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July 23, 2006 - July 29, 2006

July 28, 2006

Trulia Distributing Its Maps To Local Realtors

As described on the Trulia Blog and The Future of Real Estate Marketing Blog, vertical real estate search site Trulia is making its maps with listings available for no cost to local brokers and realtors. The maps themselves are built on the Google Maps API and reflect local real estate listings drawn from broker feeds and crawling.

Here's what Trulia says about the new maps distribution:

"How does it work? Visit the Tools For Your Site section of Trulia and click on TruliaMap. Enter your website URL and we'll quickly tell you whether we've indexed your listings. You can then customize a TruliaMap to make it your own. Options include size (narrow or wide), colors, and even an option to have the map automatically animate through your listings."

Local realtors thus get a customized map on their sites featuring their listings. This is a smart (and natural) move because it will provide off-site distribution and branding for Trulia and encourage other local realtors and brokers to get their listings onto the site. It also makes participating local realtor sites much richer for users (The Real Estate Marketing Blog also suggests they add the Zillow API for house valuations). Trulia has essentially shunned the MLS services in favor of dealing directly with local agents.

Trulia offers one of the most feature rich and user friendly real estate sites in the market today.

Google Maps API and Google Maps have been wildly popular so, by the same token, why shouldn't a useful application built on top of Google Maps? But I wonder how Google will feel about this "re-syndication"?

Posted by Greg Sterling on 5:46 PM | Permalink

Yahoo Launches New Slurp Crawler

The Yahoo Search blog announced the launch of a new crawler (aka Yahoo Slurp) that is faster and more efficient then then its previous robotic arm. This crawler is still named Slurp, but it crawls faster and uses up less bandwidth. Yahoo says we can expect a "25% reduction in the number of requests and bandwidth consumed by the crawler."

Posted by Barry Schwartz on 3:59 PM | Permalink

Search Headlines & Links: July 28, 2006

Below, a recap of stories posted today to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with other items we've spotted but not blogged separately:

From The SEW Blog...

  • Daily SearchCast, July 28, 2006: Google Class Action Suit Over Click Fraud Settled; Google Radio Ads; Anti-Phishing Protection In Search Results & More!
    Today's search podcast covers the class action lawsuit settlement against Google over click fraud getting final approval; Google ramping up radio ad testing; putting anti-phishing warnings into your search results; ranking woes and more!
  • TrustWatch Extension Puts Phishing Warnings Into Google, Yahoo & MSN Results
    Using Firefox or Flock? Now you can get an extension from TrustWatch that will may help you spot phishing scams in your search results at Google, Yahoo and MSN....
  • Google Testing Radio Ad Sales In Detroit
    Google rides the radio waves, from News.com looks at how Google AdSense for radio is now being tested in Detroit, before a planned rollout of the program to all Google advertisers. Technically, Google's been running radio ads ever since it acquired dMarc Broadcasting in January. It's not like dMarc stopped doing what it was already doing when Google bought it. The real change is that Google is integrating the ability for any existing advertiser to make radio ad purchases on a bid basis. For more on Google's radio plans, see Googleplex Irvine & "AdSense Audio" For Radio Ads and Speculation:...
  • Google Guess, Google Real Estate - New Google Coming Services Found?
    Via Google Blogoscoped, What's in Google's Sandbox? from Tony Ruscoe has him stumbling upon new services that Google may plan to release such as Google Events, Google Real Estate Search and "Google Guess."...
  • Google Hands Over Email In Hate Case
    Feds Retrieve Google Records after Gmail Used for Hate Speech from eWeek covers how the US FBI asked for and was given an email and some session information from someone accused of sending a threatening letter to the NAACP....
  • Google Click Fraud Settlement Approved
    Download fileJust got word from Google that the settlement in the class action lawsuit over click fraud has been approved. I'm dashing out, so this is just a short post to give you a heads-up. So far, I haven't seen any news stories on it. Settlement is here (PDF file), the $30 million in attorney fees is approved, apparently around 500 companies choosing to opt-out. I'll postscript more tomorrow or do a fresh post when stories appear. Google statement: We're pleased Judge Griffin has affirmed the settlement as appropriate and fair to advertisers. We look forward to continuing to manage...
  • What Drives Searchers to Buy Cars?
    The automotive industry is the largest player in the search world, in both natural search engine optimization and in the paid search arena. Until recently, auto manufacturers weren't a major presence in search results, with most search marketing campaigns conducted by independent aggregators who focused on providing quotes, helping consumers locate dealers and so on. Recently, however, the major manufacturers have begun to flex their search muscles, much to the consternation of aggregators, who are feeling crowded. A new study from Yahoo and comScore looked at searcher behavior in the automotive sector, analyzing activity, user preferences, and how purchases were...

Headlines & News From Elsewhere

Posted by Danny Sullivan on 3:00 PM | Permalink

Daily SearchCast, July 28, 2006: Google Class Action Suit Over Click Fraud Settled; Google Radio Ads; Anti-Phishing Protection In Search Results & More!

Today's search podcast covers the class action lawsuit settlement against Google over click fraud getting final approval; Google ramping up radio ad testing; putting anti-phishing warnings into your search results; ranking woes 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) or though our Yahoo Podcasts channel. Need more help tuning in live or finding the chat room? See the Daily SearchCast FAQ.

Below are links to items discussed:

Posted by Danny Sullivan on 2:53 PM | Permalink

TrustWatch Extension Puts Phishing Warnings Into Google, Yahoo & MSN Results

Using Firefox or Flock? Now you can get an extension from TrustWatch that will may help you spot phishing scams in your search results at Google, Yahoo and MSN.

TrustWatch & MSN Offer Anti-Phishing Tools To Searchers & Surfers covers how TrustWatch already does this on its own Ask-powered search engine. But the extension lets you get TrustWatch info inserted into results at Google, Yahoo and MSN (but oddly not Ask).

That article above also explains how MSN has an anti-phishing tool you can download. There are several others, as covered in these past articles:

Posted by Danny Sullivan on 8:06 AM | Permalink

Google Testing Radio Ad Sales In Detroit

Google rides the radio waves, from News.com looks at how Google AdSense for radio is now being tested in Detroit, before a planned rollout of the program to all Google advertisers.

Technically, Google's been running radio ads ever since it acquired dMarc Broadcasting in January. It's not like dMarc stopped doing what it was already doing when Google bought it. The real change is that Google is integrating the ability for any existing advertiser to make radio ad purchases on a bid basis.

For more on Google's radio plans, see Googleplex Irvine & "AdSense Audio" For Radio Ads and Speculation: Google To Begin Selling Radio Ads Through AdWords Soon.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on 7:36 AM | Permalink

Google Guess, Google Real Estate - New Google Coming Services Found?

Via Google Blogoscoped, What's in Google's Sandbox? from Tony Ruscoe has him stumbling upon new services that Google may plan to release such as Google Events, Google Real Estate Search and "Google Guess."

Want to try it out yourself? Go to https://sandbox.google.com/. It looks like Google Checkout, but ignore that. Don't try to sign in with an existing Google Account that you have. You need to create a new one just for this sandbox service, Ruscoe says. And that seems to involve registering your credit card, so I gave it a pass.

Postscript: Tony contacted me to say there's a way to register via the sandbox area and not have to enter credit card details. He emailed:

This isn't the case. All you need to do is remove everything after the "service=sierra" parameter from the URL you're directed to (which is for the Google Checkout service) and you'll be able to register an account without entering your credit card details... or just follow this link:

https://sandbox.google.com/accounts/NewAccount

You'll then be able to append "?service=codename" to that URL to add each of the services I included in my post.

I went to https://sandbox.google.com/accounts/NewAccount, opened a new account, then went back and did this:

https://sandbox.google.com/accounts/NewAccount?service=re

See the part in bold? The re part? That's the codename for one of these Google services, which Tony has listed in his post. Doing that let me sign up for Google Real Estate Search. After the screen to enroll came up, I got an error message and kicked back out into a personalized Google home page.

That's OK. Now go to https://sandbox.google.com/accounts/ManageAccount and sign back in. The next screen will show your account, and you'll see that Google Real Estate Search is now one of your subscribed services. Clicking on the link doesn't do anything, but at least you can make cool screenshots like everyone else :)

To add more services, keep going back as above and use different code names.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on 7:24 AM | Permalink

Google Hands Over Email In Hate Case

Feds Retrieve Google Records after Gmail Used for Hate Speech from eWeek covers how the US FBI asked for and was given an email and some session information from someone accused of sending a threatening letter to the NAACP.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on 6:14 AM | Permalink

Search Forums Roundup: July 28, 2006

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 Ranking In Other Countries - Yahoo! Korea Create Webzari Site Explorer - Google Showing Click Fraud Numbers In AdWords - Site Redesign - Does It Always Mean Lost Ranking?, and more.

Posted by Chris Sherman on 1:03 AM | Permalink

July 27, 2006

Search Headlines & Links: July 27, 2006

Below, a recap of stories posted today to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with other items we've spotted but not blogged separately:

From The SEW Blog...

  • Daily SearchCast, July 27, 2006: Daily SearchCast's First Birthday!; Microsoft Hires 10,000; Baidu Cuts HP Deal; Google Ranking Changes; Google: The Musical & More!
    Today's search podcast covers the Daily SearchCast podcast celebrating its first birthday; Microsoft's record breaking army of new hires; Baidu getting on HP computers in China; Google rankings shifting around; a musical about Google and more!
  • Google Click Fraud Settlement Approved
    Download fileJust got word from Google that the settlement in the class action lawsuit over click fraud has been approved. I'm dashing out, so this is just a short post to give you a heads-up. So far, I haven't seen any news stories on it. Settlement is here (PDF file), the $30 million in attorney fees is approved, apparently around 500 companies choosing to opt-out. I'll postscript more tomorrow or do a fresh post when stories appear. Google statement: We're pleased Judge Griffin has affirmed the settlement as appropriate and fair to advertisers. We look forward to continuing to manage...
  • Google The Musical Coming Soon
    Philipp Lenssen spots a new musical named Google: The Musical. The musical is being hosted at the Rarig Center on the University of Minnesota Twin Cities campus. The dates of the musical include; Friday on August 4th at 5:30 pm, Tuesday on August 8th at 7:00 pm, Thursday on August 10th at 10:00 pm, Friday on August 11th at 8:30 pm, and Sunday on August 13th at 1:00 pm. What to expect?...
  • Changes Spotted In Google Search Results
    I reported this morning at the Search Engine Roundtable that Google Search Results Shifting Again. What folks in the forums are finding is that some, but not all, of the pre June 27th results are coming back to the way they were. They are also finding that the Google site command search is again working on those datacenters that have the new results. There is a lot of commotion going on in the forums about these changes that began this morning....
  • Baidu To Be Default Engine On All HP Computers Ship To China
    Philipp Lenssen reports that Baidu, the popular Chinese search engine, will be the default search engine on all new HP's shipped to China after October 2006. As Philipp notes, this is bad for Google who has been pushing hard into the Chinese market. Today the Wall Street Journal reports that Baidu's second-quarter earnings were very high, "but didn't meet some investors' higher expectations."...
  • French Court Preventing Greenpeace France From Displaying Crop Data On Google Maps
    BoingBoing spotted an interesting case where a French court ordered Greenpeace France to remove a site using the Google Maps tool to display "locations of commercial, genetically engineered corn fields in France." Greenpeace France overlaid an X in the spot of those corn fields. They have removed the site, but plan on appealing the order. "Greenpeace argues the online maps should not be censored because an EU law requires the French government to make the crop site information public anyway," Xeni Jardin of BoingBoing writes....
  • Yahoo Partners With British Telecom For Yahoo Local UK
    Revolution Magazine reports that Yahoo has partnered with British Telecom to share the "Phone Book" data. Yahoo will add 120,000 businesses who advertise in The Phone Book from BT within the Yahoo Local UK platform. This helps BT offer an additional service to their Phone Book customers and gives Yahoo access to some more data and marketing opportunities they may have not had otherwise....
  • Microsoft Hires Over Ten Thousand Employees In Past Year
    The Seattle Pi reports that Microsoft has broke their own hiring records, by hiring 10,081 new employees worldwide over the past fiscal year. The article takes the angle that the hires were in order to compete with Google. Now Microsoft has 71,553 people worldwide as of June 30, 2006. Wow!...
  • Yahoo Launches Visual Link Map Tool Named Webzari
    The Yahoo Search Blog announced a new tool developed by the Yahoo Korea team named Webzari. Webzari is a tool that visually maps the data from Yahoo Site Explorer. It takes a site's inlinks, and maps them in planets on a map. Check out Search Engine Watch's map which is kinda hard to read, but you can also check out Search Engine Roundtable which has easier to read planets. Notice, when you mouse over the planets, it shows you the location of the server linking to you, and if you click on it shows you more. Very cool interface. Check...
  • What Drives Searchers to Buy Cars?
    The automotive industry is the largest player in the search world, in both natural search engine optimization and in the paid search arena. Until recently, auto manufacturers weren't a major presence in search results, with most search marketing campaigns conducted by independent aggregators who focused on providing quotes, helping consumers locate dealers and so on. Recently, however, the major manufacturers have begun to flex their search muscles, much to the consternation of aggregators, who are feeling crowded. A new study from Yahoo and comScore looked at searcher behavior in the automotive sector, analyzing activity, user preferences, and how purchases were...
  • Study Reveals Changing Web
    A report of a new study over on WebSiteOptimization.com has some interesting research showing how users ineract with web sites, revealing an "F-shaped" eyetracking patterns similar to the results Enquiro found looking at earch results. From the study: A new browser study revealed a shift in how we interact with the Web. University of Hamburg researchers found the Web moving from static hypertext information to dynamic interactive services. Clickstream heatmaps and web page statistics show rapid interaction over smaller areas of the screen. The authors recommend that web developers create concise, flexible, and fast loading web pages to keep pace...

