Back to Main

May 2007

May 31, 2007

Search Headlines & Links: May 31, 2007

Want a snapshot of the day's search marketing news? Here we've collected today's top news stories posted to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with search-related headlines from around the Web:

From the SEW Blog:

Headlines & News from Elsewhere:

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 11:00 PM | Permalink

SpotRunner Dives Deeper into Local

Yesterday, local video ad and distribution provider Spot Runner announced a deal with Lexis Nexus Martindale Hubbel. This gives the company closer access to local advertisers in the legal vertical by opening up a single point of entry to a broad base of private attorneys.

The deal will make Spot Runner's ad creation engine and cable spot buying dashboard available to Lexis Nexus affiliated law firms. This is very similar to Spot Runner's deal with Coldwell Banker in the real estate vertical that gives the firm's far flung agents immediate access to customize 30 second ads and choose where they want them distributed.

This involves voice overs and text that are overlayed on stock video footage (available for many different advertising categories). The cable spot buying dashboard then lets advertisers choose geographic and demographic targeting for where the ads will run. The price for ad creation is $500, while ad placements can be as low as $12 (surprisingly) for 30 second spots on comedy central and CNN in some markets.

These deals for spot runner are the best way for the business to scale. Otherwise it is addressing a very wide and fragmented segment of small businesses. This becomes even harder if you look at the fact that it employs a self service model without a sales force. One single deal with a large business with many decentralized constituents effectively gives it a single point of entry to many local businesses.

But the significance this announcement is that it's Spot Runner's first move into the legal vertical. Real estate and autos have already caught on quickly with video advertising and represent the biggest advertiser groups for Spot Runner. This is because of the high consideration items, pressure for leads, and high margins that have made early adoption a necessity, and advertising spends somewhat inelastic. These factors are also very much present in many professional services areas including lawyers.

Spot Runner's move into the legal vertical is also significant because it is an area traditionally "owned" by yellow pages publishers. In fact, this should be a call to action for yellow pages publishers to begin to offer video advertising to local professional services advertisers.

This could be a complimentary addition to the advertising bundle they currently offer including print and online (internet yellow pages) placements. Spot Runner could be a nice creative partner in rolling this out, but it currently offers only cable distribution. Other video producers such as TurnHere and Spotzer offer online video distribution, and Spot Runner will likely follow suit soon.

The model for IYPs and local search destinations could be a video window that is embedded in individual business listings that is sold as an additional ad unit or upsell. Many IYPs that spoke at The Kelsey Group's Drilling Down on Local conference -- including Yellowpages.com and YellowBook.com -- expressed a pressing interest to do this. But they better do it quick, or someone else will. Oops, Citysearch already has.

More on the subject of local video advertising in an upcoming SEW experts column.

Posted by Mike Boland on 5:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Mapping The Minds of Visitors Helps Categorizing, Keyword Development

Bill Slawski, of SEO By The Sea, wrote an interesting article about mapping visitor intent to help develop effective categories and keywords for your marketing efforts.

Between his detailed report and some perceptive comments, this is a post well worth reading and using to improve your search marketing.

Posted by Frank Watson on 3:31 PM | Permalink

Yahoo SERP Lists Google Group That Redirects To MFA Search Page

Talk about a maze. I was checking one of my keywords at Yahoo and found down at the number 10 spot a listing for what would appear to be a Google Group covering the subject. The url should have told me something was most probably amiss.

groups.google.com/group/loan-loans-bad-bad/web/currency_trading.html

The arbitragers are getting really creative. But I really want to know how they got someone at Google to create the redirect. It is a little hard to do that without access to the server.

Now you aren't finding the result in the Google organic results, so I guess Yahoo places more stock in Google Groups than Google itself! After this they may be a little less likely to do so.

Posted by Frank Watson on 2:18 PM | Permalink

Search's Place in the Marketing Mix

Are you giving search its due credit when you look at results of other marketing campaigns? Are you taking those campaigns into account when you plan your search activities? In today's SearchDay, In the Mix: Search in the Overall Marketing Mix, Impaqt's Pat Stroh explains that without knowing the full details of a client's media mix, an agency is limited in how well it can optimize a paid search campaign. But once an agency is armed with at least some of this historical data, it can begin to explain the mountains and valleys in those paid tracking reports.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 2:12 PM | Permalink

Calacanis Launches Human-edited Search Engine

Jason Calacanis, former CEO of Weblogs Inc. and GM of Netscape, has revealed his latest project: a human-edited search engine/wiki/directory called Mahalo.

The idea is to hand-craft search results for the top search queries. At launch (in Alpha, meaning "not ready for users, but looking for feedback"), Mahalo has results for 4,000 terms, and expects to have 10,000 by the end of the year. There are currently 40 editors on staff, with 100 planned by the end of the year. Calacanis, currently an "entrepreneur in action" at Sequoia Capital, is the CEO of Mahalo. Investors include Sequoia, Elon Musk, and Newscorp.

Calacanis has no pretensions about replacing Google, since the human-edited model would not scale to match the billions of pages in Google's index. Instead, he looks at Mahalo as a way for searchers to get a better answer for top queries, while defaulting to Google for those not served by Mahalo.

"Google's mission is to index the world's information; our mission is to curate that wonderful index," Calacanis said in a statement. "It's my belief that humans can play a significant role in the development of search results and we're going to try to figure out exactly what that role is over the next couple of years. I am really looking forward to hearing what people think of the Alpha."

The idea is similar in certain ways to what About.com did with its guide sites, what the Open Directory Project was once, or what Squidoo or Wikipedia hope to become. Even with answers for only 10,000 terms, Mahalo's editors face a daunting task of keeping those terms updated, while adding newly popular terms.

But Calacanis has a track record of keeping a large team motivated, with more than 300 bloggers in the Weblogs Inc. Network at one point.

Another challenge, faced by all new search engines, is getting people to change their habits and try something new. Calacanis is counting on a good user experience and word-of-mouth to do that.

The site will be monetized with Google AdWords, and Calacanis has no immediate plans for Mahalo to sell its own ads. There is a way for users to suggest sites to a guide as answers to specific queries, but Calacanis – no fan of SEO – has said that process will be heavily monitored to prevent gaming of the system.

Track the coverage of Mahalo on Techmeme.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 10:06 AM | Permalink

Google Announces Google Gears

Google Developer Day kicked off today with the announcement of Google Gears, an open source project focused on the development of offline web applications. While the phrase "offline web" may seem like an oxymoron, it speaks directly to the goal of Google Gears, which is to increase access to data and applications even when there is no Internet connection available.

Google's announcement indicates that Google Gears is a browser extension that is being "made available in its early states so that everyone can test its capabilities and limitations and help improve upon it". In addition, Google is proposing that this concept evolve into a "single standard for offline capabilities that all developers can use". Google Reader has already implemented Google Gears and as a result is offering offline capabilities.

The underlying technology uses JavaScript APIs for data storage, application caching, and multi-threading. Companies announcing support for Google Gears include Adobe, Mozilla Corporation, and Opera Software.

Posted by on 9:41 AM | Permalink

SEW Experts: Avoiding Low-Quality Links and Link Networks

In today's Link Love column, "Avoiding Low-Quality Links and Link Networks," Justilien Gaspard tells you how to build links while spotting low-value links or links that might be devalued.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 12:28 AM | Permalink

May 30, 2007

Search Headlines & Links: May 31, 2007

Want a snapshot of the day's search marketing news? Here we've collected today's top news stories posted to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with search-related headlines from around the Web:

From the SEW Blog:

Headlines & News from Elsewhere:

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 11:59 PM | Permalink

Google Picks Up Geo-locating Photo Service

Google announced today that it will acquire Panoramio, a Spanish community site that links photos with the geographic location at which they were taken, viewable in Google Earth and Google Maps. Other users can also add metadata to photos posted to the site. Google has been using Panoramio data in a default layer in Google Earth since the beginning of the year, and will continue to do so. It will also incorporate the technology into its other mapping products.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 11:41 PM | Permalink

eBay Acquires StumbleUpon

As rumored last month, eBay has acquired social media service StumbleUpon for $75 million in cash. The deal gives eBay access to StumbleUpon's 2.3 million users via the StumbleUpon toolbar, which allows users to "stumble" to new sites, videos, and other content within user-selected categories.

StumbleUpon's founders and management will remain with the company, which will now be led by Michael Buhr, senior director at eBay, who becomes StumbleUpon's general manager.

It's unclear at this point what eBay plans to do with StumbleUpon. Om Malik hypothesizes that eBay will add a StumbleUpon search box to the Skype client, which it acquired last year, as a "desktop backdoor." Other options include adapting the technology to eBay's core auction business, to showcase related products based on a user's bid history, or using the StumbleUpon toolbar as the entry point.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 11:28 PM | Permalink

Yahoo CTO Retires

"Yahoo!'s CTO, Farzad Nazem, 45, has decided that it's time to take a breather and has announced his retirement. His last official day at Yahoo! will be June 8, 2007", according to the company press release.

"Zod agreed to remain on board to help see Yahoo! through some key milestones including the company and subsequent Technology Group re-design efforts as well as the critical launch of Panama. Zod has established an extremely strong and accomplished leadership team within the technology organization" the press release explained.

"Effective immediately, Jerry Yang has agreed to step in as the interim executive sponsor of the group and will work closely with David Filo and the technology leadership team to continue to drive the technology strategy forward. We will begin an immediate search for a new technology leader.

For additional information on Zod's retirement, please read his post on our corporate blog, Yodel anecdotal: http://yodel.yahoo.com/2007/05/30/eleven-years-12000-yahoos-and-one-great-ride/."

Posted by Frank Watson on 5:56 PM | Permalink

Mobile SEO Presents Challenges

Mobile search engine optimization shares some common methods and problems with its Web-based counterpart, but there is a whole set of other issues unique to mobile sites. In today's SearchDay, Search to Go: Meeting the Needs of the Mobile User, Amanda Watlington looks at some of those challenges.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 3:33 PM | Permalink

News from SES China

I didn't make the trip to Xiamen for SES China, though I was tempted by the thought of spending at least 24 hours sitting on a plane. Thankfully, there were several intrepid souls from the States that did make the trip last week, and have blogged about it:

SES Milan took place yesterday and today, so if anyone attended that show, let me know and I'll link to any blog coverage, or feature it here. The next Search Engine Strategies events are coming up in June, in Toronto on June 12-13, and in Miami on June 18-19.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 2:22 PM | Permalink

Web Is 'Force for Democracy': Schmidt

Goolge CEO Eric Schmidt said, at a conference yesterday in South Korea, that the web is a force for democracy.

"Politicians will be forced to be more transparent," PC World reported Schmidt said.

"Internet tools like search ultimately help make the world a better place, allowing more people to access information that affects their lives and make smarter choices when voting for officials. "More people looking at an idea results in a better outcome," Schmidt said, calling the Internet a "powerful force for democracy."

...

While Schmidt preaches the value of greater information access for democracy, Google hasn't always been so free with information about itself. Relative to many of its competitors, the company has earned a reputation for carefully managing the release of information about its activities and executives, even as it compiles reams of personal information about its users."


PC World

Posted by Frank Watson on 12:53 PM | Permalink

Google Map Directions Have Sense of Humor

Friend of mine came across this. When you do a New York City to London request the results tell you to swim the Atlantic.

Guess the same jokesters that would prompt you with the question "Do you mean French war defeats" when searching for "French war victories" are playing here.

Posted by Frank Watson on 12:17 PM | Permalink

SEW Experts: A Look at Latency In Search Engine Ranking

In today's By the Numbers column, A Look at Latency In Search Engine Ranking, Eric Enge presents a case study of a niche content site that reveals differences in latency involved in each search engine's index, and in how each search engine responds to removed pages.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 8:04 AM | Permalink

Google is a Data Company

Google is a data company. No, it's not a search engine company, or an advertising company, it's a data company. I'm talking about their core expertise here.

My thinking on this emerges from a few different discussions I had during my recent visit to the Google Searchology event. First during the presentation by Google VP of Engineering, Udi Manber, there were two interesting comments:

  1. Google does it's testing of new algorithms and changes to their UI on a complete copy of the web. This is already impressive!
  2. With it's Cross Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) program, Google is performing real time, on the fly translations into 12 different languages that they are supporting with this program.

That means that they are keeping 2 total copies of the web, and are doing real time translation into 12 languages on a query by query basis. That's some serious data management.

After the main event, when we sat down for lunch, I spoke with Peter Norvig, director of research at Google. Peter is the first person who got me focused on this notion of Google being a data company. He underscored that by telling me a story of the early Google days. The gist of the story was that before Google was conceived, it occurred to Sergey Brin and Larry Page that having a copy of the entire web would be a useful thing, but they did not originally know how they would use it.

It was only after the fact that they thought about building a search engine, once they realized that the web's complexity would not be easily catalogued in a human edited directory.

