Why? Because comparison counts don't mean much any more, something Yahoo has said itself. In short, Google is leaving it to users to prove to themselves whether it does -- or does not -- measure up as most comprehensive.

More in my story, as well as a long look at why count figures themselves aren't the comprehensiveness metric they've sometimes been in the past.

Want to discuss? Visit the Google Drops The Home Page Count thread in our Search Engine Watch Forums

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 27, 2005, 12:01 AM | Permalink

Google Accused of Issuing Misleading Statements in Gmail Name Dispute

Do you remember a blog post from a couple of week's ago about a possible lawsuit by a UK firm against Google over the name Gmail? This Sunday Times article reports that the dispute is quickly turning into a war of words as Independent International Investment Research (IIIR), the company who has been contesting the use of the Gmail trademark, says that Google has been issuing "inaccurate and misleading statements."

From the article:

Times Online today had sight of an e-mail exchange between Google and the chief executive of Independent International Investment Research (IIIR) - which is threatening legal action over the trademark for GMail. In the e-mails, the IIR takes Google to task over official comments it made in response to his case.

Much more in the article: Google accused of misleading in Gmail row.

Posted by Gary Price on September 26, 2005, 7:00 PM | Permalink

Google Looking More Portal-Like

Google has struck its first deal to promote TV programming through video content on its site. The search company is working with UPN to make the premiere episode of Chris Rock's "Everybody Hates Chris" available on Google Video.

As Gary Price notes on the SEW blog, Yahoo! previously "aired" the Kirstie Alley Showtime program "Fat Actress" and America Online streamed the WB pilot "Jack and Bobby".

Says UPN president Dawn Ostroff, in the press release:

"UPN's young adult viewers are avid online users, and streaming the premiere episode of EVERYBODY HATES CHRIS on Google Video is the perfect opportunity to reach this audience in a new and creative way," said Ostroff. "Everyone at UPN is very excited about this innovative relationship with Google, which offers viewers who may have missed the premiere the chance to watch it and hopefully motivate them to watch the second episode on UPN."

Posted by Pamela Parker on September 26, 2005, 5:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For Many, It's All About the Very First Search Result

Jakob Nielsen's new Alertbox article: The Power of Defaults, does a great job of summarizing and commenting on new search engine research from Cornell University about why and where people click on a search results page.

From Nielsen's article:

Search engine users click the results listings' top entry much more often than can be explained by relevancy ratings. Once again, people tend to stick to the defaults. This study goes far to address why users tend to click on the top hit. There are two plausible explanations:

Search engines are so good at judging relevancy that they almost always place the best hit on top.

Users click the top hit not because it's any better, but simply because it's first. This might be due to sheer laziness (after all, you start from the top) or because users assume the search engine places the best hit on top, whether that's actually true or not. As the study shows, the answer is clearly a little of both.

As someone who does a great deal of work teaching people how to become better searchers and take advantage of the "power" that most of the large web engines and verticals offer, I'm hardly surprised by these numbers.

Sure, searching should be easy but at the same time most people don't have a clue about what a small amount of learning can do to provide them with better results in less time and aggravation.will Every good and useful result can't always be at number one.

Search education does not need to be a long, drawn out affair. A little learning goes a long way and it's been my experience that just sharing a little gets people motivated to learn more. I've said time after time here on the blog that the search engines should do more to help teach people (especially certain user groups) to be better searchers, go beyond the defaults, and formulate better queries from the outset.

Web searching is not a field of dreams. Building search tools (for example, customization features) doesn't mean people will come and use them. In fact, they don't. Some user education is not only a good public service but also good business because a typical user can't even attempt using what an engine offers if they don't what's available and why it might be useful.

Two groups that need and deserve plenty of search education are students and teachers. Let's get to new searchers at a young age. Librarians would be a great group for any engine to partner with. Good info retrieval and critcal info skills (is the info accurate? current? etc.) should be a top concern for all of us.

Posted by Gary Price on September 26, 2005, 5:21 PM | Permalink

IAB Report: Search Ads Account for 40% of Ad Sales During First Half of 2005

Via a thread in the Search Engine Watch Forums, news from the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PriceWaterHouseCoopers about online ad spending in the first half of 2005.

From a ZDNet article:

As of June, advertisers had spent $5.8 billion to place ads online this year, a 26 percent increase compared with the first six months of 2004, according to a new report...Overall, search ads accounted for 40 percent of Internet ad sales, in line with last year, the group said. Banner ads and classified listings were the next-biggest ad categories, attracting 20 percent and 18 percent of the spending, respectively.

This IAB news release offers a bit more. The complete report will be available via the IAB web site next week.

Last year, Danny noted that contextual advertising, which he doesn't conisder search advertising, was included in the search ad total. I can't spot anything in today's news release that shows that this fact is any different this time around.

It's very likely that Danny will post some analysis of these numbers in a future blog entry but I thought they were worth getting out asap.

Want to discuss? Check out this thread in our Search Engine Watch forums.

Posted by Gary Price on September 26, 2005, 4:37 PM | Permalink

Infospace Gets Ready to Launch Mobile Search Client

The Seattle Times article: Cellphones emerge as local-search tool, reports on some new mobile search/local search client software that InfoSpace (there's a company we haven't blogged much about recently) and Action Engine will launch in October.

The new product require users to download client software onto their cell phones and then pay for access to the database How much InfoSpace will charge and which wireless carriers will offer access, is unknown.

InfoSpace hopes for a model in which merchants will pay when a user clicks on information about that merchant, said Joe Herzog, InfoSpace's director of emerging products.

The article goes on to say:

Herzog said that InfoSpace will not support a model in which advertisers pay to be at the top of the list ? a common practice in PC searches ? because consumers would find that irritating, especially since such listings could clutter the mobile phone's small screen.

Huh? I'm unaware of any major web engine where the advertiser can pay for placement at the top of the organic results. Perhaps the writer should have done a bit more research.

As many of you know I'm the mobile search guy around the SEW Blog and as soon as I can get my hands on the software I'll give it a test and report back. I'm not saying it can't be done but getting the typical cell phone user to first download and then pay for software to access local listings, etc. is going to be an uphill battle for InfoSpace especially when many other companies offer similar services for free via WAP and SMS. More in this news release.

Postscript: If you have a Treo SmartPhone and some models of phones from Kyocera and Samsung, I've found Rick Whitt's Directory Assistant 3.2x client worthy of attention and use. Local listings from YP.com, maps from MapQuest, and more. Directory Assistant 3.2x is donationware.

Posted by Gary Price on September 26, 2005, 3:33 PM | Permalink

A Behavioral Network for Branding Campaigns

Tacoda's CPM-based behavioral ad network, which the company talked about in April, officially launched today.

Called Audience Networks, it boasts approximately 60 million uniques on 800 or so Web sites. Early advertisers include Delta, TGIFridays, Radisson, Western Union and eBay; and two thirds of clients have renewed. A longer list of participating sites can be found in the news release.

Posted by Zachary Rodgers on September 26, 2005, 12:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Google Video Gets Flashy

A Google spokesperson has confirmed what we first learned via a InsideGoogle post over the weekend that reports you'll no longer need to download and use the Google Video Viewer to watch streaming content from the Google Video database. During the past few days, streaming video content from Google Video began being delivered via Adobe Flash. The short lived Googe Video Viewer debuted in June. Todays news should make Mac users happy since the video viewer was only available for Windows. Look for a Google Blog post about the switch to Flash sometime today.

Since Flash in already installed on many systems, Google will increase their video user base in seconds (including Mac and Linux users) without making new users do anything. In many cases, a Google Video searcher can now be watching streaming content online in seconds. Keeping it simple for the masses, yet another smart move from Mountain View.

Here are other features that the swith to Flash will offer Google Video users (from an email note from Google):

Better Viewing: Users can now watch videos in a larger viewing window that is resizable to fit their browser.

More Control: Google Video now includes user controls for play, pause, skip back, skip forward, position timeline with slider, and volume control.

Faster Searching and Viewing: Large thumbnail video "snippets" enable users to play 10-second previews of videos that are available for playback right on their results page.

Posted by Gary Price on September 26, 2005, 11:05 AM | Permalink

Google and UPN Announce Deal to Stream Video of Recently Aired TV Premiere

Google is joining AOL and Yahoo in making new television programming available via their video search service. Today, UPN and Google have announced that Google Video now offers access (free) to the premiere episode of Everybody Hates Chris which aired last week on the network and is "inspired" by comedian Chris Rock's life as a kid. You can watch the complete program here. More in this article from Broadcasting and Cable.

Last week we blogged about Yahoo News offering web-based video news reports from Kevin Sites in Iraq. In February, Yahoo streamed the premiere episode of "Fat Actress" starring Kirstie Alley. For more about Yahoo's plans to create original video content, see this SEW Blog post from yesterday.

Last year, AOL streamed the WB tv pilot, Jack and Bobby. This past summer, AOL offered live streams of the Live8 concerts.

Postscript: The complete "Everbody Hates Chris" program is only viewable to U.S. users of Google Video for the next four days

Posted by Gary Price on September 26, 2005, 10:22 AM | Permalink

OneStat Puts Google On Top

OneStat has released its latest results of most popular search engines worldwide, putting Google first on average over the past two months. The figures:

Google 56.9%
Yahoo 21.2%
MSN Search 8.9%
AOL Search 3.2%

It said that MSN Search's share rose from 8.6 to the current 8.9 percent over the past eight months, while Yahoo stayed stable and Google dropped from 57.2 percent to the current 56.9 percent.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 26, 2005, 10:10 AM | Permalink

Blog Buzz News: PubSub Improvements Coming, BuzzMetrics Sold

PubSub to Measure Blog Influence by Category from ClickZ says that PubSub is supposed to release a new version of its LinkRanks service, to help you find key blogs in various topics. Watching to see what comes up. No news yet on the PubSub blog. Top of my list is a hope that PubSub goes back and measures links from actual blog posts rather than just feeds, because of the problems with this I covered before. Meanwhile, BuzzMetrics Bought By Israel-Based Trendum covers word-of-mouth firm BuzzMetrics being bought by Trendum.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 26, 2005, 10:00 AM | Permalink

Google's Marissa Mayer Profiled

John Battelle called Google's Marissa Mayer a "hummingbird" of a woman in his new book The Search, which is a great description for anyone who has ever met her. She's literally flying around constantly with excitement and activity about various products. Managing Google's Idea Factory is a new BusinessWeek profile on Marissa, the company's director of consumer web products, covering what her workday is like, her background and how she goes about managing so many of the things Google develops. See also Google's Mayer: Searcher Behavior & Google Factoids.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 26, 2005, 9:37 AM | Permalink

More Transparency Needed On How AdWords Are Ranked?

Google Goes Las Vegas from Robert X. Cringely at PBS looks at the anecdote of someone who was paying $0.10 per ad to promote his site and then tried to test new ideas with a different site, coming away perplexed about why paying more for the second site generated LESS traffic. Are things rigged, Cringley asks?

The person he writes about decided to try testing ideas on getting better results with an entirely new web site. When he created ads for this site -- using the same terms as the old site -- he was told he had to pay $1.00 per click.

It's not clear whether he actually had to pay that full amount or if this is what Google was recommending he pay that amount (what you pay and what Google suggests and actually bills can be different). But he did pay that amount and got more clicks than his main site.

Then he dropped to $0.40 per click, and his clickrate plunged. Why didn't the test site still do better than the main site? After all, it was paying four times more.

Cringely says he has "no idea" what this happened, leading to his main point. Since the system has a lot of things to calculate about how well an ad does, more transparency would help those who might assume it's just rigged to benefit Google.

Of course, the system's always been rigged to benefit Google. Ranking ads on the old formula of CPCxCTR did help promote relevancy, but first and foremost in my mind, it also ensured Google was giving the most play to ads that were making it money.

Recent changes -- as covered in New Google AdWords Bidding System Live For All and Goodman Revisits AdWords Changes & Importance Of Clickthrough -- introduced the quality score factor, but exactly what's in that isn't certain. That's concerned some advertisers. Certainly a clearer explanation would help. Cringely's article points this out. John Battelle calls for the same here, and Andrew Goodman, of course, has been wanting that for weeks.

For all we know, part of the quality score might be rewarding an advertiser with a longer history of performance with Google. Since this advertiser set up an entirely new account for an entirely new web site, the quality score might have counted against him in that instance, since that account had no real history.

It would also be interesting to know more about exactly what wording was used in both ads. Is the "main" site a more "trusted" URL to users? That has an impact. More transparency from Google would help, but knowing more specifics about this advertiser's situation would also be useful.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 26, 2005, 9:23 AM | Permalink

More On Yahoo & Its Own Programming

It's Not TV, It's Yahoo from the New York Times is another look at Yahoo's moves to provide its own programming. The opening anecdote is key. Yahoo media chief Lloyd Braun "fumed" that Yahoo News was only offering "a white page filled with links to other sites on the web" during the troubled Discovery space shuttle mission rather than something original of its own.

I wrote before of the challenge this type of approach poses to Yahoo. Create your own programming, and people may not trust you're going to point them elsewhere. Indeed, that type of pointing IS programming and worked to bring people to Google in droves back when search engines became portals and decided they needed to have "channels" and their own content.

I don't know which way it will pan out, of course. Soon after Braun came aboard and talked about Yahoo's vertical areas as "channels," I wasn't impressed that he didn't seem to know the past history with search of that metaphor. But the closing quote in today's New York Times article suggests he does see the difficult balancing act:

"People want the freedom to do exactly what they want to do," he said. "But they also like to be programmed to and reminded of the different things that exist. Yahoo is in a position to do both of those."

I can certainly agree with this. There are definitely times when going beyond the algorithmic organization of information, some human programming, is helpful.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 26, 2005, 8:52 AM | Permalink

Emcee James Fallows Expects Blogorrhea Leaks Of Google Zeitgeist 05

Reader P. Webster sends me word that in the current edition of transAtlantic, a rundown of happenings related to The Atlantic magazine by that publication, "Google Zeitgeist 05" emcee James Fallows is expecting news of the off-the-record event to leak out. It writes:

Fallows admits that with guests representing "a zillion blogs" and some of the biggest U.S. newspapers, it's unlikely that anything will remain a big secret. He doubts there will be articles with Mountain View datelines, but with so much attention focused on Google these days, he anticipates "a fair amount of 'blogorrhea' on this subject."

Fallows is friends with Google CEO Eric Schmidt, which lead to him participating in the event:

In fact, Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt, and its founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, recently invited him to emcee their technology conference, Zeitgeist '05: The Google Partner Forum. (Fallows met Schmidt and his wife, Wendy, both avid Atlantic readers, on a book tour in the 1990s, and their families have remained friends.)

For more background on the event, see my original post, Google Zeitgeist 05: Featuring Press & Bloggers But No Blogging Or Coverage Allowed and the News.com follow-up to that, Google invites 400 to 'off the record' event.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 26, 2005, 8:28 AM | Permalink

Microsoft Opens adCenter & MSN Keywords To Singapore & France

Microsoft has officially launched its adCenter system to sell paid search in France and Singapore. More details in this company press release. More info on the program in general here.

Actually, the release notes that Singapore officially launched on August 30, so it's France that gets rolled out today. MSN lance sa plateforme de liens sponsorisés en France from Abondance has more details on that, and the new French program can be found here.

Microsoft Plans to Sell Search Ads of Its Own from the New York Times has some overview coverage of the rollout, with some reaction comments from Google and Yahoo. MSN reiterates previous timing of hoping to replace Yahoo ads on its own sites entirely by next spring.

For more, see also

Coming in October: Microsoft To Begin Testing Paid Listings Program in US: Points to Wall Street Journal article about planned rollout in the US.
More Details On New MSN Keywords Program: Covers how the system has been in a closed beta in France and Singapore and how will partially open to US advertisers in October and be rolled out overall.
Details About MSN's AdCenter Begins Emerging: Points to a review of someone who has been playing with the system.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 26, 2005, 8:17 AM | Permalink

Google Targeting College Students With Newspaper Ads

I wrote earlier of Google targeting colleges with a special "College Life" page at Google. Now the other part of that story -- how university students are finding that page. That's through print ads in college newspapers such as the one that Google Blogoscoped has posted. It pitches Gmail as a way of getting "infinite" mail storage. Try the listed URL, www.google.com/university/gmail, and you end up at the Google College Life page. See also the Google Expanding Consumer Ads With European Campaign for a rundown on some other consumer-facing ad campaigns Google has been doing.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 26, 2005, 8:00 AM | Permalink

Apology To David Berlind

I postscripted an apology to my critique of ZDNet's David Berlind's complaint in wanting Google Alerts to offer a blog-specific email alerting service. I didn't want that apology lost in the shuffle, however. Dave Winer brought me up after my post for being unnecessarily personal, and he was right. The piece could have, and should have, been written without such a negative tone. My sincere apologies for that to David, plus for any suggestion that I somehow was implying that he couldn't write a fair piece about Google because of Google's policy of not speaking to CNET publications.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 26, 2005, 7:54 AM | Permalink

FirstGov Switches to Vivisimo & MSN

FirstGov, the official U.S. government information and services portal, will soon be powered by Vivisimo and MSN Search. Since 2002, FirstGov has been powered by Norway's FAST, but the switch was apparently made not to get homegrown technology but rather because the new deal provides more services at less cost. Gary Price has more about the new arrangement in today's SearchDay article, Vivisimo and MSN to Power FirstGov.

Posted by Chris Sherman on September 25, 2005, 10:15 PM | Permalink

Avoiding Holiday SEM Blunders

The holiday season will soon be upon us, and it can be a fantastic time for search marketers, provided you make all of the right moves, says Kevin Lee.

Though many marketers are doing a lot of things right, they're also setting themselves up to make some serious blunders this holiday season. Some best practices could easily replace those blunders.

Kevin offers a checklist of these potential blunders along with "power tips" to turn each into a best practice for search marketing in his latest ClickZ column, Turn Holiday SEM Blunders Into Best Practices.

Posted by Chris Sherman on September 25, 2005, 3:35 PM | Permalink

Search Marketing Spend Increasing at a Healthy Clip

A new survey from Marketing Sherpa reports on current and projected spend for search engine optimization and paid search campaigns.

MarketingSherpa cites Merrill Lynch data that the U.S. total SEO spending rose 177 percent over the last 12 months. The study projects the growth will continue, but at a slower pace.

Pay-per-click campaigns lifted from 34 percent of marketers reporting results to be "very good" in 2004 to 43 percent now calling their campaigns "very effective." Search engine optimization (SEO) campaigns only climbed two points, from a 31 percent success rating to 33 percent. Both strategies fared better than e-mail marketing, which reported a 25 percent "very effective" campaign rate, and affiliate marketing, which garnered 22 percent effectiveness.

Enid Burns has more details on the survey in SEM Sees Optimization PPC.

Posted by Chris Sherman on September 24, 2005, 1:03 PM | Permalink

Pay-per-Call: Hype vs. Reality

Pay-per-call advertising is being touted by many as the next big thing in search marketing. With eBay justifying its recent purchase of Skype by citing the potential of pay-per-call, and AOL, Microsoft and others jumping into the game, it's a hot topic. But is pay-per-call a viable option for search marketers today?

When AOL launched its pay-per-call program last April, I took a more in-depth look at the opportunities offered to search marketers in A Closer Look at Pay-per-Call Search Marketing. We've also had panels covering pay-per-call programs at Search Engine Strategies (see the SearchDay articles Pay-Per-Call: A New Avenue for Search Marketers and Search Advertising that Makes the Phone Ring for reports on these sessions).

ClickZ columnist Pamela Parker took a closer look at the recent activity in the pay-per-call space, and concluded that despite the hype, things are really just getting started.

"When I say the pay-per-call concept has jumped the shark, I mean the acquisitions and related hype have nowhere left to go. However, the reality of pay-per-call, for both media companies and advertisers, has only just begun," she wrote.

After talking with a number of key players, she concluded that the advertisers best served by pay-per-call programs are local businesses, service businesses, those selling high-consideration purchases, or any combination of the three. She offers excellent case studies with a comparison of the pricing models and success factors in Pay-Per-Call: Tales from the Trenches.

Want to discuss? Join the Are You Ready for Pay-Per-Call? conversation in our Search Engine Watch forums.

Posted by Chris Sherman on September 24, 2005, 12:37 PM | Permalink

Miva UK Launches Algorithmic Search

Miva has rolled out a new algorithmic web search functionality to its distribution partners in the UK, powered by Fast Search & Transfer. Miva says that the new offering provides site inclusion and exclusion lists as well as the ability to blend search results to create a mix local and global content.

FAST still doing algorithmic web search? What about the non-compete agreements it signed when FAST sold AlltheWeb to Overture in 2003?

You may remember AlltheWeb, a great search engine that for a time competed head-to-head with Google. FAST sold AlltheWeb to Overture for $70 million to focus on its enterprise search business. Today AlltheWeb is essentially just a front-end to the Yahoo algorithmic search index.

FAST sold the AlltheWeb site to Overture, not the underlying crawler technology it used to develop the search engine. FAST has maintained and improved this web-crawler technology ever since, powering dozens of specialized web search services in both public and private implementations, including U.S. government portal FirstGov.gov, Italian regional search engine Virgilio, and others.

The choice of FAST as an algorithmic search partner makes sense for Miva, avoiding potential conflicts for customers that would arise with a Yahoo, Google or MSN powered web search. More information about MIVA's algorithmic web search for distribution partners is available here.

Posted by Chris Sherman on September 23, 2005, 6:34 PM | Permalink

MSN Search Offers Free Full Text Access to Encarta Encyclopedia

Researchers might be interested to learn that MSN Search is offering a free access to the full text (not just blurbs) of Microsoft's Encarta encyclopedia. This page offers details about how to get a free pass. No, registration is required.