Headlines & News From Elsewhere

Posted by Danny Sullivan on 2:12 PM | Permalink

Daily SearchCast, July 27, 2006: Daily SearchCast's First Birthday!; Microsoft Hires 10,000; Baidu Cuts HP Deal; Google Ranking Changes; Google: The Musical & More!

Today's search podcast covers the Daily SearchCast podcast celebrating its first birthday; Microsoft's record breaking army of new hires; Baidu getting on HP computers in China; Google rankings shifting around; a musical about Google 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) or though our Yahoo Podcasts channel. Need more help tuning in live or finding the chat room? See the Daily SearchCast FAQ.

Below are links to items discussed:

  • Microsoft Hires Over Ten Thousand Employees In Past Year
    The Seattle Pi reports that Microsoft has broke their own hiring records, by hiring 10,081 new employees worldwide over the past fiscal year. The article takes the angle that the hires were in order to compete with Google. Now Microsoft has 71,553 people worldwide as of June 30, 2006. Wow!...
  • Yahoo Launches Visual Link Map Tool Named Webzari
    The Yahoo Search Blog announced a new tool developed by the Yahoo Korea team named Webzari. Webzari is a tool that visually maps the data from Yahoo Site Explorer. It takes a site's inlinks, and maps them in planets on a map. Check out Search Engine Watch's map which is kinda hard to read, but you can also check out Search Engine Roundtable which has easier to read planets. Notice, when you mouse over the planets, it shows you the location of the server linking to you, and if you click on it shows you more. Very cool interface. Check...
  • Study Reveals Changing Web
    A report of a new study over on WebSiteOptimization.com has some interesting research showing how users ineract with web sites, revealing an "F-shaped" eyetracking patterns similar to the results Enquiro found looking at earch results. From the study: A new browser study revealed a shift in how we interact with the Web. University of Hamburg researchers found the Web moving from static hypertext information to dynamic interactive services. Clickstream heatmaps and web page statistics show rapid interaction over smaller areas of the screen. The authors recommend that web developers create concise, flexible, and fast loading web pages to keep pace...
  • Powerful Search + Social Bookmarking = Diigo
    Social bookmarking and search services have been exploding in popularity recently, but I've yet to find one that combined ease of use and flexibility in just the right way. I've been playing around with a new "social annotation" service called Diigo that launched this week, and have been favorably impressed. It's simple, easy to use, but offers a lot of power, especially when it comes to searching—both the web as well as content that you've decided to save. More on the new service in today's SearchDay article, Diigo Offers "Social Annotation" Tool....
  • Baidu To Be Default Engine On All HP Computers Ship To China
    Philipp Lenssen reports that Baidu, the popular Chinese search engine, will be the default search engine on all new HP's shipped to China after October 2006. As Philipp notes, this is bad for Google who has been pushing hard into the Chinese market. Today the Wall Street Journal reports that Baidu's second-quarter earnings were very high, "but didn't meet some investors' higher expectations."...
  • Changes Spotted In Google Search Results
    I reported this morning at the Search Engine Roundtable that Google Search Results Shifting Again. What folks in the forums are finding is that some, but not all, of the pre June 27th results are coming back to the way they were. They are also finding that the Google site command search is again working on those datacenters that have the new results. There is a lot of commotion going on in the forums about these changes that began this morning....
  • Possible Shift in Google-Webmasters Communication Policy!, Threadwatch
  • Were All of Google Properties Down Last Night?, Search Engine Roundtable
  • Adam "Mini-Matt" Lasnik's Blog
  • ComScore Adds Competitive Search Data to qSearch, ClickZ
  • UK Microsoft adCenter public opening mid August, Threadwatch
  • Yahoo Partners With British Telecom For Yahoo Local UK
    Revolution Magazine reports that Yahoo has partnered with British Telecom to share the "Phone Book" data. Yahoo will add 120,000 businesses who advertise in The Phone Book from BT within the Yahoo Local UK platform. This helps BT offer an additional service to their Phone Book customers and gives Yahoo access to some more data and marketing opportunities they may have not had otherwise....
  • Live From GoogleFi, GigaOM
  • New Metasearch for Events and Ticket Providers, ResearchBuzz
  • New Natuaral Hazards Gateway Site from USGS, Fact Sheets & More, ResourceShelf
  • French Court Preventing Greenpeace France From Displaying Crop Data On Google Maps
    BoingBoing spotted an interesting case where a French court ordered Greenpeace France to remove a site using the Google Maps tool to display "locations of commercial, genetically engineered corn fields in France." Greenpeace France overlaid an X in the spot of those corn fields. They have removed the site, but plan on appealing the order. "Greenpeace argues the online maps should not be censored because an EU law requires the French government to make the crop site information public anyway," Xeni Jardin of BoingBoing writes....
  • Flickr set of bad parking at Yahoo lot, Boing Boing
  • MSN Gets Rights to 'Arrested', Los Angeles Times
  • Google The Musical Coming Soon
    Philipp Lenssen spots a new musical named Google: The Musical. The musical is being hosted at the Rarig Center on the University of Minnesota Twin Cities campus. The dates of the musical include; Friday on August 4th at 5:30 pm, Tuesday on August 8th at 7:00 pm, Thursday on August 10th at 10:00 pm, Friday on August 11th at 8:30 pm, and Sunday on August 13th at 1:00 pm. What to expect?...

Posted by Danny Sullivan on 2:00 PM | Permalink

Google Click Fraud Settlement Approved

Just got word from Google that the settlement in the class action lawsuit over click fraud has been approved. I'm dashing out, so this is just a short post to give you a heads-up. So far, I haven't seen any news stories on it. Settlement is here (PDF file), the $30 million in attorney fees is approved, apparently around 500 companies choosing to opt-out. I'll postscript more tomorrow or do a fresh post when stories appear. Google statement:

We're pleased Judge Griffin has affirmed the settlement as appropriate and fair to advertisers. We look forward to continuing to manage invalid clicks effectively and provide our advertisers with an outstanding return on their investment. --Nicole Wong, Associate General Counsel, Google

Postscript: Short AP story here, MarketWatch here, Official Google Blog post here.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on 1:43 PM | Permalink

Google The Musical Coming Soon

Philipp Lenssen spots a new musical named Google: The Musical. The musical is being hosted at the Rarig Center on the University of Minnesota Twin Cities campus. The dates of the musical include; Friday on August 4th at 5:30 pm, Tuesday on August 8th at 7:00 pm, Thursday on August 10th at 10:00 pm, Friday on August 11th at 8:30 pm, and Sunday on August 13th at 1:00 pm.

What to expect?

Synopsis

Google is taking over the world - one thought at a time. An entirely original darkly-comedic electronic musical. Librarians, DJs and zombies - it's a brave new world.
This fable about the dangers of information ubiguity will make you laugh, cry and run home to your Internet.

Some more details at MySpace.

Posted by Barry Schwartz on 11:54 AM | Permalink

Changes Spotted In Google Search Results

I reported this morning at the Search Engine Roundtable that Google Search Results Shifting Again. What folks in the forums are finding is that some, but not all, of the pre June 27th results are coming back to the way they were. They are also finding that the Google site command search is again working on those datacenters that have the new results. There is a lot of commotion going on in the forums about these changes that began this morning.

Posted by Barry Schwartz on 11:49 AM | Permalink

Baidu To Be Default Engine On All HP Computers Ship To China

Philipp Lenssen reports that Baidu, the popular Chinese search engine, will be the default search engine on all new HP's shipped to China after October 2006. As Philipp notes, this is bad for Google who has been pushing hard into the Chinese market. Today the Wall Street Journal reports that Baidu's second-quarter earnings were very high, "but didn't meet some investors' higher expectations."

Posted by Barry Schwartz on 11:44 AM | Permalink

French Court Preventing Greenpeace France From Displaying Crop Data On Google Maps

BoingBoing spotted an interesting case where a French court ordered Greenpeace France to remove a site using the Google Maps tool to display "locations of commercial, genetically engineered corn fields in France." Greenpeace France overlaid an X in the spot of those corn fields. They have removed the site, but plan on appealing the order. "Greenpeace argues the online maps should not be censored because an EU law requires the French government to make the crop site information public anyway," Xeni Jardin of BoingBoing writes.

Posted by Barry Schwartz on 11:36 AM | Permalink

Yahoo Partners With British Telecom For Yahoo Local UK

Revolution Magazine reports that Yahoo has partnered with British Telecom to share Yellow Pages data. Yahoo will add 120,000 businesses who advertise in The Phone Book from BT within the Yahoo Local UK platform. This helps BT offer an additional service to their Phone Book customers and gives Yahoo access to some more data and marketing opportunities they may have not had otherwise.

Post Script from Greg: Yell is the dominant yellow pages publisher in the UK and was previously owned by BT before it was sold a few years ago. Yell provides all its content to Google, as the basis for Google Local/Maps in the UK.

Posted by Barry Schwartz on 11:29 AM | Permalink

Microsoft Hires Over Ten Thousand Employees In Past Year

The Seattle Pi reports that Microsoft has broke their own hiring records, by hiring 10,081 new employees worldwide over the past fiscal year. The article takes the angle that the hires were in order to compete with Google. Now Microsoft has 71,553 people worldwide as of June 30, 2006. Wow!

Posted by Barry Schwartz on 11:24 AM | Permalink

Yahoo Launches Visual Link Map Tool Named Webzari

The Yahoo Search Blog announced a new tool developed by the Yahoo Korea team named Webzari. Webzari is a tool that visually maps the data from Yahoo Site Explorer. It takes a site's inlinks, and maps them in planets on a map.

Check out Search Engine Watch's map which is kinda hard to read, but you can also check out Search Engine Roundtable which has easier to read planets. Notice, when you mouse over the planets, it shows you the location of the server linking to you, and if you click on it shows you more. Very cool interface.

Check it out at the Yahoo Search Blog.

Posted by Barry Schwartz on 11:13 AM | Permalink

What Drives Searchers to Buy Cars?

The automotive industry is the largest player in the search world, in both natural search engine optimization and in the paid search arena. Until recently, auto manufacturers weren't a major presence in search results, with most search marketing campaigns conducted by independent aggregators who focused on providing quotes, helping consumers locate dealers and so on. Recently, however, the major manufacturers have begun to flex their search muscles, much to the consternation of aggregators, who are feeling crowded. A new study from Yahoo and comScore looked at searcher behavior in the automotive sector, analyzing activity, user preferences, and how purchases were ultimately made. The results are fascinating, and offer lessons for search marketers operating in any field. More on the study in today's SearchDay article, New Research Shows How Search Drives Auto Buyers.

Posted by Chris Sherman on 8:39 AM | Permalink

July 26, 2006

Study Reveals Changing Web

A report of a new study over on WebSiteOptimization.com has some interesting research showing how users ineract with web sites, revealing an "F-shaped" eyetracking patterns similar to the results Enquiro found looking at earch results. From the study:

A new browser study revealed a shift in how we interact with the Web. University of Hamburg researchers found the Web moving from static hypertext information to dynamic interactive services. Clickstream heatmaps and web page statistics show rapid interaction over smaller areas of the screen. The authors recommend that web developers create concise, flexible, and fast loading web pages to keep pace with the speed of web navigation.

Read on: Clickstream Study Reveals Dynamic Web

Posted by Chris Sherman on 6:02 PM | Permalink

Search Headlines & Links: July 26, 2006

Below, a recap of stories posted today to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with other items we've spotted but not blogged separately:

From The SEW Blog...