Then there's the conversation that Manoj Jasra of Enquiro told me about. He was talking with Larry Page, who relayed to Manoj the notion that Google would like to get to the point where they are indexing data as you are typing it in (Don't scream big brother yet, the intention here was that this would only be for data intended for the public).

While this idea is not practical, the earliest Google would be able to get the data is when it gets made public by being published, it does communicate something about the Google mind set.

Regardless of whatever else may happen (e.g. Google acquiring companies like Doubleclick, I would expect them to keep leveraging this core technology expertise for the for seeable future.

Posted by on 7:32 AM | Permalink

May 29, 2007

Search Headlines & Links: May 29, 2007

Want a snapshot of the day's search marketing news? Here we've collected today's top news stories posted to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with search-related headlines from around the Web:

From the SEW Blog:

Headlines & News from Elsewhere:

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 11:51 PM | Permalink

Using Log Files To Improve Page Rank Distribution

Following a discussion on "Link & Ranking Strategies for Enterprise Sites" at SEOMoz, Hamlet Batista wrote an interesting article on ways top pass the link love around a web site using a dynamic solution.

Basically the conversation started about Enterprise sites - ones with tens of thousands to millions of pages. Many of the pages have little if any Page Rank and Rand started the discussion with suggestions of how the link love can be shared inside a website.

Batista contributed to the comments and then wrote his own piece with details of how this could be programmed to be done dynamically.

Both articles are worth a read.

Posted by Frank Watson on 4:47 PM | Permalink

Colbert Interviews Wikipedia Founder

The Greatest Living American Stephen Colbert interviewed Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales on Thursday.

With a mix of humor and serious questions, the two discussed the future goals of Wikipedia. Wales stated he wanted the site to be the leading source of information in every language.

Colbert summed up the benefits and pitfalls of Wikipedia when he said, "Wikipedia is the first place I go when I am looking for knowledge, or when I want to create some."

Posted by Frank Watson on 3:38 PM | Permalink

Google Can Now Find Faces

Google Image Search is in the process of adding face-recognition technology, as well as new features to filter out images from news stories, according to Google Blogoscoped. The features, which so far are available only by appending a variable to the end of a search URL, are apparently based on technology from Neven Vision, a company that Google acquired last August.

For a search of faces, the filter is &imgtype=face. For example, a search for images related to Search Engine Strategies would return several kinds of images, including people, buildings, presentations and company logos. With &imgtype=face at the end of the URL, the same search shows only people.

The news image search filter is &imgtype=news. Compare a search for whales without the filter to one with the filter. The news image search returns mainly photos related to recent news stories about whales, while the unfiltered search includes many more kinds of whale images.

So far, Google has declined to comment on the changes, or to say if any other search qualifiers are expected to be launched for image searches.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 3:19 PM | Permalink

FTC Looking at Google-DoubleClick Deal?

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has opened a preliminary antitrust investigation into Google's planned $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick, according to the New York Times.

The outcry of privacy experts and competitors made an investigation all but inevitable, according to the report.

Because the FTC is handling the investigation instead of the Justice Department, which shares antitrust enforcement duties, some sources are assuming that the issues are more privacy-related than anti-trust related. When the deal was announced, three privacy watchdog groups asked the FTC to investigate the potential implications on user privacy. The groups feared that the combination of Google's search history and DoubleClick's tracking of sites visited would "give one company access to more information about the Internet activities of consumers than any other company in the world."

But privacy is not an antitrust issue, so it will not be relevant to the investigation except in the ways those issues would relate to a reduction in competition.

"We are confident that upon further review the F.T.C. will conclude that this acquisition poses no risk to competition and should be approved," Don Harrison, a senior corporate counsel for Google, told the NYT.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 12:03 PM | Permalink

80% of Podcast Listeners Seek Out Products They Hear About

As reported in the Guardian, a survey of over 300 U.K. podcast users done by Chrysalis Radio's download division found that 80% of those surveyed indicated that they would be more likely to seek out products and services after hearing about them.

Before rushing out to promote products via podcasts, it should be noted that the most popular subjects for audio downloads are books and films (not search engine marketing, surprise), and 55% of listeners seek out podcasts on entertainment topics. Electronic goods and gadgets are good targets, for 49% of listeners downloaded podcasts about gadgets and electronic goods.

The survey also found that podcasts have an underexploited social component inasmuch as 90% of those surveyed said they would consider forwarding audio shows to friends. Podcasters not already doing so should consider adding social bookmarking to their show's landing pages.

Confirmed by the survey is that podcasts are in a time-shifting medium. 75% of listeners listen at their convenience not during live show times and a similar number listen while away from home. While listening on an MP3 player or mobile phone (50%), podcast fans are engaged in exercise (10%), traveling on public transportation (20%) or doing housework (12%). Podcast listeners are dedicated listeners with 25% listening for up to two hours a day, but they are time-challenged, and a third of the time do not listen to their entire downloads. This suggests that if you want to make a point in your podcast, make it early since you may not get a chance to be heard if you wait until the end.

Posted by Amanda Watlington on 10:05 AM | Permalink

SEW Experts: Using a Corporate Blog for CRM

In today's au Natural column, "Using a Corporate Blog for CRM," Mark Jackson examines how corporate blogging can be used for customer relationship management (CRM).

Many times, a customer will visit your Web site and look for answers or a way to share their input. If none is found, they will look elsewhere. This is your window of opportunity to nurture positive comments, or nip negative ones in the bud.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 12:07 AM | Permalink

SEW Experts: Universal Search for Small Business

In today's Little Biz column, "Universal Search for Small Business: What You Need to Know About Google's New Search Results," Carrie Hill tells you what universal ranking of multiple silos of search results can mean for your small business.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 12:02 AM | Permalink

May 28, 2007

Interview with FeedBurner's Rick Klau

I had the pleasure of interviewing Rick Klau recently, and we got into a deep discussion about how to get the most out of your RSS feeds. One of the key points we discussed was the notion of including the your entire article into the feed, not just a summary.

I asked Rick about this, and he said that he is a fan of this approach. Many have debated the pros and cons of this approach, with the two sides of the argument being about the tradeoffs between providing users the ability to read your content directly in your feed, if they prefer this, versus the goal of getting users to your site.

Rick points out that there is another entire dimension to this argument that most people are missing. More and more RSS services are discovering feeds and indexing feed content based on the content of the article as presented in the feed. Including the full article in the feed itself increases exposure in these services, and therefore increases the reach of your feed and site.

One example of this is Techmeme that scans feeds to see links between posts to quickly build a map of all the discussions on a particular subject. If you publish only a summary of an article that does not include a key link, then you can miss out on participating in the traffic and exposure that a service like Techmeme can provide.

Posted by on 8:16 PM | Permalink

May 26, 2007

How To Market A Website for $100

Patrick Sexton aka feedthebot interviewed some major players in the search space and asked them all if they only had $100 how would they market their website.

The article gives some good insights, but collectively the crew (Aaron Wall, Andys Hagan and Beal, Todd Malicoat, Neil Patel, Lee Odden and CK Chung) impart the need to be dedicated.

Shoestring operations only succeed with perserverance. There is no guarantee, but a half-hearted effort is never going to get you there.

Posted by Frank Watson on 12:58 PM | Permalink

May 25, 2007

Search Headlines & Links: May 25, 2007

Want a snapshot of the day's search engine news? Here we've collected today's top news stories posted to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with search-related headlines from around the Web:

From the SEW Blog:

Headlines & News from Elsewhere:

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 11:57 PM | Permalink

Google Adds School Report Sellers To Banned AdWords Advertisers' List

The list of non-allowed advertising at Google's AdWords just got a little bigger.

Those "Buy A Term Paper" sites now join the comapny of gun dealers, alcohol and tobacco sellers as well as hackers, phisers and prostitutes; illustrious company.

The "banned" advertising list is growing... now if they could only drop all my competitors' ads I would be happy.

Posted by Frank Watson on 2:10 PM | Permalink

The Impact of Universal Search

Gord Hotchkiss wrote an article titled An Intimate View Of The World Through Google's Eyes on Search Insider yesterday. The article provides some excellent thinking on how Google's Universal Search and Google's drive towards personalization will mesh.

A couple of Gord's comments stood out for me: "I can't help but think that personalization will drive universal search", and "Google will be able to be more confident in offering a much richer and more diverse set of universal results when you can tap into previous search and Web history". I agree with Gord that personalization will do a lot to empower universal search, and vice versa.

At another point, Gord also indicates that he thinks that "universal search, in one fell swoop, makes the idea of vertical search irrelevant". I see the impact of universal search on vertical search a little bit differently. Improving horizontal web search will certainly impact certain types of vertical search opportunities. Some of these search properties may well be affected significantly.

But, I also think that vertical search is such a deep topic that universal search can't possible impact all of it. For example, there is a huge amount of vertical search in the B2B space. Outsell recently forecast that the B2B vertical search market would exceed $1.0 B in revenue in 2009 (not too far away!).

I also think that there are plenty of vertical search engines that use completely different contextual crawling methods, or use and integrate specialty data bases which are not easily interpreted by, or may not even be accessible by, a web search crawler. I suspect that borh of these scenarios will be unaffected by Universal Search.

However, as noted above, I also think that there are plenty of "thin vertical search engines" where the value add is pretty minimal, and these could be affected in a big way.

Posted by on 11:47 AM | Permalink

Blinkx savors IPO success, announces video search growth plans

The following is a transcript of the recent Reuters UK interview with blinkx's CEO, Suranga Chadratillake, on its breakout success with soaring public shares, and growing plans with its new capital.

Reuters: The online video company blinkx is making a strong debut on London's alternative investment market after announcing a placement price of 45 pence per share, giving the newly demerged company – [demerging from the British search software specialist Autonomy Corp] – a market capitalization of 125 million pounds ($247 million). The oversubscribed shares were trading at close to 63 pence per share at last glance. To talk about the decision to float, and what lays ahead, I'm joined by the CEO of blinkx, Suranga Chadratillake. First of all, tell us how it feels to debut as the boss of a publicly listed, stand-alone company?

blinkx: It's absolutely exciting. Obviously, we been working very hard over the last few years and building a great business, and its great to take it to this next step.

Reuters: What will this flotation help you accomplish?

blinkx: It will help us accomplish a lot of things. First of all, the fact that we've been able to grow significant momentum in growing the index to where we are now – as the single largest video search engine on the web. Going forward, this allows us to do more of that, but do it on a bigger scale. This market we're playing in is one that's very, very large and growing very, very fast; and we have to grow our team and stay with that market.

Reuters: How are you fairing in your mission to become the “remote control” of video on the Web?

blinkx: I think we're absolutely getting there. Online television is at the stage where we're literally seeing an avalanche of content. We were at 7 million hours of content a couple of months ago. Today, we're at almost 13 million hours of content. You can see how fast its growing.

Reuters: A few months ago… you said the future of online content was mass proliferation. Is that what its still looking like?

blinkx: Yes, it absolutely is. I think the key thing there is looking at the type of content that's coming online. Until recently, the majority of online content was small, scrappy, amateur stuff – which was interesting and fun in lots of ways, but not really television. What we've seen over the last 6 months is the acceleration of actual TV content online. That's really exciting… but to really make use of it, to really navigate it – you need remote control. That's what Blinkx hopes to be.

Posted by Grant Crowell on 10:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Blinkx IPO shares soar to near-record debut

Shares of the video search company blinkx (ticker: BLNX), the largest video search engine on the web, soared on London's Alternative Investment Market on its first day of trading. Blinkx shares jumped 40% in a single day by close – from 45 pence to 65 pence – increasing its market cap to £180 million/$355 million.

For more information on blinkx's success with its IPO – and its growing plans and expectations – I recently interviewed a source close to the company.

Crowell: How does this debut IPO rank compared to other companies?

blinkx: We are being told that blinkx's performance is the second best debut in the last two years, on any exchange, UK or U.S.

Crowell: What does blinkx foresee as the benefits of its strong public showing in the stock market?

blinkx: The success of the IPO reflects a general acceptance that Web is moving from a text-based medium to a network for audio and video. The proof points are there: broadband is essentially ubiquitous, which means that content providers are eager to get their video on the web and monetize it; advertisers are quickly embracing the power of online video advertising; and finally, people are fundamentally changing the way they watch TV, consuming more and more news and entertainment online.

Crowell: Blinkx has often said that their unique technology has given them a tremendous lead on other video search engines. With the new money generated from the IPO, what are blinkx's plans for further developing its technology, and expanding its presence?

blinkx: The benefit of the money that we raised yesterday is that we can now expand our sales and development teams, and increase our presence in the industry… Blinkx has now signed deals with 130 media companies, and has indexed more than 12 million hours of video. … We also have plans to announce a broadband tv product later this year.