Basically, when you click on a link to Encarta found on MSN Search results pages or in an MSN "direct answer," you're given a two hour free pass (set via a cookie) to the full text of the entire encyclopedia. Once your pass is activated, you can search and access the full text using Encarta search box. OK, your two hour pass has expired and you still want more. No problem! Simply return to MSN Search and click another Encarta link and your free pass is renewed.

* Exceptions: The Encarta free pass does not include access to homework tools, literature guides, and sidebars. Also, with your free pass, you can view thumbnails of MSN Encarta illustrations, photographs, audio, and video but not full-size images.

Posted by Gary Price on September 23, 2005, 4:01 PM | Permalink

Scale is a Key Technology Challenge at Google

Lengedary computer programmer, Peter Weinberger, now works at Google as a software engineer. Unix geeks might already know that Weinberger is the the "W" in the AWK programming language named for its developers. In an interview (free access) with Laurianne McLaughlin from IEEE's Security & Privacy magazine, Weinberger talks Google, future search, and privacy.

From the interview:

Security and Privacy: What are the biggest technology challenges for Google today?

Weinberger: Scale is the problem. Our business grows rapidly. That means every year, a lot of the technology decisions made a year ago don?t look so good any more. Exponential growth is a very pleasant problem but requires a lot of work.

Posted by Gary Price on September 23, 2005, 3:39 PM | Permalink

Daily SearchCast, Sept. 23, 2005: Forbes And The Richest People In Search, Getting AdSense Into Your Blogger Blog, Time Warner Loves AOL, New Search Suggestion Feature For Google Toolbar & More!

Today's search podcast covers Forbes naming the richest people -- and lots of them are in search. Plus getting AdSense more easily on your Blogger blog, Time Warner staying with AOL, the Google Toolbar getting new query suggestion tools and more!

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 23, 2005, 2:59 PM | Permalink

The Source of South-Sourcing

Outsourcing. It's not just for programmers and developers anymore.

Zach's covered the trend among major agencies to oursource rich media work. I had a chance to visit an outsourcing source during my recent visit to Buenos Aires. I wasn't alone - OgilvyInteractive's Executive Director, Eric Wheeler, was down there, too. Sure, we were both speaking at the same conference. But I noticed Eric was also spending quality time with Mookie Tennebaum, head of BA-based United Virtualities. And Eric did tell me Ogilvy's more than open to outsourcing.

I spent an afternoon Gaston Silberman, United Virtualities creative director. He's been making the agency rounds recently in NY and SF. UV is handling all kinds of agency work down there, from banner resizing to creative production, Flash, and video conversion.

Seems sensible. Culturally, Argentina is firmly rooted in the same vernacular we are. Are there differences? Sure. But nowhere near Bangalore-size differences, and with communications, that's what matters. Heck, there's barely even a time difference to speak of. BA's only an hour ahead of New York.

I remember how we used to scrouge for Flash jockeys back in my agency days. They were in short supply -- and they could thus name their price. This kind of puts a new spin on things, doesn't it?

p.s. Ladies, slacks are strongly advised if you visit UV's all-glass headquarters. We're talking glass floors here -- and the place is multi-level. It's a lot of fun to look down between your feet and see what's on someone's lunch plate down below. But as easily as you can look down, they can look up.

Posted by Rebecca Lieb on September 23, 2005, 2:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Google Testing Remove Results Feature

Google's testing a new option letting a small percentage of people remove results they don't like from their own personalized search results. This will only happen if you're logged in and using Google Personalized Search. In other words, see a page you don't like? You can block that page from coming back. It only will impact the personalized results you see -- not the personalized results of others or general results that anyone sees.

Whether it will be released to everyone will depend on how the experiment goes, Google says. Whether the data might be rolled out to being used more broadly for regular, non-personalized results also remains to be seen, I'm told. It's just gone live about an hour ago.

See also the A Search Marketer's Look At Yahoo My Web 2.0 for Search Engine Watch members for a detailed look at how a similar feature operates on Yahoo. Yahoo provides more info on this (it's in My Web 1.0, not My Web 2.0, here).

Postscript: Google's Matt Cutts has posted more info about the feature over here.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 23, 2005, 1:20 PM | Permalink

Vivisimo and MSN Awarded Contract to Power Search on FirstGov

Word in this news release that Vivisimo (the Clusty people) has been awarded a federal government contract to provide search techology to the U.S. Government's FirstGov.gov portal. MSN Search will also play a role in the new FirstGov search.

As part of the agreement, Vivisimo teamed with Microsoft's MSN Search Web service to provide search results for the government domain.

The announcement also points out that Vivisimio plans to use its own crawling technology to develop focused/targeted crawls of some government (federal and local) material and then combine and cluster with MSN results.

Another news release from the General Services Administration (the organization that oversees FirstGov) offers a few more details including:

New Services

FirstGov.gov will launch government-wide News and Image search services so citizens will not have to go to individual agencies to find these resources.

Financial

This new search strategy provides significantly more services for less than the cost of previous FirstGov search services. The value of the contract is $1.8 million annually, which is nearly half the cost of the current search service on FirstGov.gov. The contract is part of a new Blanket Purchase Agreement (BPA) FirstGov has set up to acquire future Web search services. The BPA has a total value of $18 million over the length of the agreement.

The news release also points out that FirstGov has signed Blanket Purchase Agreements (BPA) with Fast Search and Transfer (the company currently powering search on FirstGov), Gigablast, and Vivisimo.

The BPA enables GSA to easily acquire new search services that are important to citizens, and enhance citizen access to government information.

When can we expect to begin seeing the new FirstGov search? Neither press release lists any dates. However, this FirstGov newsletter from August says to begin looking in February 2006.

We first blogged about FirstGov publishing a request for information from companies interested in offering search services to the government portal back in March.

Since 2002, FirstGov's search capabilities have been powered with a database and search technology provided by Fast Search and Transfer and managed by AT&T. At its inception, FirstGov search was powered with technology from Inktomi.

Postscript: Clusty currently offers its own U.S. government meta search tool (released, March 2005) that includes .gov results from the MSN Search database.

Posted by Gary Price on September 23, 2005, 11:30 AM | Permalink

New Watson Sidebar for MSN Search

Watson, a "proactive" search utility that watches what you do and automatically provides related search results from the web, is now available as a plug-in for the MSN Desktop/Toolbar suite.

From the press release:

Watsons sidebar display is continuously updated with real-time information that is relevant to the work being done at any given moment. This gives users an instant snapshot of information thats pertinent to their work. The security and identity of each Watson and Windows Desktop Search user is never compromised, since Watson does not store or transmit any personal data.

I'll be taking a closer look at Watson and its capabilities in an upcoming SearchDay. Meanwhile, the free 30-day trial of Watson 2.0 and the Add-in is available to download at http://addins.msn.com.

Posted by Chris Sherman on September 23, 2005, 10:57 AM | Permalink

Google Enhances AdSense Tools for Blogger Users

Via Search Engine Roundtable, a JenSense post about Google releasing enhancements that makes it easy, very easy according to SER's Barry Schwartz, to add AdSense to a Blogger templates. You'll also read how Blogger users can create customized color palettes for AdSense.

Want to Discuss? Visit this discussion in the SEW Forums.

Posted by Gary Price on September 23, 2005, 10:23 AM | Permalink

Search Forums Roundup: Sep. 23, 2005

Today's SearchDay, Search Engine Forums Spotlight, features our weekly links to this week's hot topics from search engine forums across the web: Ask Jeeves to Rebrand - How To Know Whether A Site Is Accessible - Can We Agree Automated Comment & Link Posting Is A Bad Thing? - Could Google Bid for AOL? - XHTML and SEO, and more.

Posted by Chris Sherman on September 23, 2005, 10:02 AM | Permalink

AOL.com Portal Leaves Beta

After a three month beta period, the AOL.com open web portal has been officially released.

The AOL.com home page offers access to a many AOL services including mail, mobile tools, and AIM which are available at no charge to all web users as the service continues its move from its original subscription model to one that's ad-supported. AOL.com also includes a tabbed AOL Search box at the top of the site. The home page seems to put emphasis on multimedia content. You'll find access to AOL Video material via the main search box, a "Video on Demand" link located directly below the search box, and a "Media on Demand" module (along with another search box) located about 3/4 of the way down the page. The AOL.com portal also provides a link to the MyAOL service which remains in beta and currently offers an RSS feed reader. This page offers additional info about what AOL has planned for the MyAOL service in the future.

Posted by Gary Price on September 23, 2005, 9:54 AM | Permalink

GoogleTV Job Posting is No Longer Online

This morning I wanted to take a closer look at the GoogleTV job listing that was discoverd just two days ago and now has everyone talking. Well, the listing has already been removed from the Google Jobs site. I checked the url and learned the page is "not available." Maybe the listing was moved to a new url? I searched the Google Jobs database for GoogleTV and still came up empty. Lots of interest, I'm sure Google has received plenty of responses but only posting the info for 48 only hours? Well, if nothing else Google did what it does so well, keep people talking and guessing about what they're up to.

Posted by Gary Price on September 23, 2005, 9:05 AM | Permalink

Time Warner Keeping AOL

Via Threadwatch, Time Warner Head Says AOL Is the Company's Future from the New York Times covers how Time Warner sees AOL as a key asset for Time Warner to improve, suggesting that it's not going to sell some or all of it to MSN. We do know that MSN and AOL have been talking. That's not a surprise. Next month is the earliest date I can estimate that the Google deal to power AOL's search may expire. MSN would obviously like to grab that audience share as a way of further enticing advertisers over to its new ad system that's slowly being rolled out. Naturally, Google would love to keep that business and will be making all the right overtures to AOL. You can also expect Yahoo will be talking to try and gain back an important traffic source it lost to Google years ago -- and Ask Jeeves will be doing some talking, as well.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 23, 2005, 7:22 AM | Permalink

Recapping Official Search Engine Blogs

Search Engine Blogs as Public Relations Tools from Loren Baker over at Search Engine Journal is a nice overview of how the various major search engines are turning more and more to blogs as a communication tool, with continuing unofficial help from employee blogs such as those from Yahoo's Jeremy Zawodny and Google's Matt Cutts (hey, Google, get his blog listed in your Blogs By Googlers section on the Google Blog already!).

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 23, 2005, 7:10 AM | Permalink

Silicon Valley Search SIG Has First Meeting, Talks Audio Search

I've been meaning to write about SDForum's Silicon Valley Search SIG since Robert Scoble mentioned it earlier this month. The new group just had its first meeting, Audio Search: Selling Picks & Shovels at the Podcast Gold Rush. Yahoo's posted a summary on its search blog today, pointing at the end to even more summaries. Audio of the event is promised to come via several of the podcasting search vendors in attendance. The group sounds great for anyone in the area. I always feel sorry for those not in the middle of Silicon Valley who can't take part in these things, however. Want to hit the next one? The group sadly lacks any type of decent home page that I could find. It does have a mailing list, and you can sign-up or read archives here. A next event in October on vertical search is being planned.

Postscript: The group has a blog now here.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 23, 2005, 7:00 AM | Permalink

Begging For Free Links

When Money Can't Buy You Link Love from Rand over at SEOmoz is a nice rundown on ideas for gaining links when cold hard cash isn't an option. Write a letter, give a call, do a giveaway. Whatever you do, ask appropriately. Increase Your Link Request Conversion - Don't Do This! in our SEW Forums is a current discussion starting out with a list of great tips on what NOT to do from member Stuntdubl, Todd Malicoat. You can also see my Thanks For Your Horrible Link Request post from last year.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 23, 2005, 6:46 AM | Permalink

Google Toolbar For Firefox Leaves Beta, Gains Google Suggest

Google reports on its blog that the Google Firefox Toolbar has gained Google Suggest query suggestions. Hey, if it's good enough for the toolbar, it's good enough for the main site. Bring it on! And the toolbar out of beta after only two months! Maybe there's hope Google News will graduate yet from beta. It's four years old this March.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 23, 2005, 6:40 AM | Permalink

Yes, Google Does Alert You To New Blog Finds

ZDNet's David Berlind rants that Google Alerts don't include blogs, so he can't get an email update on news found via the new Google Blog Search service. David, you can have an RSS feed of anything you want on blog search. I explain that here. It's not even that hard. There are links to keyword-based feeds at the bottom of each page. So you want the latest from blogs via Google -- there you go.

Want to get huffy about something? Stick to the bigger problem that for the blog RSS alerts I get, there's still a ton of spam and off-topic material, not to mention it misses stuff because it's not an full-text index of actual blog posts yet. Of course, it's only been out for less than two weeks, so I'll cut them a little slack for now.

Berlind's just flat wrong when he goes into this part:

I can understand if Google feels as though the blogosphere isn't a part of "news." But isn't the blogosphere part of the Web? Or is the blogosphere not the Web? This problem with Google Alerts is nothing new. For example, Yahoo!'s Jeremy Zawodny made hay about the exclusion over two years ago.

Google, of course, does index blogs as part of its web index. In fact, anyone who has half an ear to the blogosphere knows the conventional wisdom that blogs have supernatural ranking powers that can push ordinary web pages aside in Google web search.

It's not quite like that, but blogs can, do and have existed in Google web search. So if you have a Google Alert to monitor the web, and a new blog page shows up in the top rankings, you'll get that alert. The real problem with watching web search is that it's not really time sensitive. If the top results don't change a lot -- and they really generally shouldn't -- then there's nothing to alert you to. News search, blog search -- these change often, since new material is purposely flowing in and given a deliberate relevancy boost, as it makes sense for that content.

As for what Jeremy was making hay about, let's be clear. It wasn't an exclusion of blogs from web search. It was the exclusion of blogs as part of NEWS search. Not web search, got it? Blogs have always been part of web search.

This part is fun:

I'd do a fact check with Google to find out why the Blog Search isn't included as a new type in Google Alerts (doesn't it make sense for Google to do this?), but, as an employee of CNET Networks, I'm included in Google CEO Eric Schmidt's blackout.

Yeah, that sucks. They're stupid for doing that to News.com. Bad, bad Google -- and example of why this will keep blowing up in their face as well as why it hurts the communication process. Of course, Berlind probably wouldn't be so ticked it he hadn't been banned. More to the point, he can certainly fact check in other ways. Hmm, maybe even by reading the FAQ.

Postscript: Dave Winer says I'm wrong and unfair in my post above:

Google doesn't include blogs in Google News, or at least that's what they claim. However, a lot of the supposed non-blogs they include are in every way blogs.

Yes, Dave -- I know that. David wasn't writing about how Google keeps blogs out of news search. He acknowledges in the story that blogs aren't part of news search -- as I wrote in my summary. In fact, he even says he "understands" why Google doesn't include blogs in news search.

Where David was wrong, and what I was correcting, was his suggestion that blogs aren't in WEB search. Blogs, of course, are in web search.

Postscript 2: And now David Berlind's not happy and STILL incorrect again. Since he feels so taken to task that he wants to take me to task, I'll answer what he said:

First things first. Sullivan never bothered to call me before questioning the integrity of my coverage when, in referring to Google's blacklisting of journalists that work for CNET Networks, he wrote "Of course, Berlind probably wouldn't be so ticked it he hadn't been banned. " Had you called Mr. Sullivan, or if you've read anything I've written in my 15 years as a hi-tech journalist, you'd know that I've never and will never take vendors' personal treatment of me into consideration when writing about them. This is true in both respects. My coverage cannot be swayed to the positive by currying favor, nor can it be swayed to the negative by treating me negatively.

OK, first, I didn't need to call you because the key fact in your story about blogs not being in web search was wrong. I could see that. It would be like calling you up and saying, "David, you said 2+2=5. I disagree with this. How are you doing the math." What were you going to explain to me? How further wrong they were?

Question whether you were ticked at Google? Of course you were. You should be. They have a stupid policy of not talking to CNET, and it means you can't get direct answers from them, when you should. Could you verify the facts another way, if you really cared. Of course you could. You didn't. And did that ticked tone come through in your story? It did from where I sit. Rather than using the standard CNET line that all your collegues I talk with regularly with at News.com about having tried to ask for a response and not getting one, you went with a brand new "I'm on the blacklist" tone.

As for Sullivan's explanation of why I was wrong about Google Alerts, I think the fact that he provides a workaround instead of factual evidence that I am wrong to ask the question I asked actually supports my position. Instead of discussing Google Alerts, as I did, he discusses Google's new blog search and how to set it up to satisfy my needs. So, let me fall back to the original facts, and the original question.

It's not a workaround. You want to be alerted to new blog finds. RSS feeds at Google give you this. You want it fast? RSS is faster than web alerts. You can't get it via email, no. The Google Alerts may not be working right. But the point is, you want blog content from Google, but you with "15 years as a hi-tech journalist" don't seem to know that Google's new blog search offers exactly what you want. Did you read any of the coverage of Google's blog search launch last week? This type of alert is what you want. Numerous people including myself mentioned it exists. It's right on the blog search result pages. Is there some additional road map you need?

And back to the original incorrect fact, you were wrong before and you're yet WRONG again:

Google Alert says it can watch for me: News and the Web. Not that I agree (it's the subject of huge debate), but I understand the reasons that a search engine company might fall on the side of saying blogs are not news. But, there's just no way anyone can say that they're not part of the Web.

No one is saying that. Google isn't saying that. They've never, ever said blogs aren't part of the web. In fact, they said the exact OPPOSITE when some people worried that blogs might get pulled from web search back in 2003. From my story then:

By the way, one thing NOT in the cards for future index changes are any plans to pull blog content out of Google's regular search results. Google made a special point of stressing that blogs are staying, during my interview with them last week.

Google offers you a web search alert. Blogs, as I wrote before, are part of web search. Here, do this search for your name. Plenty of blogs there for your name. Go sign up for a Google web alert to that, and if some new blog (or anything) in web search shows up, you'll see it. Suggesting that because it doesn't say "web & blogs" is like saying you aren't getting oxygen because the canister of air doesn't say "air & oxygen" on it. There's oxygen in the air. There are blogs in web search.

I don't know how else to say it. Blogs are in web search. They ARE in web search. You get a web search alert, you get blogs in there. If you JUST want blogs, then you have to do something else. That's what you want, I know. But you're wrong to suggest that blogs aren't already in web search results. They are.

I don't know much about ranking algorithms. But, I have a difficult time understanding how I can be alerted to something "as it happens" if that something has to get ranked by an algorithm first. In Sullivan's words, some blogs "have supernatural ranking powers that can push ordinary web pages aside in Google web search." Thanks but no thanks. I'm not looking for the bloggers that have figured out how to manipulate search engines. I'm looking for the ones with the most interesting things to say about Vista (including ones that work at Microsoft). So, the pages I actually want to see are probably the unranked ones. At the very least, this should be a configurable item (like a checkbox that says "filter results based on Google's rankings").

This isn't about knowing ranking algorithms. It's about understanding the basics of search. What does the search engine include, and how does it sort things.

Google web search includes content from across the web, including blogs. Scoring is done by relevancy, rather than currency/freshness. IE, just because you are the newest site doesn't mean you'll be the site at the top.

So you want bloggers that seem to be most relevant for Windows Vista over time. Web search helps there. You want the very latest things being posted? You have to use a blog search engine where the default sort is on currency.

Over at Google's blog search, you can do both. The default is on relevancy overall, but you can switch to getting the most recent. The underlying results so far aren't that great either way, to me.

Overall, sorry you wrote a column where you made a major factual error about what's in Google's web search. Sorry you were upset I felt like I had to comment on a piece written by a major IT journalist who thinks blogs aren't part of WEB search. But that's what you said, and it was wrong.

Postscript 3: Just in case there is any confusion, I wholehearted apologize to David for giving any impression that he somehow wrote a slanted article because of the policy of Google not talking to CNET. I did feel the tone of his piece seemed upset at Google, but upset doesn't mean you can't be fair. In short, I really wasn't trying to imply he was unfair. I can't apologize for the fact that he made a factual error in saying blogs aren't part of web search or that he could have fact checked this in ways other than contacting Google.

Postscript 4: One more wholehearted and unreserved apology. I certainly could have written my critique of his piece without it being so personal or in a better tone.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 23, 2005, 6:19 AM | Permalink

Sergey, Larry, Eric, David and Jerry - Forbes Says Rich!

The 2005 edition of the Forbes 400 list of the of the wealthiest Americans was published this afternoon and includes Brin, Page and Schmidt from Google as well as Filo and Yang from Yahoo. Of course, Gates and Ballmer from Microsoft are also on the list. Here's a quick look at how several people who have interests in the web search biz fared.

Bill Gates, Microsoft
Estimated Wealth: $51 Billion
Ranking: 1st

Steve Ballmer, Microsoft
Estimated Wealth: $14 Billion
Ranking: 11th

Sergey Brin, Google
Estimated Wealth: $11 Billion
Ranking: 16th (tie)

Larry Page, Google
Estimated Wealth: $11 Billion
Ranking: 16th (tie)

Fast Fact: In case you're wondering, both Brin and Page ranked 43rd on last year's Forbes 400 with. Their wealth was then estimated at $4 billion each. Hat tip, Google IPO!

Jeff Bezos, A9/Amazon.com
Estimated Wealth: $4.8 Billion
Ranking: 42nd

Eric Schmidt, Google
Estimated Wealth: $4.0 Billion
Ranking: 52nd

David Filo, Yahoo
Estimated Wealth: $3 Billion
Ranking: 73

Jerry Yang, Yahoo
Estimated Wealth: $2.5 Billion
Ranking: 93rd

Mark Cuban, IceRocket
Estimated Wealth: $1.8 Billion
Ranking: 164th

Barry Diller, Ask Jeeves-IAC/InterActive
Estimated Wealth: $1.3 Billion
Ranking: 258th

Posted by Gary Price on September 22, 2005, 9:01 PM | Permalink

NORML and CGM

Some brands and causes are made for consumer generated media. Via AdRants comes word that The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws will host a video blogging contest that will award $5,000 to the best entry. Right on. Just so long as they limit what camcorder effects are permissible.