  • Daily SearchCast, July 26, 2006: Google Use Of Landing Pages For Ad Rank Raises Issues; Google Now Reporting Invalid Clicks? Google Parachute (Beta) & More!
    Today's search podcast covers issues with Google making more use of landing pages to rank ads; Google now reporting invalid clicks to advertisers; online ad spend expected to continue rising; bailing out of the Google Jet and more!
  • Powerful Search + Social Bookmarking = Diigo
    Social bookmarking and search services have been exploding in popularity recently, but I've yet to find one that combined ease of use and flexibility in just the right way. I've been playing around with a new "social annotation" service called Diigo that launched this week, and have been favorably impressed. It's simple, easy to use, but offers a lot of power, especially when it comes to searching—both the web as well as content that you've decided to save. More on the new service in today's SearchDay article, Diigo Offers "Social Annotation" Tool....
  • New US Child Protection Law Might Make Webmasters Second Guess What They Write
    Via Threadwatch, Congress spanks naughty sex sites from News.com covers how the US is likely to gain a new law making it illegal to send people to porn by using misleading text....
  • FAA Safety Instructions For The Google Jet
    InsideGoogle spotted a funny write up from the Seattle Times called Google founders eager to take users for a ride. I'll quote the piece InsideGoogle quoted: I'm now required by the Federal Aviation Administration to give the following safety instructions, because our aircraft is in beta and always will be:...
  • Google Toolbar Look-Alike Installing Malicious Programs
    Search Engine Journal reports on a SurfControl release that fake Google Toolbars are being downloaded unknowingly and causing those computers to be contaminated with malicious programs. The programs then use the computers to send out mass-email spam and/or for "internet attacks." So be careful where you download your toolbars....
  • Online Ad Spend 9% Of All Ad Spend By 2011
    ClickZ reports on a JupiterResearch report that online advertising spend is projected to snag up nine percent of the total advertising pie by 2011. They estimate that $25.9 billion in revenues will be spent on online ads by 2011, "rising at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 11 percent over the next five years." For search marketers, 43 percent of the online ad spend will be search-based ads, accounting for $11.1 billion by 2011....
  • Google AdWords Now Reporting Invalid Click Rates
    Google is now offering AdWords advertisers the ability to see how many invalid clicks that Google catches before they are billed. "Estimating invalid clicks" from the Official Google Blog has more about this good move, which should help to better educate advertisers....
  • AOL Redesigns Local CityGuides
    Thanks to Gary Price for pointing out that AOL has launched a beta redesign of its popular CityGuides. Here's the current version of the site for New York and here's the new beta version of the same city site. Of the more than 300 CityGuides AOL offers, the top 25 are part of the new beta. Among the upgrades and improvements are a visually richer interface, more imagery, more dynamically generated content and more community features. Gary also points out that AOL's Moviefone and CityGuides have also been added to the AOL mobile application....

Headlines & News From Elsewhere

Posted by Danny Sullivan on 3:21 PM | Permalink

Daily SearchCast, July 26, 2006: Google Use Of Landing Pages For Ad Rank Raises Issues; Google Now Reporting Invalid Clicks? Google Parachute (Beta) & More!

Today's search podcast covers issues with Google making more use of landing pages to rank ads; Google now reporting invalid clicks to advertisers; online ad spend expected to continue rising; bailing out of the Google Jet 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) or though our Yahoo Podcasts channel. Need more help tuning in live or finding the chat room? See the Daily SearchCast FAQ.

Below are links to items discussed:

  • Detailed Look into the Google AdWords Landing Page Algo
    The Google AdWords landing page algo changes this month have resulted in many advertisers sitting up and thinking about quality issues beyond their ad copy, and looking more closely at their landing pages. I caught up with Google to get specifics on how the algo works, including just how they decided what made a good landing page versus what didn't when they created their algo. I also have ten best practices for advertisers needing to improve landing page quality. The full length SEW subscribers article is here. A shorter (but free!) version is here. Want to share your own best...
  • Virgin's Not So Generous Frequent Flyer Program
  • Google AdWords Now Reporting Invalid Click Rates
    Google is now offering AdWords advertisers the ability to see how many invalid clicks that Google catches before they are billed. "Estimating invalid clicks" from the Official Google Blog has more about this good move, which should help to better educate advertisers.
  • Google Toolbar Look-Alike Installing Malicious Programs
    Search Engine Journal reports on a SurfControl release that fake Google Toolbars are being downloaded unknowingly and causing those computers to be contaminated with malicious programs. The programs then use the computers to send out mass-email spam and/or for "internet attacks." So be careful where you download your toolbars.
  • Online Ad Spend 9% Of All Ad Spend By 2011
    ClickZ reports on a JupiterResearch report that online advertising spend is projected to snag up nine-percent of the total advertising pie by 2011. They estimate that $25.9 billion in revenues will be spent on online ads by 2011, "rising at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 11 percent over the next five years." For search marketers, of that 9-percent of the pie, 43-percent of the online ad spend will be search base ads accounting for $11.1 billion, by 2011.
  • AOL Redesigns Local CityGuides
    Thanks to Gary Price for pointing out that AOL has launched a beta redesign of its popular CityGuides. Here's the current version of the site for New York and here's the new beta version of the same city site. Of the more than 300 CityGuides AOL offers, the top 25 are part of the new beta.
  • FAA Safety Instructions For The Google Jet
    InsideGoogle spotted a funny write up named Google founders eager to take users for a ride. I'll quote the piece InsideGoogle quoted. I'm now required by the Federal Aviation Administration to give the following safety instructions, because our aircraft is in beta and always will be:

Posted by Danny Sullivan on 3:16 PM | Permalink

Powerful Search + Social Bookmarking = Diigo

Social bookmarking and search services have been exploding in popularity recently, but I've yet to find one that combined ease of use and flexibility in just the right way. I've been playing around with a new "social annotation" service called Diigo that launched this week, and have been favorably impressed. It's simple, easy to use, but offers a lot of power, especially when it comes to searching—both the web as well as content that you've decided to save. More on the new service in today's SearchDay article, Diigo Offers "Social Annotation" Tool.

Posted by Chris Sherman on 3:13 PM | Permalink

New US Child Protection Law Might Make Webmasters Second Guess What They Write

Via Threadwatch, Congress spanks naughty sex sites from News.com covers how the US is likely to gain a new law making it illegal to send people to porn by using misleading text.

From the bill:

2252C. Misleading words or digital images on the Internet

(a) IN GENERAL.—Whoever knowingly embeds words or digital images into the source code of a website with the intent to deceive a person into viewing material constituting obscenity shall be fined under this title and imprisoned for not more than 10 years.

(b) MINORS.—Whoever knowingly embeds words or digital images into the source code of a website with the intent to deceive a minor into viewing material harmful to minors on the Internet shall be fined under this title and imprisoned for not more than 20 years.

Hmm -- and source code means meta data? Body copy? Both:

the term ‘source code' means the combination of text and other characters comprising the content, both viewable and nonviewable, of a web page, including any website publishing language, programming language, protocol or functional content, as well as any successor languages or protocols.

And what's obscene or harmful to minors? I didn't find that defined in the copy (PDF file) of the bill News.com is pointing at. Section 2252B covers the part about minors, and that's here.

(d) For the purposes of this section, the term “material that is harmful to minors” means any communication, consisting of nudity, sex, or excretion, that, taken as a whole and with reference to its context—

(1) predominantly appeals to a prurient interest of minors;

(2) is patently offensive to prevailing standards in the adult community as a whole with respect to what is suitable material for minors; and

(3) lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors.

(e) For the purposes of subsection (d), the term “sex” means acts of masturbation, sexual intercourse, or physcial [1] contact with a person's genitals, or the condition of human male or female genitals when in a state of sexual stimulation or arousal.

The News.com article goes into more depth on how a lack of clarity could mean that a porn site showing things like Barbie dolls having sex could potentially fall into trouble.

As a parent, I certainly appreciate an effort to protect my children and those of others. But I also get worried about laws that potentially are overly broad. What's "obscene" isn't well defined, for example, from what I can see. We'll see how it goes.

FYI, even without this law, the US government has already been able to stop sites that are misleading. FTC Steps In To Stop Spamming covers how in 1999, the US Federal Trade Commission did exactly this in a case of a porn site trying to mislead people to it.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on 12:24 PM | Permalink

FAA Safety Instructions For The Google Jet

InsideGoogle spotted a funny write up from the Seattle Times called Google founders eager to take users for a ride. I'll quote the piece InsideGoogle quoted:

I'm now required by the Federal Aviation Administration to give the following safety instructions, because our aircraft is in beta and always will be:
In the event of a sudden loss of cabin pressure, stock options will drop from the ceiling above you. Please inflate the options until you feel financially secure.

In the event of a sudden loss of propulsion, look under your seat for the blue, red, yellow and green Google parachute. Place the straps around your shoulders, tighten the waist belt, jump out of the aircraft and press the “I'm Feeling Lucky” button on your chest.

Posted by Barry Schwartz on 10:27 AM | Permalink

Google Toolbar Look-Alike Installing Malicious Programs

Search Engine Journal reports on a SurfControl release that fake Google Toolbars are being downloaded unknowingly and causing those computers to be contaminated with malicious programs. The programs then use the computers to send out mass-email spam and/or for "internet attacks." So be careful where you download your toolbars.

Posted by Barry Schwartz on 10:18 AM | Permalink

Online Ad Spend 9% Of All Ad Spend By 2011

ClickZ reports on a JupiterResearch report that online advertising spend is projected to snag up nine percent of the total advertising pie by 2011. They estimate that $25.9 billion in revenues will be spent on online ads by 2011, "rising at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 11 percent over the next five years." For search marketers, 43 percent of the online ad spend will be search-based ads, accounting for $11.1 billion by 2011.

Posted by Barry Schwartz on 10:06 AM | Permalink

Powerful Search + Social Bookmarking = Diigo

Social bookmarking and search services have been exploding in popularity recently, but I've yet to find one that combined ease of use and flexibility in just the right way. I've been playing around with a new "social annotation" service called Diigo that launched this week, and have been favorably impressed. It's simple, easy to use, but offers a lot of power, especially when it comes to searching—both the web as well as content that you've decided to save. More on the new service in today's SearchDay article, Diigo Offers "Social Annotation" Tool.

Posted by Chris Sherman on 8:40 AM | Permalink

Google AdWords Now Reporting Invalid Click Rates

Google is now offering AdWords advertisers the ability to see how many invalid clicks that Google catches before they are billed. "Estimating invalid clicks" from the Official Google Blog has more about this good move, which should help to better educate advertisers.

Concern about click fraud has been rising over the years, though whether click fraud itself has risen remains a debatable point. In my The Abridged Version: Independent Report On Google's Click Fraud Detection Practices post yesterday, I highlighted one example of this -- of how Google is conducting more investigations into click fraud reports but not paying out more. The independent expert who compiled the report felt this was due to people having more concerns rather than more click fraud occurring.

Still, that same report highlighted what many search marketers already know. It's difficult to know what exactly is going on within the black box of Google's ads billing system. The reporting Google is doing will help shed a bit more light into that box.

Specifically, there are new reporting options to see "Invalid Clicks" and "Invalid Clicks Rate." Check these, and you'll see all the clicks that Google has filtered before you were billed, plus the percentage of those clicks versus the total clicks to your campaign. More help from Google is covered here.

It will be especially interesting to see what stats individual advertisers start to share publicly. Going back to that independent report I mentioned, it covered how Google catches far more invalid clicks through its filters compared to those found when investigations are done after billing. Some advertisers might find they have double-digit invalid click rates. That's not a reason to panic, in the sense that you aren't paying for those clicks. You should be reassured.

Then again, I suspect anyone seeing high levels of invalid clicks being caught might also want to take a harder look at what they are actually getting billed for beyond this, since the high rate might suggest they are in a click-fraud prone industry and perhaps stuff is still slipping past the Google filters. Of course, a low rate might warrant a further look since perhaps Google's not catching stuff it should.

Confused? Here's the overriding advice. Everyone should be auditing their click logs, watching for odd things, just as you would your credit card statement. Google and Yahoo both have long had systems in place to automatically catch fraud. The Google move significantly helps advertisers understand that this protection is already in place. But it doesn't relieve the advertiser of being prudent and doing their own review, as well.

Finally, isn't giving this data making it easier for those who want to conduct click fraud to test what can get through? What prevents someone from opening an account, then trying various things until they find a way to generate clicks that Google can't catch?

"If you want to invest a huge amount of time and resources, you could already run those type of experiments. It doesn't provide significantly more feedback to fraudsters," said Shuman Ghosemajumder, Google's business product manager for trust and safety.

By the way, though the reports are said to be "real-time," they actually give you a total for an entire day. You can't see minute-by-minute catches.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on 4:42 AM | Permalink

July 25, 2006

AOL Redesigns Local CityGuides

Thanks to Gary Price for pointing out that AOL has launched a beta redesign of its popular CityGuides. Here's the current version of the site for New York and here's the new beta version of the same city site. Of the more than 300 CityGuides AOL offers, the top 25 are part of the new beta.

Among the upgrades and improvements are a visually richer interface, more imagery, more dynamically generated content and more community features. Gary also points out that AOL's Moviefone and CityGuides have also been added to the AOL mobile application.

Posted by Greg Sterling on 4:12 PM | Permalink

Search Headlines & Links: July 25, 2006

Below, a recap of stories posted today to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with other items we've spotted but not blogged separately:

From The SEW Blog...