Posted by Grant Crowell on 9:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

SEW Experts: Getting Hyper-Active in Local Search

In today's Vertical Challenge column, Getting Hyper-Active in Local Search, Michael Boland dives into the world of hyper-local, where newspapers and online startups use local online communities to get an edge on news aggregators like Google and Yahoo.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 1:43 AM | Permalink

SEW Experts: Measuring ROI Can Be Difficult for SEO

In today's Outsourced column, Measuring ROI Can Be Difficult for SEO, Chris Boggs offers tips on calculating ROI to see if your SEO campaign is cost-effective.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 1:26 AM | Permalink

May 24, 2007

Enquiro Finds Search Plays an Integral Role in B2B Purchases

For business to business (B2B) buyers, search engines are the primary research source, and one of the top influencers on purchasing decisions, according to the latest research from Enquiro Search Solutions. In today's SearchDay, How Do B2B Buyers Search?, we look at the findings of Enquiro's Business to Business Survey 2007.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 11:59 PM | Permalink

Search Headlines & Links: May 24, 2007

Want a snapshot of the day's search marketing news? Here we've collected today's top news stories posted to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with search-related headlines from around the Web:

From the SEW Blog:

Headlines & News from Elsewhere:

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 10:51 PM | Permalink

Lee Odden Polls For Best Search Podcast

Lee Odden over at Top Rank Blog asked a number of search marketers for some input on what they consider to be the better search podcasts. Using that information he has started a poll of the top 10 or so and is looking to get an indication of which search podcasts we listen to regularly.

The poll is here and worth a visit and vote.

Share your opinion and give some hard working members of our industry a little recognition. The list being polled is:
Beginning SEO Podcast - Brian Mark
Daily Search Cast - Danny Sullivan
Rush Hour - Neil Patel
Web Analytics World - Manoj Jasra
The Alternative - Jim Hedger
Marketing Pilgrim - Andy Beal
MR SEO - Joe Balestrino
Net Income - Jeremy Shoemaker
Good Karma - Greg Niland
Strike Point - Dave Naylor
SEO Rock Stars - Greg Boser
RSS Ray - Brian Offenberger
SEO Radio - Bryan Azorsky
eMarketing Talk Show - Cindy Turrietta
The Pulse - Barry Schwartz

Posted by Frank Watson on 6:04 PM | Permalink

Hakia Holds Concert To Launch Music Search

Hakia is throwing two concerts to promote the launch of their new music search. I RSVPed for the New York City event next Tuesday and will add a review next week.

It is an interesting approach and one that seems to reflect a playfulness the company presents.

"In the beginning, there was light. In the digital age, there is the search engine. Man asks questions and expects answers. To search for the meaning of life on the Web is to plunge into the depths of absurdity, a challenge to any creative mind. The “Search Music" reflects this challenge", the website tells us.

Hey they are even looking for musicians to submit music for their next CD!

Posted by Frank Watson on 5:56 PM | Permalink

Google Patent Details Mobile Search Plans

A new patent application published today may reveal some of Google's plans for mobile search, according to ZDNet blogger Russell Shaw.

The application, Local Search and Mapping for Mobile Devices, describes a method that geo-targets a local search based on user-submitted text info, a location currently being displayed on a map, or using the location of user detected via GPS.

The application also goes into detail on some possible page navigation methods, with stored query histories, visual hints of which direction on the map has more results to a query, and click-to-dial functionality.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 2:10 PM | Permalink

Search Still Leads Online Ad Spending

According to the latest Internet Advertising Revenue Report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), search advertising made up 40 percent of the $16.9 billion spent in the U.S. for online advertising last year.

Search ad revenues (which include PPC search ads, contextual text ads, paid inclusion and SEO) total $6.8 billion for the year, up 31 percent from the $5.1 billion reported in 2005. The next-largest category for 2006 is display ads, at $5.4 billion, or 23 percent of total online ad spending. Next comes online classifieds, at $3.1 billion, or 18 percent of overall ad revenues.

Online ad spending in 2006 was still dwarfed by offline:

  1. Direct mail – $55.7 billion
  2. Newspapers – $51.2 billion
  3. TV networks (broadcast and cable) – $39.9 billion
  4. TV distribution – $32.5 billion
  5. Magazines – $24.6 billion
  6. Radio – $20.8 billion
  7. Internet – $16.9 billion
  8. Outdoor – .6.8$ billion

Kate Kaye has the full story at ClickZ News.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 11:14 AM | Permalink

Google's Cross-Language Search Launches

The cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) technology which Google VP Udi Manber previewed at Searchology last week has launched, according to the Google Blog. The technology has been built into Google Translate. It allows users to type in a query in one language, and instruct Google to find results from another language.

Google will translate the query into that other language, find results, and then translate those results into the original query language to present to the user. In effect, this allows users to seamlessly search documents in foreign languages as easily as they search in their own language.

An example is [wine tasting events in Bordeaux].

Google admits the translations are not always perfect, as illustrated by a search of Japanese Web sites for Boston Red Sox pitcher Daisuke Matsuzaka, or a search of Spanish sites for soccer team Real Madrid. But of course, the product is still in beta.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 10:40 AM | Permalink

SEW Experts: Building the Love

In today's Link Love column, "Building the Love," Sage Lewis gives tips for brainstorming ideas for building links. It takes more than business basics on a Web site to create link bait, and even a site offering the most mundane products can create compelling content.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 10:26 AM | Permalink

May 23, 2007

Search Headlines & Links: May 23, 2007

Want a snapshot of the day's search marketing news? Here we've collected today's top news stories posted to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with search-related headlines from around the Web:

From the SEW Blog:

Headlines & News from Elsewhere:

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 10:02 PM | Permalink

Local.com on a Roll II

Following its string of recent announcements (previous posts on Local.com here and here), Local.com today unveiled a new mobile search product.

Known as Local Mobile, the ad supported mobile site lets users search by entering keywords and locations using mobile device keypads. This includes access to Local.com's business profile pages, mapping, driving directions, click to call, and the ability to send listings to other mobile users (using SMS).

Mobile distribution of listings will be built into the company's ad offerings to local businesses, which currently include online featured listings and landing page development.

This falls in line with Local.com's slow reinvention of itself that should help it to gain more users and advertisers in the highly competitive and quickly developing local search space. Some of the company's recent developments have involved site enhancements and redesigns while most are new ad products.

Today's press release can be found here

Posted by Mike Boland on 5:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Creating a Global SEO Strategy

Developing a global SEO strategy is not an easy undertaking – not by a long shot. However, if you have a worldwide presence, or plan to have one in the future, you should be thinking about SEO globally...and sooner rather than later. John Tawadros takes a look at what's involved in today's SearchDay, Is Your SEO Strategy Global?

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 4:45 PM | Permalink

Google Invests In Sergey's Wife's Company

Guess Google likes to keep the money in the family. Sergey Brin's new wife, Anne Wojcicki, cofounded the bitech start-up that just received $3.9 million in funding from the search giant, according to EcommerceTimes.

"Formerly a biotech investor herself, Wojcicki cofounded 23andMe last year with biopharmaceutical industry veteran Linda Avey. The startup, located near Google's Mountain View, Calif., headquarters, is trying to "allow individuals to gain deeper insights into their ancestry, genealogy and inherited traits," Wojcicki said, according to ECommerceTimes.

23andMe plans to officially launch by the end of the year. The company name refers to the 23 pairs of chromosomes in humans.

Posted by Frank Watson on 2:21 PM | Permalink

"Microsoft Does Not Need Yahoo Anymore" MSN Strategist Claims

With the purchase of aQuantive and its other advertising assets, Microsoft nolonger needs to buy Yahoo to conquer the online advertising world, Microsoft Chief Advertising Strategist Yusuf Mehdi stated, according to 247WallSt.com.

"The whole thing rings a bit hollow. Numbers from Hitwise show that Microsoft's US search share dropped from 12.6% in April 06 to 8.5% last month. Google's share of market rose sharply to 65.3%," wrote Douglas A. McIntyre, at the 247wallst.com site.

"While search is not everything when it comes to building a successful online advertising business, it is something. Or, perhaps a lot of something. Microsoft may hope its new aQuantive's ad serving platform and MSN and Microsoft Live can dig that company's online business out of its hole," McIntyre stated.

Posted by Frank Watson on 2:11 PM | Permalink

Google Buying Feedburner?

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch says that he's confirmed that Google is acquiring Feedburner for close to $100 million. He's citing "a source close to the deal," so he could still be wrong, but if he's right, it's an all-cash deal, mostly upfront, with Feedburner's founders to stay on for a couple of years, at least.

The deal had been rumored to be in the works earlier this week, and ValleyWag said it had confirmed the deal as well.

The move gives Google a working feed-based ad network, but more importantly it keeps Google close to publishers, which it can then try to entice to take on more of its services. Feedburner also offers an impressive analytics package that can be incorporated into both Blogger and Google Analytics.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 1:33 PM | Permalink

Technorati Retools, Gets "Universal" Too

Technorati has gotten a "major refresh" that's six months in the making, according to founder and CEO Dave Sifry. The biggest change is a shift away from searching only blogs to include more kinds of user-generated content, including photos and video. Technorati's search technology is still tag-based, but now include more social media:

Whereas folks using Technorati a couple of years ago were predominantly coming to us to search the blogosphere to surface the conversations that were most interesting to them, today they are increasingly coming to our site to get the 360 degree context of the Live Web - blogs of course, but also user-generated video, photos, podcasts, music, games and more. They want all the good stuff out there, all in real-time, and we're using the power of 80 million bloggers to help organize it and make it fun to browse; using the wisdom of crowds as a mirror on ourselves.

In addition, Technorati has gone the same "universal" route as Google, eliminating search silos to return multiple media in the same results set, rather than having a separate search function for each category. Technorati has kept a blog-search-only option. Another way Technorati is similar to Google is the presence of a ticker across the top of the page highlighting popular searches, as Google is doing with its Hot Trends.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 12:01 PM | Permalink

Google Testing AdSense for Video

Google has announced a pilot with a small group of publishers to test streaming video ads. Writing on the Inside AdSense blog, product marketing manager Christina Lee said, "Just as AdSense adds value to the text content on your website and is useful for your users, we think these in-stream ads in video will add value to publishers' video content and help to deepen engagement with users watching the videos."

In this pilot, the selected publishers, with their own video content, will be able to control which videos get ads, and when the ads play in those videos.

This is different than the standalone click-to-play video ads Google offers to publishers in its content network. It's also different from the video distribution tests Google did with Warner Music and Sony BMG in January, and with MTV last August, both of which paired video content from those providers with video ads from Google advertisers.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 11:47 AM | Permalink

Strategic Analytics Consulting from Eric T. Peterson

Eric T. Peterson recently left Visual Sciences to focus his attention on strategic consulting through his company Web Analytics Demystified. I spoke with Eric yesterday about his new focus.

Eric said that his focus on strategic consulting came about because he saw problems with how companies were utilizing web analytics. He indicated that "part of organizations are good at web analytics", but "very few organizations are good at web analytics throughout the organization". This speaks to a failure to get the best ROI from a company's web analytics investment.

It's common for organizations that invest in web analytics to setup a team that focuses on analytics, and then does a good job with it within that team. But the value of analytics does not stop there. For example, getting the marketing team engaged and benefiting from analytics is something that is often not done as well as it could be. In addition, getting senior management buy in for ongoing investments in analytics is usually quite a bit easier if they are being fed the metrics for the business that they are looking for.

These are the types of areas that Web Analytics Demystified is going to focus on. This enables them to focus on the strategic view, and therefore work with other companies that provide services such as web vendor selection, implementation assistance, and business analysis of the analytics data as it comes in.

In addition, Web Analytics Demystified recently announced a partnership with Aquent, the world's largest marketing staffing firm. This partner will help Eric's new venture gain steam fast.

Aquent works with something like 90% of the Fortune 100, and will frequently receive requests from it's clients for people to staff an analytics team. Eric can then help ensure that Aquent's clients get the most out of their analytics investment by providing strategic consulting.

Posted by on 10:25 AM | Permalink

SEW Experts: Digging Deeper Into Google Analytics

In today's By the Numbers column, "Digging Deeper Into the Latest Release of Google Analytics," Eric Enge explores the subtle differences in the latest version of Google's metrics tool. Among other enhancements, Enge notes that the new interface does a much better job of presenting the most common numbers people look for up front.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 10:02 AM | Permalink

What Should Ask.com Do?

An interesting discussion has begun on several blogs this week considering what Ask.com should do to be successful. It focuses on ways that Ask.com could compete with Google, both in search and advertising. While there are many things that Ask.com is doing right, it's hard not to wonder if it will be enough.

It's interesting that so much discussion is being devoted to Ask.com all at once. Is it a wish to back the underdog, or a dissatisfaction with Google, and a lack of faith in runners-up Yahoo and Microsoft? Let's start with a run-down of the conversation to this point, and see if we can come up with any answers to help everyone's favorite underachiever.