Posted by Zachary Rodgers on September 22, 2005, 4:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Daily SearchCast, Sept. 22, 2005: MSN Quashes Relevancy Report, Google TV Coming, Monitoring Hurricane Rita, Top Search Terms For The Past Decade, Goodbye To The Ask Jeeves Butler & More!

Today's search podcast covers MSN squelching the release of a search relevancy report where it doesn't shine, Google getting more into TV search, ways to monitor the movement of Hurricane Rita, most popular search terms over the past ten years at Lycos, Ask Jeeves getting rid of its butler mascot and more!

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 22, 2005, 3:15 PM | Permalink

More Hurricane Resources: Watch and Listen to Houston Media on the Web

If you're interested in watching or listening to live local coverage of Hurricane Rita coming out of Houston, here are links to stations streaming their coverage.

+ KPRC-TV (NBC Affilate), Houston
Look for the LIVESTREAM link near the top of the page.

+ KTRK-TV (ABC Affiliate), Houston

+ KTRH Radio, Houston
All-News station.

+ KSEV Radio, Houston

+ KUHF Radio, Houston
Houston Public Radio.

Postscript from Gary: More Maps.

From ESRI: A large collection of maps, imagery, and data for both Hurricane Rita and Hurricane Katrina

From Geodata.gov: Hurricane Rita Tracking Map

From the Harris County (Houston area) Office of Emergency Management: Real-time, interactive rainfall map.

Posted by Gary Price on September 22, 2005, 2:19 PM | Permalink

AdWords Help Online Forum & API Bug Being Fixed

Spotted on the Inside AdWords blog, word of a recently launched AdWords online forum (via Google Groups, of course) named AdWords Help. At the moment, the forum has 267 registered members who can post post questions/responses/comments. If you don't register, you're still able to browse/read posts and search.

And while we're on the Google AdWords beat...
Via Smart-Keywords.com we learn that a bug the new AdWords API caused problems for users. The Google AdWords Blog has confirmed the bug and says that the recent API update has been rolled-back. Once the problems have been fixed Google will notify API users and rerelease the code.

Posted by Gary Price on September 22, 2005, 1:30 PM | Permalink

Websoured Executives Fired

Via Threadwatch, Websourced fires 2 executives from the News & Observer covers how the company has fired two senior vice presidents, after writing of $1.4 million in bad debt.

An analysis into the business continues by parent company Think Partnership continues, the article says. The debt was caused by small companies signing up for one year contracts but refusing to pay because they had too much "success" in the first few months, the company says. The clients themselves, however, are also blamed for not having enough "dedication" to achieving "sustainable search marketing results."

Websourced recently lost its vice president of search marketing Andy Beal and had a planned acquisition of Proceed Interactive get called off. This follows after earlier acquisitions of other firms and some prominent search marketing speakers and writers. Threadwatch also has earlier discussion of Websourced problems here, Rumour: Websourced being Raided by Dept of Revenue.

Want to comment or discuss? Visit our forum thread, Resignations At Websourced.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 22, 2005, 1:29 PM | Permalink

Your Chariot Awaits

If this doesn't prove online advertising is back, I don't know what does.

Remember a couple of years ago when you were lucky to get maybe a Coke at an interactive marketing event? If anyone was even throwing an event, that was?

Compare and contrast with this message I just received from a publicist after RSVP'ing for a Yahoo! do next week:

Also, would you like for us to schedule you a car service to the event?

Here's hoping we don't turn back into pumpkins again for a good, long while!

Posted by Rebecca Lieb on September 22, 2005, 12:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Findory Completes Release of Personalized RSS Reader

In August, Findory's Greg Linden blogged that an "early" version of Findory's personalized RSS reader was available. Yesterday, Greg said that the release is now complete. You can access the service here.

Key Features:

Import your Bloglines subscriptions by entering your login

Import a users public Bloglines subscriptions

Import subscriptions via other readers and services via OPML

Related and personalized articles for every feed that you're subscribed to

Personalization: "My Top Stories" page reveals articles from your favorite feeds picked based on the articles you read in the past

Well, I'm off to spend some time with the reader. So far, I've had no trouble importing my Bloglines feeds into Findory. Greg offers a bit more about the service here. Note to Greg: How about a mobile version Findory's RSS reader? The "My Top Stories" feature (aka personalized selections) would be great to have when I want to check "what's happening" while I'm on the go and time is at a premium.

Posted by Gary Price on September 22, 2005, 12:27 PM | Permalink

Search Supreme Court Nominee Hearings and MacBeth With askSam

Database software provider askSam continues to roll-out free searchable databases containing documents in the news and other interesting content. These databases can be browsed and searched online and/or downloaded and searched offline. You'll need the askSam viewer to use the material offline. No worries, the software is free to download.

In the past week, askSam has released two new databases:

The Confirmation Hearing Transcripts of Supreme Court Nominee John Roberts

MacBeth by William Shakespeare

You'll find a complete list of the free databases that askSam makes available in this news release.

Posted by Gary Price on September 22, 2005, 11:47 AM | Permalink

University of Michigan Official Comments on Google Library Lawsuit

The University of Michigan Library is one of the five libraries Google plans to digitize materials from. The Michigan Daily article: U backs Google in lawsuit, offers comments from a U of M official who says that the unversity is enthusiastic about the program. On Tuesday, The Authors Guild (and three authors) filed a class action lawsuit. The Authors Guild says that the Google Library scanning program is a, "brazen violation of copyright law."

From the Michigan Daily article:

Defending the legality of Google's actions, the University said it continued to be enthusiastic about the project. "We are confident that this project complies with copyright law," James Hilton, an associate provost and the University's interim librarian, said in a written statement. "This project represents an enormous leap forward in the public's ability to search and find knowledge," he said.

The article also includes comments Stanford Law School Prof. Lawrence Lessig:

"Technically, copyright law states that if you make of copy of a work, that you need to obtain permission from the author," Lessig said. However, he said it is important to recognize what Google is attempting to accomplish by digitizing works and enhancing public access.

Postscript: The full text of the University of Michigan statement about Google Library is available here.

Posted by Gary Price on September 22, 2005, 11:17 AM | Permalink

Dr. Kai-Fu Lee Begins His Job as Head of Google China

Asia Pulse reports that Kai-Fu Lee has begun his job as the person in charge of Google's operations in China.

He begins his job after a Washington judge ruled nine days ago that Lee could recruit for Google and work on getting government permissions but cannot work on search or speech technology. A trial that begins in January will offer a final ruling.

Lee told Asia Pulse that Google will soon decide in which city (either Beijing or Shanghai) they'll build their China research enter.

The top Chinese scientist at Google said his job is to hire at least 50 college graduates by the end of this year, as the job-hunting season for graduate students starts this month. "We are here not to steal talent from other companies, but to train local people," he said.

More in the article: Lee starts job as head of Google in China.

Posted by Gary Price on September 22, 2005, 10:47 AM | Permalink

Microsoft Quashes Search Relevancy Report

New Search Engine From Microsoft Gets Cool Welcome from the Wall Street Journal (paid reg. required) delves into the rumors we heard in August and confirms them -- that the latest Keynote findings on search relevancy have been suppressed by Microsoft. The last we had were back in January. Why? Well, MSN Search is found to have slipped in those metrics. For its part, Microsoft says it asked for the study not to be released because it questions the methodology.

See? Further evidence it really is 1999 again. I used to get relevancy figures from NPD back then in a scatter-shot approach. I'd know who was ranked first, maybe third, but any search engine that didn't think they were doing well would quash releases of their own figures.

I covered this problem in my In Search Of The Relevancy Figure article in 2002:

Public release of this data is also important. Some companies that contracted with eTesting Labs in the past refused to let the tests be made public, if they did poorly. Similarly, the NPD Group used to do consumer surveys, where the search engines' own users rated their relevancy. Those search engines that did well often released their figures, while those that did poorly kept quiet.

While it may be tempting to sit on bad news, if the search engines want us to take seriously their claims of relevancy, then they have to agree to release both the good and the bad. If a search engine does poorly, then that poor performance should be an excuse to work harder.

I recently dared Google and Yahoo to report on relevancy and get past the size morass. So far, no word. I can tell you that both companies have spent a serious amount of time looking at the best way to spin the issue, far more than I suspect is being spent on coming together to benchmark performance. Guess Microsoft won't be dared at all.

Honestly, if Microsoft and Yahoo execs can collaborate with Google for its stealth Zeitgeist strategic partner meeting, is it really too much to think they can't come together to benchmark relevancy? I know intimately the difficulties in measuring such a subjective thing. But this is your CORE product, gang. This is what you do -- serve search results, and you have no way of proving to the world how good you are. Really, screw knowing who is biggest -- we don't even know which of you is most relevant!

It goes to the business model so crucially. More and more I hear about people talking about Google's search not being as good. Is it? What's the proof of this beyond ego searches? Traffic numbers staying up are one indication it might be doing OK. But the more Google moves away from core search into areas like, hmm, chat and wireless internet access, the more it becomes vulnerable to the "you aren't staying focused" accusations. In turn, those help fuel believe that relevancy might be worse, even if it's not.

In short, even the relevancy winner according to anecdotes and word-of-mouth, Google, has a vested interest showing a relevancy fitness report to the public that can be believed. That's because anecdotes and word-of-mouth can easily turn against it. Google, like all the major players, need to get us the benchmarks.

Meanwhile, I'll say this. Microsoft may be one of Keynote's biggest revenue streams as the WSJ reports and thus has clout to help Keynote make a "business decision" not to release the findings. But here's another business decision to consider. You've just wiped out any faith I have in your figures at all.

The next time Keynote trots them out -- assuming there's a better business climate allowing that to happen -- I'm going to be sitting here dubious if I should even trust them.

Honestly, I can't say enough how tired I am -- and how tired everyone should be -- of these types of games. Google's growing its index -- fact -- but won't budge the home page number until it obviously feels it will be able to wallop any counterclaims by Yahoo. So that number on the home page is meaningless other than as a PR hamburger count stunt. Yahoo played the game as well, of course, deciding it was prudent to finally publish its figures only when knew they'd have a count far larger than Google could trot out. Microsoft's playing the "don't release relevancy figures" game.

We did this once already in Web 1.0 or Search 1.0 or whatever you want to call it. If we're in Web 2.0 or Search 2.0, let's see things advance. No more games. Come together and go fund someone to properly study and benchmark how you are doing, and publicly pledge you will live and die by those results. Don't roll back into the rut of last decade.

Aside from the relevancy quashing, the story also looks at how Microsoft doesn't seem to be gaining in the search wars despite the technological investment in build its own search engine and backing it with marketing money. It has been noticeable as when I did the various traffic numbers last month how MSN hasn't really gained share. One interesting tidbit also is Microsoft thinking of sharing ad revenue with computer makers to help lock in potential search traffic.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 22, 2005, 10:41 AM | Permalink

Google: The Telecom Provider, Leases Massive Amount of Space in NYC

The NY Post article (reg. required, free): Google Feeling Lucky, offers a massive amount of fuel to the Google, your telecom company story. According to The Post, Google is leasing 270,000 sq. feet in a Chelsea office building that's known as a telecom carrier "hotel" because the Eighth Avenue building is home to thousands of servers (from many carriers including BellSouth, MCI, Qwest, and Sprint) and the critical infrastructure to support them.

"111 Eighth Avenue is the premier telecom and data facility in the United States," said Neal McGraw, the chief financial officer of NYC Connect LLC, which operates a facility in the building that allows tenants to connect their networks efficiently and at a low cost.

Also worth noting:

[The buildings] concentration of interconnected networks would allow Google to offer its new voice-over-Internet service, Google Talk, more efficiently and at lower cost because it would be able to connect directly to the networks of many of the world's leading telecom firms that are also housed there.

One telecom analyst tells The Post that he and his colleagues have never seen a network buildup on this scale.

Posted by Gary Price on September 22, 2005, 10:30 AM | Permalink

Loomia & podOmatic's AutoCatcher For Podcasts

Two for the podcasting crowd, a new podcast search engine called Loomia and the AutoCatcher service from podOmatic that keyword-scans for new podcasts each day that you might be interested in.

Via Google Blogoscoped, in turn via Waxy, Loomia is a new podcast search engine that feels very similar to Odeo. Feed not listed? Add it here. You can tag podcasts and get recommendations based on what it thinks you will like. Keyword search for content or browse the tag-based directory.

Meanwhile, podOmatic offers podcast delivery to your MP3 player or computer using its podAmigo software or via email. Beyond that, the new AutoCatcher service lets you create a keyword search for matching content, then get a feed to you with all the latest matching podcasts.

To use this -- or just search for any podcast -- visit the site's search page. Do a search, and after searching, you'll see a "Use AutoCatcher to add this search to my iPod or mp3 player daily" link underneath the search box on the results page. Click on that, and you have saved the search and generated a feed link to use, if you've registered.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 22, 2005, 9:58 AM | Permalink

Mossberg Says Yahoo Mail Superior to Gmail

Walt Mossberg's column today offers a review Gmail and the new Yahoo Mail. Which service gets the nod? Yahoo Mail. Score one for Yahoo mojo. Mossberg writes that Yahoo Mail is "far superior" to Gmail and if Yahoo Mail was widely released today, "it would blow Gmail away...That's partly due to its features, but also to its respect for user choice." More in Mossberg's review: Yahoo Email Delivers That Desktop Feel Most Users Expect.

I've been a Yahoo Mail user for years but just started using the new Yahoo Mail interface (beta) and love it. I'll have more to say later on. In the mean time, if you want to take a look at the interface, I've posted a screen caps here and here.

Posted by Gary Price on September 22, 2005, 9:37 AM | Permalink

Country-Specific Search Engines & Telephone Directories

Phil Bradley's updated his Country Based Search Engines page, so if you're looking for a search engine serving a particular country, it's a good resource to consult. Phil also turned me on to another good resource a few months ago, Infobel's guide to telephone directories around the world.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 22, 2005, 9:34 AM | Permalink

Meta Searching for Relevancy, Using Your Own Rules

Myriad Search is a new tool from Aaron Wall's Free Open Source SEO Tools site that allows you to play around with search results from Ask Jeeves, Google, MSN Search and Yahoo. It's a meta search tool that displays information about the relative ranking of sites in each underlying engine, and calculates an "authority score" based on those rankings—a potentially useful service for doing competitive SEO work.

Myriad Search also allows you to give more prominence to your favorite search engine, and dial down the importance of engines you don't like. It's an intriguing idea, and I've got more about the service in today's SearchDay article, Myriad Search: Meta Search Your Way.

Posted by Chris Sherman on September 22, 2005, 9:29 AM | Permalink

Googlers Tapped To Forecast Launches

Putting crowd wisdom to work on the Google Blog covers how the company uses its own staff as a predictive market to forecast things like launch dates for products, office openings and other things of "strategic" importance to Google. Apparently it works pretty well, though there's not really near enough details to tell. At first, I thought it was a far more interesting idea that Googlers might actually have to bid against each other to determine who gets to next launch their pet project when there are upteenmillion going on. But the idea that Googlers might contribute in this way to help shape when and where the company goes in particular directions still sounds kind of cool. What would be really cool is if people outside Google could play.

Postscript: Sure, Google may have a fancy-schmancy forecasting tool, but it also has the big master plan white board where Googlers contribute to what the company should do, as well. We wrote about that before in the The Illustrated Google Master Plan. Niall Kennedy has just posted a new shot of it. I keep forgetting to take my camera and fully map it out properly. Next time!

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 22, 2005, 9:03 AM | Permalink

Google TV Coming - Expect Both GiVo & TVSense

Spotted via Inside Google, news from Adam Lasnik of a job posting for a product manager for Google TV. Google TV? Yeah, we and others have written before about how TV is going to converge with search. I talked about the Windows Media Center as one part of this earlier this year. TiVo Talks to Google and Yahoo from April provides more examples. The job posting shows Google's planning to move well ahead with TV plans, both with making more television searchable and getting ads out there, as part of it. Wonder if we'll be seeing contextually-targeted TVSense-like ads coming, now. Some highlights:

In this role, you will provide leadership on product vision and execution of projects that enable using Google's search and advertising technologies to enhance users' Television viewing experience.

You will identify key market trends that are shaping user behavior when watching Television. These include but not limited to the intersection of Internet and Television technologies, Video-On-Demand, Personal Video Recorders and emergence of next generation set-top-boxes with IP connectivity. You will then identify areas where use of Google's search and advertising technology can enhance this user experience and define appropriate products to deliver these user benefits. You will work with UI designers and software engineers to conceptualize and develop these features.

As part of this role, you may also be required to interact with strategic partners in the telecom and cable segments across the world. As part of these interactions you will be required to present product and business strategy to senior executives at these companies and work with them to deploy these products in their network.

That last part is going to be fun. Some execs haven't been happy with Google Video having just upped and taped content off the air, with the Wall Street Journal having reported, as I covered earlier, that some "hit the roof" and the president of digital media at CBS feeling they hadn't show "proper respect" as a partner.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 22, 2005, 8:54 AM | Permalink

SEO Book Files Legal Response To Traffic Power Suit

OK, one more item on the Traffic Power-SEO Book case. Sorry -- just a lot happening with it today. SEO Book's Aaron Wall's attorney has filed a formal legal response in the case, which you'll find here. From my quick skim, it denies all the allegations and the complaint asks for the case to be dismissed, with attorney fees awarded to Wall.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 22, 2005, 8:17 AM | Permalink

SEMPO Says No, SMA-NA Says Yes To Fight Against Traffic Power

Further to my earlier post on the Traffic Power story, some were wondering how the two US search marketing organizations would respond to the suit alleging that SEO Book's Aaron Wall revealed Traffic Power's trade secrets. The answer is in. SEMPO is staying out of the fight, while SMA-NA is jumping in and siding with Wall.

The SEMPO statement from our forum discussion on the case:

It is the policy of SEMPO not to comment on any legal cases pending, particularly those that do not directly involve our organization. This matter in particular will be decided under existing case law relating to freedom of speech, libel/slander, and contract law. There is no compelling reason for a nonprofit group with a mission of education and market expansion to become embroiled in a legal discussion unless there is a specific reason for it such as providing expert opinion on definitions or methodologies; and if we had been solicited, then we certainly wouldn?t be able to comment.

I can understand the caution, but then again, you kind of like the chutzpah of fledgling SMA-NA deciding to take the potentially risky move and diving in. Some highlights from SMA-NA leader Ian McAnerin's blog post, Traffic Power Lawsuit, Blogging, and the SMA-NA:

I felt it was a key issue, and a serious one affecting the internet as a whole. As such, I discussed it with the other paid members of the SMA-NA at the time and decided it would be best to see what we could do about this on behalf of the SEO and Blogger industry....

I talked to Aaron and got his approval to help out on behalf of the SMA-NA. Then I went to one of the best law firms (IMO) in the state - Jones Vargas, whom I've worked with before, and contacted Ariel Stern, an all-around nice guy....

It was pretty clear that SEO's and bloggers sometimes need legal help (I get questions all the time, for example). So I talked to the fine folks at FindLaw and we are in the process of working out the details on providing methods of connecting experienced internet lawyers to SMA-NA members, in addition to providing other legal resources, advice and benefits.

Once we work out the exact details, I'll use that as a template to approach lawyers in Canada and Mexico so that any SMA-NA member anywhere in North America (or any SMA member worldwide who needs legal help from within North America) will be able get it.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 22, 2005, 8:09 AM | Permalink

WSJ Dissects Traffic Power Complaints & Search Engine Bans

Sites Get Dropped by Search Engines After Trying to 'Optimize' Rankings from the Wall Street Journal (paid sub. required) revisits the Traffic Power case against SEO Book's Aaron Wall -- though this time, diving into complaints about Traffic Power by customers saying they found themselves dropped after the company did SEO work for them.

These complaints all came out last year, so they aren't new. This is just a fresh retelling in light of the lawsuit. For its part, Traffic Power says ranking drops for most clients were due to search engines changing their indexing methods, not something they did.

The story further dives into Traffic Power having an "army" of cold-callers, according to former employees, and that over 100 complaints have been filed against the company with the Better Business Bureau. It also discusses how after the complaints, the company starting using other names such as 1P.com and First Place.

Overall, the article just highlights what I said earlier over the lawsuit against SEO Book. If the intent was to squash criticism, it's simply backfired into getting Traffic Power much broader and negative play that it was initially concerned about. These types of hits will continue to come as the lawsuit progresses, making me think the smart move would be to drop the suit altogether. Also, Aaron comments on his blog over here about the story.

Want to discuss? Visit the Traffic Power Files Suit Against SEO Book thread in our Search Engine Watch Forums.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 22, 2005, 7:53 AM | Permalink

More On Google WiFi Client

Google WiFi Client Explained from Om Malik is a quick, nice follow up on some of the Google WiFi stuff. In short, people ARE using it even outside of San Francisco, along with some info on how it works and maybe isn't so secure.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 22, 2005, 7:40 AM | Permalink

Maps & Resources Tracking Hurricane Rita

As Hurricane Rita bears down on Texas, we're obviously hoping for the best. Some new resources for those who want to track the storm's progress are covered below, including very nice MSN Virtual Earth-powered and Google Maps-powered services.

Robert Scoble points to an MSN Virtual Earth-powered map produced by Poly9 for MSNBC. It shows where the storm has been and where it is projected to go, future points in lighter shades of white.

Hover over any future point for a bit more info on forecasted winds. Wondering how the track will impact Galveston? Hard to see on the map, because as a small town, Galveston's not shown unless you zoom in a bit. Basically, find Houston and come down at a 5 o'clock angle until you hit the coast -- or zoom in.

Sadly, if you visit either the actual MSN Virtual Earth site or MSNBC, you don't find any links to this map. How Robert found it, he doesn't say, but it should be a lot easier.