  • Daily SearchCast, July 25, 2006: Report Says Google's Click Fraud Practices "Reasonable;" Few Opposed Proposed Google Click Fraud Settlement; Tracking Packages Via Search; Getting Real-Time Traffic Info & More!
    Today's search podcast covers an independent report finding Google's click fraud practices to be "reasonable," few object to Google's proposed click fraud settlement; Google's "wow" versus Yahoo's "consistency" in terms of product development; tracking packages via search engines; getting live traffic reports via maps and more!
  • The Abridged Version: Independent Report On Google's Click Fraud Detection Practices
    Last Friday, an independent report on how Google deals with click fraud was published as part of the ongoing Lane's Gifts v. Google class action lawsuit over click fraud. To my knowledge, it is the most comprehensive, detailed public look into how Google deals with click fraud that's ever come out. It finds that Google's efforts to combat the issue have been reasonable, though there are some eyebrow raising bits on how the author only finds the situation was in control by the end of 2005 and how it's impossible to fully know whether some clicks are invalid -- and...
  • Detailed Look into the Google AdWords Landing Page Algo
    The Google AdWords landing page algo changes this month have resulted in many advertisers sitting up and thinking about quality issues beyond their ad copy, and looking more closely at their landing pages. I caught up with Google to get specifics on how the algo works, including just how they decided what made a good landing page versus what didn't when they created their algo. I also have ten best practices for advertisers needing to improve landing page quality. The full length SEW subscribers article is here. A shorter (but free!) version is here. Want to share your own best...
  • Real-Time Traffic From Google Maps Mobile
    Google Maps has rolled out a new mobile version offering real-time traffic information in 30 US cities. The service also offers directions designed for those who are walking, in addition to driving....
  • Yahoo Invests In Social Search Research
    Reuters reports Yahoo hired Dr. Raghu Ramakrishnan, as vice president and Yahoo research fellow. Dr. Ramakrishnan is a well-respect database expert who has joined Yahoo to study "links between computer and human-aided Web search." Honestly, I am excited what this can potentially mean for social search. Yahoo has so many properties that can be tightly integrated with social search; Flickr, Del.io.us, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Video, web search, desktop search, Yahoo Groups and so on....
  • Librarians And Google: Tips Of The Trade
    Google attended the ALA Conference in New Orleans and produced a video entitled Tips of the Trade together with some additional text only tips from librarians and other information professionals. It's a shame that Google limited participation to American librarians, but it was explained to me that there would have been technical and legal problems with filming librarians from other countries (though that doesn't explain why they couldn't have added in anecdotes from them; a lovely opportunity to draw together and share global experiences). However this is perhaps carping; it's good to see a search engine (other than Ask who...
  • Yahoo & Symantec To Offer "New Security Offerings"
    News.com reports that Symantec and Yahoo will be announcing a "new security offering" sometime today. News.com says this partnership will "improve online security for consumers." But honestly, I have no more details. Is it email focused? Web search focused? Is it desktop focused? We don't know as of yet. So stay tuned....
  • SuperPages Buys Inceptor
    As reported in ClickZ today, SuperPages, which is itself up for sale, has acquired SEM firm Inceptor for an undisclosed amount. Verizon has been the most forward thinking and acting of the yellow pages publishers when it comes to offering performance-based products and leveraging search. This acquisition gives SuperPages more range in what it can offer and how the company can implement it -- and brings that cost in house. For more on this deal see my blog post....
  • Daily SearchCast, July 21, 2006: Google's Great Second Quarter Results; MSN Revenue Down; RSS Feeds For Ask Smart Answers And Google Base Results & More!
    Friday's search podcast covers Google's great second quarter results; MSN's revenues decline; Windows Live Local deserving a second look; RSS feeds for Ask Smart Answers and Google Base results and more!

Headlines & News From Elsewhere

Posted by Danny Sullivan on 2:55 PM | Permalink

Daily SearchCast, July 25, 2006: Report Says Google's Click Fraud Practices "Reasonable;" Few Opposed Proposed Google Click Fraud Settlement; Tracking Packages Via Search; Getting Real-Time Traffic Info & More!

Today's search podcast covers an independent report finding Google's click fraud practices to be "reasonable," few object to Google's proposed click fraud settlement; Google's "wow" versus Yahoo's "consistency" in terms of product development; tracking packages via search engines; getting live traffic reports via maps 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) or though our Yahoo Podcasts channel. Need more help tuning in live or finding the chat room? See the Daily SearchCast FAQ.

Below are links to items discussed:

  • Judge Hears Objections To Google's Click Fraud Settlement
    Associate Press reports that now that the independent report is out, a judge will consider the fifty-plus objections to the Lane's Gifts v. Google settlement. The judge will hear out advertisers today and tomorrow before finalizing that settlement....
  • Independent Report: Google Click Fraud Detection Practices Are "Reasonable"
    The Google Blog just posted the independent study on their click fraud detection practices that shows Google makes reasonable efforts to detect click fraud. The report was part of an agreement of the Lane's Gifts v. Google settlement and was performed by Dr. Alexander Tuzhilin, Professor of Information Systems at NYU. Obviously Google is pretty happy about this report and I didn't have time to go through the full 47 page report, but if you have time, I bet you as Search Engine Marketer can learn a ton about the AdWords system. Possibly, Danny will dig into this deeper next...
  • The Abridged Version: Independent Report On Google's Click Fraud Detection Practices
    Last Friday, an independent report on how Google deals with click fraud was published as part of the ongoing Lane's Gifts v. Google class action lawsuit over click fraud. To my knowledge, it is the most comprehensive, detailed public look into how Google deals with click fraud that's ever come out. It finds that Google's efforts to combat the issue have been reasonable, though there are some eyebrow raising bits on how the author only finds the situation was in control by the end of 2005 and how it's impossible to fully know whether some clicks are invalid -- and...
  • GoDaddy Launches Private Label Domain Park Program
    GoDaddy has long placed ads on registered domains that customers have parked at GoDaddy. Now, GoDaddy is allowing webmasters to sign up for a paid monthly subscription to CashParking, that would see webmasters get a share of the profits made from all clicks on the parked domain....
  • Google Versus Yahoo: Consistency Or Wow In Product Development?
    An article over at the New York Times 'In the race with Google, it's consistency vs 'wow'' discusses the differing approaches of Google and Yahoo to the introduction of new technology and resources. The fact that Google hasn't added some of the basics to its mapping service in comparison to the Yahoo and AOL offerings is the starting point for an indepth discussion on how both engines (MSN, AOL and Ask get very short shrift) are trying to increase their user base....
  • Yahoo Invests In Social Search Research
    Reuters reports Yahoo hired Dr. Raghu Ramakrishnan, as vice president and Yahoo research fellow. Dr. Ramakrishnan is a well-respect database expert who has joined Yahoo to study "links between computer and human-aided Web search." Honestly, I am excited what this can potentially mean for social search. Yahoo has so many properties that can be tightly integrated with social search; Flickr, Del.io.us, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Video, web search, desktop search, Yahoo Groups and so on....
  • Yahoo & Symantec To Offer "New Security Offerings"
    News.com reports that Symantec and Yahoo will be announcing a "new security offering" sometime today. News.com says this partnership will "improve online security for consumers." But honestly, I have no more details. Is it email focused? Web search focused? Is it desktop focused? We don't know as of yet. So stay tuned....
  • Librarians And Google: Tips Of The Trade
    Google attended the ALA Conference in New Orleans and produced a video entitled Tips of the Trade together with some additional text only tips from librarians and other information professionals. It's a shame that Google limited participation to American librarians, but it was explained to me that there would have been technical and legal problems with filming librarians from other countries (though that doesn't explain why they couldn't have added in anecdotes from them; a lovely opportunity to draw together and share global experiences). However this is perhaps carping; it's good to see a search engine (other than Ask who...
  • SEOMoz Spills The Beans On Pricing An SEO Campaign
    Rand posted a blog entry named How to Price an SEO Campaign. He actually broke down his pricing methodology for everyone to see. I have personally never seen this done to this extent before in this industry. SEOs and SEMs can learn a lot about how to price their campaigns and proposals by Rand's post. Rand breaks down a consulting contract versus an implementation contact. His post is very detailed and can give many SEMs an idea on how to improve their contracts. Check out Rand's post here....
  • Google Test Expandable "More" Link
    Philipp Lenssen reports Google is testing an expandable box that opens with options, when you click on the "more" link from the Google.com home page. The more link currently takes people to the more google products page, but this link, is a little DHTML popup that has links to these products directly on the page. The pop up cannot possibly have all of the products listed, so they have a link to "even more" products that probably links to the page. A screen shot is at Philipp's site....
  • Become.com Launches Search Zoom Filtering Feature
    No longer do you have to weed through hundreds or thousands of search results to find a discussion forum or product specs for Aston Martin's Vanquish. With Become, you can search for 'Aston Martin Vanquish' or any other product and then filter by Product Reveiws, Buying Guides, Discussion Forums, and Product Details. As Jon Glick, Become's Sr. Director of Product Search told me, "users can see what type of listing it is before going into it." I think this is an extremely useful feature. My original search results for 'Aston Martin Vanquish' (yes, I'm obsessed) contained 171, 573 results vs....
  • Tracking Packages Via MSN Search
    The MSN Search weblog has now announced that it is possible to use the system for tracking packages, or more specifically, packages from FedEx, DHL, UPS and USPS. Searchers can simply enter a tracking ID and some other tracking keywords and the Package Tracking Instant Answer will correctly construct the link. An example given is 'Where is UPS tracking number?' Additionally you could use the RSS feed for the search to really keep up to date on where your package has gone. Google has had this feature for years now, although it doesn't have an option for DHL. Postscript from...
  • Real-Time Traffic From Google Maps Mobile
    Google Maps has rolled out a new mobile version offering real-time traffic information in 30 US cities. The service also offers directions designed for those who are walking, in addition to driving....
  • Real-Time Traffic Via My MSN Direct Spot Watch

Posted by Danny Sullivan on 2:47 PM | Permalink

The Abridged Version: Independent Report On Google's Click Fraud Detection Practices

Last Friday, an independent report on how Google deals with click fraud was published as part of the ongoing Lane's Gifts v. Google class action lawsuit over click fraud. To my knowledge, it is the most comprehensive, detailed public look into how Google deals with click fraud that's ever come out. It finds that Google's efforts to combat the issue have been reasonable, though there are some eyebrow raising bits on how the author only finds the situation was in control by the end of 2005 and how it's impossible to fully know whether some clicks are invalid -- and thus, potentially -- impossible to prevent some types of fraud through purely automated means.

The report is long, a 47 page PDF file. Anyone interested in click fraud issues should give it a thorough read. But given how everyone's always busy, I thought I'd highlight below a number of sections that stood out in my review of the document.

The report is by Dr. Alexander Tuzhilin, Professor of Information Systems at New York University. To prepare it, he says in the Executive Summary at the beginning (page 1):

I have been asked to evaluate Google?s invalid click detection efforts and to conclude whether these efforts are reasonable or not. As a part of this evaluation, I have visited Google?s campus three times, examined various internal documents, interviewed several Google?s employees, have seen different demos of their invalid click inspection system, and examined internal reports and charts showing various aspects of performance of Google?s invalid click detection system. Based on all these studied materials and the information narrated to me by Google?s employees, I conclude that Google?s efforts to combat click fraud are reasonable. In the rest of this report, I elaborate on this point.

Immediately, the first thing that comes to mind is that he makes no mention of talking with individual advertisers, which could lead you to think that if he's only talking with Google, of course he's likely to come away with the idea that Google is doing everything just fine.

When you read the report, it's clear this isn't the case. Google does come under criticism. It's also important to realize Tuzhilin was not employed by Google to create this report. He's an independent expert appointed to my knowledge by the court. Exactly how he was selected is unclear, and I do think it would be a better report if advertiser data had been involved. But there's still plenty of good stuff here to digest.

Page 2 covers his background and materials reviewed from Google to prepare the report.

Page 3 and some of page 4 covers those he talked with at Google. Interesting details are that Google's click quality team consists of about 36 people, one-third engineers looking to design detection systems and the remaining two-thirds dedicated to doing manual investigations of suspected fraud.

Pages 4 through 6 cover the history of the internet, search engines and Google, most of which isn't that necessary for most experienced search marketers. Page 7 talks about three main ways of purchasing advertising:

  • CPM - cost per impression
  • CPC - cost per click
  • CPA - cost per action

Again, basic stuff. But it's worth touching on because of some of the current debate that Google and other search engines will be forced to go to CPA pricing to fully eliminate fraud.

On page 8, Tuzhilin lends some support of this, or at least the problems that others have raised with CPC:

Although currently popular, the CPC/PPC model has two fundamental problems:

  • Although correlated, good click-through rates (CTRs) are still not indicative of good conversion rates, since it is still not clear if a visitor would buy an advertised product once he or she clicked on the ad. In this respect, the CPA-based models provide better solutions for the advertisers (but not necessarily for the search engines), since they are more indicative that their ads are ?working.?
     
  • It does not offer any ?built-in? fundamental protection mechanisms against the click fraud since it is very hard to specify which clicks are valid vs. invalid in general, as will be explained in Section 8 (it can be done relatively easily in some special cases, but not in general). For this reason, major search engines launched extensive invalid click detection programs and still face problems combating click fraud.

In response to these two problems and for various other business reasons, Google is currently testing a CPA payment model, according to some reports in the media. Some analysts believe that the conversion-based CPA model is more robust for the advertisers and also less prone to click fraud. Therefore, they believe that the future of the online advertising payments lies with the CPA model. Although this is only a belief that is not supported by strong evidence yet, Google is getting ready for the next stage of the online advertising ?marathon.?

What Will Replace Pay-Per-Click Advertising? over at Publishing 2.0 from Scott Karp is a good roundup and debate on some of the issues of CPA perhaps as the solution to CPC issues.