We begin with Allen Stern at Center Networks, who writes Ask.com goes "all in"... and my strategy suggestions to help them fight the beast. He outlines five areas of focus he'd suggest if he were asked:

  1. Get site publishers to integrate Ask.com, with cash incentives, if necessary.

  2. Focus on Google's potential data and privacy issues.

  3. Look for categories to own, like Ask Kids.

  4. Work with bloggers to educate them and create an 'Ask.com feeling."

  5. Arrange local demos of Ask.com

Over at Read/Write Web, Josh Catone weighs in with The Future of Ask.com: Search? How About Advertising. He shares his opinions on Stern's suggestions, and adds another area of focus for Ask: advertising.

This, I think, is an area that Google dominates which is currently ripe for competition (more so than search). Google's service isn't great (the most glaring check against them, in the eyes of publishers, is their lack of transparency -- they don't disclose how much of the ad revenue is being shared), and publishers are always willing to try out a new service to see if it makes them more money.

Catone also outlines several elements of an advertising program that Ask should focus on to match Google, including management tools for advertisers and publishers, contextual ad matching technology. He also names a few areas where Ask could potentially beat Google, including transparency with publisher earnings, a solution to stop click fraud, and the creation of "hybrid" text/image ads.

Over at Search Engine Guide, Jennifer Laycock asks the question, On Fire, or Going Down in Flames?, citing the latest Nielsen//NetRatings search share data that shows Ask.com losing ground after a year of slow but steady growth.

"It's a frustrating journey to watch as it seems that every time they do something great, they follow up with something that makes me cringe," writes Laycock.

At the Bruce Clay blog, Lisa Barone shares her hopes for Ask.com's success, and points to a major flaw amidst minor successes:

Let's be fair. Everyone knows that Ask.com's tools are better than Google's, Yahoo's, or Microsoft's. AskCity is awesome, their blog search kills, and the Smart Answer and query refinement tools Ask has been using for years are just now starting to be adopted by the other engines. When it comes to advanced search tools, Ask.com is in a league of their own. This is great, but their traditional search results are still lacking. Without a strong SERP, Ask.com will never become more than a specialty engine. You'll use it when you need to find a local furniture store, but you won't trust it for everyday searching.

There are many things that Ask.com is doing right. It's clearly committed to developing both its search and advertising products, and has committed $100 million to a TV ad campaign to try to spur user interest.

On the search side, Ask has been innovating with its Smart Answers product, which searches multiple databases to return more targeted results on certain queries. They've made some strides in local search with their AskCity product. They're also doing some interesting things with Ask Mobile and the AskX interface.

Ask.com is also in the midst of combining its Teoma and Direct Hit algorithms, along with other technologies it has developed, into the upcoming Edison algorithm, which will roll out over the course of 2007.

And Ask.com is reaching out to certain niches, notably librarians. Gary Price, Ask's director of online information resources, told SEW recently that his primary roles are outreach to media, outreach to librarians, and outreach internally to other IAC properties.

As for advertising, Ask.com has been making moves there already. It expanded its Ask Sponsored Listings product last fall, and is in the process of launching a contextual ad network across its own IAC-owned sites and third-party sites.

But as Andy Beal points out on his Marketing Pilgrim blog, whatever Ask does may not be enough, if it doesn't change its attitude: "The problem is that Ask still seems to want to compete with Google and Yahoo. ... Edgy ads aren't going to cut it, you need to find a niche and fill it."

Will these moves be enough to give Ask.com a fighting chance? What's Ask.com doing right? What are they doing wrong? What are they missing? Share your thoughts in the SEW forums.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 12:12 AM | Permalink

Microsoft's Berkowitz: Consider aQuantive Deal a Merger

At a JP Morgan Technology conference Tuesday (link to webcast), Steve Berkowitz, Microsoft's senior VP of online services, told investors that they should consider the company's $6 million purchase of aQuantive as "more of a merger" than an acquisition, according to Seattle P-I blogger Todd Bishop.

At the conference, Berkowitz told investors:

I look at it more as a merger. ... There are certain acquisitions you acquire to look at and say, 'OK great, there's lots of cost synergies, and how are you going to do that.' We look at the aQuantive acquisition as one of revenue opportunity and relationship opportunity. ... We didn't have a strong publisher-facing relationship. ... We have a very strong advertiser connection but we didn't have the tools for the advertisers. So we look aQuantive as an additive, or more of a merger of businesses, and that for us is really exciting, because it's getting us into places we weren't in before.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 12:02 AM | Permalink

May 22, 2007

Search Headlines & Links: May 22, 2007

Want a snapshot of the day's search marketing news? Here we've collected today's top news stories posted to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with search-related headlines from around the Web:

From the SEW Blog:

Headlines & News from Elsewhere:

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 8:55 PM | Permalink

Universal Search and SEM

Last week, Google announced a major change in the way it delivers search results, moving from "siloed" searches for blogs, videos, news and other categories to a "universal search" model, incorporating all of those categories in a single page, ranked against each other for relevance.

That move is bound to bring changes for both searchers and search marketers. We explore some of the possibilities in today's SearchDay, What Does Universal Search Mean for SEM?

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 6:11 PM | Permalink

Google Is Big Brother

I guess it has just gotten to be all too much for the senior staff over at Google.

CEO Eric Schmidt, was quoted by the Financial Times as saying “(t)he goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as ‘What shall I do tomorrow?' and ‘What job shall I take?’”

Really now.... sort of like the modern-day "mirror on the wall" - or some other twisted piece of macabre theater.

The messages may be mixed, but the intent seems to be focused: "Total Global Domination".

But without being evil.....

We seem to have taken the bitter pill and are living this "Google-in-Wonderland" life.

Guess that makes either Larry or Sergie Alice and the other the White Rabbit.... I already know who the Mad Hatter is!

Posted by Frank Watson on 5:11 PM | Permalink

Marchex Teams with Fox for Latin Web Sites

The potential of the Latin market is obviously not lost on the Marchex team, as they have partnered with Fox's Latin American Channels division to jointly develop a set of Spanish-language Web sites owned by Marchex.

Sites include the Spanish-language equivalent dot-com domains for “Cook,” "Photos," "Sports," "Movies" and more than 100 other domains that Marchex recently acquired for $10 million. As it does with its English-language network of direct navigation domains, Marchex will monetize those sites with display ads and pay-per-click text ads.

“It is a key step in our ongoing strategy of acquiring Web sites and developing them into high quality destinations which, over time, will continue to build our base of global and local traffic,” Peter Christothoulou, Marchex's chief strategy officer, said in a statement.

The Marchex company includes search engine Enhance and GoClick, as well as vertical content advertising source Industry Brains. This should provide some increased interest in the Latin market.

Posted by Frank Watson on 4:21 PM | Permalink

Changes at SEW: Moving Over Yonder

It's been a really interesting year here at Search Engine Watch. I'm happy to say traffic to the site is strong, if not at an all-time high, due to the fantastic work of our bloggers, expert columnists, and SearchDay contributors. News Editor Kevin Newcomb deserves much of the credit for those areas as well, since joining the site in January.

For those reasons, I'm also sad to say, my last day as editor of Search Engine Watch is this Friday, May 25.

It's been terrific being a part of SEW for three years, from launching the discussion forums in 2004, to bringing the local SEW Live! networking series to five cities, and expanding my editorial duties over the last year, including the recent launch of SEW Experts.

But, I am leaving the site and the daily editing duties in the hands of a capable staff, and wish them the best of luck. I'm also happy to announce that Rob Kerry (aka, evilgreenmonkey) is going to be resurrecting my former role as the SEW Forums Editor, which became a part of my role as Editor, but started to get lost alongside my expanding duties on the rest of the site.

What's next for me? I'm joining a start-up in the travel vertical based here in Salt Lake City, founded by a few people with long-time search industry experience. After years of agency work and freelance consulting, as well as my time at SEW on the editorial side, I'm looking forward to being the in-house director of online media, managing the content development strategy and online marketing programs for vacation rentals at zonder.com.

The timing is fantastic, as I now get to practice what I preach, particularly as I'm still programming our first SES Travel event in Seattle, WA, July 26-27. It's shaping up to be a great event, with a ton of buzz from speakers and prospective attendees, the agenda will be posted shortly, and stay tuned to the SES blog for further announcements on the program. I hope to see many of you at that event and others in the SEM conference circuit.

Meanwhile, Search Engine Watch is in the process of upgrading the site, adding contributors and new staff, so you can expect some announcements on that front soon.

Posted by Elisabeth Osmeloski on 3:13 PM | Permalink

Top Three SEO Mistakes

In the process of creating a presentation for catalog retailers at a DMA conference, SiteLogic's Matt Bailey has distilled the essence of SEO into three common things that businesses do wrong.

Here are his Top Three SEO Mistakes:


  1. Branding comes before marketing tactics – On-page optimization is often at odds with brand decisions.

  2. Call things what they are – Customers don't always search for branded terms; they use their own words to describe your product.

  3. The basis of optimization is the customer experience – Optimizing pages for users will help you rank well in search engines.

Matt has posted his 48-page slide deck from the presentation, which is filled with more SEO basics like these.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 2:08 PM | Permalink

Google Tracking Hot Trends

Google has been regularly tracking popular searches in the form of the Google Zeitgeist for some time, and added the Google Trends service last year, providing an unfiltered, uncategorized view of popular queries in relation to each other.

Now, Google has introduced a new tool called Hot Trends. "It's a new feature of Google Trends for sharing the the hottest current searches with you in very close to real time," according to the Google Blog post. It's also added a Hot Trends group to help decipher the reasons why some seemingly odd phrases are appearing in Hot Trends.

Hot Trends are not a straight list of most popular searches, but are ranked with a new algorithm:

Hot Trends aren't the search terms people look for most often -- those are pretty predictable, like [weather] or [games] or perhaps [myspace]. Yes, [sex] too. Instead, the Hot Trends algorithm analyzes millions of searches to find those that are deviating the most relative to their past traffic. And the outcome is the Hot Trends list.

Google has also updated the Google Trends page to make it easier to break trends down by geographic region, for example. It's also ending its weekly Zeitgeist, but will continue monthly and annual publications.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 1:47 PM | Permalink

SEW Experts: Blog Your Way to the Top

In today's au Natural column, "Blog Your Way to the Top," Mark Jackson takes a look at the benefits of blogging on a corporate Web site. Besides the SEO-related benefit of adding fresh content to usually static sites, corporate blogs can also provide a good way to interact with customers and potential customers, and to establish thought leadership in your industry.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 10:42 AM | Permalink

SEW Experts: Convincing the Executive Team to Invest in SEO

In today's Big Biz column, "Convincing the Executive Team to Invest in SEO," Aaron Shear shares tips on how to get the executive management team to buy into the idea of search marketing. There are still many executives at large companies that think SEO is black magic. The key to convincing them otherwise is to start small, prove the value of search marketing, and build up allies in your organization.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 10:38 AM | Permalink

People Search Makes up 30% of All Searches

Back on May 8th, Google hosted a People Search SIG at their headquarters in Mountain View. Michael Arrington of TechCrunch presided over the session that included:


  1. Michael Tanne - CEO Wink
  2. Jaideep Singh - CEO Spock
  3. Bryan Burdick - COO ZoomInfo

This is another one of those fascinating areas of people search which has unexpectedly eye popping numbers. Data shows that 30% of all searches on Google or Yahoo are for specific people or people-related. I would love to get some stats on how much of that is celebrity-related versus plain old folks.

But you can see that many companies are doing quite well with their people search strategies. In addition to the companies listed above, most people are also familiar with Classmates and its leading competitor Reunion.

This is yet another vertical search area where specialized search tools that access uniquely structured data bases can do quite well.

Posted by on 9:14 AM | Permalink

May 21, 2007

Salesforce.com, Google Partnership Discussions

The Washington Post reported talks between Google and Salesforce.com, a hosted CRM application vendor.

This move is another direct challenge to Microsoft, which offers CRM products, but also could add an element to Google Analytics that only a handful of other companies have: the ability to track offline conversions to online advertising.

Visual Sciences, formerly known as WebSideStory, is one such competitor that will be impacted by this alliance. Using the Salesforce.com API, an analytics company is able to pass the lead information along with the advertising info - thus creating a two-edged sword for improving ROI.

The first and most obvious advantage is the ability to improve spends for offline conversions. The second, and more attractive to large scale sales teams, is the ability to determine where the better quality leads originate, and thus pass them to the right sales people.

One wonders how far in advance this alliance was in the minds of the people at Google, or if the creative CEO at Salesforce.com saw it as a great way to partner with a company that could help it improve its market share against Microsoft's CRM products.

Give your opinions here.