One plus to the exploring, however. MSNBC has another great Hurricane Tracker map that shows the past path and projected route, along with how the storm has grown in strength. Look to the left of the map, and you'll see links for past storms in 2004 and 2005, including Katrina.

Doc Searls points to Central Florida Hurricane Center 2005, or flhurricane.com. As the site says, this is not some official government site but a nice resource run by weather hobbyists.

They've got a Google Maps-based storm track you can follow -- where the storm has been, where it's expected to go, and info when you click on any of the pinned points along the way.

I think it's much nicer with the hybrid view switched on, and Galveston shows easily with only slight zooming. Also check out the legend that explains the storm strength as show with colored dots.

Steve Rubel notes you can now get weather feeds via Yahoo, by the way. I didn't think this was new, but they're adding so much, it's hard to keep track! A page with severe weather alerts is here, Texas here, but these are sent via email only. A Yahoo News feed for "Hurricanes & Topical Storms" is here -- and those who prefer to read online can see the Full Coverage area for hurricanes here.

Hurricane Rita Takes Aim at Texas Coast from Gary yesterday also notes some other news resources tracking Rita. Basically, pick your usual news source suspect, and they're going to be doing something.

FYI, I remarked to my wife when Ophelia came along how quickly we were going through the hurricane alphabet. What happens if we hit Z (or really W, the last letter actually used)? MSNBC writes we move to the Greek alphabet, along with nice background on how storms are named.

Postscript from Gary: More Maps.

From ESRI: A large collection of maps, imagery, and data for both Hurricane Rita and Hurricane Katrina
From Geodata.gov: Hurricane Rita Tracking Map
From the Harris County (Houston area) Office of Emergency Management: Real-time, interactive rainfall map.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 22, 2005, 7:35 AM | Permalink

Mobile Access + Local Search + GPS

A new article from News.com: Tech turns phones into back-seat drivers, reports on a presentation at Demofall today of the Destinator Anywhere Server. It along with personal versions of the product allow mobile searchers to use their GPS enabled phone or mobile device to find and access info based on where they're located.

Essentially, the technology is a mix of services like Yahoo Local (which provides comprehensive listings of local businesses and attractions) and mobile phones incorporating GPS...When the Destinator service is instructed to look up, say, a sushi restaurant in some specific town, it interfaces with Yahoo Local and comes up with a list of choices. When the user selects a choice, the service creates a map and proceeds to direct the user to the sashimi, speaking out the directions as they drive.

You can learn more about Destinator here. Darn, it's presently not available for my Treo 650.

You've got to think that with the massive amount of interest in both local and mobile search these days, Destinator and companies offering similar types of technology would be ripe for acquisition by some of the large web search players.

Posted by Gary Price on September 21, 2005, 5:10 PM | Permalink

blinkx.TV Adds Video Content from HBO

blinkx.TV is now making program highlights, show previews, additional footage, etc. from HBO (Home Box Office) keyword searchable via their database. HBO content is also searchable (metadata only) via AOL Video Search. HBO and AOL are owned by the same company, Time Warner.

Posted by Gary Price on September 21, 2005, 4:32 PM | Permalink

Paid Search to Displace Online Display Ads by 2010

Paid search will garner more revenue share than online display advertistments within five years, according to a new market forecast by Jupiter Research. According to a ClickZ article:

The category accounted for 34 percent of total online ad spending in 2004, or $4.2 billion in spending. In 2009, paid search will draw even with display advertising, with both bringing in around $6.9 billion. By 2010, paid search, including paid listings and paid inclusion, is expected to equal 40 percent of the online ad spend, or $7.5 billion.

The article goes on to quote Jupiter Research analyst Sapna Satagopan who offers a number of suggestions for search marketers to get ahead of this trend.

In particular, Satagopan recommends that search marketers familiarize themselves and take advanage of the new search advertising programs from Ask Jeeves and MSN. Savvy search marketers will also change their focus from achieving top position to measuring the revenue generated by spending on search ads.

For more detail, see the press release announcing the forecast.

Posted by Chris Sherman on September 21, 2005, 4:08 PM | Permalink

Diller Says Ask Jeeves Will Rebrand as Ask.com

Thanks to SearchViews and SEOBook for pointing us to The Street.com article: Diller Sacks the Butler. It reports on comments made today by IAC/InterActive CEO, Barry Dillerm about the future of one of his newest employees, Mr. Jeeves. According to Diller, Mr. Jeeves will be out of a job as the company mascot when Ask Jeeves rebrands itself as Ask.com. That's right, the new name of Ask Jeeves will be Ask.com. Diller did not provide a specific date as to when Mr. Jeeves will be unemployed.

We've been awaiting word of a new name since Diller made comments about a possible rebranding in May of this year.

I think a new name can only be good news for the search engine. Why? Sure, people know the name Ask Jeeves but as I said on the Searchcast today, everytime I bring up the name Ask Jeeves in a search training session, people look at my like I'm wasting their time by mentioning it. They associate the name Ask Jeeves and the mascot with what it once was, a bad search engine. They have no idea that in the past four years the product has become an increasingly valuable search and research tool. Hopefully, new branding and marketing will help convince the masses to take another look.

Diller also told attendees at an investment conference today that he wants to integrate Ask into other IAC/InterActive properties like Ticketmaster and Match.com. Last week I blogged about a bit of IAC synergy with the new Ask Gift Finder that uses a database from Gifts.com, another IAC property. Finally, Diller told the audience to look for Ask.com to expand into the China search space next year.

Posted by Gary Price on September 21, 2005, 3:56 PM | Permalink

Want to Be a Relevance Analyst?

If you're in search-related job, here are two that just might be relevant. (-: The other day I learned that Yahoo Search Marketing has posted two openings for Relevance Analysts (part of the Relevance Assessment Team) at the Yahoo Search Marketing hq in Pasadena.

What would you do?

The primary responsibility of the Relevance Analyst will be to test new and existing matching technologies by scoring listings from a relevance perspective and providing feedback on the results.

Posted by Gary Price on September 21, 2005, 3:22 PM | Permalink

Daily SearchCast, Sept. 21, 2005: Google Sued Over Library Scanning Project, Cool Tool For Web Research, Microsoft Reorganizes & More!

Today's search podcast covers Google being sued over the program that scans books for inclusion to Google Print, a cool utility helpful for net research, car buyers turning to search, Microsoft reorganizing and more!

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 21, 2005, 3:08 PM | Permalink

Hurricane Rita Takes Aim at Texas Coast

It looks like another massive and powerful hurricane, currently a category five storm, is heading for landfall somewhere along the Texas coast. Let's pray that we will not be needing satellite imagery to survey the damage. For those of you tracking the storm, The Wall Street Journal is making a Storm News Tracker available (free). It's updated with storm headlines as news breaks. Also, NewsNow is constantly aggregating stories about the storm from over 21,000 sources.

Posted by Gary Price on September 21, 2005, 2:46 PM | Permalink

Save the Time of the Searcher: Yahoo's New "Quick Links"

On Search Engine Roundtable, Barry blogs about Yahoo's new Quick Links feature that you'll now find included in some Yahoo web results summaries.

Quick Links allow the searcher to save time and clicks (something we like) by integrating direct links to specific parts of web site. For example, this search for American Airlines shows Quick Links right below the text snippet. You'll find links to the reservations, travel info, and AAdvantage (American's frequent flyer program) portions of the American web site. On the Yahoo Search Blog, you'll read more about the technology and learn that Quick Links are generated by an algorithm that, "tries to guess the most used information about that page." Also on the blog you'll find a Quick Links example where services like cool send to phone feature from Yahoo Local are also included as a Quick Link. Note: When I searched for several stores and restaurants in my neighborhood I found web pages about these places but they didn't show any Quick Links. It's likely that Yahoo is gradually rolling out Quick Links for local establishments.

Embedding links to non-web search services (like the send to phone feature) also reminds me that while those of us who watch the close industry closely know about specific tools and databases that Yahoo and other large engines offer, many users only know about web results. This is why including links to these services on web results pages gives "web search only" users a chance to learn about and use non-web search services. Heck, all of the major engines now include thumbnail images from their imagery databases on web results pages if the query string suggests that the searcher is looking for this type of material. Promotion and timesavers all rolled into one.

Finally, Yahoo's new service will likely remind you of what Google has been testing in the past few weeks.

Want to discuss Yahoo Quick Links? Here's a link to a thread in the SEW Forums.

Posted by Gary Price on September 21, 2005, 2:17 PM | Permalink

Google Adds Google Print Testimonials Page

Google has added two new pages to the Google Print portion of their site.

The first page offers testimonials from users about how wonderful the Google Print service is. The second page offers a compilation of press mentions about Google Print.

It's important to remember that Google Library project (now heading to court) is only a part of the total Google Print service. In this post, I do my best to explain what's what. Danny comments here.

I'm wondering when we might see some new features from Amazon.com's Search Inside the Book (SITB) program. Like Google Print (not Google Library) SITB allows users to search and read a selected amount of content (as determined by the publisher) from new books. Btw, I noticed today that Chris Sherman's new book, Google Power and John Battelle's, The Search can be searched and previewed via Amazon's SITB. I was unable to find either book in the Google Print database.

Finally, did you know that you might have access to services that allow you to search, print, and read the full text of new books online? Unlike Google Print and SITB there is no limit on how much you can read. More about a few of these services in a postscript here.

Postscript: Google also has pages of user testimonials for Gmail, desktop search, Google Answers, Picasa, web search.

Postscript 2: I Just noticed that Google has also posted a page with info for authors.

Posted by Gary Price on September 21, 2005, 1:08 PM | Permalink

Yahoo Search Marketing Hires Ron Belanger

It was just a month ago when Danny posted that Ron Belanger had left Carat Interactive to take a job be vice president of marketing for BuyDomains. Well, Ron's time at BuyDomains was short. According to this press release from Yahoo Search Marketing, Belanger is now the Senior Director of Global Advertiser Strategy and Development at YSM.

In his new role, Ron will be an ambassador to clients and agencies, serving as an expert resource in helping them effectively incorporate search marketing into their overall marketing mix. Ron will also support clients and agencies in their performance marketing planning and budgeting efforts, and will help them develop and maximize the efficiency of their performance marketing infrastructure.

Posted by Gary Price on September 21, 2005, 12:05 PM | Permalink

Microsoft's Start.com Portal Expands with New Non-English Versions

Well, one post about international expansion (see below) deserves another. (-: We've mentioned Microsoft's experimental Start.com customizable portal several times on the SEW Blog. Earlier today we learned that the Start.com is now available in several languages. You'll find a link on the upper-right side of the Start.com to change the default language. Start.com will also respect your browser language/locale setting.

Start.com is now available in these languages:

English--Australian

English--US

English--UK

French

German

Italian

Japanese

Spanish

Spanish--US

Posted by Gary Price on September 21, 2005, 11:17 AM | Permalink

Google's Picasa Now Available in Many Languages

Google's digital photo management program, Picasa, has gone international. A post on Google Blog notes that Picasa, is now available in many languages including Chinese, French, German, and Spanish. Here's a complete list with direct links to each version:

Posted by Gary Price on September 21, 2005, 10:46 AM | Permalink

A bid for Aegis

An unknown entity, probably an agency holding company, has approached Aegis -- which contains the Isobar network's iProspect, Carat Fusion and numerous other interactive businesses -- with a a bid worth 140 pence per share, or U.S. $2.8 billion.

UPDATE (by Pamela Parker): The WSJ is reporting that the previously unnamed entity is Publicis.

Posted by Zachary Rodgers on September 21, 2005, 10:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

10 Years of Popular Search Terms at Lycos

As Lycos celebrates its 10th birthday, The Lycos 50, their daily look at popular search terms, has published a new list that takes a look at the 50 most popular terms over the past decade. The Clickz article: Ten Years of Search Terms, offers a look at the complete list along with some analysis by Lycos 50 writer, Dean Tsouvalas. More analysis here.

So, what have people been trying to find info about over the past decade? Here's a quick peek at the Top 5 terms from The Lycos 50, September 1995 - September 2005.

Pam Anderson

Dragonball

Pokemon

Britney Spears

Btw, the first editions of the Lycos 50 (according the archive) were published in August, 1999.

Posted by Gary Price on September 21, 2005, 10:07 AM | Permalink

Microsoft Announces Management Reorganization; Is it a Reaction to Google?

Word from numerous sources, including this excellent overview on Searchblog, about a management reorganization at Microsoft.

John B. writes of Searchblog:

For all those watching the AOL/MSN/Google M&A game, Microsoft's recent reorg, covered here (NYT), is worth noting. The company is creating three divisions, and the one I find critical is what is called "Platform Products and Services". This division combines Windows and MSN, and that is an important shift - the two are increasingly interdependent. Applications like Office are now in a separate division, as are Entertainment and Devices.

Martin LaMonica's article at News.com offers more analysis: Microsoft reorg a bulwark against Google?

Microsoft's decision to combine MSN with its platform products group is "a Google reaction," said Frank Gillett, an analyst at Forrester Research. "Microsoft is certainly alerted to the impact Google is having on what Microsoft thinks is their domain."

Posted by Gary Price on September 21, 2005, 9:41 AM | Permalink

Paid Links Shouldn't Count? What Exactly Is Paid?

We've had a debate on our SEW Forums recently (see Matt Cutts Comments On Reputable Sites & Link Selling) over whether publishers should tag paid links so search engines won't count them. Part of that covered the issue of links where payment isn't so readily visible. Help Us Build a Link Farm, Get an iPod Nano? from Traffick is a case in point. Want to win an iPod Nano from them? Just post some links to them. It's an example of how what may seem to be a clear-cut, black-and-white issue isn't. Those who forthrightly pay for links potentially might not get those links counted, but do a savvy rub-our-back giveaway and that might fly under the radar?

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 21, 2005, 8:26 AM | Permalink

A Versatile Web Research Tool

Once you've found something interesting or useful on the web, what then? Bookmark it, clip it, share it—tools abound to help with these tasks, and we've reviewed many of them in SearchDay. Guest writer Mary Ellen Bates has been using a new tool from Net Snippets that has multiple features bundled into a single package that make it a seriously cool (and fun) addition to her web research arsenal, she reports in today's SearchDay article, A New Approach to Sharing Web Research.

Posted by Chris Sherman on September 21, 2005, 1:32 AM | Permalink

Google's Library Scanning Project Heads to Court

Many predicted that the copyright issues that surround Google's library book scanning project would end up in court. Today those predictions came true.

This afternoon, the 8000 member Authors Guild and three individual authors, including a former Poet Laureate of the United States, filed a class action lawsuit in federal court against Google over the Google Library book scanning project which is part of Google Print.

From the news release:

The suit alleges that the $90 billion search engine and advertising juggernaut is engaging in massive copyright infringement at the expense of the rights of individual writers....This is a plain and brazen violation of copyright law, said Authors Guild president Nick Taylor. It's not up to Google or anyone other than the authors, the rightful owners of these copyrights, to decide whether and how their works will be copied.

More in the news release and this News.com story by Elinor Mills.

What does Google have to say about the lawsuit? Google's Nate Tyler told SEW:

The Google Print program respects copyright. We regret that this group has chosen litigation to try to stop a program that will make books and the information within them more discoverable to the world. Google Print directly benefits authors and publishers by increasing awareness of and sales of the books in the program. And, if they choose, authors and publishers can exclude books from the program if they don't want their material included. Copyrighted books are indexed to create an electronic card catalog and only snippets of the books are shown unless the content owner gives permission to show more.

Over the past few months we've blogged about major concerns over the Google Library scanning project from several publishing trade groups. However, as far as I know, no legal action has been filed by any of these groups.

For more on Google Library see:

Postscript From Danny:

Google Print and the Authors Guild on the official Google blog has a reaction to the suit, illustrating that only tiny, tiny portions of copyrighted
works would be shown and defending the project as being consistent with copyright law.

Via BoingBoing, a copy of the legal complaint is here (PDF). BoingBoing also points to this EFF article saying (as some of the articles above have already covered) that Google may have a good fair use argument. The EFF article points to this analysis (PDF) by Jonathan Band looking at how the complaints compare when measured up against the limited case law we have about search engine indexing.

I agree with the paper, especially the point as I've written before that
search engines already supposedly infringement copyright in the way publishers
describe for web indexing, and have done so for years and to some of these
publishers' own web sites, without them complaining. More on that from me in
these articles:

However, on the fair use front, I recently discussed on in some circumstances, even the tiny snippets shown could potentially be found to do real harm to an author. It would be rare, but possible, and might be a reason for Google to adopt a policy of not showing anything content at all beyond book title and maybe table of contents, for books which is doesn't have explicit copyright permission. The article below has more on that:

Legal Experts Say Google Library Digitization Project Likely OK; Will It Revolve Around Snippets?

Want to discuss or comment? Visit our forum thread, Google Sued Over Google Print Library Scanning.

Posted by Gary Price on September 20, 2005, 7:23 PM | Permalink

Google's Philosophy: Then and Now

Yesterday, Danny blogged about Google making some changes to their philosophy of business page (aka Ten Things Google Has Found to Be True). Over at efuddle.com, Gabe Rivera from Memeorandum uses Aaron Swartz's HTML Diff tool to make it easy to identify precisely what changes Google has made to the page. Thanks Gabe! Btw, if you want to reminisce about other things Google "used" to say, let's not forget the August 2002 comment from Google's David Krane to News.com regarding the company having a "laser-like focus on a search-only business model."

Posted by Gary Price on September 20, 2005, 6:45 PM | Permalink

Daily SearchCast, Sept. 20, 2005: Google's Internet Access Plans, Yahoo Trust Questions, Google's Stealth Partner Event, "Miserable Failure" Result Just A "Prank," Getting Unbanned On Google & More!

Today's search podcast covers Google growing its own broadband network and offering secure wireless connections, Google's philosophical truisms being in need of change, Yahoo having trust issue, the Google event that bloggers and journalists can come to but can't blog or journal about, the famous "miserable failure" query downgraded by Google from "web's opinion" to "prank," what do do if banned on Google and more!

NOTE: Apologies for the broken link to the MP3 file earlier. It has now been corrected

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 20, 2005, 3:10 PM | Permalink

Google Wants to Be Your IE7 Default Search Engine

This should make Mr. Gates and Mr. Ballmer happy...NOT! Google Blogoscoped (welcome back Philipp) has posted a screencap that users of IE7 are seeing if/when they visit the Google home page that asks if they want to make Google their default search engine in the new MS browser. Google is already the default search tool in Firefox.

Posted by Gary Price on September 20, 2005, 3:03 PM | Permalink

Mid-September 2005 Search News Recap Posted

If you're a Search Engine Watch member, the latest edition of Search Engine Update newsletter has been posted. It recaps top stories in search from the first part of this month.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 20, 2005, 2:33 PM | Permalink

Search Drives One In Five Visits To Car Sites

Yahoo!: One In Five Land On Car Sites Via Search from MediaPost looks at a new study from Yahoo finding that one in five visitors to a car web site came from search engines. That 20.6 percent of visitors, up from 17.5 percent last year. Not in that story but from the press release, the study also found that nearly 70 percent of those buying cars said the first turned to search for advice. Search was also considered the most credible research source. Need more? I've posted an executive summary of the report here, completely with pretty charts.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 20, 2005, 1:54 PM | Permalink

Google's Matt Cutts Provides More Formal Info On Ban Notification Program

Earlier we noted that Google was testing a program to notify webmasters if they'd been banned on Google. Now Google's Matt Cutts has posted information more formally on his blog, in a Q&A format. More here: Alerting site owners to problems.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 20, 2005, 1:50 PM | Permalink

BusinessWeek Looks At Yahoo Trust Issues

Further to my earlier post on Yahoo Messenger, For Yahoo, Mistrust Is Popping Up is a brand new article spotted via Slashdot from BusinessWeek covering recent hits Yahoo's taking on the installation issues front, the China censorship/privacy front and the spyware front. Yahoo says its reputation is safe. "Users can put their trust in us because that is what we're built on," Yahoo COO Daniel Rosensweig is quoted as saying. But the idea that Yahoo might perhaps pale "as rival Google Inc. holds itself up as a paragon of consumer friendliness." Many, many are no longer seeing Google as so friendly, either.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 20, 2005, 10:38 AM | Permalink

Issues With Yahoo Messenger Installs

Yahoo IM users get more than they bargained for from News.com earlier this month looks at how the latest version of Yahoo's instant messaging client wants to make itself at home on your desktop beyond just instant messaging. Go with the defaults, and you'll not just get Yahoo Messenger but also the Yahoo Toolbar and new "Yahoo Extras" with "live links" that sound like Google AutoLink but seem to only act that way in the IM client, from what I can see. The install also tries to make Yahoo your default home page and search tool. It's easy to choose not to add any of these additional features, programs and changes, assuming you look for the right checkboxes, but many don't.

Yahoo's Jeremy Zawodny saw the story and commented that he found the practice "insulting and disrepectful." Google UI designer Kevin Fox chimes in on the comments at Jeremy's blog about dislike the tactics as well and defending Google's bundling of tools with WinZip as being "upfront."

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 20, 2005, 9:59 AM | Permalink

Upcoming Search Conferences & Stuff

Over at our Search Engine Watch Forums, we've added a new calendar at the bottom of the home page listing various search and search marketing-related conferences coming up. You can also jump to the calendar here.

Included are the dates for the upcoming WebmasterWorld PubCons this month in London and next November in Las Vegas. Our SES event next month in Stockholm, in November in Paris and Chicago in December are also shown.

Debra Mastaler and Eric Ward, two of our regular SES speakers, are also having a special seminar on link building next month in Charlotte, North Carolina. More about that here.

Jill Whalen, another regular SES speaker, is also having her next search marketing seminar in November in Philadelphia. More on that here.

These latter two events aren't on the SEW Forums calendar because we're keeping that mainly large, non-seminar style events or organizational meetings.