I've posted lots of comments in Karp's post, but my personal view is this. Currently, Google is offering all three major payment systems: CPC, CPM and CPA. It is offering all three not just because of fraud issues but because advertisers have different goals with advertising, where different payment models may be required.

Building brand? You want impressions perhaps more than clickthrough, and suddenly CPM makes sense. Really savvy with conversion tracking? CPA might make more sense for you, as a way for you to feel less likely to be exposed to fraud and more likely to really be paying only for key traffic. Fairly rudimentary with conversion tracking? Doing low-cost CPC ads might make a lot of sense, for your situation. And beyond the three big ones, I'm sure we'll see other options emerge. The unifying goal around all of them, from Google's perspective, will be figuring out a way to help advertisers track that the ads are working according to some type of metrics that the advertisers want.

Skipping down past background on how AdWords works and the AdSense program (AdSense For Domains doesn't get mentioned, though it's a major program), page 13 starts in on what Google can tell about clicking activities.

Google is apparently making use of conversion data that advertisers provide to determine if fraudulent clicks are happening. My understanding was that conversion data was supposed to be ringfenced and not used by Google for anything, not even in the aggregate. But perhaps the policy has changed or perhaps I misunderstood this. I'll check on that (and also note that confusingly, the report says on page 34 that "None of the filters uses the conversion information that Google collects"). Certainly Google made no such restrictions when it launched Google Checkout. But even with conversion data, the report notes using this info isn't perfect.

Google collects various types of information about querying and clicking activities, including certain types of ?post-clicking? data about conversion actions on the advertiser?s website where the visitor is taken following the click. All this data accumulated by Google is extracted from various sources and contains comprehensive information about visitor?s activities on the Google Network.

As stated before, the conversion data ? the ?post-clicking? data about conversion actions on the advertiser?s website ? constitutes an important piece of this collected data. In particular, if the advertiser formally agrees to provide this information, Google collects data on whether or not the user visited certain designated pages on the advertised website that the advertiser marked as ?conversion? pages, such as the checkout page and certain form filling pages. This conversion data is limited to what the advertiser decided to provide to Google and is not as rich as the clickstream data collected by advertisers themselves on their websites. Also, many advertisers decide to opt out from providing this conversion data. In this case, Google does not have any conversion information and therefore does not know what happened after a visitor clicked on the ad. Nevertheless, this post-clicking conversion data is important for Google even in its limited form because it conveys some intentions of the visitors on the advertised website and provides good insights into whether or not the visitor is seriously considering purchasing the advertised product or service....

This ?raw? clicking data described above is subsequently cleaned, preprocessed and stored in various internal logs by Google for different types of subsequent analysis conducted on this data.

One inherent weakness of Google?s (or any other search engine) data collection effort that is important for detecting invalid clicks, is inability to get full access to all the clicking activities of the visitors of the advertised website. In other words, the conversion data that Google collects provides only a partial picture of all the post-clicking activities of the visitor on the advertised website. This data is important for detecting invalid clicks since better invalid click detection methods can be developed using this data. Unfortunately, Google (and other search engines) does not have full access to this data, unless the advertised website decides to provide its clickstream data to Google, which many websites are reluctant to do. However, this is not Google?s fault ? this is an inherent limitation of the types of data available to Google.

While it might not be perfect, the report also notes at the end of this section that no one has the perfect collection of information:

However, this lack of full conversion data available to Google is compensated by various types of querying and clicking data that Google can collect, whereas advertisers and third-party vendors cannot. Therefore, there exists a tradeoff between the types of data relevant for detecting invalid clicks that is available to Google, advertisers and the thirdparty vendors. None of these three groups have the most comprehensive set of data pertinent to detecting invalid clicks, and each of them needs to settle for the invalid click detection methods possible only with the data that they have.

On page 14, the report addresses the frustration advertisers feel over the relatively non-granular nature of Google's reporting versus Google's need to keep some things carefully protected:

The smallest unit of analysis is one day. For example, the number of invalid clicks on an ad detected by Google (or any other related statistic) can only be reported on a daily basis (although there are certain alternative methods of obtaining aggregation granularity that is smaller than a day). In other words, advertisers cannot know if a particular click on a particular ad was marked as valid or invalid by Google, and Google refuses to provide this information to advertisers.

This is a source of contention and dispute between Google and the advertisers, and one can understand both parties in this dispute. On one hand, the advertiser has the right to know why a particular click was marked as valid by Google (when the advertiser thinks that it is invalid) because the advertiser pays for this click. On the other hand, if Google discloses this information, it opens itself to click fraud on a massive scale because, by doing so, it provides certain hints about how its invalid click detection methods work. This means that unethical users will immediately take advantage of this information to conduct more sophisticated fraudulent activities undetectable by Google?s methods.

This conflicting dilemma between advertisers? right to know and Google?s inability to provide the appropriate information to advertisers because of the security concerns is part of the Fundamental Problem of the PPC advertising model to be discussed in the next section. More recently, Google tried to bridge this gap between Google and the advertisers.

Page 15 spends time looking at various definitions of click fraud, bringing us to page 16 which raises the bigger issue that it is impossible to know the intent of ALL clicks, which is crucial to understand what chunk of them might be fraudulent:

Unfortunately, in several cases it is hard or even impossible to determine the true intent of a click using any technological means. For example, a person might have clicked on an ad, looked at it, went somewhere else but then decided to have another look at the ad shortly thereafter to make sure that he/she got all the necessary information from the ad. Is this second click invalid? To make things even more complicated, the second click may not be strictly necessary since the person remembers the content of the ad reasonably well (hence there is no real need for the second click). However, the person may not really like or care about the advertiser and decides to make this second click anyway (to make sure that he/she did not miss anything in the ad and his/her information is indeed correct) without any concerns that the advertiser may end up paying for this second click (since the person really does not care about the advertiser and his/her own interests of not missing anything in the ad overweigh the concerns of hurting the advertiser). Therefore, in some cases the true intent of a click can be identified only after examining deep psychological processes, subtle nuances of human behavior and other considerations in the mind of the clicking person.

Soon after this, on page 17, comes the first real bombshell to me. As said above, you can't detect the intent of all clicks. Given this, there's no reasonable way to be certain that technological fixes for click fraud detection are working:

In summary, between the obviously clear cases of valid and invalid clicks, lies the whole spectrum of highly complicated cases when the clicking intent is far from clear and depends on a whole range of complicated factors, including the parameter values of the click. Therefore, this intent (and thus the validity of a click based on the above definitions) cannot be operationalized and detected by technological means with any reasonable measure of certainty.

What? Didn't the report find Google was acting reasonably? Yes, and I think this is is because as the report goes on, it's because Google's not relying solely on automated means to stop click fraud, which might allow some clicks to get through, if that were only the case.

Page 18 picks of the issue even more strongly, and I've bolded this section because it deserves special attention. Note that the italics were originally included:

The last statement has one important implication: given a particular click in a log file, it is impossible to say with certainty if this click is valid or not in all the cases. This means that

  • It is impossible to measure the true rates of invalid clicking activities, and all the reports published in the business press are only guesstimates at best.
     
  • The invalid click detection methods need to be developed without a proper operationalizable conceptual definition of invalid clicks.

The important word above is all the cases since in some cases it can be stated with certainty if a particular click is valid or not. For example, it is easy to detect a doubleclick using relatively simple technological means, assuming that the doubleclick is invalid.

Again, it seems to be a case that automation can catch some, perhaps lots of click fraud, but it can't catch all of it because the intent problem. Also crucial in the above is the stressing that rates we've been given from various sources are simply guesses, since the intent of clicks aren't know to some of these other sources.

Indeed, in the case of the recent Outsell report, you don't even have to worry about figuring out the intent of particular clicks. Click fraud stats from that report come from half the panel entirely guessing about what click fraud rates they might have -- guessing, because that half does not auditing of clicks at all.

Page 19 deals with ways of identifying invalid clicks, at least according to operational approaches -- IE, automated criteria. Do the clicks show some type of:

  1. Anomaly from past clicking patterns for a site or ad?
  2. Violate certain predefined rules?
  3. Fall into certain classes of behavior that make them deemed invalid?

Page 20 explains that Google primarily depends on the first two approaches -- looking for anomalies and using rules -- but then gets into what it stresses as the "Fundamental Problem" of fraudulent clicks:

We conclude that there is a fundamental problem associated with the definition of invalid clicks for the Pay-per-Click model. This problem can be summarized as follows:

  • There is no conceptual definition of invalid clicks that can be operationalized in the sense defined above.
     
  • An operational definition cannot be fully disclosed to the general public because of the concerns that unethical users will take advantage of it, which may lead to a massive click fraud. However, if it is not disclosed, advertisers cannot verify or even dispute why they have been charged for certain clicks.

This problem lies at the heart of the click fraud debate and constitutes the main problem of the CPC model: it is inherently vulnerable to click fraud.

Page 21 poses solutions to the problem:

  • The ?trust us? approach of the search engines. The search engines can assure advertisers that they are doing everything possible to protect them against the click fraud. This is not easy because of the inherent conflict of interest between the two parties: the money from invalid clicks directly contribute to the bottom lines of the search engines. Nevertheless, it may be possible for the search engines to solve this trust problem by developing lasting relationships with the advertisers. However, the discussion of how this can be done lies outside of the scope of this report.
     
  • Third-party auditors. Independent third-party vendors, who have no financial conflicts of interest, can work with advertisers and audit their clickstream files to detect invalid clicks.

These two approaches would still constitute only a partial solution to the Fundamental Problem because there is no conceptual definition of invalid clicks that can be operationalized.

Page 21 continues on looking at how Google does click fraud detection, covering a range of general preventative measure and more active things done when clicks actually happen.

On page 23, a look at filtering systems begins, ending with this summary that's positive for Google, at the moment. It also stresses that filtering will always come under new challenges:

The current set of Google filters is fairly stable and only requires periodic ?tuning? and ?maintenance? rather than a radical re-engineering, even when major fraudulent attacks are launched against the Google Network. It also demonstrates that various recent efforts of the Click Quality team to improve performance of their filters produce only incremental improvements. Thus, the Click Quality team currently reached a stability point since additional efforts to enhance filters produce only marginal improvements.

Having said this, the Click Quality team also realizes that this is only a local stability point in the sense that major future modifications in clicking patterns of online users and new types of fraudulent attacks against Google can lead to radically new types of invalid clicks that the current set of filters can miss. Therefore, the Click Quality team is working on the next generation of more powerful filters that will monitor a broader set of signals and more complex monitoring conditions. These new filters will require a more powerful computing infrastructure than is currently available, and the Click Quality team also participates in developing this infrastructure. Their overall goal is to make click spam hard and unrewarding for the unethical users thus making it uneconomical for them and turning many of them away from Google and the Google Network.

At page 28, the expert notes that Google's filters are relatively simple in nature, yet they work:

The structure of most of Google?s filters, with a few exceptions, is surprisingly simple. I was initially puzzled and thought that Google did not do a reasonable job in developing better and more sophisticated filters. I was initially certain that these simple filters should miss many types of more complicated attacks. However, the evidence reported in the previous two sections indicates that these simple filters perform reasonably well.

Why? A variety of reasons, such unsophisticated attacks:

Although some of the coordinated attacks can be quite sophisticated, the majority of the invalid clicks usually come from relatively simple sources and less experienced perpetrators....Still, there are certain types of attacks that Google filters will miss; but these attacks should be quite sophisticated and would require significant ingenuity to launch. Therefore, there cannot be too many of these, unless perpetrators become much more imaginative....

The Long Tail / Search Tail even gets a mention, with the idea being that -- if I understand correctly -- most activity focuses around the same type of things that the filters work well to detect. IE, the filters do well at cutting off the head of click fraud -- and if tail activity gets through, it's relatively little in comparison:

Despite its current reasonable performance, this situation may change significantly in the future if new attacks will shift towards the Long Tail of the Zipf distribution by becoming more sophisticated and diverse.

At the bottom of page 29, the report starts examining whether Google is letting stuff slide to earn more money:

Since Google does not charge advertisers for invalid clicks, this means that it loses money by filtering out these clicks. Thus, there is a financial incentive for Google not to forgo some of these revenues and simply be ?easy? Long Tail Left Part Frequency Rank 30 on filtering out invalid clicks. Therefore, it is important to know if any business considerations entered into the filter specification process or is it entirely determined by Google?s engineers in an objective manner with a single purpose to protect the advertiser base. This is one of the important issues that I investigated as a part of my studies of how Google manages detection of invalid clicks....

The conclusion is that Google isn't trying to favor itself:

I have spent a significant amount of time trying to understand who sets these threshold parameters, how, and what are the procedures and processes for setting them. In particular, I tried to understand if it is an entirely engineering decision that tries to protect the advertisers from invalid clicks or any of the business groups at Google are involved in this decision process with the purpose of influencing it towards generating extra revenues for Google.

As a result of these investigations, I realized that it constitutes exclusively an engineering decision with no inputs from the finance department or the business units, except the following two cases:

  • The first one was a special case when one particular IP address was disabled because of inappropriate clicking activities, and a business unit requested the Click Quality team to conduct an additional investigation since it was an important customer associated with that IP address, and restore it if the investigation results were negative. When I was explained what had happened, I felt that Google?s actions were reasonable in this particular situation.
     