Posted by Frank Watson on 5:19 PM | Permalink

Search Headlines & Links: May 21, 2007

Want a snapshot of the day's search marketing news? Here we've collected today's top news stories posted to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with search-related headlines from around the Web:

From the SEW Blog:

  • Chasing the Long Tail
    Looking at the real search terms entered by people really reveals something about the human mind. And, man, the human mind is all over the place.
  • Will Ad Targeting Change?
    ow that the ad network/server companies are shifting around, we should make our online ad targeting dreams come true.
  • Google Cracking Down on AdSense Arbitrage
    Several AdSense publishers have received notice that their AdSense arbitrage sites are being kicked out of the program as of June 1.
  • Indeed Testing Pay-per-Action Ad Model
    Job search engine Indeed.com has been testing a pay-per-action (PPA) advertising model, which for recruiters means a pay-per-applicant ad model.
  • SEW Experts: Ego Bidding Gone Wild
    In today's Search Ads column, Tony Wright talks about the danger of ego-bidding and how to stop a client from bidding their business into the ground.
  • Winning on Digg Podcast
    Eric Enge and Neil Patel have created a second podcast focused on becoming a top Digg user, and how to get content to the Digg home page.
  • Google Adds Neighborhood Search
    Google has added a neighborhood search capability for 50 U.S. cities, catching up with sites like Ask.com, Trulia and Yelp.
  • Who Said It...
    After major ownership changes have been announced in the online ad business, let's try to match the players with these "unquoted reasons" for the moves.

Headlines & News from Elsewhere:

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 4:23 PM | Permalink

SEW Experts: Ego Bidding Gone Wild

In today's Search Ads column, "Ego Bidding Gone Wild," Tony Wright talks about the danger of ego-bidding and how to stop a client from bidding their business into the ground.

Besides being bad business in general to spend money that can't be shown to bring a return, Wright points out that "in a world where relevancy criteria is in play, number 1 is somewhat nebulous."

Personalized search, quality scores, geotargeting, behavioral targeting, and other factors can make the concept of a "top result" that everyone sees a quaint memory. Wright says it's better to focus on the return, and not to let ego drive you to make bad decisions.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 3:45 PM | Permalink

Indeed Testing Pay-per-Action Ad Model

Job search engine Indeed.com has been testing a pay-per-action (PPA) advertising model, which for recruiters means a pay-per-applicant ad model. The offering lets recruiters pay only when a job applicant responds to their listing, or lets other advertisers pay only when a specified action has occurred. Advertisers can specify any kind of online action they want to pay for, such as filling out a form or creating an account.

The PPA job ads will appear above and below Indeed's organic results, in the same positions as its pay-per-click (PPC) ads run now. Keyword-targeted ads, sold by Indeed and back-filled with Ask Sponsored Listings ads, appear next to the organic listings. PPC and PPA ads will be intermixed, with Indeed's algorithm ranking both types of ads together.

Organic and sponsored job listings are also outsourced to Indeed's network of content sites, who share in revenue generated by a co-branded job search or a site-targeted "Jobroll," a custom feed of jobs matching the interests and locations of their audiences.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 2:31 PM | Permalink

Winning on Digg Podcast

A couple of weeks ago Neil Patel and I put together our second podcast about winning on Digg. This second podcast focused on becoming a top Digg user yourself, and how to get content to the Digg home page.

One of the most important things to remember about this topic is that with Digg, as with all social media sites, you are dealing with a community. This means that you have to think about building relationships. Building and managing those relationships is the key to ongoing success.

For example, you can't come into Digg and begin to fling content into the system just to see what happens. You need to learn about what content the audience likes, and become friends with other important users. Becoming a Digg friend means a lot more than just getting them to agree to add you to their friends list.

You need to look at their content submissions regularly, and vote for the things you like. You need to start by giving, and then over time you can begin to get their support. Once you have this process working with a few people, you are well on your way.

You can also listen to the first podcast with Neil Patel. This one focuses more on the mechanics of story selection, titles, and descriptions.

Posted by on 1:29 PM | Permalink

Google Adds Neighborhood Search

Google has added a neighborhood search capability for 50 U.S. cities, so a user can search for things like bagels upper east side new york or restaurants, over the rhine, cincinnati on Google Maps.

As Greg Sterling points out, in this case Google is playing catch-up with sites like Ask.com (which launched this in December with its AskCity local search tool, as well as Trulia and Yelp. Yahoo has defined neighborhoods in large cities for some time as well.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 11:33 AM | Permalink

Google Cracking Down on AdSense Arbitrage

Several AdSense publishers have received notice that their sites, which are mainly of the AdSense arbitrage/made for AdSense (MFA) variety, are being kicked out of the AdSense program as of June 1. According to Jennifer Slegg, the letter explains that the site involved has an "unsuitable business model," and most of the targeted publishers are earning significant amounts of money from AdSense. (Though how much of that money is being pumped back into AdWords to drive traffic to the site is not known, of course). Google will pay the publishers through the end of May.

Slegg notes that this could be good news for advertisers, since it should help clean up the content network:

From a business perspective, it does make perfect sense for Google to make this move, since so many Google AdWords advertisers refuse to advertise on the content network because there are so many "Made for AdSense" style sites as well as those doing arbitrage. So in the long run, it could mean more money for publishers if/as advertisers return to the content network.

In the short-term, this could affect publishers not engaging in MFA sites, since these large-scale arbitrageurs will take their ads out of the program. These publishers could see at least a temporary drop in earnings, but a better-quality content network could bring in more advertisers in the long run, Slegg said.

The discussion is ongoing at Webmaster World and Search Engine Roundtable.

UPDATE: According to a Google spokesperson, this is part of an ongoing quality initiative on its content network: "At Google, we are always focused on how we can make the user experience as positive as possible while still providing value to our publishers and advertisers. As part of this effort, we continually conduct automated and manual reviews of publishers and sites that violate our policies. In some cases, violations of our program policies will result in termination from the AdSense program."

It's not clear how many sites were affected in this batch of reviews.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 11:06 AM | Permalink

Chasing the Long Tail

When you pursue a competitive market you quickly find out how hard it is to rank for the highest volume terms. In education it's terms like "online degrees" and "nursing schools". In the mortgage space, it's terms like "mortgage" and "refinance". It's really hard to remove an entrenched competitor from high positions for these terms. First, they are making lots of money, and can afford to keep investing in staying there.

That's one of the beautiful things about the web, because looking at the real search terms entered by people really reveals something about the human mind. And, man, the human mind is all over the place. While a term like "refinance" is huge in search volume, the volume in related terms is much higher.

How big is this phenomena? At Google's Universal Search announcement, Udi Manber put up a slide that stated that 20% to 25% of the search queries Google sees every day are search queries it has never seen before. Let that sink in for a moment. To me, that number was startlingly large.

If we look a bit more deeply at how this plays out in a competitive market space, you will quickly see that in every market space on the web that there is this long tail phenomena. In conventional terms:

The sum of the searches on all the low volume terms = the sum of the traffic on all the high volume terms.

Better still, ranking for the low volume terms is often much easier to do. So you can get a ton of traffic to your site in a competitive market without ever ranking highly for the most important terms. This is why you see so many people talking about the long tail today. How do you chase the long tail? There are basically two ways to pursue the long tail:

  1. Write in depth articles. This provides you access to long tail terms simply through the natural combination of words that the search engine will extract from your article. The scope of this is somewhat limited, of course, as there are so many word combinations that can be extracted from one article.

  2. Implement lots of pages all targeted at different terms. The trick with this approach is to make the pages unique and different from each other, so they are not seen as spammy duplicate content.

The ideal world is to implement a site with thousand of pages, each with their own in depth article. However, this is not for the faint of heart. However, there are two major ways to go at achieving this goal:

  1. User generated content. Social media sites that succeed in drawing an initial crowd have a strong potential to really take off, because the user generated content naturally creates a very strong long tail pull affect. It becomes a feeding frenzy, because more user generated content causes the site to rank for more long tail terms in the search engines, which drives more traffic, which drives more content.

    Of course, the trick here, is to create the initial buzz around the site.

  2. Machine generated content. Tricky waters here. I am not talking about machine generating crappy sites. The user experience still must rule, if you plan to be in the game for the long term. But if you have the ability to access a variety of large databases in your market space, the opportunity exists to present that data and present analysis of that data that really does add value to the user.

Neither of these things are easy to do. But it can be a lonely experience (and a not very profitable one) to chase a highly competitive market any other way.

Posted by on 10:01 AM | Permalink

May 19, 2007

Who Said It...

It's the Saturday after major ownership changes have been announced in the online ad business. We have heard all the official reasons for the transactions. The true motivations remain with the players, namely Google, WPP, Microsoft, Yahoo, DoubleClick, 24/7 Real Media, aQuantive and Right Media.

So here's a quick puzzler. Try to match these players with the following "unquoted reasons" likely mentioned behind closed doors, in hushed tones. (Sorry, but answers will NOT be provided.)

– We serve ads to the world.
– Improve those CPC buys!
– We can change.
– Make love, not war with publishers.
– We can't keep losing people.
– Selling CPMs is dull.
– Have advertisers, will travel.
– We're all about paid search.
– Our publishers are impressive.
– No more sweat shop for us.
– So few ways to spend our money.
– Our optimization rocks!
– Don't creative ideas matter?
– Welcome Big Brother.
– We finally joined the club.

Posted by on 4:44 PM | Permalink

Will Ad Targeting Change?

Whenever there are big ownership shifts in the ad business, it seems like a good time to ask for changes. Now that the ad network/server companies are shifting around, we should make our online ad targeting dreams come true. Here are three dreams.

Get keywords assigned to ads. Have your ad network assign the right keywords for search ads. We think these companies know a lot about what is getting searched. There's so much data and modeling horsepower. Let them do much more work for advertisers.

Buy banners with keywords. Port your search keywords over to your displays buys. Imagine not having to buy based on demographics or interests, which are tendencies anyway. We think you can keep the CPM buying model intact, but make social or contextual placements across the board.

Banish the spam. Harness the collective interests about web site visitors, even anonymously. Megaliths should offer these opportunities to increase eCPMs for publishers, where it wasn't possible before. Then make run of network, spam ads a dark and distant memory.

There are several different players, when it comes to the ad networks. In this oligopoly, my hope is that they will compete to fulfill our proverbial dreams.

Posted by on 4:31 PM | Permalink

Search Headlines & Links: May 18, 2007

Want a snapshot of the day's search marketing news? Here we've collected today's top news stories posted to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with search-related headlines from around the Web:

From the SEW Blog:

Headlines & News from Elsewhere:

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 8:38 AM | Permalink

Fair Isaac Click Fraud Report Spreads False Alarm

Media reports (including Search Engine Watch's) saying Fair Isaac Corp. (FIC) reported industry-wide click fraud at 10 to 15 percent are not accurate. FIC decided to put out a press release and speak at its user conference about data that was extremely preliminary, based on a small sample size, and not statistically significant.

While FIC's press release and public statements were carefully worded, the data was inevitably taken out of context, especially by mainstream media that may not understand the intricacies of click fraud, or of statistics and research. This is compounded by headline editors, who don't always go for nuance when they write headlines.

So that meant that much of the news coming out of Friday's announcement ended up being misleading, such as the reports from AP, Information Week. And industry and blog reports, based on these mainstream media articles, followed suit.

I spent a good portion of my day yesterday trying to get the facts, collected in yesterday's post, Fair Isaac Pegs Click Fraud at 10-15%. I've edited that to reflect the latest facts, but I feel that it needs even more clarification and explanation to put it in perspective, so I'll try to do that here.

OK, here's the situation: Fair Isaac Corp. (FIC) is in the early stages of applying its substantial fraud-detection skills and technology to the world of click fraud. It's been planning a study, with SEMPO's help, for the past year. FIC started collecting click fraud data in August.

The data has been hard to come by, with advertisers either interested but not able to convince their company to share all the data, or advertisers not having adequate data to meet FIC's strict quality standards. That means any preliminary findings are of limited value, which FIC did say in its press release, and in talks with journalists. But as I said, data and research are often misrepresented in news stories, not because of any malicious intent, but because it's not always easy for a reporter to dig that deeply on a deadline, and many reporters are not equipped to do much more than write down the findings as told to them by the researchers.

So was it really a good idea for FIC to go public with data, which they admit is not significant and should not be extrapolated to apply to the broader industry? I really don't think so. I can't say definitely what their motivations were, but I don't think they were malicious. It seems they wanted to have something to talk about at their InterACT conference. They may have been feeling pressure to produce some results, since this data collection phase has been dragging on much longer than they expected. They may also be trying to attract more advertisers to the study, so they can get more usable data. Good intentions, but this was misguided.

They're implying that 10-15 percent of advertisers' PPC budgets go to click fraud. That's a huge jump from what the search engines and other click fraud detection firms have said:

  • In March, Google reported that "under 10-percent" of clicks could be categorized as "invalid clicks," which Google catches before advertisers are charged. The amount of invalid clicks that are not proactively detected and are caught by advertisers is less than 0.02 percent.

  • Also in March, Yahoo reported its "network discard rate," representing the average number of clicks (in aggregate) that its clickthrough protection filters identify, tag and do not bill to advertisers, is between 12 and 15 percent.