See also our SEM Related Organizations & Events section of the forums where anyone can post about upcoming events. Some of these will begin to move to the calendar, but not all of them.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 20, 2005, 9:54 AM | Permalink

Feedster CTO Comments on Splogs (Spam Blogs)

Scott Johnson, CTO at Feedster, has written a commentary for Media Post about splogs (spam blogs) and what the industry must do to combat them. The commentary is titled, The Newest Front in the Online Wars: Splogs.

A splog is a spam blog--that is, a fake blog that is created for the sole purpose of getting a high search engine "page rank" to reap profits through ad clicks, or to drive customers to an otherwise obscure e-commerce site... To give you an idea of the magnitude of the problem, in the United Kingdom there is a company with over 15,000 spam blogs at last count. There were well over 10,000 spam blogs on BlogSpot alone related to the Triple Crown horse races. Of course, each time a visitor clicks on a paid search term, the advertiser pays for it and the "splogger" gets a revenue share... Blog search companies must maintain an aggressive stance on blog spam, and continue to hone their tools and techniques.

Posted by Gary Price on September 20, 2005, 9:50 AM | Permalink

Confirmation From Google That The Sandbox Does Exist

In some catch-up news, Bloggers: Google 'sandboxing' sites at News.com from last month covers how Google engineers at the recent Search Engine Strategies conference finally confess that there is indeed a sandbox where new sites sit until they can rank well.

Google Sandbox Exists - So Says Google at Threadwatch is one source of the information, where member DougS said:

I listened for some time to one of the Google engineers expounding on all things search at Google. He said that internally they do not refer to the probationary period as the sandbox. They've been amused by the term, and have affectionately turned to calling the sand covered volley ball court in their quadrangle "the sandbox". He did, however, openly acknowledge that they place new sites, regardless of their merit, or lack thereof, in a sort of probationary category....

More of his comments are here, including how there are exceptions (as many have long assumed) that can spring a site out of the sandbox.

Oh Ye of Little Faith at SEOmoz is Rand Fishkin as the other key, earlier source. He writes:

We all shared the opinion that ranking new sites at Google was a pain since the inception of "sandbox" and Matt [Cutts, a Google software engineer] noted (this is a near word-for-word quote) - "OK, so it's really working. Even on you (guys)."

--and from another engineer--

He noted in words I cannot remember exactly that they felt it was having a remarkable effect on the quality of the index. We moved on to other subjects after this, but not before he was vehement in explaining to me specifically that they did not design it to affect "all new websites", but that a "filter must be tripped" for a site to be "boxed".

Postscript: Dave Naylor tells me a different story, that he felt the conversation Rand is talking about (Dave was also there) wasn't about sandboxing but instead new spam filters.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 20, 2005, 9:44 AM | Permalink

Comments On Web Analytics Packages

Which Stats Package is right for you? is a very nice thread from late last month at WebmasterWorld well worth a look, where various members contribute comments about web analytic packages they like.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 20, 2005, 9:32 AM | Permalink

The Importance of Keyword Research

One of the first things anyone embarking on a search marketing effort learns is that effective selection and use of keywords can make or break a campaign. Keyword research is an art, but the appropriate use of tools can help you practice the art much more effectively.

The folks who offer Wordtracker, one of the most popular keyword research tools, invited a number of search marketing experts to contribute their thoughts in a guide to keyword research that they're making freely available. I've got a review of the guide in today's SearchDay article, An Experts' Guide to Keyword Research.

Posted by Chris Sherman on September 20, 2005, 8:55 AM | Permalink

CPA, Cost-Per-Action, As Click Fraud Solution?

Last month, Putting an End to Click Fraud at iMedia Connection had Ron Belanger pushing the idea that CPA -- cost per action -- pricing for ads might help solve click fraud issues. Why? You'd only pay for traffic that converts. This month, Why CPA is Not a Cure for Click Fraud has Isaac Scarborough at iMedia delivering the counterpoint. Actually, he sees a lot of positives but not a complete end to click fraud, plus difficulties in moving people used to CPC to CPA.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 20, 2005, 7:59 AM | Permalink

Ask Jeeves Radio Ads Don't Win Over Tara

Why I Think the Internet Bubble is Back, Part I from Tara over at ResearchBuzz covers her hearing Ask Jeeves radio commercials -- and coming away unimpressed.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 20, 2005, 7:45 AM | Permalink

Baidu Ordered To Stop Music Downloads

Baidu ordered to halt music downloading service from Reuters covers Chinese search engine Baidu being ordered by a Chinese court to stop providing music downloads. Baidu plans to appeal, saying it doesn't provide downloading services but rather search services. Music search is a chief driver of Baidu's popularity, as I've written recently. If it's not even allowed to offer music searching, that's likely to put a major crimp in its growth. Five Music Companies Sue Baidu covers other companies that have suits filed against Baidu.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 20, 2005, 7:34 AM | Permalink

Secure Wireless Access From Google & More On GoogleNet Broadband Plans

Google Pulls The Other Leg With Secure Access from InsideGoogle covers new Google Secure Access wireless software now being offered for download, while Threadwatch and Om Malik points to the Google Reviewing Bids for National Optical Switching Network article at IP Media Monitor (free reg. required) adding further proof that Google is building out a US nationwide optical fiber network.

Google Secure Access is software you install on your computer designed to let you establish a more secure WiFi connect, or so the FAQ page says. A Google engineer apparently developed this during his personal 20 percent time. While the FAQ says it's available for download at "certain Google WiFi locations in the San Francisco Bay Area," I was able to download it from the UK. I haven't yet installed it to see if I could get a secure wireless connection through an access point routed through Google, however.

All internet traffic you send and received is encrypted and sent through Google. Google says in its privacy policy that it may log some of the pages you view. It says cookies aren't logged and some query data is stripped away. However, it probably still logs your IP and may have other ways of knowing a particular person may be using the service.

Google Web Accelerator Raises Worries covers just some of the concerns that the earlier Google Web Accelerator program raised about privacy and other issues. The company stopped offering the internet browsing software days after it was released, saying as it does today:

Thank you for your interest in Google Web Accelerator. We have currently reached our maximum capacity of users and are actively working to increase the number of users we can support.

Five months later, Google doesn't appear to have solved the "support" problem, making it seem much more likely that the negative reaction to web accelerator means it may never return or not for some lengthy period.

That leads to Nathan's "pulls the other leg" headline over at InsideGoogle. He, as with many others, assumes that web accelerator was a master plan to get data from users as a means of improving search results.

Perhaps, but as I've said before, Google doesn't need either Web Accelerator or Google Secure Access for this. It already has millions of installed copies of the Google Toolbar that, when advanced features are switched on, gives it plenty of data about browsing habits of surfers -- and data is has had access to for years.

Both Web Accelerator and Google Secure Access could add to that data, but they are giant, bandwidth intensive ways to get what can be gained more easily through other methods.

So why offer these? Back when news that Google had invested in a broadband-over-powerlines company came out, the company made it clear:

As part of our corporate mission, we are interested in promoting universal access to the internet for users.

Google wants everyone online. Get everyone online, and you can more easily ensure you're routing them to Google information for searching the web, searching video, whatever. And along the way, you'll show them ads -- targeted to what they're viewing, to where they are actually located (as Om's written) or whatever. Which leads to the other key bit of news, the bids for a optical fiber network.

The IP Media Monitor article says the network would be cheaper to construct than some similar networks, maybe costing only $100 million, and be up and running within months. The assumption is that offering video services is a chief reason why Google wants the network.

The article also talks about the "last mile" problem and how it might be closed by connecting the network to users through wireless. And hey, wouldn't it be cool if you had a bunch of people feeling more comfortable about wireless if they had a secure connection? How about some software with that?

Want to comment or discuss? Visit our forum thread, Google Wireless & Broadband Moves.

Postscript: Google begins limited test of Wi-Fi service from Reuters has Google confirming that it is offering two wifi spots near its headquarters, but it won't comment on any further evolution of this test.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 20, 2005, 7:10 AM | Permalink

Former Google Chef Charlie Ayers Starting His Own Restaurant

While Google is still seeking a replacement for its former celebrity chef, Charlie Ayers, Charlie's plans post-Grateful Dead, post-Google are now public. From Google to Noodles: A Chef Strikes Out on His Own from the New York Times covers how he's going to open his own restaurant in Silicon Valley. Aside from investing some of his own money, former Googlers and private groups are backing him. Name of the restaurant? Calafia!

If that name sounds familiar to some readers, it's because that's the name of my consulting company, Calafia Consulting -- and I own the calafia.com domain. I'm a native Californian and named my company after a Spanish story of California being an island ruled by Amazon women.

Charlie loves California as well, having heard the story behind the name at a Grateful Dead concert from a woman at the show. It stuck with him, he told me, and he's always had it in mind as a name for a future restaurant.

He doesn't have a site yet live for the restaurant, so I can't point you at that. But I'll do a follow up when it opens, plus I'll be linking to it off my calafia.com home page, just in case anyone ends up at the wrong place.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 20, 2005, 5:47 AM | Permalink

Google's Philosophical Ten True Things Not So True Anymore?

Google Horoscopes? is an older item from last month at News.com I've been meaning to mention. It notes how a Slashdotter spotted that the Google Our Philosophy page was apparently quietly changed recently to remove the "Google does not do horoscopes, financial advice or chat" line. Google, of course, now does chat via Google Talk. A footnote at the bottom of the page reflects on the change:

Full-disclosure update: When we first wrote these "10 things" four years ago, we included the phrase "Google does not do horoscopes, financial advice or chat." Over time we've expanded our view of the range of services we can offer ?- web search, for instance, isn't the only way for people to access or use information -? and products that then seemed unlikely are now key aspects of our portfolio. This doesn't mean we've changed our core mission; just that the farther we travel toward achieving it, the more those blurry objects on the horizon come into sharper focus (to be replaced, of course, by more blurry objects).

I don't know how "blurry" chat could have been four years ago, considering what Google rolled out is essentially the same as chat was back then, except for the voice side of things.

The reality is that Google's mission of "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible" is so broad that the company can argue anything is a part of it and is doing so as it expands to compete with the portals.

I don't agree that all these moves are related to organizing information, as I've written. And I doubt the full-disclosure update over "blurry" things coming into sharper focus will convince some others, either.

At the very least, the entire second point of the "Ten things Google has found to be true" items on that Our Philosophy page should go. That's:

It's best to do one thing really, really well.

That thing is supposedly "Google does search," but Blogger is search? Google Talk is search? AdSense is search? Selling print ads is search? Even if you buy into all of these being search, can so many different products and services be considered "one thing?"

Of course, if that point's going to go, time to take out point four, as well:

Democracy on the web works.

We know that's not the case, because Google's had to introduce things like nofollow, campaign against link/vote selling and acknowledge that some elected to the top search results get there because of pranks, rather than democracy. Democracy on the web, it seems, can be susceptible to many problems.

How about the first point:

Focus on the user and all else will follow.

It goes on to say how Google has grown by word of mouth, "from one satisfied user to another." But apparently not enough in Kansas City, Japan or Korea, places where Google has run consumer-facing ad campaigns.

Overall, that page needs more than a full-disclosure footnote. It probably needs to come down entirely, at least the portion with points about what Google has found to be true. It's not that the horizon is becoming less blurry. It's simply that Google itself is growing up and changing, and so will the things it finds true as part of that process.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 19, 2005, 3:02 PM | Permalink

Can't Beat The Local Search Aggregators? Join 'Em!

Join the Local Search Authorities from Justin Sanger at ClickZ looks at something familiar to many who do local searches at major search engines -- how results from other local search engines like SuperPages, Citysearch and Switchboard always seem to be popping up. Lesson? If you can't beat them, join them. IE, if your local search company can't win for a local search term, be sure you are listed with those who are winning, these local search "authorities," as Justin calls them.

Of course, down the line I expect the major search engines to stop listing aggregators like this. Why would Yahoo Local point at a page at Citysearch that points to actual locally-oriented pages if Yahoo Local can do the same itself? Fortunately, that isn't an issue for the local merchant that's focused on doing well with the aggregators and the local search pages of the major search engines, as well.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 19, 2005, 2:18 PM | Permalink

Google's Hosting What? Fun With Reverse IP Lookup

Interesting spot via Threadwatch, Reverse IP Tool and Google Servers lists a variety of weird and wacky domain names that come up when checking on IP addresses that are also used by Google servers. Google apparently doesn't own or operate all these domains. If I understand things right, some of the domain owners may simply be pointing their domains at Google. I'm sure someone will poke harder at this, and I'll postscript accordingly.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 19, 2005, 2:11 PM | Permalink

More Travel Search Resources

A sightseer's best sites: Answers to your travel questions on the Web from the San Jose Mercury News is a very nice collection of travel sites to help those heading out. Real-time flight trackers, flight conditions, airport info -- there's lots to check out. Meanwhile, further to the updating of our travel search engines page last week, NexTag Travel is a travel search comparison service and SkyScanner is a comparison tool aimed at European flights with an interested "month" view where you can see prices in bar chart format across an entire month, useful for those planning ahead and seeking best dates.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 19, 2005, 2:00 PM | Permalink

Traffic Power Suit Against SEO Book Moves To US Federal Court

Traffic Power Lawsuit Update from Aaron Wall notes that the suit filed against him by Traffic Power over allegedly revealing trade secrets has been moved from Nevada state court to US federal state court, through his efforts. The federal case number is CV-S-05-1109-RLH-LRL. For more background on the case, see Traffic Power Suit Could Be Quashed Through Anti-Slapp Motion and SEO Book's Aaron Wall Sued By Traffic-Power Over Revealing "Trade Secrets".

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 19, 2005, 12:50 PM | Permalink

Google's Now Promoting Gmail on Google Home Page

Over the weekend I began to notice that Google is now promoting Gmail on the Google home page. Here's a screen cap. The text reads:

Email can be as easy as search. Gmail.

The word Gmail is hotlinked to the Gmail login page. There, info about getting a Gmail login via cell phone (SMS, text messaging) is available. However, a potential Gmail user will find no info about how to get an account without SMS access unless they click again and find the FAQ that tells them to ask a friend who has SMS acess or already has a Gmail account. Offering a link to this info from the outset would seem to make sense and save people time.

Posted by Gary Price on September 19, 2005, 12:47 PM | Permalink

New Reprise Feedcast Tool To Get News Publishers Quickly Into Paid Search

Reprise has a new Feedcast tool out designed to scan articles and other newsworthy content and create paid search campaigns for related topics automatically. In short, imagine you are a news publisher wanted to get ads out quickly, to attract interest in a recent news stories. Feedcast is designed to make that happen quickly.

The link takes you to a page with more info, including a helpful Flash demo. Introducing Feedcast on the Reprise SearchViews blog has more info. A SEM Tool for Content Creators from ClickZ has details on those already using it through a private beta.

Somewhat related, Leverage the News for Search Engine Success is a fresh look at why publishers and others might want to ensure they're tapping into news searches as a means to reach an interested audience.

And spotted via Threadwatch, Forbes.com Aims to Improve Search Rankings looks briefly at how publisher Forbes is tapping into SEO via company 360i -- and in particular, free listings rather than paid ones as the New York Times and Washington Post do.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 19, 2005, 12:41 PM | Permalink

Google Earth Gains National Geographic Content Links

Running the Google Earth software? The Google Blog notes that there are new "National Geographic" layers you can enable. Switch these on, and if you see the National Geographic logo, you can zoom in to get more information from the magazine including high-resolution "Megaflyover" images. Meanwhile, the Jensense blog notes with amusement that while National Geographic may be providing the content, the ads on the National Geographic pages shown in Google Earth continue to carry ads from Yahoo.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 19, 2005, 12:26 PM | Permalink

Can We Declare Automated Comment & Link Posting To Be Bad?

This week, search engines and blog software vendors are meeting again for a second "summit" on fighting blog spam. That's tipped me over the edge for tossing out a related proposal to search marketers and marketers in general. Can We Agree Automated Comment & Link Posting Is A Bad Thing? has the full details in our Search Engine Watch Forums.

In short, I explain that unlike some other debates over what's spam or what should be acceptable in search marketing, inserting content and links into other pages through automation just doesn't seem a defendable practice by anyone. Indeed, even "black hats" get annoyed by it.

So as an industry, or a community, could search marketers unite to say "No!" on this practice? Lots more explanation and thoughts are covered in the forum thread, plus the ability to vote and chime in with opinions. Please stop by.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 19, 2005, 11:59 AM | Permalink

Buh-bye to Friedman, Dowd and Brooks

TimesSelect launches today, cutting off free access to the publisher's flock of pundits. The audience for those stories will shrink immensely. ClickZ managing editor Pamela Parker asks: will adveritsers value the new paid inventory more highly than the free stuff? They might... especially the Audibles of the world, the ones looking for people who spend on content.

David Card observes that for the columnists, TimesSelect to an extent means they're leaving "the conversation." They can't be happy about that. And neither should the Times. Fewer quotations and links in blogs means less share of mind among young people.

Meanwhile, print subscribers are thrilled. I get the weekend paper (to save my ibook from destruction by marauding twin one-year-olds who want a piece of whatever daddy's reading in the morning), which now comes with access to archival stories going back to 1981. Score. Yet I can't make it work. I just called to get my subscription account number (which I need to join up), and the rep I got was clearly overwhelmed. I asked if she was busy; she said the call center was "bananas" and two of the site registration features were not working. She gave me the desired code, but now the member site is totally locked up. No dice.

Posted by Zachary Rodgers on September 19, 2005, 10:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Checking If You're Banned On Google

Now that you know how to get reincluded in Google if banned, thanks to minty fresh advice from Google's Matt Cutts, how do you know if you've been banned at all? Some advice:

You could read all the information that Marcela De Vivo wrote up in the Coping With Search Engine Penalties article in SearchDay last month.
You could hope (or pray that you don't!) that you get one of the new "you've been banned" emails that Google is currently testing.
You could try a new tool I spotted via SEOmoz that tries to report if you've been banned. It sees if you have pages coming up via the site: command in Google. If not, that's sometimes a sign you've been banned. It also uses a second method to check if you've been banned, though exactly what this is isn't documented. There's a thread about the tool here, but really doesn't cover the second method.

In the end, the very best way would be if Google provided a ban checking tool of its own. The current test of sending banned notification emails provides a glimmer of hope that this might come. Google's rejected such things in the past, but recent discussion between Matt and I and others at Threadwatch suggests perhaps it could happen.

Want to discuss? Visit our forum thread, Google Testing Ban Notification -- Could New Webmaster Tools Come?

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 19, 2005, 10:38 AM | Permalink

FatLens Will Expand Shopping Search Offerings

More shopping search news to report. FatLens, the meta search service that currently allows the searcher to simultaneously query several databases that offer tickets (concerts, plays, games, etc.) for sale will soon expand into several new product categories. According to this news release, FatLens will offer shopping search for six new product categories in time for the 2005 holiday season. The new product categories are:

Clothing
Accessories
Shoes
Luggage
Jewelry
Electronics

FatLens launched their ticket search service earlier this year.

You can read more about what FatLens plans to offer including info about their "merchant revenue approach" in the news release.

Posted by Gary Price on September 19, 2005, 10:18 AM | Permalink

Online Debate Over Google Scanning Project Underway

The Friday Project's Google Debate program has begun, which will have various solicited parties offering up opinions on the Google Print program's library scanning project. Worth checking out, if you're interested in exploring the legalities and opinions in the process. I'll likely be contributing an opinion in the near future.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 19, 2005, 10:04 AM | Permalink

Googlebombing Now A "Prank" And Not Web's Opinion, Says Google

What's old is new again -- and apparently controversial still. Specifically, the entire [miserable failure] search that brings up the official George W. Bush biography -- a story from late 2003 -- has been resurrected and escalated to warrant a comment on the official Google Blog itself. What caused this and how did we go from that Googlebomb being the "web's opinion" to a prank? Sit right back and you'll hear a tale....

The original story of the miserable failure query is covered in my Google's (and Inktomi's) Miserable Failure article from January 2004. It talks about how a "google bombing" campaign in December 2003 involving at most a few hundred links caused the official George W. Bush biography to rank tops at Google and Inktomi (now owned by Yahoo).

I was kind of ticked at Google's response to comments over the entire thing. It wasn't that I felt Bush should or should not be there. It was that at that time, I did indeed feel there were more "legit" pages that might come up for that search, pages that were being pushed aside by the "cybergraffiti" of link bombing, as the New York Times called it.

Moreover, Google told the New York Times that the results for that query "just reflect the opinion on the web." I disagreed. A few hundred links weren't reflective of the entire web's opinion. They were reflective of a particular opinion on the web, and one being heavily influenced by the fact that an originally obscure term was being manipulated purposely.

If this had been the result of some type of active search marketing campaign -- say someone who bought a few hundred links, or a company that bartered such links, or someone who got the links through some type of link exchange program -- Google's response might have been different. Then it might have decided it needed to intercede in the results. But since it was chalked up as the "web's opinion," Google felt no need.

Why is this back in the news? My Looking At Google Bombs, But Not Very Well post from last week goes into this. In particular, this person earlier this month stumbled upon the fact that a search for [failure] on Google brings back the Bush bio at first, a slightly new twist but one already three months old. This person picked up on the post, noting that MSN lists the Michael Moore site instead. That got the attention of widely-read Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble, who posted briefly about it.

So new life was injected into an old corpse, and what an impact! I started getting email from people recently about the queries because they're coming across the older article I did. I assume Google is on that receiving end as well, since on today's Google blog, director of consumer web products Marissa Mayer commented on the query:

If you do a Google search on the word [failure] or the phrase [miserable failure], the top result is currently the White Houseï¿œs official biographical page for President Bush. We've received some complaints recently from users who assume that this reflects a political bias on our part. I'd like to explain how these results come up in order to allay these concerns.