  • The change in the doubleclick policy that was considered in Winter 2005 and implemented in March 2005. It turned out that the change in the doubleclick policy (i.e., not to charge advertisers for the immediate second click in a doubleclick) had non-trivial financial implications for Google. Being a publicly traded company at that time, this change would have had a noticeable effect on Google?s total revenues with corresponding implications for the financial performance of the company. Therefore, this policy change had legitimate concerns for Google?s management, and these financial implications have been discussed in the company. Still, despite its noticeable negative effects on its financial performance, Google decided to abandon the old doubleclick policy and not to charge advertisers for the second click, which was an appropriate action to take.

In conclusion, with the exception of the doubleclick, I found Google?s processes for specifying filters and setting parameters in these filters driven exclusively by the consideration to protect the advertiser base, and, therefore, being reasonable.

Doubleclick constitutes a special case. For me, the second click in the doubleclick is invalid, as I argued in Section 8, and the advertisers should not be charged for it. It is not clear to me why it took Google so long to revise the policy of charging for doubleclicks. Nevertheless, this policy was revised in March 2005 despite the fact that the company lost ?noticeable? revenues by taking this action.

I find the conclusion that Google wasn't trying to benefit itself doesn't mesh well with the expert's own concern/confusion/uncertainty about why Google took so long to change its policy on doubleclicks. Moreover, that entire policy isn't well explained. Way back up on page 20, there's this very brief mention:

It turns out that Google had a history associated with the definition of a doubleclick: at some point doubleclick was considered to be a valid click and advertisers were charged for it, while subsequently Google reconsidered and treated doubleclick as invalid.

And that's it until the section later in the report, where Google's effectively accused of footdragging on changing its policy, where business discussions about the change were made, but Google then seems to be given the all clear because eventually it did the right thing.

The entire matter is something that feels like it should have been explored more, but page 31 sheds light as to why this might have been difficult. Google's apparently had a complete staff change in relation to click fraud detection since it began charging by the click:

In this subsection, I will describe the history of development of Google filters. First of all, I would like to point out that most of the descriptions in this subsection are not based on documents provided to me by Google but rather on the verbal descriptions by the members of the Click Quality team based on their recollections of the past events and on the ?folklore? evidence since none of the team members I interviewed were even around or involved in the click fraud effort when the AdWords program was introduced in February 2002.

The section continues with detection divided into these groupings -- and I've bolded a key part:

  • The Early Days (February 2002 ? Summer 2003). These were the early days of the PPC model and of the click fraud characterized by extensive learning about the problem and determining ways to deal with it.
     
  • The Formation Stage (Summer 2003 ? Fall 2005). This stage started with the introduction of the AdSense program in March 2003, formation of the Google Click Quality team in the Spring/Summer 2003, launch of new filters and the intent to take the invalid click detection efforts to the ?next level.? It ended with the development of the whole infrastructure for combating invalid clicks and the consolidation of Google?s invalid click detection efforts. This stage was characterized by significant progress in combating invalid clicking activities and developing mature systems and processes for accomplishing this task. Although the Click Quality team?s solutions were still not perfect, based on the information provided to me by Google, I reached the conclusion that the invalid clicking problem at Google was ?under control? by the end of 2005.
     
  • The Consolidation Stage (Fall 2005 ? present). By this time, Google had enough filters and perfected them to the level when they would detect most of the invalid clicking activities in the Left Part of the Zipf distribution (see Figure 1) and some of the attacks in the Long Tail. They would still miss more sophisticated attacks 32 in the Long Tail, and the Click Quality team continued working on the neverending process of improving their filters to detect and prevent new attacks. The Click Quality team has also been working on enhancing their infrastructure and improving their processes....

What? Click fraud wasn't under control until the end of 2005, yet Google is said to have acted reasonably by the report? How does this make sense? The best explanation seems to be that as the report goes on, the author feels click fraud was an evolving problem, and that Google was reasonably reacting to prevent it even though it wasn't "under control" until the end of last year. In contrast, had Google been doing nothing, then it might have been deemed not to have been taking reasonable steps to gain control.

Page 32 looks at the early days and notes that for a year and a half, no new filters were added other than the three original ones that CPC-based AdWords started with. Why? Maybe click fraud was less understood at that time since it was so new (though Search Engine Watch was citing articles on the problem like this one from Wired as far back as 2001). That's one suggestion, along with Google having fewer resources, lacking the right infrastructure or click fraud being on a smaller scale. But these are all guesses, since as the author notes (again, I've bolded a key part):

Not a single person on the Click Quality team was either around or involved in the click fraud detection back in 2002. The only person from this era who is still at Google is on an extended leave and was not available for comments during my visits to Google.

It is hard to judge reasonableness of Google?s invalid click detection efforts between 2002 and summer 2003 because there is simply not enough information available for this time period for me to form an informed judgment about this matter. One exception is the doubleclick policy that I have described before. As I have already stated, the second click in the doubleclick is invalid in my opinion, and Google should have identified it as such well before March 2005 (however, the detection and filtering out the third, fourth and other subsequent clicks was there since the introduction of the PPC model, and advertisers were not charged for these extra clicks).

Again, I get confused by the report declaring that Google operated reasonably when it also states that it can't judge if it indeed acted reasonably for part of the claim period.

The middle period finds progress with far more confidence, as covered on page 33:

The Formation Stage (Summer 2003 ? Fall 2005). This stage started with the introduction of the AdSense program in March 2003 and the formation of the Google Click Quality team in the Spring/Summer 2003 (the first person was hired in April 2003 with the mandate to form the Click Quality team; several people joined the team during the summer of 2003, and the initial ?core? team consisting of Operations and Engineering groups was consolidated by Fall 2003).

During this time period, two new filters were introduced in Summer 2003 and one more in January 2004. These three new filters remedied several problems that existed since the launch of the first three filters and significantly advanced Google?s invalid click detection efforts. Besides the development of new and better filters, there was a separate effort launched to develop the whole infrastructure for doing the offline analysis of invalid clicks and managing customer inquiries about invalid clicks and billing charges.

Despite all these efforts, the new filters and the offline analysis methods still failed to detect some of the more sophisticated attacks (presumably from the Long Tail of the Figure 1) launched against the Google Network in 2004 and the first half of 2005. In response to these activities and as a part of the overall invalid click detection effort, Google engineers introduced some additional filters around Winter and Spring 2005, including the filter identifying the second immediate click in a doubleclick as invalid.

As a result of all of these efforts by the Click Quality team, a significant progress has been made in combating invalid clicking activities and developing mature systems and processes to accomplish this task. Although the Click Quality team?s solutions were still not perfect, based on the information provided to me by Google, I reached the conclusion that the invalid clicking problem at Google was ?under control? by the end of 2005.

And overall filtering is given this conclusion at the top of page 35:

Google put much effort in developing infrastructure, methods and processes for detecting invalid clicks since the Click Quality team was established in 2003. These efforts were not perfect since Google missed certain amounts of invalid clicks over these years and it adhered to the doubleclicking policy for too long in my opinion. However, click fraud is a very difficult problem to solve, Google put a significant effort to solve it, and I find their efforts to filter out invalid clicks as being reasonable, especially after the doubleclick policy was reversed in March 2005.

Page 35 then begins looking at "offline" or non-automated ways to find click fraud that's gotten past filters. By page 37, it gets into systems applied to review what happens on some AdSense sites:

Auto-Termination System is an automated offline system for detecting the AdSense publishers who are engaged in inappropriate behavior violating the Terms and Conditions of the AdSense program. It examines online behavior of various publishers and either immediately terminates or warns the publishers who are engaged in the activities that the system finds to be inappropriate.

Interestingly, the system is still relatively new, only about a year old, as explained on page 38:

The first prototype of the auto-termination system was built in the early 2005 and the system was launched in the summer 2005. Recently, Google has developed major enhancements to the current version of the auto-termination system deploying an alternative set of technologies.

Page 38 also starts a look at the manual review that the click fraud team does, with this positive summary coming on page 40:

I have personally observed several such inspections and can attest to how successfully they have been conducted by Google?s investigators. This success can be attributed to (a) the quality of the inspection tools, (b) the extensive experience and high levels of professionalism of the Click Quality inspectors, and (c) the existence of certain investigation processes, guidelines and procedures assisting the investigators in the inspection process.

However, using humans also poses a bottleneck, as covered on page 41:

My only concern with these manual inspections is about scalability of the inspection process. Since the number of inquiries grows rapidly, so does the number of inspections required to investigate these inquiries. As stated before, Google tries to automate this process by letting software systems do a sizable number of inspections. Still, the number of manual inspections keeps growing significantly over time, based on the numbers that I have seen. This means that Google has a challenging task of expanding and properly training its team of inspectors to assure rapid high-quality inspections of inquiries in the future.

Page 41 also revisits the tug-of-war between advertisers wanting more transparency and Google trying to protect against click fraud by giving too much information away:

One of the complaints about Google?s investigation system that I keep hearing is that Google is quite secretive and does not provide meaningful explanations of the inspection results neither to the advertisers nor to the publishers. After examining how their inspection systems work, I can understand this secrecy. If Google provides such explanations, then the unethical users can gain additional insights into how Google invalid click detection methods work and would be able to ?game? their detection methods much better, thus creating a possibility of massive click fraud. To avoid these problems, Google prefers to be secretive rather than to risk compromising their detection systems and the advertiser base.

And this interesting tidbit on how when someone gets kicked out of AdSense, advertisers apparently get refunds:

Finally, I would like to point out that when Google terminates an AdSense publisher, all the clicks generated at that publisher?s site over a certain time period (valid and invalid) are credited to the advertisers whose ads were clicked on that site....

How well are things going? That begins to be addressed at the bottom of page 41, and here's a key statement from page 42:

The number of inquiries about invalid clicks for the Click Quality team increased drastically since late 2004. However, the number of refunds for invalid clicks provided by Google did not change significantly over the same time period. Therefore, the number of refunds per inquiry decreased drastically since late 2004. Since each inquiry about invalid clicks leads to an investigation, this means that significantly fewer investigations result in refunds. This statistic can be interpreted in several ways. First, it can be an indication that Google?s invalid click detection methods have significantly improved over this time period and that reactive investigations do not find any problems when searching for invalid clicks. Second, this statistic can mean that Google tightened its refund policies and is less generous with its refunds than it used to be. Third, this statistic can mean that more advertisers are looking more carefully into their logs and are more suspicious about invalid clicks since this problem received wide attention in the media and the public discourse in general. Therefore, they may request Google to investigate suspicious clicking activities even if nothing really happened. I examined investigative activities of the Google Click Quality team and can attest that it consists of a group of highly professional employees who do their investigations carefully and professionally. Therefore, I do not believe in the second reason stated above. The third reason is quite possible since advertisers are indeed concerned about invalid clicks and request Google to investigate suspicious clicking activities more frequently than before. However, the number of inquiries increased so significantly that I would expect that the number of refunds would also increase somewhat. Since this did not happen, I attribute this effect to the fact that Google?s invalid click detection methods work reasonably well by now.

I've bolded the most important parts to me. The expert is saying that more advertisers are raising inquiries, probably because of increased concerns (which we know is the case from various surveys over the past two years) but that Google isn't refunding more. Nor is that Google just protecting itself, the expert says. To him, it's a case that the concerns aren't matching the reality. Click fraud -- bad clicks getting past Google -- do not appear to be on the rise.

Nor is click fraud getting past filters a major problem compared to the amount Google is proactively catching, the expert says:

The total amount of reactive refunds that Google provides to advertisers as a result of their inquiries is miniscule in comparison to the potential revenues that Google foregoes due to the removal of invalid clicks (and not charging advertisers for them).

Another interesting part is how Google is comparing traffic across its network to that from within Google.com, which is said to be a "gold standard" of a pure site. The network is said to compare well:

Another indirect piece of evidence provided to me by Google is that Conversions-Per- Dollar (CPD) rates on various partner sites of Google Network are not significantly lower than on their ?flagship? Google.com site. CPD is the statistic determining the number of conversions that occurred divided by the dollar amount spent on advertising. This statistic shows how effective advertising campaigns are for the advertisers. Since Google spent much effort over the past 4.5 years to make sure that Google?s AdWords program works reasonably well, it now serves as the ?golden standard? against which other programs are compared at Google. Since CPD numbers for other parts of the Google Network approach that of at Google.com, this is an indication that other advertising programs work as well as AdWords works on Google.com. Since other parts of the Google Network are affected by invalid clicking activities significantly more than Google.com, this is an indication to the Click Quality team that their efforts to combat fraud on other parts of the Google Network are as effective as on Google.com.

At the bottom of page 43 is an overall conclusion about that Google's doing a reasonable job with detection, as best as this scientist can tell. It also takes some slams at general reports of click fraud being widespread in the press as not being proven true or false yet. I've bolded the key paragraph for all this below:

As a scientist, I am accustomed to seeing more direct, objective and conclusive evidence that certain methods and approaches ?work.? Having said this, I fully understand the difficulties of obtaining such measures for invalid clicks by Google, as previously discussed in this report. Moreover, one can challenge most of the reports pertaining to invalid clicking rates published in the business press by questioning their methodologies and assumptions used for calculating these rates. Most of these reports would not stand hard scientific scrutiny.