  • In January, Click Forensics put overall click fraud at 14.2 percent, which would compare to Google's "under 10 percent" number. Click Forensics does not offer a corresponding number to Google's "less than 0.02 percent" figure of invalid clicks that are billed to advertisers. That's the number that Fair Isaac's numbers would correspond to.

The huge difference between FIC's findings and the previous findings should have given them enough pause to wait until they had better data to report. Technically, everything they said was correct, but they had to know, or suspect, that it would be taken out of context and applied as a broader figure about the entire market. So chalk this up to a media-relations mistake, an error in judgment, or a mis-played hand.

I think FIC can have a tremendous influence on the PPC space, if they can get enough data. They have years of experience in detecting fraud, first on credit and debit cards, and then on other fields, like insurance and provider fraud, and network assurance, which monitors signals over telephone networks. But until they get that data, and can perform a full investigation into click fraud across markets and across verticals, I wouldn't put much weight on these preliminary findings.

UPDATE: Google's Shuman Ghosemajumder spoke with FIC as well, and has more of his response on his blog

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 8:21 AM | Permalink

May 18, 2007

Fair Isaac Pegs Billed Click Fraud at 10-15% – IN VERY LIMITED CASES

I've updated this post with several clarifications. I've also blogged separately about how these numbers should be looked at, in Fair Isaac Click Fraud Report Spreads False Alarm.

Preliminary data from a study of click fraud by Fair Isaac Corp (FIC) shows that, in the limited cases it was able to study, 10 to 15 percent of billed pay-per-click traffic was deemed "pathological," indicating a likelihood of click fraud, according to Joseph Milana, the company's chief scientist of research and development.

While many reports are extrapolating this data to say that this should be considered an industry-wide click fraud rate, Milana said this was not FIC's intent, and the data should not be used that way. It's press release was carefully worded, but inevitably taken out of context, as I explain here.

"A limited number of advertisers have been able to provide data of the quality that we're asking for," Milana told SEW. "We're not saying these results are definitive."

The click fraud was detected using a combination of Fair Isaac's profiling technology, similar to the kind it uses to detect credit card fraud, and its "anomaly detection engine," which it uses to detect medical insurance fraud.

In March, Google reported that "under 10-percent" of clicks could be categorized as "invalid clicks," which Google catches before advertisers are charged. The amount of invalid clicks that are not proactively detected and are caught by advertisers is less than 0.02 percent. Also in March, Yahoo reported its "network discard rate," representing the average number of clicks (in aggregate) that its clickthrough protection filters identify, tag and do not bill to advertisers, is between 12 and 15 percent.

In January, Click Forensics put click fraud at 14.2 percent, which would compare to Google's "under 10 percent" number. Click Forensics does not offer a corresponding number to Google's "less than 0.02 percent" figure of invalid clicks that are billed to advertisers. That's the number that Fair Isaac's numbers would correspond to.

The company has been working with SEMPO for the past year, and started collecting click fraud data in August.

I've gotten a statement from a SEMPO spokesperson:

Click fraud continues to be a concern for SEMPO and our primary objective at this point is trying to establish credible scope of the problem. We supported Fair Isaac because of their excellent track record in financial fraud.

While we can't really comment on the initial findings announced by Fair Isaac because of the extremely limited scope of the study, we are actively encouraging others to get involved in the study to give Fair Isaac a large enough dataset to be able to accurately scope the incidence of both invalid clicks and pathological behavior.

If advertisers want to get involved to determine if there's pathological behavior in their dataset they can contact either SEMPO or Fair Isaac to learn the details of the type of data required. There is no cost to the advertiser for this participation.

From Google's Shuman Ghosemajumder:

The amount we filter proactively is consistently less than 10% of all clicks but individual invalid click rates can vary by advertiser, campaign and even keyword. The relatively rare cases we find of advertisers being affected by undetected click fraud constitute less than 0.02% of all clicks. Without knowing more about Fair Isaac's data gathering and methodology it is difficult to comment on their study except to say that a handful is not a representative sample size for our hundreds of thousands of advertisers.

And from Yahoo's Reggie Davis:

Yahoo is deeply committed to fighting click fraud, because our business is built on the high ROI we deliver to our advertisers. Click fraud erodes advertiser trust – trust that is key to the success of our business – which is why Yahoo employs an aggressive Clickthrough Protection System that identifies and does not bill advertisers for 12-15% of the clicks on our network.

We are focused on building the world's highest quality, most effective search and display advertising marketplace, and fighting click fraud is a significant part of that effort. Without having more information about their methodology, and given what seems to be a small sample size, it's difficult to comment on Fair Isaac's research.

While we welcome third-party viewpoints on how the industry can strengthen its fight against click fraud, we strongly believe that the industry needs a single set of definitions and standards around click measurement to ensure that we're all speaking to advertisers in the same language. Yahoo is working closely with the IAB as part of the IAB Click Measurement Working Group to help drive the development of industry definition and standards and looks forward to auditing our systems against those standards in the future.

I've spoken with Fair Isaac, and have more updates and some comments on this data in another post, Fair Isaac Click Fraud Report Spreads False Alarm.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 12:17 PM | Permalink

Microsoft to Acquire AQuantive

It looks like Microsoft wasn't really missing out on getting 24/7 Real Media after all. This morning, the company announced plans to acquire digital marketing agency aQuantive for $6 billion.

AQuantive is the parent to Atlas (ad-serving tools for advertisers and publishers, as well as Atlas Search bid management tools), DRIVEpm (behaviorally targeted ad network/media broker) and Avenue A | Razorfish (digital marketing agency, including search).

Microsoft is touting this as a commitment to become a "major player in online advertising."

The acquisition puts Microsoft in a similar position as Google with its DoubleClick acquisition. DoubleClick's Performics and DART Search; and aQuantive's Avenue A | Razorfish and Atlas Search create potential conflicts of interest. Google has said it is not planning on spinning off Performics, and on a conference call this morning, the company said it had no plans to spin off Avenue A | Razorfish.

You can find all the coverage on Techmeme.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 10:33 AM | Permalink

Will Universal Search Drive Growth of Google's Vertical Search Properties?

I attended the Searchology event at Google in Mountain View this past Wednesday. For those of you who read my article Will Universal Search Mean Universal Domination?, you already know I like what Google has done with this initiative.

There are some aspects that I think will be particularly interesting about this. Historically, many users have never tried any of the other search products, such as image search, local, video, etc. People simply get used to the idea that they go to one place and do their search there. They get in the habit of getting all their answers from the web search engine.

The problem is that this may not always provide the most relevant answer. By integrating all of their search assets into Universal Search, Google accomplishes two things:

  1. Potentially provides a more relevant search result
  2. Exposes other search properties to a broader audience of users

I think this second item may be the hidden gem of Universal Search. Exposing these other search tools through the traditional web search interface may actually increase the useage of the vertical search tools, potentially in a dramatic way. While the old saying is "Familiarity breeds contempt", the reality is that making people familiar with tools that can help them is likely to breed usage.

Bottom line: In addition to the potential relevance gains, Google may also get a tremendous burst of growth to it's other search properties.

Posted by on 9:44 AM | Permalink

Online News Is Hottest Video Search Category

According to data released by ClipBlast video news is the fastest-growing category on the Video Web. ClipBlast has found that video news now accounts for 32 percent of all the video that ClipBlast indexes. This is up from only 15 percent in January. This explosive growth is being driven by local television stations that are enhancing their coverage with streaming video displayed on their Web sites.

According to Hitwise the share of traffic leaving News and Media websites and going directly to Entertainment - Multimedia websites increased by 196% from April 2006 to March 2007. News events that involved user-generated video helped drove the increase in traffic between News and Media and Multimedia websites.

Viewers accustomed to getting the bulk of their news coverage from TV news are now finding video news on the Web in an increasing volume. Whether it is the execution of Saddam Hussein or the shootings at Virginia Tech, searchers will come to expect to find video on the Web covering the story. This should serve to drive even more traffic to news clips on the Web.

Posted by Amanda Watlington on 9:23 AM | Permalink

May 17, 2007

Search Headlines & Links: May 17, 2007

Want a snapshot of the day's search marketing news? Here we've collected today's top news stories posted to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with search-related headlines from around the Web:

From the SEW Blog:

Headlines & News from Elsewhere:

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 11:59 PM | Permalink

Interview with YouTube on Partner Program

I recently spoke with YouTube's Head of Product Marketing Jaime Byrne about the recent expansion of YouTube's revenue-sharing partner program to include select users from the YouTube community.

Formerly reserved for YouTube's professional content partners, the pilot partner program will allow for YouTube to evaluate if their revenue-sharing program with Google AdSense (originally reserved for their high-end professional partners) should be considered for expansion to more non-professional content partners.

Grant: What is the criteria you used for considering certain video accounts as "most popular"? Is it views, subscribers, comments, or a combination?

Colvin: Members were invited to participate based on their past performance on the platform. The user partners announced are all popular content creators known by the YouTube community and we believe they will be attractive for advertisers. The new user partners are creating series that attract a persistent audience and have a large numbers of subscribers. We feel it's important to reward those who are creating more than just viral one-off hits. User partners' videos remind us of the other larger partners on our site, and the content they create is often in the same vein.

Grant: What are the revenue-sharing and promotional opportunities available to these new content partners, and how to they compare with YouTube's professional partners?

Colvin: YouTube will monetize the partner videos in a manner consistent with the monetization of professional content posted on YouTube by partners. YouTube is exploring a variety of options and will deploy advertising models that work for the YouTube community, advertisers and professional content partners.

Grant: Do you have an example of how the advertising would appear adjacent to the video?

Colvin: You can click on any of lonelygirl15's videos to see the banner running against her content. Participating user partners will receive revenue from advertising that runs directly against their content. (Grant's comment: Some irony that YouTube rewards the example of a counterfeit person.)

Grant: How many partners do you currently have in the program, both professional and those that are part of the general community?
Colvin: YouTube currently has more than 1,000 partners with whom we share revenue, including major media companies like the BBC and CBS. The user partner program is simply an extension of the way we share revenue with any of our partners who provide content that we sell ads against. Other partners include the NBA, the Sundance Channel and Sony BMG.

Grant: If someone were to fill out YouTube's partnership lead form to be considered as a content partner, how long would it take to receive a decision?

Colvin: We will continue to evaluate the success of this program and add new partners if and when appropriate.

Grant: Are there certain categories of content that might be given special consideration? Such as education or government services?

Colvin: We will consider all types of content for this program, although no category will be given preferential consideration over another.

Posted by Grant Crowell on 7:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

New Local Search Site: LocalGuides

Denver-based Local Matters has launched a new local search site, LocalGuides.com. The site lets users create lists of favorite local businesses, based on destinations, like "jazz clubs," or on a task, like "kitchen remodel." The site also incorporates social media elements by letting users share those guides with friends, or with all other users.

"Consumers want more involvement with local information. While some progress has been made in a few entertainment categories, the search industry has failed to give consumers useful tools for personalized local information and opinions," Perry Evans, Local Matters CEO, said in a statement. "LocalGuides.com fills this void by creating a relevant and engaging shared-consumer experience, while also helping local merchants find new ways to connect with their local audience. This is a big part of what has been missing in Local Search."

Writing on his blog, Evans describes LocalGuides as a mix of local, social and vertical search.

"We think we have made it engaging to turn your list into a richly annotated guide that you'll be excited to share. A very web 2.0 style mash-up tool sits at the center, supported by lots of local content aggregation with simple tools for finding, copying and sharing guides," he writes.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 4:18 PM | Permalink

WPP Snaps Up 24/7 Real Media

Ad agency holding company WPP has acquired 24/7 Real Media for $649 million. The company has three main businesses: a CPM-based display ad network, publisher-side ad-serving technology, and a search marketing consultancy.

The 24/7 search business was built from acquisitions of Website Results in 2000 and Decide Interactive in 2004.

On the search side, WPP already owns Outrider, now part of MEC Interaction, and Boston-based Catalyst. According to WPP's statement, 24/7 will increase search spend under WPP's management by $200 million, "taking search volumes to more than $450 million and adding a robust technology platform for managing search."

This acquisition seems to be more about the ad network and ad-serving technology, as that's the focus of much of WPP's announcement.

This is the latest in a string of ad network acquisitions, and another example of Microsoft apparently missing out. Google got DoubleClick, Yahoo got Right Media, and so far Microsoft has been left empty-handed. Microsoft had reportedly been eyeing both DoubleClick and 24/7.

Of course, it's possible that Microsoft is the sane one here, since it doesn't need an ad network, but could have been after the publisher relationships 24/7 had with its ad serving technology, which would help jump-start a base for its adCenter platform.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 12:00 PM | Permalink

Yahoo Researcher Declares Semantic Web Dead

Mor Naaman, a research scientist with Yahoo Research Berkeley, stood in front of a roomful of semantic Web researchers and declared that the semantic Web is dead. This happened last week at the International World Wide Web Conference in Alberta, Canada, as Naaman describes on the Yahoo Research Berkeley blog.