Google's search results are generated by computer programs that rank web pages in large part by examining the number and relative popularity of the sites that link to them. By using a practice called googlebombing, however, determined pranksters can occasionally produce odd results. In this case, a number of webmasters use the phrases [failure] and [miserable failure] to describe and link to President Bush's website, thus pushing it to the top of searches for those phrases. We don't condone the practice of googlebombing, or any other action that seeks to affect the integrity of our search results, but we're also reluctant to alter our results by hand in order to prevent such items from showing up. Pranks like this may be distracting to some, but they don't affect the overall quality of our search service, whose objectivity, as always, remains the core of our mission.

My observations on this latest statement:

Notice what was the "web's opinion" in 2003 now becomes a "prank."
Pranks, when not involving paid links or for some commercial gain, are apparently tolerated. Pranks involving commercial gain may be deemed spam and so threatening to the purity of the index that sites might be banned, be prevented from passing link reputation or other actions.
Google has flat out said in the past they don't hand manipulate their results. What they've meant, as I explained in my Google In Controversy Over Top-Ranking For Anti-Jewish Site article, is that they don't try to manipulate what ranks well for a particular term. They do hand manipulate from the point of view of removing sites from their index for various reasons.

This latest Google post is specifically about the manipulation of rankings, rather than site banning -- and it's noteworthy that rather than having a flat out denial, Google is simply saying it is "reluctant" to alter rankings by hand. That suggest that in some cases, they might do this.

Realistically, I think this was bad wording on the part of Google. I suspect they still don't hand manipulate rankings, as they've long said they wouldn't do.

Finally, I've long called Google bombing instead "link bombing," because these so-called "Google bombs" go off on other places aside from just Google.

Indeed, a quick review today shows the Bush bio at the top of results for a search on [miserable failure] at Ask Jeeves, Google and Yahoo and ranked ninth at MSN. For just [failure], the bio is tops at Google and second at Yahoo and MSN -- no presence at all at Ask Jeeves. FYI, AOL's Google-powered results don't show the Bush bio because of specific hand manipulation AOL does.

Given this, I find it bizarre public relations, at the very least, for Google to be embracing the term "googlebombing" itself, since that implies it's a problem that only Google has, as opposed to the industry as a whole.

I'll stick with link bombing myself, but who knows, maybe I'll have to bend to popular pressure that will no doubt be further fueled by Google's own statement.

Postscript from Gary: Here in the U.S. it appears that Google is running an ad for the search terms [miserable failiure]. The ad reads:

Why these results? These results may seem politically slanted. Here's what happened.

A link to the Google Blog post about linkbombs is included. Here's a screen cap of the results page and ad.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 19, 2005, 9:53 AM | Permalink

Penalized in Google? Here's What to Do

If you've pushed the line with optimization techniques and have been dinged by Google, Matt Cutts offers advice on how to get back into the search engine's good graces. Matt says it boils down to two basic things:

Fundamentally, Google wants to know two things: 1) that any spam on the site is gone or fixed, and 2) that its not going to happen again. Id recommend giving a short explanation of what happened from your perspective: what actions may have led to any penalties and any corrective action that youve taken to prevent any spam in the future.

Follow Matt's guidelines and with luck your site will be reinstated in Google search results in anywhere from 2-8 weeks.

Posted by Chris Sherman on September 19, 2005, 7:43 AM | Permalink

Yahoo Cache Now Offers Direct Links to Wayback Machine

It appears that Yahoo has joined Gigablast and Clusty and is now providing direct links to "archived" versions of pages via The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. You'll find a direct link to check to see if older versions of the page are available in the box at the top of every page that Yahoo caches. Look for the text link that reads, "check for previous versions at the Internet Archive." Click the link and you'll transported to The Wayback Machine to see if older copies for the page/URL you're viewing have been archived.

Posted by Gary Price on September 18, 2005, 2:35 PM | Permalink

Results from Google Groups Now Appearing at the Bottom of Google Web Results Pages

Results from Google Groups are now visible (query dependent, of course) in a OneBox on Google web results pages. The addition is documented on the Google Web Search Features page. Unlike other OneBox results that embed relevant links from Google Local, Google Print, Froogle and other sources at the TOP of web results pages, the OneBox for Google Groups appears at the BOTTOM of web results pages. Here's an example. The Google Groups OneBox contains three direct links specific posts along with direct link to run the query in the Google Groups database. These results are also set apart with two icons. The first a balloon with a question mark inside. The other a balloon with an exclamation point inside.

Postscript From Danny: We'd seen Google experiment with bringing this in at the end of August, but I can't recall if it was documented then. I don't think that was the case, but it could have been.

Posted by Gary Price on September 17, 2005, 1:38 PM | Permalink

Best Buy: the $30,000 Podcast Sponsor

Poynter's Steve Outing has it that Best Buy is spending $30,000 on a podcast sponsorship with DenverPost.com.

Posted by Zachary Rodgers on September 16, 2005, 3:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Shopping.com's Merchant Account Center Offline for Six Days

Brian Smith from ComparisonEngines.com is not very happy with Shopping.com. Smith writes that beginning today Shopping.com's merchant account center will be unavailable for six days. Yes, Brian did get one email notifying him of the extended down time but thinks (correcly, I might add) that not allowing customers to have a method to make changes to their account for almost a week is "absurd" and "poor customer service."

Smith writes:
According to the current notification on the site, no changes can be made to my account over the next 6 days which means that merchants are going to get charged for clicks they might not want. This is poor customer service, and I expect to be credited for any clicks over the next 6 days.

Posted by Gary Price on September 16, 2005, 2:31 PM | Permalink

Daily SearchCast, Sept. 16, 2005: Baidu Sued Over Music Copyright; Microsoft Wants AOL?; Google Guys Do Lunch With Investors; Google Sends "You're Banned" Emails, & More!

Today's search podcast covers Chinese search leader Baidu sued over music copyright infringement claims, the Google Guys lunching with investors and analysts, another Katrina missing persons search tool, Google for the first time notifying webmasters if they've been banned, Microsoft maybe wanting a piece of AOL, a new gift chooser at Ask Jeeves and more!

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 16, 2005, 2:27 PM | Permalink

Google Zeitgeist 05: Featuring Press & Bloggers But No Blogging Or Coverage Allowed

So I'm reading a discussion over at Threadwatch about those going to our SEW Forums Live Anaheim event next month, and member eWhisper notes he can't make it, as Zeitgeist ends that day? Zeitgeist? I follow the link. Zeitgeist '05: The Google Partner Forum is happening on Oct. 25-27, the first "customer innovation conference" Google says it has ever held. About 400 people are on the invite only list. Speakers on the agenda range from the top three Google Guys, Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Eric Schmdit to IAC's Barry Diller to MSN's Yusuf Mehdi to Yahoo's Terry Semel to Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble. The traditional press is well in attendance, with James Fallows of the Atlantic Monthly, New Yorker staff writer Malcolm Gladwell, the chairman and publisher of the New York Times Arthur Sulzberger and others. Excellent, can't wait to hear what comes out. Wait a minute! The FAQ says:

All speeches and discussions at Zeitgeist are off the record. To ensure that our presenters and attendees can speak openly, no press coverage or blogging is permitted.

This will be good, to see if you can keep open discussions among 400 people, some of them bloggers, many of them press, somehow off the record.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 16, 2005, 12:46 PM | Permalink

Internet on TV: Big in Japan?

Apparently, five Japanese TV broadcasters are cooking up plans for Internet TV-related with ad giant Dentsu and communications conglomerate Softbank. That's according to a report from Reuters that quotes "sources".

The sources said Softbank aims to create a new joint venture that will launch a Web site with more than 1,000 television programmes distributed by the broadcasters next spring that would be available to viewers at no cost and funded by commercials.

Interesting stuff. Also noteworthy -- U.S. cable player Comcast has been involved in the discussions. It's potentially providing programming, according to the report.

Posted by Pamela Parker on September 16, 2005, 11:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Five Music Companies Sue Baidu

Baidu sued over music downloads from the Hong, from the Hong Kong Standard, reports that several large music companies are suing Chinese search engine Baidu for allegedly making hundreds of songs easily accessible via their MP3 search tool. The companies filing the lawsuit are Universal, EMI, Warner, Sony BMG and their local subsidiaries, Cinepoly, Go East and Gold Label.

What has drawn the industry's ire is the ease with which Internet users can use Baidu's search engine to locate copies of music stored on the Web, even to the point of organizing songs into Top 10 lists by category. When a user clicks on a particular song, the engine provides a direct link to the URL where the file is stored.
Since the search process is automatic, Baidu argues that it is simply providing the basic service offered by all search engines, and is not itself involved in any copyright infringement. In addition, it promises to remove the link if a company can prove it owns the right to a song. "This practice is consistent with legal requirements of PRC law," Baidu said last night.

The industry, however, argues that a Chinese court, in an earlier case, ruled MP3 searches were illegal.

Prior to Baidu's IPO, some speculated that copyright issues might be a concern for the company. We also blogged a report about Baidu removing links to thousands of pirated files from their database.

Posted by Gary Price on September 16, 2005, 10:36 AM | Permalink

Search Forums Roundup: Sep. 16, 2005

Today's SearchDay, Search Engine Forums Spotlight, features our weekly links to this week's hot topics from search engine forums across the web: Google Offers Advice to Sites on Penalty - Yahoo! Instant Search - Google Blog Search Launched - MSN AdCenter Review - New legal threat to Google over GMail, and more.

Posted by Chris Sherman on September 16, 2005, 10:13 AM | Permalink

Google Execs Lunch With Investors and Analysts

The Bloomberg article: Google may expand in China, buy faster computers, offers a bit about what Google's Eric Schmidt and Sergey Brin "hinted" about yesterday with stock analysts and investors at an invitation only lunch at the St. Regis Hotel in New York.

'All that people care about is what are they going to use the money for,' said David Schiller, a portfolio manager at JPMorgan Chase & Co who attended the meeting and doesn't own Google shares. 'Best-case scenario is they want to buy a bunch of search companies or online gaming companies in China.' The meeting didn't blunt one common criticism of Google and its executives: they're secretive.

Posted by Gary Price on September 16, 2005, 9:47 AM | Permalink

Updated List Of Answer Search Engines & Travel Search Engines

I somehow grabbed some time from the ongoing search news to start on some site updates! Answer Searching & Answer Search Engines is now minty-fresh with resources that help you get answers, such as from reference works or fact databases. Going on a trip? Travel Search Engines is also now updated with all those new travel search engines that tap into more than just partner databases, along with some old favorites. More updates to come, as I can squeeze them in.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 15, 2005, 7:02 PM | Permalink

A Terrorism Research Database

Here's a resource for your research database file.

A couple of week's ago over on ResourceShelf (one my other sites) our deputy editor, Shirl Kennedy, wrote an thorough overview of the Terrorism Knowledge Base from the the National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism. This resource contains info about terrorist groups, incidents, leaders, image archive and much more. Resources can be browsed or searched via a simple search box or this powerful advanced search interface.

Posted by Gary Price on September 15, 2005, 6:42 PM | Permalink

Daily SearchCast, Sept. 15, 2005: MSN Katrina Flyover, John Battelle's Book 'The Search,' Sneaking Kai-Fu Lee In The Backdoor, Elections For SMA-NA, Google Graduates Its Personal Home Page, Yahoo's New Instant Search & More!

Today's search podcast covers a new before-and-after aerial photo service from MSN, thumbs up for John Battelle's new book, a search marketing group holding its first officer elections, whether MSN's new search API really is "way better" than Google's, as Bill Gates says, Google encouraging people to make use of its personalized home page service, Yahoo Instant Search showing answers before you even push the search button and more!

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 15, 2005, 6:35 PM | Permalink

Watch "The Google Boys" Video

Well, John's new "must read" book is now out and in about five weeks, The Google Story by David Vise and Mark Malseed will be released. Lots to read. If you're looking for a history of Google on video, you might want to check out: The Google Boys. This 50 minute program originally aired on The Biography Channel last year and is available on tape (VHS). Comments from John "The Search" Battelle, Terry Winograd, and Fred Vogelstein are featured in the program.

Postscript: Btw, I noticed today that short bios of Sergey Brin and Larry Page are now in the The Biography Channel's BiograpySearch database.

Posted by Gary Price on September 15, 2005, 6:13 PM | Permalink

Google Testing Notification Of Banning To Webmasters

Nice scoop over at Threadwatch, coming off a thread at Search Engine Forums! Google Pilot New Webmaster Communications Initiative at Threadwatch covers a new Google program where Google is emailing those who run sites where they spot things they think might violate their guidelines. Google's Matt Cutts is going to blog more, but he comments over there:

Google is trying out a pilot program to alert site owners when we're removing their site for violating our guidelines. JavaScript redirects are the first trial, but we've also sent a few emails about hidden text, I believe. This is not targeted to sites like buy-my-cheap-viagra-here.com, but more for sites that have good content, but may not be as savvy about what their SEO was doing or what that "Make thousands of doorway pages for $39.95" software was doing. Personally, I think opening up a line of communication to let webmasters know when we're taking action is a really good thing--a site owner doesn't have to guess about what happened. But again, we're starting with a trial program. I'll blog about it more soon. [Note: Matt's blog is here]

Yeah, communication is great. It's just odd that after years of being told it was impossible or difficult to provide some type of "is my page OK" tool for webmasters to use, now Google's proactively doing it. Such a tool has been dismissed as potentially helping spammers.

The email sent says that a particular URL was removed and lists some reasons why, along with a note that it will be pulled for at least 30 days unless content is changed and a reinclusion request is done.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 15, 2005, 4:03 PM | Permalink

SEW Forums Live Comes To The OC!

It's time for our next Search Engine Watch Forums Live event, and where are we going? Disneyland! Well, the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim, California, to be precise. SEW Forums Live Anaheim 2005 happens on Thursday, October 27 from 2:30pm to 6:00pm.

For those not familiar, SEWF Live isn't a huge four day extravaganza like our SES shows. Instead, it's meant as an easy, informal networking event designed especially for those who can come by from the local area.

A general session kicks off at 2:30pm where Search Engine Watch Forums editor Elisabeth Osmelowski will have a panel taking questions and offering advice and thoughts on anything. After a break, there will also be another short open panel session involving some of our SEWF moderators from the area -- we've got quite a contingent out there! -- and some from afar (Disneyland is tempting some to come on out). More networking runs from 5pm to 6pm. After that, Disneyland's just a monorail ride away.

For those unaware, Orange County's where I grew up and lived until my British wife dragged me kicking and screaming to England eight years ago. We're going back for vacation when this is happening, so I get to be out there having fun. Finally, we get to do a search event of some sort back at home!

More information on the event and very shortly, how to actually register, is here.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 15, 2005, 2:20 PM | Permalink

Microsoft Talks To Time Warner About Acquiring a Piece of AOL

Via a post in our forums, we learn of a NY Post article: AOL's Time May Be Up, about Microsoft talking with Time Warner about about acquiring a piece of AOL.

Under the plan being considered, Microsoft would pay some money to Time Warner for the AOL stake, leaving the two companies approximately equal partners in the venture.

The article also says that AOL has also talked with Google and Yahoo about acquiring part of the service.

Of course, a partnership between MS and TW/AOL would likely have implications for Google. Why? Google ads are visible on AOL Search results pages. Google could/would loose eyeballs if AOL begins showing advertising from MSN's soon to launch AdCenter service. For site owners, an implication is also that AOL's Google-powered results would be replaced by MSN's own crawler results.

Posted by Gary Price on September 15, 2005, 1:17 PM | Permalink

YoungGuns Creative Contest on AdHoles

As part of its work for the YoungGuns creative awards -- which is limited to the under-thirty set -- Crispin Porter + Bogusky has set up a sub-community on ad industry networking site AdHoles.

CPBs own Kat Morris is the community chair. She's also one of the creatives who stripped for the agency's filthy-minded "Hardly Legal" campaign supporting the show. See our coverage.

I'm going to use this as an excuse to join AdHoles. I'll admit my experience so far with Soflow has made me a gunshy of marketing-centric online social networks. The forums there are good, but the pace of new threads in the marketing communities has been too furious since mid-summer. Can't keep up.

Posted by Zachary Rodgers on September 15, 2005, 1:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Breaking Down The Google Print 5 Libraries

If you're interested in learning about the print book collections of the five libraries Google plans to scan/digitize (assuming all goes as planned), a new article in Digital Libraries: Anatomy of Aggregate Collections, uses data from OCLC's WorldCat (the largest bibliographic database in the world) to provide breakdowns and comparisons.

From the article:

This article offers some perspectives on GPLP in light of what is known about library print book collections in general, and those of the Google 5 in particular, from information in OCLC's WorldCat bibliographic database and holdings file. Questions addressed include:

Coverage: What proportion of the system-wide print book collection will GPLP potentially cover? What is the degree of holdings overlap across the print book collections of the five participating libraries?

Language: What is the distribution of languages associated with the print books held by the GPLP libraries? Which languages are predominant?

Copyright: What proportion of the GPLP libraries' print book holdings are out of copyright?

Works: How many distinct works are represented in the holdings of the GPLP libraries? How does a focus on works impact coverage and holdings overlap?

Convergence: What are the effects on coverage of using a different set of five libraries? What are the effects of adding the holdings of additional libraries to those of the GPLP libraries, and how do these effects vary by library type?

Posted by Gary Price on September 15, 2005, 12:48 PM | Permalink

searchkatrina.org: Missing Persons Meta Search from Louisiana Tech University

searchkatrina.org is a meta search tool that scours 10 databases that contains the names of people missing after Hurricane Katrina devastated the gulf coast. searchkatrina.org was built by a computer science faculty member and five grad students at Louisiana Tech University.

From a news release:

Noting the site's user friendliness, [Professor] Leangsuksun said, "Simple is beautiful." The group agreed. "If a name is not found in our database, the user is directed to another link. From there the user just has to click," Limaye said. "We wanted the people to have fewer difficulties." The site combs numerous databases of sites containing lists of evacuees. Users can also register their information with the site. In some cases, the Web site provides locations of where the victims evacuated to and an update on their safety.

We've posted links to other missing people meta search tools here, here, and here.

Posted by Gary Price on September 15, 2005, 12:02 PM | Permalink

My Thoughts On "The Search"

Chris did the heavy lifting in reviewing John's Battelle's new book, "The Search," but I wanted to add my own comments as well. Overall, it's fantastic work and a must read for anyone interested in search.

The web-driven search industry is now about 10 years old and has been sorely lacking a good recounting of how it developed. John delivers us that history, and it's very welcome to have. One of the most pleasing things is that he's managed to avoid as much as possible making this entirely about Google. Google is a dominant force, but other players such as AltaVista and GoTo/Overture get well deserved time here.

I told John already I felt a bit sad that the rise and fall of the Open Directory and human directories in general really didn't get covered. They may be a footnote, but for a short period, it seemed like human power was going to be the way forward. Why that failed is an important lesson as we go into a second decade where many assume folksonomies will somehow take over.

Another quibble. In 1996, it's not correct to say as on Page 78 that it was "nobody's goal" to be indexed in search engines. Plenty of people wanted exactly this. If they weren't, I wouldn't be writing now. That's the year I started writing about search and SEO issues, and the positive reception from readers told me there was tons of interest in being well indexed.

Site owners simply didn't want to get stomped on by badly behaving spiders that threatened to stall their servers, as Google's predecessor BackRub was doing. That WAS a concern for some during that year and more in the preceding years. That leads me to the only really good prior history on web search we've had until now, "Bots: The Origin Of New Species" from Andrew Leonard from 1997. That's another must read. It's amazing we've gone this long without the rest of the chapters of search being written since Leonard's book, but again, so glad John's now done that now.

John also talks of Google getting complaints over how people were ranked because "this was the first time anyone had claimed to rank the inherent value of a web site." I have to disagree and feel this overcredits Google. Plenty of people were concerned about being listed well in Excite or Lycos or Infoseek or AltaVista or Yahoo -- and all of those services suggested they were trying to rank sites by their quality or relevancy. Some of them even did rudimentary link counting.

As I said, these are quibbles. I'm a tough audience to please, and if that's all I'm finding in a 300+ page book, it's an A+ effort :)

Some favorite parts. Overall, for anyone who has been involved in search over the years, I think the entire journey through of various search milestones will make you smile, laugh or go "oh, yeah" as you recall where you were when you heard bits of search news.

Out on page 185, there's a jaw-dropping part that Google may have rigged AdWords to show ads in a certain way to help its trademark infringement suit with American Blinds. He writes:

The American Blinds lawyer dropped his bomb: he had what he believed to be incontrovertible proof that Google had fiddled with its own search results this very day and only in this region so as to sway the court's opinion in this matter

Google denied the allegation, suggesting it might be a technical glitch that caused it.

John also talks of the US Patriot Act and how it requires search engines among others to cooperate with the US government to release information -- and how Google cofounder Sergey Brin hadn't read it. Wow. Well, wow to some, I'm sure, as I've seen in some reviews of the book. I can see not reading the legalese part, so perhaps Brin hadn't read it but knew what was in it. But still wow again, when you come to the part that the act prevents apparently even disclosing to anyone that you've handed over information!

Be sure to check out the footnotes, where it turns out Google cofounder Larry Page originally, in discussions over a final interview, wanted the right to review any mention of Google, himself or Sergey Brin in the book and respond in footnotes. John spent weeks in negotiations before Larry backed down and even apologized, though he felt journalism in general was "extremely flawed" and wanted a way to "make it better." Can you imagine all those who feel Google's search results may be flawed and would like the ability to "footnote" their own listings. That idea wouldn't fly far.

Aaron Wall over at SEO Book notes today that there's not a lot of focus on SEO in the book, and that's true. The history of search marketing and the search marketing industry essentially revolves around the Florida update of 2003 (named not as the book says for the hurricanes to hit Florida that year but for the WebmasterWorld conference planned to hit the state a few months later) and how many webmasters woke up to the fact they couldn't expect a free ride on Google.