Still, as a scientist, it is hard for me to arrive at any definitive conclusions beyond any reasonable doubt based on Points (1) ? (6) above that Google?s invalid click detection methods ?work well? and remove ?most? of the invalid clicks ? the provided evidence is simply not hard enough for me, and I am used to dealing with much more conclusive evidence in my scientific work.

Having said this, the indirect evidence (1) ? (6) specified above, nevertheless, provides a sufficient degree of comfort for me to conclude that these filters work reasonably well. Finally, this statement should not be interpreted as if I find Google?s effort to detect invalid clicks (a) unreasonable, or (b) not working reasonably well. It only states that Google did not provide a compelling amount of conclusive evidence demonstrating the effectiveness of their approach that would satisfy me as a scientist.

Finally, the measures (1) ? (6) above are only statistical measures providing some evidence that Google?s filters work reasonably well. This does not mean, however, that any particular advertiser cannot be hurt badly by fraudulent attacks, given the evidence that Google filters ?work.? Since Google has a very large number of advertisers, one particular bad incident will be lost in the overall statistics. Good performance measures indicative that filters work well only mean that there will be ?relatively few? such bad cases. Therefore, any reports published in the business press about particular advertisers being hurt by particular fraudulent attacks do not mean that the phenomenon is widespread. One simply should not generalize such incidents to other cases and draw premature conclusions ? we simply do not have evidence for or against this.

Page 44 has a section that restates conclusions in terms of economic aspects -- IE, any economic motivation for Google to hide or ignore click fraud:

First of all, most of the revenue that Google foregoes due to discarding invalid clicks comes from the filters since they identify most of the invalid clicks. The second source of the forgone revenues comes from the terminated AdSense publishers (as stated before, all the clicks made on the terminated publisher?s website generated over a certain time period are credited back to the advertisers regardless of whether they are valid or invalid). However, this second type of revenue is relatively small in comparison to the foregone revenues due to filters. The third source of the foregone revenues comes from the AdWords credits. However, these AdWord credits are miniscule in comparison to the other sources of foregone revenues. In summary, the most significant source of foregone revenues, by far, are Google filters. Hence their performance is the most crucial factor for the whole invalid click detection program (note that this observation does not mean that Google focuses mainly on this part of the invalid click detection program since other parts are also important)....

It makes no business sense for Google to go after these extra revenues and that the best long-term business policy for Google is to protect advertisers against invalid clicks. Policy reversal on the doubleclick is a good example of this. By not charging advertisers for the doubleclick since March 2005, Google lost a ?noticeable? amount of revenues. However, the revenues lost as a result of this action are insignificant in comparison to the revenues that Google risks to lose if it loses trust of the advertisers. Therefore, reversing the doubleclick policy makes sense not only from the legal, ethical and public relations point of view, but it is also a sound economic decision.

Finally, the beginning of page 46 gives this overall conclusion:

Google has built the following four ?lines of defense? against invalid clicks: pre-filtering, online filtering, automated offline detection and manual offline detection, in that order. Google deploys different detection methods in each of these stages: the rule-based and anomaly-based approaches in the pre-filtering and the filtering stages, the combination of all the three approaches in the automated offline detection stage, and the anomaly-based approach in the offline manual inspection stage. This deployment of different methods in different stages gives Google an opportunity to detect invalid clicks using alternative techniques and thus increases their chances of detecting more invalid clicks in one of these stages, preferably proactively in the early stages.

Since its establishment in the Spring and Summer of 2003 the Click Quality team has been developing an infrastructure for detecting and removing invalid clicks and implementing various methods in the four detection stages described above. Currently, they reached a consolidation phase in their efforts, when their methods work reasonably well, the invalid click detection problem is ?under control,? and the Click Quality team is fine-tuning these methods. There is no hard data that can actually prove this statement. However, indirect evidence provided in this report supports this conclusion with a moderate degree of certainty. The Click Quality team also realizes that battling click fraud is an arms race, and it wants to stay ?ahead of the curve? and get ready for more advanced forms of click fraud by developing the next generation of online filters.

In summary, I have been asked to evaluate Google?s invalid click detection efforts and to conclude whether these efforts are reasonable or not. Based on my evaluation, I conclude that Google?s efforts to combat click fraud are reasonable.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on 1:58 PM | Permalink

Detailed Look into the Google AdWords Landing Page Algo

The Google AdWords landing page algo changes this month have resulted in many advertisers sitting up and thinking about quality issues beyond their ad copy, and looking more closely at their landing pages. I caught up with Google to get specifics on how the algo works, including just how they decided what made a good landing page versus what didn't when they created their algo. I also have ten best practices for advertisers needing to improve landing page quality.

The full length SEW subscribers article is here. A shorter (but free!) version is here. Want to share your own best practices for improving landing pages? Visit our forum thread here.

Posted by Jennifer Slegg on 11:35 AM | Permalink

Real-Time Traffic From Google Maps Mobile

Google Maps has rolled out a new mobile version offering real-time traffic information in 30 US cities. The service also offers directions designed for those who are walking, in addition to driving.

The mobile version is explained more here from Google. It requires downloading Java-based software which works with many mobile phones but certainly not all of them. Count me among the ones out of luck. It also won't work on Palm devices nor, from what I can tell, Windows Mobile/Pocket PCs. The FAQ explains more. All supported devices are here.

Google's also made a new version of its personalized home page for mobile devices, using this tool. Google Personalized Homepage on Mobile Phones from Google Blogoscoped and Google Beefs Up Mobile Home Page from Micro Persuasion cover more on how this works.

Very oddly, regular Google Maps hasn't gained either traffic information or pedestrian directions. That's too bad, because if they did, I could use the regular browser on my phone to get this type of information. Since Google fails to do this, here are alternatives from its competitors.

Yahoo rolled out real-time traffic information into Yahoo Maps well over a year ago. Our SearchDay article Yahoo Offers Real-Time Traffic Reports covers more about this, and help info from Yahoo is here.

Meanwhile, Windows Live Local from Microsoft added real-time traffic info about two months ago, as our past blog post Windows Live Local Adds Traffic and Sharing covers. Help info from Microsoft is here.

Mobile Access to Info: See The Traffic from us in the past has some tips on seeing real-time traffic via the TrafficLand web site, which has expanded since our original article to cover more cities.

Ask Maps doesn't have traffic info but it does provide an option to get directions both for those driving and for walking, something Google only gives you on your phone.

Nobody walks in LA -- or The OC -- for that matter. But if Ryan on The OC really was trying to walk between locations as the TV series would make you think (see my personal blog for more), here's a rough idea of how the three hour trip by foot gets turned into only minutes through the miracle of television. Oh -- and it also demonstrates how walking directions work on Ask.

And speaking of my personal blog, I couldn't resist doing a quick post about my new favorite way of getting traffic information, via my watch. See Real-Time Traffic Via My MSN Direct Spot Watch for more on that.

Postscript: Gary Price has listed some additional real time traffic resources here

Posted by Danny Sullivan on 10:07 AM | Permalink

Yahoo Invests In Social Search Research

Reuters reports Yahoo hired Dr. Raghu Ramakrishnan as vice president and Yahoo research fellow. Dr. Ramakrishnan is a well-respected database expert who has joined Yahoo to study "links between computer and human-aided Web search." Honestly, I am excited what this can potentially mean for social search. Yahoo has so many properties that can be tightly integrated with social search; Flickr, Del.io.us, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Video, web search, desktop search, Yahoo Groups and so on.

Posted by Barry Schwartz on 9:31 AM | Permalink

Librarians And Google: Tips Of The Trade

Google attended the ALA Conference in New Orleans and produced a video entitled Tips of the Trade together with some additional text only tips from librarians and other information professionals. It's a shame that Google limited participation to American librarians, but it was explained to me that there would have been technical and legal problems with filming librarians from other countries (though that doesn't explain why they couldn't have added in anecdotes from them; a lovely opportunity to draw together and share global experiences).

However this is perhaps carping; it's good to see a search engine (other than Ask who employs Gary Price) actually showing interest in, and paying attention to librarians. What I found interesting was the choice of examples that Google used, both in the video and the text tips.

In the video we were treated to brief clips on how Google Earth could be used to orientate students around London, how the search engine could be used to find a play for children, and two quick nods towards Book Search and searching for lyrics. The video ended with a quote "I can't imagine research life without Google".

The text only tips covered the use of Google Alerts, Video, Reader, language restrictions, Desktop, Maps, genealogical searching, Scholar and searching for business information.

These were all interesting in and of themselves, but with respect to the information professionals included there was nothing really earth shattering. At one point Google describes them as "terrific anecdotes", and I think that's a rather fairer and more accurate summary than "tips of the trade". If the audience was intended to be the librarians patrons it would have been more understandable, but given that it is other information professionals I was hoping for rather more complex hints and tips.

As it stands, both the video and the text tips were interesting, but lacking that 'wow' factor that I talked about yesterday. Google has made a great start in holding discussions with librarians and the information profession as a whole; I just hope that they build on this and move towards global conversations that we can all contribute to.

Posted by Phil Bradley on 9:28 AM | Permalink

Yahoo & Symantec To Offer "New Security Offerings"

News.com reports that Symantec and Yahoo will be announcing a "new security offering" sometime today. News.com says this partnership will "improve online security for consumers." But honestly, I have no more details. Is it email focused? Web search focused? Is it desktop focused? We don't know as of yet. So stay tuned.

Postscript: BetaNews has more details in Yahoo, Symantec Partner on Net Security, explaining this is allowing several Yahoo online properties such as Yahoo Mail to use Symnantec security products for 30 days free, followed by a 12 month subscription offer.

Posted by Barry Schwartz on 9:23 AM | Permalink

SuperPages Buys Inceptor

As reported in ClickZ today, SuperPages, which is itself up for sale, has acquired SEM firm Inceptor for an undisclosed amount. Verizon has been the most forward thinking and acting of the yellow pages publishers when it comes to offering performance-based products and leveraging search. This acquisition gives SuperPages more range in what it can offer and how the company can implement it -- and brings that cost in house.

For more on this deal see my blog post.

Posted by Greg Sterling on 8:36 AM | Permalink

Daily SearchCast, July 21, 2006: Google's Great Second Quarter Results; MSN Revenue Down; RSS Feeds For Ask Smart Answers And Google Base Results & More!

Friday's search podcast covers Google's great second quarter results; MSN's revenues decline; Windows Live Local deserving a second look; RSS feeds for Ask Smart Answers and Google Base results 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) or though our Yahoo Podcasts channel. Need more help tuning in live or finding the chat room? See the Daily SearchCast FAQ.

Below are links to items discussed:

Posted by Danny Sullivan on 5:29 AM | Permalink

July 24, 2006

Search Headlines & Links: July 24, 2006

Below, a recap of stories posted from June 21st through today to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with other items we've spotted but not blogged separately:

From The SEW Blog...

  • Become.com Launches Search Zoom Filtering Feature

    No longer do you have to weed through hundreds or thousands of search results to find a discussion forum or product specs for Aston Martin's Vanquish. With Become, you can search for 'Aston Martin Vanquish' or any other product and then filter by Product Reveiws, Buying Guides, Discussion Forums, and Product Details. As Jon Glick, Become's Sr. Director of Product Search told me, "users can see what type of listing it is before going into it." I think this is an extremely useful feature. My original search results for 'Aston Martin Vanquish' (yes, I'm obsessed) contained 171, 573 results vs....

  • Google And Yahoo: Consistency Or Wow?

    An article over at the New York Times 'In the race with Google, it's consistency vs 'wow'' discusses the differing approaches of Google and Yahoo to the introduction of new technology and resources. The fact that Google hasn't added some of the basics to its mapping service in comparison to the Yahoo and AOL offerings is the starting point for an indepth discussion on how both engines (MSN, AOL and Ask get very short shrift) are trying to increase their user base....

  • Only 11 Percent Of Searchers Use One Word Queries

    OneStat.com published a report detailing that only 11.4 percent of searchers use one-word queries, two-word queries 28.9% leads the bunch, followed by three-word queries at 27.85%, four-word queries with 17.1%, five-word with 8.25% and six-word queries with 3.7%. The report also breaks down number of queries used by country; Canadians are more likely to search with four-word queries, Germans use two-word queries 40% of the time and then 28% use one-word queries. OneStat's research was "based on a sample of 2 million visitors divided into 20,000 visitors of 100 countries each day." More details at OneStat.com....

  • Google Base Becomes More eBay Like With Rich Text Feature

    The Google Base blog announced Friday that Google Base's editor now has the ability to add rich text. Next time you log into Google Base to add or update your listings manually, you should see a WYSIWYG editor. It does not appear those who do bulk uploads, can pass along rich text. It's important to note, however, that at this time, we're not enabling any scripting, data input controls, or frames. Also, HTML descriptions are only available for single item posts....