While Naaman, a semantic Web researcher himself, was admittedly using some hyperbole in his statement, he maintains that "the grand vision of 'A Semantic Web' will not be achieved," mostly because users cannot be expected to annotate media with complex labels, as a researcher would, but can only be expected to use simple tags. In addition, developers should be expected to pass over complicated standards in favor of simpler ones, like RSS, microformats, and Flickr machine tags.

"There is simply no hope in enforcing a complete set of semantics for media (or content) annotation on the web as a whole. Which led me to declare the [grand vision of the] semantic web dead," Naaman said.

Things like tags and microformats are ways to add what Naaman calls "lightweight semantics" to a piece of media, which researchers can then attempt to make sense of with more complex tools and techniques, such as schema mapping, pattern extraction, or semantic analysis. Naaman refers to this structure as the "Emerging-Semantics Web."

He's included his presentation, along with links to the presentations of the other researchers on his panel, at the Yahoo Research Berkeley blog.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 1:55 AM | Permalink

Google Experimental to Offer Sneak Previews

At the Searchology event yesterday, Marissa Mayer, Google's VP of search products and user experience, introduced Google Experimental, a new tool that will allow users to opt in to various tests that Google is doing.

It has been Google's policy to roll out potential new features or interface tests to small groups of users before going live with all users. This of course leads to frustration for SEOs and other Google-watchers who want to see what these new features and interfaces look like.

Now, those leading-edge users can sign up for these tests at the Google Experimental site, and they will be added to the test group. Google will continue to conduct random tests with users, since the self-selected group using the new tool would skew results, but Mayer said she hopes that that group will be able to provide Google with valuable feedback as well.

The first tests available on the site are timeline and map views, keyboard shortcuts, and left- or right-hand navigation options.

The concept of Views was introduced by Mayer yesterday as a way to extract structure from unstructured information. For the timeline view, for example, a user could see the history of the civil rights movement throughout history. With a map view, a user could plot out the locations of golf courses on the PGA tours. Other kinds of views will continue to be added.

Keyboard shortcuts allow a user to navigate search results with a keyboard, in much the same way that users have been able to navigate around Gmail. The navigation location preferences allow a user to test out a layout that moves the new overhead navigation to the left or right side of search results.

Google Experimental will not replace Google Labs, which will continue to house standalone applications and products to test. With Experimental, users need only go to the site to sign up, and then all searches on Google thereafter will include the test functionality or interface, until a user opts out of a test.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 1:41 AM | Permalink

Google Planning Query Enhancements

While Google announced several things at its Searchology event Wednesday that will be live this week, two of the more interesting innovations talked about are farther out on the timeline.

During his presentation, Udi Manber, Google's VP of engineering, talked about two upcoming query enhancements intended to better understand user intent. The first is a technique that will add a supplemental query that Google's algorithm determines may return more relevant results. Since people don't always say what they think they say, Google is hoping to find what they mean, Manber said.

For instance, if a user searches for [overhead view of Bellagio pool], Google will perform that query, and also perform a second query for [Bellagio pool pictures], since that is likely to return better results. In another example, a search for [distance from Zurich Switzerland to Lake Como Italy] would lead Google to add a query for [train Milan Italy Zurich Switzerland].

The second query enhancement Manber discussed was cross-language information retrieval (CLIR). With this system, expected to launch later this year, Google will translate a query into another language, find results, and then translate those results into the original query language to present to the user. In effect, this allows users to seamlessly search documents in foreign languages as easily as they search in their own language.

UPDATE: As Chris Sherman points out, Yahoo has been doing this with Yahoo Search Translator since 2005.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 12:01 AM | Permalink

May 16, 2007

Search Headlines & Links: May 16, 2007

Want a snapshot of the day's search marketing news? Here we've collected today's top news stories posted to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with search-related headlines from around the Web:

From the SEW Blog:

Headlines & News from Elsewhere:

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 11:59 PM | Permalink

Why Wiki?

Wikipedia is not a search engine, and links from Wikipedia no longer count towards increasing your link equity – so why should SEOs care about Wikipedia? At the Search Engine Strategies conference in New York last month, a panel of experts shared their reasons why Wikipedia is still relevant to search marketers. We share them with you in today's SearchDay, Should SEOs Care About Wikipedia?

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 11:15 PM | Permalink

PR News survey finds online video is underutilized

A new survey conducted by PR News and Medialink reveals that PR pros aren't using online video as often as they're watching it. While 69% of the nearly 300 people who responded to the survey said they've watched online video footage for business purposes within the last 10 days, only half have video posted on their corporate Web sites.

So, what gives?

“Video is still an underutilized resource among PR pros – especially those in B2B communications,” Larry Thomas, COO of Medialink, told PR News. “Execs are watching video themselves, but they're not taking advantage of these cost-effective distribution tools.”

The main drivers respondents cited for using online video are the ability to measure impact/ROI (30%) and financial feasibility (28%). But, Thomas added, not enough public relations professionals are “taking existing video assets and repurposing (them) in addition to creating content from scratch.”

PR News reports on three best practices that are used when preparing online videos:
• Produce compelling content and make it as available as possible, then let the destination
attract an audience;
• Consider ways other than the Web and TV to repurpose the video before ever sending out
the camera; and
• Leverage the platform's ability to speak to a very targeted, high-prospect audience.

When it comes to online video, Thomas concluded, “PR execs can't stand on the sidelines anymore. They must accelerate their evolution by experimenting. It's scary, but it's even scarier to know that people are talking about you whether you're there or not. We're in a media 2.0 world, and video is the currency of the marketplace.”

Posted by Greg Jarboe on 4:55 PM | Permalink

Google Goes Universal, Adds Navigation

At the Searchology press event today at the Googleplex, Google showed off its past, present and future. It made a few big announcements that will be of interest to search marketers, and changes to its search that users will begin to see today.

The first is the launch of universal search results, meaning a query from Google.com will now show results from Google's vertical search engines, including images, videos, news, maps, blogs, and books. Instead of putting these various results in a set position on the page, Google will rank all types of results based on the query. A user will still have the option of segmenting results based on media type, with tabs at the top of the search results for each type.

The next announcement was the addition of a universal navigation bar to all pages of Google, from home page to search results to Gmail and Google Calendar. The navigation will change based on the page you're on, so on a search results page, the navigation shown might include news and blog search, while the navigation on Gmail might include Google Calendar and Apps.

Finally, Google announced Google Experimental, where users can opt in to various tests that Google is doing. It will still conduct random tests with users, but interested parties can now see what those tests look like, without having to wait to be selected for the tests themselves.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 4:48 PM | Permalink

AdWords Gets Its Day In Court

An actual court date has been set in the Google versus American Blind and Wallpaper Factory, Inc. court case. The suit against Google's adwords will be heard on November 9, 2007.

"In an April 18, 2007 decision denying Google's motion to dismiss the case, the court wrote that '''the evidence suggests that Google used [ABWF's] mark with the intent to maximize its own profit ... [and] ABWF has produced sufficient evidence of likelihood of [consumer] confusion [to allow the case to be decided by a jury],''' it was reported.

Google's allowance of advertisers to use other's trademark terms as keywords has been contentious for quite some time. Even though the trademarked term cannot appear in the ad copy, it does allow the branded terms to be used.

The trial will be held in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California in San Jose. So the home court advantage goes to Google.

Posted by Frank Watson on 3:16 PM | Permalink

Google Mobile Search Ad Checker Improved

Google has made some improvements on its mobile search checker tool. Our forum rep from Google (AdWordsRep) bumped a post about the topic today.

The search page may not be pretty but it appears to be functional.

Give some feedback in the forum.

Posted by Frank Watson on 3:09 PM | Permalink

Yahoo oneSearch Adds 7 More Countries

Yahoo announced it has added the availability of its oneSearch mobile application to seven more countries.

India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam are now part of the growing list of countries that can use Yahoo search on mobile devices. The country count is now 80 according to the country drop down menu.

And to think this application launched in March 2007. Not bad for two months.

Posted by Frank Watson on 2:45 PM | Permalink

Is The Company Worth As Much As The Domain Name?

Okay the company is always going to be worth more than the domain name, so long as it is not operating in the red. But the recent sales of domains like porn.com for $9.5 Million and vodka.com for $3 million shows how valuable some domain names are.

Poker.com is about to be or just has been sold and the price mentioned was $27 million. Now it would have been nice to buy that one say 10 years ago - the lottery ticket of domain names.

The thing that applies to search here is the fact these buyers value the domains mainly for write in traffic, but also for the impact they know it has in organic results. Even with all things being equal the domain will always be a tipping point.

So craft your domain name well and remember the words are very important.

Posted by Frank Watson on 2:11 PM | Permalink

SEOs Seeing Effects of Google's Paid Links Algorithm?

UK SEO Dave Naylor says his clients are being impacted by a Google algorithm to penalize buyers and sellers of paid links. In a post on his blog, Been Hit in the last 14days by Google Paidlinks Roll out?, Naylor says that the changes seem to be targeting sites with links in footers or sidebars, as well as off-topic links and link networks.

Naylor suggests webmasters "weather the storm," and see how this algorithm evens out: "So what can you do? OK I still think wait it out, but download your backlinks and check though them if you can. Clean them up do so and go get some authority!"

Google has not said that it has implemented a new algorithm, but Matt Cutts, head of Google's Webspam team, has been asking for spam reports related to link buying and selling, as a way to test a new algorithm being developed that would find such instances.

UPDATE: As expected, Google is being tight-lipped about the existence or non-existence of the algorithm. According to a Google spokesperson, "We're adding and updating algorithms on a regular basis, but our Webmaster Guidelines have remained unchanged and consistent. In order to help maintain a more level playing field, we discourage webmasters from buying or selling links with a focus on passing PageRank."

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 11:44 AM | Permalink

Yahoo's New Mission

In the wake of Yahoo's recent reorganization, Jeff Weiner, EVP of Yahoo's Network Division, has introduced a new mission statement that he says will help tie things together: “To connect people to their passions, communities, and the world's knowledge.”

"In this statement, we not only define our sense of purpose as a company, but also a strategic framework for the Network Division as well," writes Weiner.

The newly created Yahoo Network Division houses most of Yahoo's consumer-facing products, like Web Search and Answers; Yahoo Groups, Flickr and Bix; Yahoo Mail and Messenger; and its media and portal properties, including the Yahoo home page and My Yahoo.

He breaks down the statement into its parts:

"To connect people..." – "When we talk about connecting people we are specifically talking about connecting our consumers to their most essential needs, connecting our advertisers and publishers to their most valuable consumers, and connecting the dots internally to create far greater efficiencies and fully leverage the company's strengths."

"...to their passions..." – "In other words, we want to connect the right user to the right content at the right time. If we get this right, the implications are considerable. Consider that the one-size-fits-all content featured on most web sites clicks at only a fraction of the top algorithmic results in web search. Why? Because we know exactly what you are looking for when you do a query. However, for the most part we can only do our best to anticipate what you want when you are browsing your favorite property. The goal is to close that gap, and ultimately make your content browsing experience as fundamentally relevant as your web search experience."

"...their communities..." – "when we talk about connecting people to their communities, strategically we are talking about creating better user experiences not simply by knowing what you want, but also by leveraging who you know."

"...and the world's knowledge." – "we want to leverage our assets to build the most relevant, comprehensive, dynamic, and open repository of knowledge and content on the Web."

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 10:47 AM | Permalink

Podcast on Winning on Digg with Neil Patel

Neil Patel and I have put together a two part podcast series on how to succeed on Digg. The first podcast covers the mechanics of putting together good content, and writing good titles and descriptions.

One of the key things you need to keep in mind when are targeting content for the Digg audience is the nature of that audience. The audience is predominantly male (13-28 or so) and highly technical. In addition, this audience has some known interests. For example:

  1. They love Apple
  2. They love Google
  3. They love the environment
  4. They love quirky and unusual things
  5. The hate Microsoft
  6. They hate George W. Bush

Of course, the article you intend to write may not relate to one of these areas, but it is really a good idea to learn as much as you can about the audience. So if you are writing an article about a particular topic, go onto Digg and do some research. Have any similar stories made the front page of Digg before? If so, see what those people did that got them there. Also, if no related stories have made the front page before, is there a reason for that? What did the other people do wrong?

This kind of research can be invaluable in making sure you are developing the right content, and it's easy to do.

Posted by on 10:32 AM | Permalink

Krugle Announces a Code Search Appliance

Krugle, the code search engine for developers, announced last week that their latest product, Krugle Enterprise, is in selective beta. Enterprise customers that maintain large source code bases behind the firewall can benefit from Krugle Enterprise to help them improve their access to existing code and information about that code to speed the development process.