Such shake-ups had happened before to webmasters on Google and on other search engines even before that. I can remember getting a call at home on the weekend after an Excite shake-up knocked a guy out in 1999 or 2000. I'm in the UK; he was in the US and tracked me down, having a crisis because his business was so dependant on free traffic from Excite (yes, Excite!) that he was going to go under. But Florida was certainly a watershed for a generation of SEOs/SEMs that had effectively only known Google.

There's some discussion of the give-and-take/arms race/whatever between site owners and search engines, in particular Google. But for the most part, that's a side issue in the telling. Don't expect the book to be a history of SEO and search marketing. This is really a book focusing on the business of search engines themselves.

Need some more summaries? USA Today has a good review here, the Associated Press over here and Google's Matt Cutts writes over here highlighting parts he liked from his perspective.

Like I said, it's a must read, a fantastic effort, and I'm glad he fought through all the interviews not to mention the constantly changing industry to do it. Rest up, John, then get to work on The Search: Part 2, because there's going to be more history that needs a tellin'.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 15, 2005, 11:22 AM | Permalink

Ask Jeeves Unveils Gift Finder

The Ask Jeeves Blog has news about AJ's new gift finder. It's powered by another IAC/InterActive property, Gifts.com. Yes, it's IAC/Jeeves synergy.

The new gift finder can be accessed via this interface or by a Smart Answer on web results pages if the search query suggests the searcher is looking for this type of info. For example: a search for "birthday gifts" shows a Smart Answers box at the top of the results page. From here, simply click and focus your search to identify specific items by price, recipient, or interest. Here's another example, this time a search for anniversary gifts. Jeeves continues to offer a product/shopping search tool in conjunction with PriceGrabber. Btw, Smart Answers with direct links into the AJ product search database are also available for specific products and product categories. Here's an example.

Posted by Gary Price on September 15, 2005, 11:01 AM | Permalink

More on Microsoft's "Gadgets"

The other day when MSN's API's became available I mentioned that developers can now create Gadgets (similar to what others call Widgets) for MSN's Start.com page, the Windows Sidebar and Windows SideShow. If you want to learn more about MS Gadgets, the project has a blog. It's available here.

Posted by Gary Price on September 15, 2005, 10:36 AM | Permalink

Two Thumbs Up for Battelle's The Search

John Battelle's book The Search has finally been published, and it was worth the wait. Combining a history of the search industry with an analysis of search as a business, it's unlike any other book I've yet seen. The book is also worth reading for Battelle's thoughtful musings on the evolution of search into what he calls "the database of intentions," a medium that's all pervasive and will have an impact on just about all aspects of our lives.

I've got a full review of the new book in today's SearchDay article, Search as the New Great Game.

Posted by Chris Sherman on September 15, 2005, 9:11 AM | Permalink

SMA-NA To Hold Elections

Todd at Stuntdubl notes that the Search Marketing Association of North America -- SMA-NA -- may soon have elections. Chief organizer Ian McAnerin says over here on the High Rankings Forums that only one more member is needed to call a quorum and lists potential offices. Then on the SMA-NA forum, he says the quorum has been met. So election information should be going out to members soon.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 15, 2005, 8:15 AM | Permalink

Maybe MSN's API Isn't "Way Better"

When Microsoft's Bill Gates declared that MSN's search API was "way better" than Google's (and apparently Yahoo's), I did kind of think, "really?" I mean, the API had only been out for about a day. But I don't know APIs, so maybe it was super-powerful. Then again, maybe it's not. Aaron at SEO Book writes of a friend upset that the API lacks the Java and PHP support that both Google and Yahoo offer. Discussion on the Microsoft Developer Forums here.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 15, 2005, 8:07 AM | Permalink

Getting Ready For The Holidays

Search & the Holiday Season from Kevin Ryan at iMedia Connection has him looking at tips to help you get ready for the holiday shopping period, in terms of a paid search campaign. As for SEO/free search, start gearing up now!

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 15, 2005, 8:01 AM | Permalink

Google Pitches College Life, As Powered By Google

Barry at Search Engine Roundtable spots a WebmasterWorld thread discussing a new College Life, powered by Google page. What's there? Google aiming its services from Gmail to Picasa at college students. Of course, these services could easily be aimed at anyone. Expect Senior Life, Boomer Life, GenX Life, Alternative Lifestyles Life pages to come soon :)

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 15, 2005, 7:58 AM | Permalink

MSN's Katrina Flyover Offers Many Before-And-After Views Of New Orleans

Katrina Flyover is a new MSN Virtual Earth-powered service that lets you click on camera icons scatted throughout New Orleans to get a birds-eye, before-and-after view of the city in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

I found it a bit buggy, especially in Firefox, where I couldn't get the "after" images to load and the "before" images didn't fill the window properly. It didn't work at first with Internet Explorer, but after reloading, I got along fine.

There's lot and lots to explore. It would be easier if you could see the camera icons when zoomed out just a bit beyond the default level, but you can't. So be sure to scroll around the screen once you see the camera icons, to see just how many points have been mapped.

Chris Pirillo gives some background info here on the project, which was captured by planes last week. Robert Scoble points to this brief mention of the project by one of the developers involved. Robin Good has an excellent review with screenshots and background information here.

See also our past Looking for Katrina Images On Google & Yahoo and Post-Katrina Images On Google Maps, Elsewhere, People Finding Project & Wiki Resources posts for other ways to see views of the area.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 15, 2005, 7:48 AM | Permalink

Class Action Suit On Click Fraud STILL To Stay In Arkansas

Google Suit Sent Back to State Court from the Associated Press notes that a class-action lawsuit against Google, Yahoo and other search engines over click fraud accusations will STILL not move to US federal court. If I understand right, a request for this move was denied back in July. Now it looks like an appeal of that decision was also denied. More about the case here.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 15, 2005, 7:23 AM | Permalink

New Yahoo Instant Search Gives Answers Directly -- No Results Page Required

A weird one for you, but sounds pretty cool. Yahoo's given the heads-up that a new Instant Search feature is to be offered by the time this story goes live. Type in a word, and Instant Search will show you an answer for popular queries in a "speech bubble" directly below the search box.

In other words, say you wanted to search for wikipedia. Type that in, and Yahoo says it will recognize that's a popular query, where the first listing on its results page is often chosen. So, it will suggest that for you. Click in the speech bubble, and you can go right to the page, without having to generate search results.

In a way, it's a "I'm Feeling Kind Of Lucky" feature for Yahoo. Google's trademark I'm Feeling Lucky button on its home page that takes you to the first search result that would have come up on Google, had you gone to the search results page and clicked there. But if you're feeling lucky, you can trust Google, use the button, and it will take you there directly.

Yahoo's Instant Search does a similar thing, only it gives you a preview of where you'll go. So you can decide a bit more if you're feeling lucky before trusting it.

In some cases, Yahoo will take you to a shortcut result or answer. For instance, weather san francisco on Yahoo gives you a Yahoo Shortcuts result first, where the weather forecast is shown right within the results. With Instant Search, the forecast should appear just below the search box, no need even to click to reach it.

Additionally, if you type in a URL, Instant Search is supposed to turn that into a link to take you to the page entered. Misspell a word? A correction should appear, with a link to get results for the corrected word.

Not every query will have Instant Search functionality. Yahoo says it works for the most popular queries only. Behind the scenes, it depends on Ajax to make the magic happen quickly.

But if searchers don't get results, then they don't see ads -- so won't this possibly hurt Yahoo? Yahoo didn't really answer my question on that directly, saying more that they think it will be a cool new feature to enhance the search experience and stickiness of use at Yahoo. How exactly it will evolve will depend on how it gets used.

My interpretation? For some queries, Yahoo doesn't mind if you don't see ads. For many other queries, you'll still need to hit the results page. If this helps many searchers find Yahoo more useful, then it may keep them with the service and generate more queries and ad views, rather than hurt that.

Want to try the feature? OK, you're supposed to find information at Yahoo Next, the Yahoo debut area for funky experimental things like this. You're also supposed to be able to find it from the new Instant Search area. In either place, once you do a search and see the Instant Search speech bubble show up, you're supposed to get an option to make this work on Yahoo's pure search page, if you want it. That's at search.yahoo.com. It's not being offered for the main Yahoo.com page.

How about getting it into the Yahoo Toolbar? Not yet, but Yahoo said it's something they'd look to see if possible.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 15, 2005, 12:01 AM | Permalink

Ask Jeeves Launches Blog/Feed Search in Japan

While we're all focusing on Google Blog Search today, a reader sends along a note that Ask Jeeves released (beta) their new blog engine on Ask Jeeves Japan a couple of days ago. Interesting. I wonder when it will become available on other AJ sites? Of course, Bloglines, now owned by AJ, has offered a blog search service for several years. In fact, Bloglines won our SEW Award for Best Blog/Feed Search Engine this year.

Here's a search for "Search Engine Watch" on Ask Jeeves Japan blog search. I don't have a Japanese character set on my computer (I don't read Japanese) but I did notice a button to subscribe to feeds (with Bloglines) located next to each result. I also spotted a time stamp of when the post hit the database and an option to limit your search results to Podcast entries (look for a link on the right side of the results page). You can also limit a search to podcast content from the outset by selecting the option located next to the search box. More as we learn it.

Postscript: I just had a brief chat with Jim Lanzone from AJ. No word about when the new blog search tool will launch outside of Japan.

Posted by Gary Price on September 14, 2005, 7:20 PM | Permalink

Understanding How Google Grabs Feeds with "FeedFetcher"

If you're interested in learning more about how Google retrieves and displays RSS/ATOM feeds that end up on personalized homepages, the folks in Mountain View have just posted an FAQ about what they call Google "FeedFetcher."

Feedfetcher is how Google grabs RSS or Atom feeds when users choose to add them to their Google homepage. Feedfetcher collects and periodically refreshes these user-initiated feeds, but does not index them in Google's search services (feeds only appear in our search results if they've been crawled by Googlebot).

Posted by Gary Price on September 14, 2005, 5:18 PM | Permalink

Convera's Web Index Expands

Convera, a well-known name in enterprise search technology, posted a bit of news today that their web index continues to grow. So? It's been reported that Convera will enter the public web search space with a release of a web search tool by the end of this year. The company also announced that they've added 100 million images to their web index. Convera recently announced that they've just licensed use of their web database by an undisclosed U.S. Government organization.

Posted by Gary Price on September 14, 2005, 4:51 PM | Permalink

Google Personalized Home Page Graduates To, Well, A Home Page Link

Google's Personalized Home page service that I wrote about being launched last May has officially graduated from Google Labs, says the Google Blog. Heck, it doesn't even seem to still be a beta service! So what's this mean? If you go to Google.com, you'll see a "Personalized Home" link on the home page to encourage you to sign up. One caveat. You won't see that link if you are outside the US, it seems. I certainly can't see it. Don't worry. You can still sign up by going directly to the personalized home page area here. Just tried the service and want to comment or discuss? Visit our SEW Forums thread, New - Personalized Google Homepage!

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 14, 2005, 3:54 PM | Permalink

Daily SearchCast, Sept. 14, 2005: New Google Blog Search, Gates On Google's "Honeymoon," AOL Getting Podcast Search, New Video Search Tool, Cool College Course On Search & More!

Today's search podcast covers the new Google Blog Search, Gates on the Google "honeymoon," Kai-Fu Lee getting to work for Google, sort of, Yahoo's trademark app for Y.com, AOL adding podcast search support, a new video search tool, a great course on search for UC Berkeley students and more!

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 14, 2005, 3:20 PM | Permalink

Codase For Seeking Open Source Code

Codase is a new search engine designed to let you seek open source code. It apparently understand code as code, rather than text. If you deal with code, that probably sounds great to you. Check it out, and a few more details below from what they sent:

Codase is a new kind of search service for open source code. Rather than treating code as text, Codase understands programming languages, and treats code as code, the way it's supposed to be. This unique and syntax-aware approach provides the most accurate and detailed search results with fine granularity levels of controls. With Codase, developers can search functions, classes, strings, constants, macros, comments and other programming language constructs.

Codase hosts huge amount of open source codes providing a much better coverage, as it covers codes usually hidden inside compressed files and source control repositories, where general search engines fail to find and index. In addition, Codase only indexes and searches high quality codes with every line of code literally validated and compiled by intelligent and powerful source code analysis engine.

This initial alpha release focuses mainly on Linux C/C++ code. Future releases will address other programming languages and platforms.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 14, 2005, 2:52 PM | Permalink

After Just a Few Hours With Google Blog Search: Comments and Wishes

After a few hours of testing Google Blog Search (GBS), here are a few comments, complaints, and things I would like to see in the future.

Google needs to do a better job explaining what Google Blog search indexes vs. what's available from Google News.

The Google Blog Search "related blogs" section section offers access to non-blog RSS feeds like weather info from NOAA. Is the NOAA home page a blog? Please explain. Plenty of valuable and current info, in addition to blog content, is available via RSS and Google Blog Search could do a lot to promote non-blog uses of the technology.

Explanation that GBS is NOT always a full text search. In other words, if it's just a "snippet" feed, you might be missing useful material. Actually, other blog/rss engines should do the same thing and explain (aka teach) users what they are and are not searching. If it's older material, Google could also provide a link to check Google's main web index where the complete blog MIGHT be part of a frequent crawl/recrawl.

I'm not a fan of filters but when you promote the fact that you offer one (it's mentioned in a guide to GBS that Google sent me) it should work. I searched (Wed. afternoon) for words that are blocked on Google Web Search but they're currently not blocked when searching the new blog database. I activated SafeSearch (strict filtering) from the preferences page and from the advanced search page and still no go.
Ability to combine other Google Blog Search syntax with the link: command. Btw, combining other syntax with link: is also not possible with Google Web Search.

Option to remove from results blogs that simply scrape headlines from other blogs especially when the blog originally posting the item is included.

Option to quickly add blogs discovered via Google Blog Search to your aggregator, personalized page, or Google Sidebar with just a click. Something similar for pre-emptive search queries delivered via RSS would also be a timesaver.

A standalone blog directory organized by topic(s) based on publisher suggestion and mining the text of the blog over a period of time.

Option to limit by location of publisher if a Geotag is used. BlogDigger Local is offering this type of thing.

Clustering of "related" blog posts linked underneath each result. A great way to find related posts.

Improved Relevancy: One example. I did a search for my name [Gary Price] and found several non-relevant results in the first 20. In the second result "Gary" is found in one part of the post and "Price" in another. Then, back to results mentioning yours truly before posts discussing the "price" of movies for sale. Note: Yes, of course, I could search "Gary Price" and get more precise results but most searchers don't use quotes to denote phrases.

Posted by Gary Price on September 14, 2005, 1:46 PM | Permalink

Microsoft Email On Employee Loss To Google & Sneaking Lee In The Back Door

Google exodus feared early on, e-mail reveals from the Seattle Times passes along two tidbits out of the recent Google-Microsoft fight for Kai-Fu Lee. Microsoft has been worried about Google gaining its employees since at least March 2004, when the leader of MSN's search team wrote an email called, "Losing people to Google -- and a potential solutions." Sorry, what was actually in that email wasn't released to the public, but high-ranking execs up to Bill Gates took part in the discussion from it. And also, to keep things quiet about Lee coming over, Google brought him into a remote building on the campus with a private entrance and no receptionist for his interview. Hmm -- I didn't know Google had many remote buildings. They've all seemed pretty close to each other to me. But getting past a receptionist is easy for any employee with a key card.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 14, 2005, 1:38 PM | Permalink

Snap.com Offers Shopping Search Powered by Smarter.com

Word in this news release that Idealab's Snap.com has launched a shopping search engine that's powered with results from Smarter.com, an engine that I've mentioned several times on the blog. Smarter.com is led by by former Overture employees Talmadge O'Neill and Harry Tsao while GoTo.com/Overture founder, Bill Gross, is at the Snap.com helm.

Posted by Gary Price on September 14, 2005, 12:48 PM | Permalink

Vint Cerf: Helping People Understand the Potential of Google

News.com has some comments from Internet founding father and one of Google's newest employees, Vint Cerf, about what he'll be doing in his new job at Google that begins next month. Cerf spoke today at the FirstMile.US broadband conference today and told the audience:

"What (CEO) Eric Schmidt had in mind is to go around helping people understand both inside and outside of Google what Google's potential is...I want to have the opportunity to challenge people in the labs with problems that need solving.""

Cerf also said that he plans to ask Google engineers if they've explored voice-enabled search.

Vint, I'm not a Google engineer but I can answer that one. The answer is yes. Google Labs once offered Google Voice. The demo is not working but info about the project can be found here. Of course, if Vin "Googles", [voice search Google] he would also find this info. (-:

Posted by Gary Price on September 14, 2005, 12:37 PM | Permalink

The Search Stock Index

What's the Search Stock Index? Actually, Nacho Hernandez one of our SEW Forums moderators calls it the SEM 50 Stock Index. It's his brainchild to come up with 50 search firms that are publicly listed that can be tracked. The list is up to 28 so far, as you'll find here. Think there should be others? Come contribute to the list! And why to do I say "Search Stock Index?" Because not all of these firms are involved with search engine marketing. Search Stock Index is more broad. If not SSI Top 50, then maybe the Search Top 50.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 14, 2005, 11:07 AM | Permalink

Google's Italian Webmaster Guidelines Need Better Translation

Enrico Altavilla writes to note that Google guidelines for Italian webmasters have taken a turn for the worse. After helping them eliminate some translation errors two years ago, he was shocked to find the material reverted in July. He writes:

Back in January 2003, Google.it's guidelines for webmasters (1) were full of translation errors and many Italian webmasters were puzzled by the misleading and meaningless information published on Google.it web site.

So, I sent a correct version of many phrases to the Google translation team, they thanked me with some merchandise and they published a corrected version of their italian guidelines, that you can currently see only in this Archive.org cached page.

The correct version has been on Google.it web site until last July (I can't be more precise), when I noticed that the guidelines reverted to the two years old errors-filled version. This change is producing (again) doubts and questions on webmasters and SEO Italian forums.

I published an article about this problem on my SE related news service and of course I contacted again the translation team to submit the issue. That was on July 17 2005 and since then they did nothing.

That big of a deal? Well, you can judge yourself. Here's how he says the material translates, from what was there, to what's there now, bold noting the changes:

Original: "Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100)."

Italian: "Keep the links to a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100)."

Original: "In particular, avoid links to web spammers"

Italian: "In particular, avoid links to sites that send unsolicited emails"

Original: "Don't employ cloaking or sneaky redirects."

Italian: "Don't employ cloaking or unaccepted redirection commands."

Original: "Avoid 'doorway' pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches"

Italian: "Avoid 'doorway' pages created just for search engines, or other approaches to suppress [browser] cookies"

Original: "It's not safe to assume that just because a specific deceptive technique isn't included on this page, Google approves of it."

Italian: "It's not safe to hypotize that Google approves a web page just because no deceptive techniques were adopted."

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 14, 2005, 10:50 AM | Permalink

Awesome UC Berkeley Class On Search & Webcasts Available

Marti Hearst, a professor over at UC Berkeley, has put together an fantastic line-up of speakers for her Search Engines: Technology, Society, and Business class. I love the topic, because I've wanted to see so much more of this type of study of the impact of search on society. I'd hoped to make it out to California again next month and perhaps take part myself, but my schedule wouldn't work. The good news for anyone is that Marti's doing webcasts of the classes. John Battelle found time to talk yesterday in between being slammed with radio interviews for his new book The Search (it's excellent, FYI -- Chris has a review coming, and I'll blog a few comments as well, likely tomorrow). Use the class link above, and you'll find a link to his webcast, a past one that Marti did and future ones to come.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 14, 2005, 10:37 AM | Permalink

Truveo: A New Video Search Tool

According to the News.com article a new video search engine, Truveo, is launching today. I haven't had much time to tryout the new engine but will try to spend some time with it soon. According to the story, Truveo finds and crawls material from the open web and from mainstream news sources by, "by analyzing visual characteristics of a Web page rather than just text." You can read more about how Truveo works here.

I did notice that Truveo recognizes MediaRSS and offers numerous advanced search options. Again, I haven't had time to run many comparison searches but did see that many of the "mainstream" news video sources (CNN, NY Times, BBC, etc) are also available from video engines like Blinkx, AOL Video, and Yahoo Video. Also, from what I can tell, Truveo doesn't offer "transcript search" of video clips. So, you're searching on metadata and /or blurbs about the content.

More in the article: Start-up Truveo enters video search field.

Posted by Gary Price on September 14, 2005, 10:03 AM | Permalink

Roundup Of Google Blog Search Commentary

Below, a roundup of bloggers and others talking about the new Google Blog Search service that's been launched. For more background on the service, see our Google Launches Industrial Strength Blog Search and Thoughts On & Poking At Google Blog Search posts.

Google's new blog search makes a great first impression has Robert Scoble doing an ego search for himself and finding it sucks because his blog isn't tops. Except it is tops but shows "Velveetaland" as the domain. Why? Glitch, hijacking, I dunno. But the actual link does lead directly to his site. He loves the speed and the relevance when doing an advanced search for scoble PDC, sorted by date.

The only "advanced" thing there really is that he set results to show 100 listings rather than 10. Otherwise, it's just a multiword query. FYI, use the preference options to set results to 100 results permanently. Bad news? That does it for ALL of Google and doesn't let you have a sort by date preference, as I've written. Google Blog Search really needs its own preferences page just for that service, allowing sort by date as a lockdown option.