  • Judge Hears Objections To Google's Click Fraud Settlement

    Associate Press reports that now that the independent report is out, a judge will consider the fifty-plus objections to the Lane's Gifts v. Google settlement. The judge will hear out advertisers today and tomorrow before finalizing that settlement....

  • SEOMoz Spills The Beans On Pricing An SEO Campaign

    Rand posted a blog entry named How to Price an SEO Campaign. He actually broke down his pricing methodology for everyone to see. I have personally never seen this done to this extent before in this industry. SEOs and SEMs can learn a lot about how to price their campaigns and proposals by Rand's post. Rand breaks down a consulting contract versus an implementation contact. His post is very detailed and can give many SEMs an idea on how to improve their contracts. Check out Rand's post here....

  • Google Test Expandable "More" Link

    Philipp Lenssen reports Google is testing an expandable box that opens with options, when you click on the "more" link from the Google.com home page. The more link currently takes people to the more google products page, but this link, is a little DHTML popup that has links to these products directly on the page. The pop up cannot possibly have all of the products listed, so they have a link to "even more" products that probably links to the page. A screen shot is at Philipp's site....

  • Tracking Packages

    The MSN Search weblog has now announced that it is possible to use the system for tracking packages, or more specifically, packages from FedEx, DHL, UPS and USPS. Searchers can simply enter a tracking ID and some other tracking keywords and the Package Tracking Instant Answer will correctly construct the link. An example given is 'Where is UPS tracking number?' Additionally you could use the RSS feed for the search to really keep up to date on where your package has gone. Google has had this feature for a while now, although it doesn't have an option for DHL....

  • GoDaddy Launches Private Label Domain Park Program

    GoDaddy has long placed ads on registered domains that customers have parked at GoDaddy. Now, GoDaddy is allowing webmasters of sign up for a paid monthly subscription to CashParking, that would see webmasters get a share of the profits made from all clicks on the parked domain....

  • Independent Report: Google Click Fraud Detection Practices Are "Reasonable"

    The Google Blog just posted the independent study on their click fraud detection practices that shows Google makes reasonable efforts to detect click fraud. The report was part of an agreement of the Lane's Gifts v. Google settlement and was performed by Dr. Alexander Tuzhilin, Professor of Information Systems at NYU. Obviously Google is pretty happy about this report and I didn't have time to go through the full 47 page report, but if you have time, I bet you as Search Engine Marketer can learn a ton about the AdWords system. Possibly, Danny will dig into this deeper next...

  • Search Forums Roundup: July 21, 2006

    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 Maps + Reviews In Main Search Results - Yahoo Panama Release Delayed - Microsoft: MSN - Strider Search Defender - Buying Brand Name Keywords On Adwords, and more....

  • More 3D Maps, an iTunes Video Podcast Directory, .CA Goes Mobile & Wildfires Database: Specialty Search Wrap Up

    This weeks specialty search wrap up from Resource Shelf includes more 3D mapping tools, a iTunes video podcast directory, the Canadian government mobile edition, a resource for locating primary sources with international news and a wildfires and forest fire real time database....

  • Microsoft's MSN Revenue Declined 3% Year Over Year

    ClickZ reports that MSN's revenue declined 3 percent year-over-year. CFO Chris Liddell makes it clear that Microsoft adCenter will be funded well, stating, "it's not far off that we're going to have 100 percent of our business on adCenter." Microsoft plans on spending $500 million on adCenter, Windows Live, MSN Search and other online services this year. Next quarter results should be interesting....

  • Google Finance Leaks Version Two Information

    Garett Rogers stumbled upon a link in Google Finance at the top right corner that said "v2 (test)" in red font. The link points to http://0.frontend-live.sfe.scrooge.hs.borg.google.com/finance, which seems to not be accessible from my location, or outside of Google's network. Notice the sign of the borg again? borg.google.com from before. So, now we have rumors that Google is going to be launching a version two of Google Finance soon. Maybe it includes stock indices from other worlds? :)...

  • Site Diagnostics Tab Added to Google AdSense Console

    Google has added a new tab, a tab they have been beta testing for a couple months, named Site Diagnostics. What this tool does is show you which pages the AdSense crawler is having problems getting to. Why would they crawler have a problem getting to those pages? The several possible reasons include a robots.txt file blocking then, password protected pages, server down or slow and other reasons explained in the AdSense help pages. I have posted screen captures at the Search Engine Roundtable....

  • Google Adds RSS To Google Base Results

    I wrote about Google adding drop down menus to some search results at the Search Engine Roundtable last night and then discovered something new. At least I think it is new. If you go to a Google Base landing page, like this one for Clinical trials results, you may notice a new button at the top right of the page. The button is an RSS feed icon, that links to RSS results for that query refinement in Google Base. I personally have never seen that feature there before, I asked a few people and they haven't either - so I...

Headlines & News From Elsewhere

Posted by Barry Schwartz on 4:06 PM | Permalink

Become.com Launches Search Zoom Filtering Feature

No longer do you have to weed through hundreds or thousands of search results to find a discussion forum or product specs for Aston Martin's Vanquish. With Become, you can search for 'Aston Martin Vanquish' or any other product and then filter by Product Reveiws, Buying Guides, Discussion Forums, and Product Details.

As Jon Glick, Become's Sr. Director of Product Search told me, "users can see what type of listing it is before going into it." I think this is an extremely useful feature. My original search results for 'Aston Martin Vanquish' (yes, I'm obsessed) contained 171, 573 results vs. the 51 returns for discussion forums (which I really wanted). This is a search engine starting to answer my questions as opposed to just returning a bunch of irrelevant results.

So how does this work? Jon immediately went over my head in his explanation (all of you know how sophomoric my tech undertanding is), but here's what I was able to grok. The 4 month project started with human input to define the parameters for a buying guide or discussion forum (a buying guide has characteristics X, Y, and Z while a discussion forum has characteristics D, R, Q, and Y). Then the machine learning takes over, looking at each and every page that Become.com crawls to try to put it in a bucket. But this has to be done in an efficient manner balancing precision and recall and this has to be done for all 4 filters. And then there's the added issue that one web page can be both a product review and product detail page (think Amazon's product pages). As a marketer, I have no idea how difficult this is to pull off, but it didn't sound easy and I don't see many other companies with a similar feature set.

What immediately came to mind when Jon explained Search Zoom was Kosmix's filtering and personalization options. Kosmix also crawls the web, searching over 3.2b pages, and has what I'd consider advanced filtering options. The company also looks at individual web pages, not just the website as a whole.

So if I find the results from Become's Search Zoom so helpful, why don't the general search engines do this? Jon explained "If you?re a general purpose search engine, you can?t have 30 buttons across the top. As a vertical search engine, we just wanted to limit the choices to the decisions that people who need to make a buying decision need. We have a more constrained problem. We can help people in ways that Google as a general search engine can't."

With Search Zoom, Become has an extremely useful and easy to understand product which it should try to syndicate. As I mentioned last week in reference to Zillow's partnership with Yahoo!, biz dev deals are an attractive alternative to spending millions on the PPC engines. First on the biz dev list should be Shopping.com. Become is syndicating Shopping.com's price comparison listings to supplement its own...there's already a relationship. Shopping.com recently added a 'Buying Guides' section. This could be 227x better with Become's assistance.

Posted by Brian Smith on 1:00 PM | Permalink

Google Versus Yahoo: Consistency Or Wow In Product Development?

An article over at the New York Times 'In the race with Google, it's consistency vs 'wow'' discusses the differing approaches of Google and Yahoo to the introduction of new technology and resources. The fact that Google hasn't added some of the basics to its mapping service in comparison to the Yahoo and AOL offerings is the starting point for an indepth discussion on how both engines (MSN, AOL and Ask get very short shrift) are trying to increase their user base.

Alan Eustace (Senior VP at Google for engineering and research) is quoted as saying "We are trying to come up with something that is new and different, that makes people say ?Wow.? " Yahoo on the other hand is taking a rather different approach of ensuring that their services are predictable and consistent.

Although the article doesn't use the analogy it does remind me very much of the tortoise and the hare story, with Google of course being the hare, bouncing along, playing to the audience, not really looking where he's going, but getting there very quickly. The Yahoo tortoise carefully places one foot in front of the other, and it isn't very exciting, but you know where you'll be with it.

Is one approach better than the other? Clearly there are examples that can be drawn from both camps; the speed of Google mapping with its click and drag approach certainly did draw 'wow' responses. 'Wow' is exciting - it gives bloggers something to write about, teachers something new to teach and industry commentators something to talk about on the conference podium. On the other hand consistency is rather dull, but ultimately important if you want to provide a raft of integrated services.

I'm as guilty as the rest - when demonstrating features from search engines I like to demonstrate all the 'wow' functionality, and the delegates love it and enjoy playing with it. But at the end of the day, when it comes to answering quiz questions they tend to go for the resources and functions that work, and that they can rely on.

What I'd like to see is a situation where I can look at a search engine, with all of its offerings, search syntax, extra resources and so on and go 'Wow - all this stuff works well together, and it's really exciting', but perhaps that's asking too much?

Posted by Phil Bradley on 12:36 PM | Permalink

Only 11 Percent Of Searchers Use One Word Queries

OneStat.com published a report detailing that only 11.4 percent of searchers use one-word queries, two-word queries 28.9% leads the bunch, followed by three-word queries at 27.85%, four-word queries with 17.1%, five-word with 8.25% and six-word queries with 3.7%. The report also breaks down number of queries used by country; Canadians are more likely to search with four-word queries, Germans use two-word queries 40% of the time and then 28% use one-word queries. OneStat's research was "based on a sample of 2 million visitors divided into 20,000 visitors of 100 countries each day." More details at OneStat.com.

Posted by Barry Schwartz on 10:58 AM | Permalink

Google Base Becomes More eBay Like With Rich Text Feature

The Google Base blog announced Friday that Google Base's editor now has the ability to add rich text. Next time you log into Google Base to add or update your listings manually, you should see a WYSIWYG editor. It does not appear those who do bulk uploads, can pass along rich text.

It's important to note, however, that at this time, we're not enabling any scripting, data input controls, or frames. Also, HTML descriptions are only available for single item posts.

Posted by Barry Schwartz on 9:22 AM | Permalink

Judge Hears Objections To Google's Click Fraud Settlement

The Associated Press reports that now that the independent report is out, a judge will consider the fifty-plus objections to the Lane's Gifts v. Google settlement. The judge will hear out advertisers today and tomorrow before finalizing that settlement.

Posted by Barry Schwartz on 9:15 AM | Permalink

SEOMoz Spills The Beans On Pricing An SEO Campaign

Rand posted a blog entry named How to Price an SEO Campaign. He actually broke down his pricing methodology for everyone to see. I have personally never seen this done to this extent before in this industry. SEOs and SEMs can learn a lot about how to price their campaigns and proposals by Rand's post. Rand breaks down a consulting contract versus an implementation contact. His post is very detailed and can give many SEMs an idea on how to improve their contracts. Check out Rand's post here.

Posted by Barry Schwartz on 9:09 AM | Permalink

Google Test Expandable "More" Link

Philipp Lenssen reports Google is testing an expandable box that opens with options, when you click on the "more" link from the Google.com home page. The more link currently takes people to the more google products page, but this link, is a little DHTML popup that has links to these products directly on the page. The pop up cannot possibly have all of the products listed, so they have a link to "even more" products that probably links to the page. A screen shot is at Philipp's site.

Posted by Barry Schwartz on 9:03 AM | Permalink

Tracking Packages Via MSN Search

The MSN Search weblog has now announced that it is possible to use the system for tracking packages, or more specifically, packages from FedEx, DHL, UPS and USPS. Searchers can simply enter a tracking ID and some other tracking keywords and the Package Tracking Instant Answer will correctly construct the link. An example given is 'Where is UPS tracking number?' Additionally you could use the RSS feed for the search to really keep up to date on where your package has gone. Google has had this feature for years now, although it doesn't have an option for DHL.

Postscript from Danny: Yahoo added a package tracking command in 2004. It also doesn't cover DHL. Bloglines added tracking in March 2005, and parent Ask.com offers it as well, Ask's Gary Price tells us. He sends this example. Unfortunately, there's no help information that I can find on Ask that explains this further, not even in the Smart Answers section. Finally, check out PackageMapper.com, which we mentioned earlier this year. It provides the actual route your package is taking (though it wasn't loading when I tried today).

Posted by Phil Bradley on 4:49 AM | Permalink

GoDaddy Launches Private Label Domain Park Program

GoDaddy has long placed ads on registered domains that customers have parked at GoDaddy. Now, GoDaddy is allowing webmasters to sign up for a paid monthly subscription to CashParking, that would see webmasters get a share of the profits made from all clicks on the parked domain.

The unique aspect of GoDaddy's program is that they are giving the domain parking service to those who may only have a small number of domains in their portfolios, while Google normally only accepts those into the program with domain portfolios numbering hundreds of thousands of page views per month.

GoDaddy's domain parking program is serviced by Google's AdSense for Domains program (formerly known as Domain Park), with ads being displayed with the Google AdWords program. And example of the GoDaddy landing page can be found at fishinginia.com

For more analysis on the CashParking program, please see JenSense.

Posted by Jennifer Slegg on 2:44 AM | Permalink

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