More playing with Google blog search has him Robert playing more and liking Google more better, and Testing link search out on Google blog search especially in getting backlinks.
Google adds blog search from Dave Winer doesn't seem happy you can get results in either RSS or Atom. Yeah, pick a format and go with it. Of course, if they picked Atom, he wouldn't be happy. So no surprise they decided to offer them both. He's also concerned that if he does a post without a title, Google doesn't seem to "have it." I don't see that. Here are results for his site. Here's the first result:

http://archive.scripting.com/2005/09/14#When:8:19:23AM
46 minutes ago
NPR has a podcast about the Roberts hearings. I caught a bit of it yesterday and
it was really interesting. Surprisingly so.
Scripting News - http://www.scripting.com/

They've got the post -- they just don't have a title because the post doesn't have a title. Solution? Give posts titles. But it may be he's concerned that many of his posts don't appear when compared to Google web search. My other article explains this is the memory problem -- they only have info from March 2005 onward in Google blog search.
Google launches blog search is this the death knell for Technorati, et. al? from Forrester's Charlene Li comes out generally positive about the service. But the idea of Google stripping out "non-blog feeds" like weather and stock quote updates. Not what they tell us. Haven't poked hard enough to test, but if it's a feed, there's a chance it's in there. Only sites they know are in their hand-picked source list for Google News are potentially removed from Google Blog Search, we've been told.
Welcome to the Blogosphere, Google! from Technorati's David Sifry doesn't have him putting Technorati in a casket but instead saying the competition will make things better for everyone.
Google Blog Search is live from Technorati's Niall Kennedy talks about blog search as a potential new testing ground for search marketers. Not really. It's based off feeds, and the ranking is going to be much different than the full text indexing of web pages that web search uses. But then again, if you haven't yet starting running a proper blog, time to start doing them. As I said at an SES conference recently, they're the "acceptable" mirror site. IE, have a regular site and a blog, and that's just fine to the search world, assuming they do different things. And you should, because as you can see, to play in blog search, you need a blog. An ordinary site doesn't get in to have fun.
Google Blog Search reviewed at Blog Herald thinks the link counts suck compared to the competition. Chances are, this is because the Google blog "memory" stretches back only to March 2005, as I wrote. Similar criticism over size of coverage, and chances area again that history is the issue.
Google launches Blog Search at Six Apart, spotted via John Battelle, focuses more on Six Apart's AtomStream service that's in development, that flows out all the content of LiveJournal and TypePad content to any tool that wants them. Pinging and crawling might be eliminated if everyone just flowed out full information this way.

Yes, except that blog/feed search services are increasingly encountering the same spam problems that web search has had to grapple with. Expect that if anyone can flow content, some are going to making use of this nice cloaking mechanism to be misleading.

THAT's why web search engines crawl. The idea of flowing information to them isn't something they never thought off until now. They've simply learned not to trust what people might give to them. As blog spam continues to grow -- IE, "fake" doorway page style blogs -- the blog search world is going to learn in short order that flowing info may not work as well as they think.

I really do hope some better solution will come about so people can feed content into the major services, rather than just sending URLs. Certainly Google's Froogle has seemed successful on this front.
Google Launches Blogsearch from InsideGoogle posts thoughts here and finds that overall, it's likely to pull people from other blog search services.
Google Blog Search Launched is discussion at Threadwatch.
Via Barry's Search Engine Roundtable site, see also discussion at DigitalPoint Forums, Cre8asite Forums and WebmasterWorld.
Google Blog Search Launched is discussion on our Search Engine Watch Forums.

NEW ITEMS SINCE ORIGINAL POST
Google Launches a Blog Search from Tara at ResearchBuzz who likes somethings, hates others, but especially thinks the default should be by date. I'm with you, Tara -- sort of. Problem for Google is that when you search by data, relevancy drops like made. Searches for [google] still bring back tons of junk/spam. Tara also details some of the URL switches used to get the number of results back, for those who want to dig really deep. She says site: works; I still find it does NOT.

WAIT, MYSTERY SOLVED! I REALIZE IT WORKS IN COMBINATION WITH ANOTHER QUERY. In other words, site:napsterization.org brings back nothing but mary hodder -site:napsterization.org will work. Google web search used to not allow site: as a standalone search but that was changed a few months to a year ago, if I recall correctly. Blog search has yet to realize this and depends instead on blogurl: as the command.
Dear Google, Thank you for blog search has Jason Calacanis expecting blog search to show up on the Google home page. Yeah, maybe. More likely, I think you'll see it combined with news, especially since there's only so many buttons you can put up there. Note to Jason -- no search engine wants to look like this, and people don't see those tabs/links anyway as the article that link leads to explains.

Jason also completely overlooks the fact that plenty of news search services already put great small and individual publishers into the results there alongside MSM -- mainstream media or "traditional media." In fact, I'd wager the vast majority of news search sources in any major news search service are NOT traditional media outlets. So ease off the idea that this is a precursor to the big leveling of web society. Web search was already a leveler and remains so.

Realistically, news and blogs go together as well as news and opinion go together. The two sides of the same coin and all that. Need that illustrated more. The new Memeorandum site does the blend well, as I explained yesterday.
Google Launches Blog Search from Mary Hodder who has done a great series on blog search recently finds an ego search for her name doesn't get all references (it's likely the memory problem mentioned above, Mary).

She also doesn't like that a serach for her own blog name bringing up her own pages over and over is annoying. Yep, and if if were web search, Google's clustering (showing you only up to two pages from the same site per results page) would have solved this. No clustering for blog search. Easy workaround, however. napsterization -site:napsterization.org. There you go -- your self-referential problem disposed of.

She also notes no change in relevance when doing a link lookup and sorting by date or relevance. Betcha I know why. Google may simply not want to tell you what link it thinks has the most link juice flowing to a site.

Overall, she thinks they've got a lot to learn about blog search. Probably, but it also sounds like that perhaps tailoring some of her regular searches with a few search commands might also get more of what she wants.

NEW ITEMS SINCE LAST UPDATE ABOVE
One Service, Two Faces from Ken Yarmosh highlights how the Blogger version makes a search within and find all posts feature available for listings. You could do this with the Google version, just not as easily.
Google Introduces Blog Search from Tristan Louis wants to see one of the major search engines offer their own ping server. From talking with Google, they seem more behind the idea of supporting the development of FeedMesh as a solution.
Blog Search: Redirects and Indexing from the official Blogger blog, spotted via InsideGoogle, notes that the redirect page you see when clicking on a result in blog search will be going away, now that it is no longer needed to help protect the secrecy of the project.
After Just a Few Hours With Google Blog Search: Comments and Wishes from our own Gary Price has him giving a laundry list of wish, as well as showing how non-blog content is in the blog search engine and how SafeSearch fails to keep you safe.

We may add more items as we see them and as time allows. In the meantime, need more? See the new Memeorandum Tech page, and the new Google blog search is the top item, with tons and tons of links to discussion from across the web.

Want to comment or discuss? Visit the Google Blog Search Launched thread in our Search Engine Watch Forums.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 14, 2005, 9:27 AM | Permalink

Thoughts On & Poking At Google Blog Search

Chris covered the launch of Google's new blog search in today's SearchDay article, Google Launches Industrial Strength Blog Search. In this post, I want to add some of my own thoughts. I'll also be working up a rundown on reaction from others, and Gary may be adding his own thoughts as a postscript here or as a separate post. Top line thoughts? It's not spam free. I wish it were "full text" blog search to better represent the blog world. It's got a short memory, not going back past March 2005. But the backlink info looks good, certainly better than you'll get on Google itself.

Chris mentioned this in his article, but I think it's worth stressing, technically, this is FEED SEARCH. You are only searching through any feed that Google has found. Some blogs don't have feeds. Some feeds don't come from blogs. Google understands these issues and figures down the line, it may have to revisit changes to make it truly a blog search, if that's what's intended.
By default, sorting is by RELEVANCE, not DATE. If you are looking for the latest posts on a particular topic, use the "Sort by date" link in the upper right-hand corner. Unfortunately, you can't save this as a preference. However...
As Chris noted, you can have results constantly sent to you via a feed alert. The feed links are at the bottom of each page. So if you wanted to know the latest blogs mentioning Google, you'd search for that word, sort by date, then subscribe.
Want to know the latest backlinks to your blog? Use the link: command, such as link:blog.searchenginewatch.com, sort by date, then subscribe to a feed of that search. That shows all links to your domain, to any page anywhere on your blog and will send you the newest ones.
Want to know the latest backlinks to a particular post? Use the full page address, such as link:blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/050831-091033. That brings back matches linking just to that page.
Don't want to learn these commands? Just type in a full URL, with or without the http:// prefix into the Blogger version of Google Blog Search. It will automatically do the right thing there and show backlinks.
As Chris notes, Google says that for blog search backlinks, it's not suppressing any of the links it knows about. To spell that out, here are some figures to contemplate:
- link:blog.searchenginewatch.com on Google web search brings back "about" 4,000 results
- link:searchenginewatch.com on Google Blog Search brings back 6,586 results
- link:blog.searchenginewatch.com on MSN Search web search brings back 15,551 results
Notice, a search across the ENTIRE web on Google brings back fewer backlinks than across the much more limited feed database on Google. Why? The third line shows the answer. A search on the ENTIRE web on MSN Search web search brings back more results as well, despite MSN supposedly having a slightly (very slightly) smaller database of pages based on self-reported figures. Google simply doesn't report all the backlinks it knows about for web search, something it has said time and again when pressed on the issue, a fact well know to many experienced search marketers.
It's not FULL TEXT blog search. Huh? If you post to a blog, you might not send out the entire text of your post in a feed. We don't, for instance. Our reason is that we don't want everyone assuming they can reprint our material. Jason Calacanis of Weblogs has written of similar issues despite copyright warnings in his full-text feed. But Google's only currently searching what's in the feed, meaning that it actually may be ignorant of a huge amount of blog content that's not pushed in a feed. That produces some skewing, as I found with PubSub back in June.

Ideally, I'd like to see Google do what Technorati does and grab the actual full-text of the post, rather than depend just on the feed. For its part, Google says this is something it's pondering.
The site: command is said to work, but I didn't find that the case. site:scripting.com came back with no matches, for example. But the new blogurl:scripting.com seems to do the trick. However, compare that to site:scripting.com on Google web search. Blog search gets about 414 matches, while web search of that blog brings back 344,000 matches. It's a huge difference and show the greater blog coverage Google web search actually gives.

The advanced search page highlights the issue. You'll see that the earliest date you can search back to is March 1, 2005. In other words, the feed database has a much shorter history range than the web database, something that full text indexing would solve -- though you'd lose the ability to more accurate do things like author and date range searching if you're taking scraped data, rather than delimited data in a feed.
Spam clearly hasn't been eliminated. A search for google blog search brings up a series of "Related Blogs" that are all spammy in nature to me. However, the main results below look fairly clean. But for a query on google, spam is back with a vengeance. The first result (on Google's Blogger service) tells me:

Resources To Acquire Stanley Power Tool Or Draper Power Tool On The Internet Get your stanley power tool on the world wide web. The first thing I thought of is how easy it is to get stanley power tool online. Google has listings for many stanley power tool sites. There are lots of stanley power tool that will help you.

In fact, the first four results when sorted by date are all similar in terms of spammy, nonsensical copy. Doorway page spam on Google -- it is 1999!

What we need is either better spam filtering or some type of super "sort by date and relevancy" feature. PubSub's got a feature that's sort of like this, but when I last looked, I still found spam and irrelevant content getting though.

Freshness or comprehensiveness seems an issue. For that query on google, I get the latest post as being 40 minutes ago, with the one after that an hour ago, then the next one two hours ago. That's it? Over the past two hours, there's only been three blog posts about Google?

While I don't want all those poor selections where just anything mentioning Google may come up, I also want to see the latest. What we need is either better spam filtering or some type of super "sort by date and relevancy" feature. PubSub's got a feature that's sort of like this, but when I last looked, I still found spam and irrelevant content getting though.

Want to discuss or comment? Visit our forum thread, Google Blog Search Launched.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 14, 2005, 7:19 AM | Permalink

AOL Adding Podcast Search Tools

AOL is adding new features to help those seeking podcasts. Up today on its AOL Music site is a new Podcasting 101 section, which features a handful of featured podcasts. More expansive is a new partnership that puts the iPodder podcast directory into the AOL-owned Winamp player as the new "Shoutcast Wire Podcast Directory." But most significant, I'd say, is that the Podscope podcast search engine from TVEyes will be offered on the AOL site in the fall. Podscope turns spoken words in podcasts into text that can be searched. Gary's written of the service before here. Blinkx offers a similar service. Expect a closer look from either Gary or I on some of this in the near future. In the meantime, the AOL and TVEyes press releases are below:

AOL Release

New York, NY ? September 14, 2005 ? Bringing the podcasting craze to a whole new level, America Online today announced new features designed to deliver the best of the web's podcasts to more than 100 million visitors at the AOL.com® portal (http://www.aol.com). Currently available at http://www.aol.com/podcasting , listeners can easily discover, experience and download some of the web's most popular podcasts, including programs from KCRW, "This Week in Tech," AOL's "Sports Bloggers Live," "Reel Reviews," the BBC, CNN and more through the comprehensive Podcasting 101 feature, or enjoy a 24/7 stream of standout programming on AOL® Radio's new Podcasting station. Fans are also able to search for thousands of additional podcasts with the new version of AOL's Winamp® 5.1 media player. Enhanced podcast search ability is coming this fall to AOL® Search ( http://www.aolsearch.com).

Podcasting 101 and the AOL Radio Podcasting Station

With step-by-step instructions on getting started, Podcasting 101's guide to podcasting lets visitors pick from the most popular podcasts available ? from big names to small ? for one time download or subscription. To sample some of the hottest podcasts, visitors can tune in to AOL Radio's new Podcast station, featuring a non-stop stream of these popular programs.

Currently, AOL's podcasting offerings include AOL-hosted "best of the web" talk format programs such as:

* KCRW's "Morning Becomes Eclectic," "Music Exchange," "Le Show," "Left, Right & Center," and "Bookworm;"

* The hugely popular "This Week in Tech" and "Security Now!;"

* AOL's own "Sports Bloggers Live;" and

* Michael Geoghegan's "Reel Reviews," the first movie-related podcast on the net.

Fans can also access popular content from CNN, Science at NASA, Adam Curry's "The Podfinder," BBC's "Today" and "From Our Own Correspondent," Battlestar Galactica, Engadget, Grape Radio, Gamespot.com and more.

Over the coming months, AOL will introduce more original programming podcasts from AOL® Music, Moviefone, AOL® Coaches and the KOL® (kids) and RED® (teens) services.

Podcast Search

In addition to the comprehensive programming available through the Podcasting 101 and the Podcasting station, users of AOL's popular Winamp 5.1 media player can access the new SHOUTcast Wire podcast directory, powered by iPodder. The directory gives users the ability to discover, download and subscribe to podcasts from hundreds of podcasters around the world.

In a separate announcement today, TVEyes announced that its Podscope search engine will be integrated within AOL Search ( http://www.aolsearch.com) . In the coming months, AOL will offer fans the ability to discover thousands of additional podcasts. This innovative search capability will enable fans to generate audio search results using Spoken Word Indexing, meaning they will be able to sample from tens of thousands of search-specific audio clips.

Winamp v5.1 Surround Edition is available now for download from http://www.winamp.com/. Launched in January 1998, Winamp is a world leading advanced media player application with more than 48 million monthly worldwide users*. Winamp supports high fidelity playback of CD, MP3, aacPlus, MPEG, WMA, WMV, NSV and other popular digital audio and video formats, skins and plug-ins. Winamp ( http://www.winamp.com) and SHOUTcast ( http://www.shoutcast.com) were acquired by America Online, Inc. in May 1999 and are part of AOL Music's leading offerings ( http://www.aolmusic.com).

AOL® Music is a leading online destination for music, reaching more than 18.7 million music fans a month* through a rich array of programming, products and services that make it easy to discover, experience, listen to and buy music online. AOL Music's offerings include original programs such as AOL Music Sessions, AOL Music LIVE! and AOL Music Breakers, and special features such as First Listen and First View. They are available through aolmusic.com, the AOL Music Channel, the AOL® Radio Network, Netscape® Music, CompuServe® Music, AIM® Music, ICQ® Music, Winamp® and SHOUTcast® services. Integrated commerce options make it easy for consumers to purchase the music they hear on AOL Music through MusicNet@AOL, iTunes on AOL, AOL's CD/DVD shop and AOL's Entertainment for Mobile store.

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TVEyes Release

Fairfield, Conn., Sept. 14, 2005 - AOL will be the first major Web portal or search engine to provide its users with Podscope's podcast search capability, according to a new agreement between AOL and TVEyes, Inc. The new capability will be based on an integration of the TVEyes Podscope search engine with AOL® Search (http://www.aolsearch.com). Podscope, which creates a Spoken Word Index? for every word in audio and video files, makes the files searchable in the same manner as text pages on the Web.

Available this fall, AOL's podcast search function will offer immediate access to every known podcaster's most current files and thousands of archived files, a vast library being added to each day, as well as AOL's podcast offerings and programming. The new search functions will be accessible through the AOL.com® portal (http://www.aol.com) and AOL Search (http://www.aolsearch.com). In addition to plans for enhanced podcast search, AOL.com has introduced an array of new features and programming (http://www.aol.com/podcasting), including a Podcasting 101 guide, designed to make it easy for listeners to discover, experience and download some of the web's most popular podcasts.

"AOL visitors will be able to search for content within podcast files just like they do for text within Web pages," said David J. Ives, president and chief executive officer of TVEyes, Inc., whose technology and company are behind Podscope. "Because of AOL's commitment to podcasting, consumer-created and broadcast media distributed as podcasts will gain truly global distribution."

"We're excited to work with Podscope to offer the unique capability to search within podcasts through our AOL.com Web portal and AOL Search," said Alex Blum, Vice President, Audience Product Management, for America Online. "This innovative search capability will enable podcast enthusiasts to sample relevant audio snippets using Spoken Word Indexing prior to subscribing to the podcast."

"As TV and radio migrate to the on-demand dynamic of podcasts on the Internet, new search tools are needed to make what will ultimately be billions of spoken words in millions of files accessible in a meaningful way," said Allen Weiner, research vice president at Gartner. "Indexing the spoken word has a profound impact on a consumer's ability to find what they want and get the most out of audio and video search."

About Podscope

Podscope (http://www.podscope.com), is the first and only search engine that creates a Spoken Word Index? for the entire content of podcasts - enabling the user to find the exact content that interests them, a technology which is also applicable to video blogs and personal videos. Podcasts are essentially downloadable radio programs that can be played on a digital media music player or PC. Podscope crawls the web looking for podcasts and creates an index against every word, thereby making the contents searchable. The user can search on a term, generate a list of results ranked by a variety of methods to find the most relevant podcast and click to play or click to download. Podscope is a service of TVEyes Inc., headquartered in Fairfield, CT, which has been indexing television and radio broadcasts since 1999. It is the first company to deliver real-time TV and radio search across multiple languages on an international platform. More information on TVEyes can be found at http://www.tveyes.com or http://www.podscope.com

Posted by Danny Sullivan on September 14, 2005, 5:42 AM | Permalink

Google (Finally) Offers Blog Search

Nearly two and a half years after buying Pyra Labs (the company that developed Blogger), Google has launched its blog search service (beta, natch). Although all of the major search engines have been dabbling with blog and feed search to a degree, Google is the first out the gate with an an industrial strength blog and feed search utility. It's very Google-like, with familiar search result pages and advanced search capabilities.

For more on the new service, including tips on making sure that your own feeds are picked up by the new blog search engine, read on in today's SearchDay article, Google Launches Industrial Strength Blog Search.

Want to discuss or comment? Visit our forum thread, Google Blog Search Launched.

Posted by Chris Sherman on September 14, 2005, 12:00 AM | Permalink

Gates Talks Google

Bill Gates sat down with CNET for an interview today about a variety of topics including web search and Google. The complete interview is posted here.

Here are a few quotes from Bill Gates:

On API's

Our search API is way better than their search API. Clearly, they are working in that area. They haven't done as much on the server piece. They had a Google server, but it was very bad at corporate search.

On Organizing all of the Worlds Info

...they have this slogan that they are going to organize the world's information. Our slogan is that we are going to give people tools to let them organize the world's information. It's a slightly different approach, based on the platform-ization of all of our capabilities and not thinking of ourselves as the organizer.

On the Honeymoon Period

You do me-too Google Talk, and it's a big deal. But we had our honeymoon phase, and it was fun from maybe 1985 to 1995. And we've had lots of competitors in their honeymoon phase. But I'd say, in some ways, this is the biggest honeymoon I've ever seen.

Posted by Gary Price on September 13, 2005, 9:01 PM | Permalink

Pokemon Meets Advertising Week?

Fond of advertising spokes-characters and slogans? Collect all 52! That's the idea behind a digital trading cards game cooked up by Yahoo! and Digital Allegiance in honor of Advertising Week 2005.

Each card portrays a classic brand icon -- such as Charlie the Tuna or Juan Valdez -- or a slogan, like "Just do it" or "They're Gr-r-reat!" Players can collect the cards by visiting sponsor Web sites, by answering quiz questions about brands, and by inviting friends to join.

The idea is to get users "as young as 8-years old, as well as adults" immersed in the "fun" of Advertising Week (taking place the week of September 26 in NYC).

Do people love advertising this much? Now, I'll agree they feel positive about brands and they will accept ads in exchange for free content, but I can't imagine folks eager to collect digital cards that represent McGruff the Crime Dog and the Morton Salt Girl.

But what do I know? Seems the organizers hosted a similar trading card game last year, and around 100,000 people registered.

Posted by Pamela Parker on September 13, 2005, 6:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yahoo Files For Two Trademarks

Yahoo recently filed with the US Patent and Trademark Office for two new trademark or to be more precise, service marks.

First, Search Engine Roundtable points to the Yahoo Moves To Trademark Y.com discussion in our Search Engine Watch Forums about Yahoo applying to trademark the term "Y.com." This filing was made on August 22, 2005.

Next, three days later on August 25th, Yahoo filed to trademark/service mark an oval and exclamation point logo. You'll see an example at the top of the application.

Posted by Gary Price on September 13, 2005, 4:21 PM | Permalink

Details About MSN's AdCenter Begins Emerging

Via