Krugle Enterprise is provided by Krugle in as an appliance, to allow for rapid and error-free installation and configuration. The business model is a subscription model, with a low entry price, instead of the large up front price often associated with the appliance business models.

According to Laura Merling, Krugle's VP of marketing, the company already has beta customers signed up for using the product. Two of these beta customers are named in the Krugle press release, and they are Persistent Systems, and Science Applications International Corporation. Target markets for the company include large software development companies, financial services companies, and other companies that maintain a sizable amount of code behind the firewall.

According to Ms. Merling, the product will be fully released by the end of the Summer.

Posted by on 9:52 AM | Permalink

Start.com Stopped

Microsoft is shuttering Start.com, its experimental interface launched in February 2005 that developed many of the features that ended up in the Live.com start page. According to a blog post by Sanaz Ahari, lead program manager for Live Search, the project is being terminated, with Start.com to be redirected to Live.com starting next week.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 8:54 AM | Permalink

AOL on Ad Technology Buying Binge

A day after it announced it would acquire Third Screen Media, a mobile ad technology provider, AOL has now acquired a controlling interest in ADTECH, a German ad network with display ad and e-mail marketing capabilities. ADTECH, like Third Screen Media will be rolled into AOL's Advertising.com business.

While it has been building up its search advertising capabilities through its partnership with Google, AOL has also been building up its non-search ad options, mostly through Advertising.com, which it acquired in 2004. The move is an extension of the strategy AOL embarked on last summer, in which it began moving away from its roots as a dial-up service provider to become an ad-supported media network.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 8:45 AM | Permalink

May 15, 2007

Search Headlines & Links: May 15, 2007

Want a snapshot of the day's search marketing news? Here we've collected today's top news stories posted to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with search-related headlines from around the Web:

From the SEW Blog:

Headlines & News from Elsewhere:

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 8:42 PM | Permalink

Google Audio Ads See Broad Release

Google is in the process of making Audio Ads available to U.S. AdWords advertisers. The platform, which auctions off remnant inventory on radio stations, has been in beta since December, and was expanded in March.

Barry Schwartz has several screenshots of the interface at Search Engine Roundtable.

Audio Ads competitor Bid4Spots currently serves the U.S. radio market, and announced plans to expand its radio ad auction to the U.K. last week.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 2:00 PM | Permalink

It's Raining Search Engines

Seems like everyone wants to launch a search engine. 2007 will be the year of the niched search engines. The news today has had a lot of stories about these small engines.

ChaCha and blinkx announced a partnership.
Autobytel joins Kosmix for a car sales engine.
ISEdb launches a search engine, Scoop, for news about search engines.
Prodge rolls out music band search engines like SearchWithMaroon5.com
Trulia, a real estate search engine goes Web 2.0.
Zuula, an engine that uses results from the search engine a person prefers, is launched.

Posted by Frank Watson on 11:25 AM | Permalink

Yahoo Starting Unlimited Email Space Today

As was announced a couple of months ago, Yahoo started its push for unlimited email storage today. Funny mine is still 1 gig as of a minute before this posting.

The rollout will take a couple of months and will be global, their press release stated.

Yahoo! Mail today began a global rollout of unlimited e-mail storage, which will reach all users of the service within the coming months. The service upgrade to the world's most popular Web mail service* was previously announced in late March on the company blog, Yodel Anecdotal. Yahoo! is the first of the world's three largest Web mail providers to provide unlimited e-mail storage.

“Yahoo! Mail has become an essential part of people's lives over the past decade and people around the world are increasingly sharing more of their lives online. By providing unlimited e-mail storage, we're continuing to build upon the industry's best Web mail service,” said John Kremer, vice president, Yahoo! Mail.

Both new and existing Yahoo! Mail users will receive an unlimited amount of free e-mail storage as long as they follow normal e-mail practices and abide by the company's anti-abuse limits. The service upgrade will be available to users of the original Yahoo! Mail service and the Yahoo! Mail Beta.

Posted by Frank Watson on 10:56 AM | Permalink

ChaCha Partners with blinkx for Video Search

ChaCha, a search engine that search engine that uses human guides to enhance its search results, has announced a partnership with video search engine blinkx for multimedia content. Now, the video search results shown on ChaCha will come from blinkx's index of the video content. Users of ChaCha can either rely on the engine algorithm for results or seek assistance from one of ChaCha's guides who provide real time search assistance. Both companies will share in revenues generated from these search results.

Posted by Amanda Watlington on 10:39 AM | Permalink

Yahoo Names New CFO

Yahoo! announced today it will appoint Blake Jorgensen, the co-founder of Thomas Weisel Partners, as their new Chief Financial Officer. He is scheduled to assume the position June 4th. The previous CFO, Sue Decker, has been named head of advertising and publishing.

The company press release details his experience:

Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq: YHOO), a leading global Internet company, today announced that the Board of Directors has appointed Blake Jorgensen, the co-founder of Thomas Weisel Partners, as chief financial officer. Jorgensen will commence employment with the Company on or about June 4, 2007. Jorgensen will replace Susan Decker, who has moved into a new role as head of the advertiser and publisher group. Jorgensen will be a key member of Yahoo!'s executive team, overseeing the company's finance, investor relations and mergers and acquisitions (M&A) groups. He will report directly to Yahoo!'s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Terry Semel.

"Blake has a strong track record of building and running a successful investment banking franchise serving many clients in the Internet and technology industries. His broad financial, operating and strategic experience, which complements the deep financial expertise of our existing team, will make him a valuable addition to Yahoo!'s senior management," said Semel. "Blake will help Yahoo! continue to execute against our growth plan and identify emerging opportunities, as well as maintain our tradition of financial excellence and fiscal discipline."

Prior to his Yahoo! appointment, Jorgensen was with Thomas Weisel Partners, which he co-founded in 1998 and where he served as chief operating officer, co-director of investment banking and a member of the Executive Committee. In these roles, he was instrumental in managing all aspects of the publicly traded investment bank, working in close partnership with the CEO, members of the Executive Committee and the Board of Directors. Jorgensen also managed the firm's relationships with key investors and managed several strategic alliances with international partners.

Prior to joining Thomas Weisel Partners, Jorgensen was a managing director and principal at the corporate finance department of Montgomery Securities. Earlier in his career, he also worked as an independent management consultant and held roles at MAC Group/Gemini Consulting and Marakon Associates.

Jorgensen holds a Bachelor of Arts from Stanford University with a major in Economics, and a Masters of Business Administration from Harvard Business School.

"I couldn't be happier to be joining Yahoo! to help it achieve a new level of success as an Internet leader. And I'm excited about joining a finance team that, collectively, has such deep functional experience," said Jorgensen. "I believe Yahoo! is well positioned to deliver value to shareholders -- with unique audience, advertising and technology assets and a strong financial base -- and the company is pursuing the right strategy to achieve its great potential. Yahoo! has made significant strides in recent months and I am looking forward to working closely with Terry and the rest of Yahoo!'s impressive management team to continue the company's progress as it aggressively executes against its growth strategy."

Decker assumed her new role as part of the company's reorganization in December 2006. That reorganization was designed to align Yahoo!'s operations with the company's key customer segments -- audiences, advertisers and publishers -- and more effectively leverage Yahoo!'s significant strengths to capture future opportunities for growth.

"Blake's arrival will enable Sue to devote her full attention to her new responsibilities where she is building on the recent momentum we've achieved with Panama, major new partnerships and our agreement to acquire Right Media. With Blake's appointment, we're continuing to put the right people in the right places to execute against our strategy and adding outside talent to complement an already strong management team," added Semel.

Posted by Frank Watson on 10:24 AM | Permalink

Autobytel Selects Kosmix as Vertical Search Partner

Autobytel has selected Kosmix to power an automobile-focused vertical search engine on their "next generation consumer automotive website," MyRide.com.

Kosmix indicates that this will be the first automotive vertical search engine on the market. A number of key areas on the MyRide.com site will be enhanced by the Kosmix Technology. These include:

  1. Reviews & Ratings
  2. Safety & Recalls
  3. Advice & Tips
  4. Future & Classic Cars
  5. Racing & Performance
  6. Insurance & Loans
  7. Fuel Economy
  8. Used Cars
  9. Green Cars
  10. Community Blogs & News
  11. Service & Repair
  12. Parts & Accessories

We covered MyRide.com in a February SearchDay, Autobytel Hopes to Usher in Second Phase of Automobile Search.

Posted by on 10:03 AM | Permalink

Internet Search Engine Database launches ISEdb SCOOP

Early this morning, Internet Search Engine Database launched its newest site called ISEdb SCOOP. It presents search engine industry news in such a way that user-appreciated information is pushed to the top of the overflowing pile.

Based on the now familiar social search technique, ISEdb SCOOP encourages visitors to submit news or articles then vote for their favorite search engine industry stories.

Tariq Ali, the site's owner, says, "I wanted a community powered by users where they could submit, share, bookmark and discover search engine related news, articles and tips. I also wanted their feedback in order to help promote this quality information."

On ISEdb SCOOP, users can submit articles they discover while conducting a news search or blog search. These stories will then appear in the "Upcoming Stories" section of the new site. As site visitors read articles and tips on the site, they can vote for the ones they find helpful and relevant.

What can you expect to find on ISEdb SCOOP? Virtually every type of search engine-related story, from reviews of Search Engine Strategies sessions to announcements about new technological advances.

Check it out.

Posted by Greg Jarboe on 9:04 AM | Permalink

Google Webmaster Group Calls for Backup

Google's Webmaster Help group is getting some much-needed backup in the form of additional Google Search Quality team members. The site, manned by a team of Googlers led by Vanessa Fox and Adam Lasnik, will soon see more team members publicly answering questions on the group, according to a recent post by Lasnik.

The team has also been undergoing training to "bring this Google Group to the next level," including "online communications workshops, training in spotting issues, and even (eeek!) a review of important legal issues," Lasnik wrote.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 8:46 AM | Permalink

May 14, 2007

Search Headlines & Links: May 14, 2007

Want a snapshot of the day's search marketing news? Here we've collected today's top news stories posted to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with search-related headlines from around the Web:

From the SEW Blog:

Headlines & News from Elsewhere:

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 11:59 PM | Permalink

Yahoo Being Sued For Faulty Ad Platform

The Blob (aka the Overture PPC platform) has struck Yahoo again - even after they replaced it with Panama - as a company is suing Yahoo for using an ad platform that was "operationally defective".

This one should not get too far, and if it does Yahoo may as well get out of search - stopping the floodgates after a result against Yahoo would be hard.

Danny Sullivan gives a great overview of the situation.

Posted by Frank Watson on 4:17 PM | Permalink

Forget Demographics Google May Soon Offer Psychological Profiling

Okay this is just getting more and more science fiction like. Google has submitted a patent for psychological profiling of users. The patent outlines the ability to profile game users by their chat conversations and other text based interaction with the games.

"The company thinks it can glean information about an individual's preferences and personality type by tracking their online behaviour, which could then be sold to advertisers. Details such as whether a person is more likely to be aggressive, hostile or dishonest could be obtained and stored for future use," The Age reported earlier today.

The patent says user dialogue may be used to characterise the user as, for example, profane, blunt, polite, cautious, aggressive, non-confrontational, stealthy, honest, cooperative or uncooperative.

The information could be used to make ads that appear inside the game more "relevant to the user", the patent stated.

I guess we can gather whatever information we want all for the good of better marketing. We joke about this quite a bit, but Google is fast changing into Big Brother. When our screens record what we are doing I think it will be all over - hey it does that now.......

Posted by Frank Watson on 3:56 PM | Permalink

Matt Cutts' Paid Links Update

Matt Cutts, head of Google's Webspam team, has taken time out of his vacation to add some clarification to his post about Google's treatment of paid links. The original post has been widely discussed, with search marketers and webmasters coming down strongly on both sides – either happy that Google is cracking down on what they see as Web spam, or indignant that Google is dictating how they do business.

To clarify, Cutts' is asking webmasters to report instances of paid links that flow PageRank, meaning they are direct links to a site, without "nofollow" attributes:

As someone working on quality and relevance at Google, my bottom-line concern is clean and relevant search results on Google. As such, I care about paid links that flow PageRank and attempt to game Google's rankings. I'm not worried about links that are paid but don't affect search engines. So when I say "paid links" it's pretty safe to add in your head "paid links that flow PageRank and attempt to game Google's rankings."

Cutts also clarifies how Google may use the reports of paid links it gets from users:


  1. Measure and improve precision of Google's existing algorithms

  2. Build datasets that will help guide future algorithms

  3. Test new tools and techniques for detecting paid links

  4. Investigate and take direct action on those reports

He stresses that the reports are not going directly into algorithms, so it's not likely a competitor can buy links to another's site and report them to damage their ranking in Google's results

Cutts says he's not lumping directories into this paid links discussion, but he does offer some questions to consider when buying a link in a directory, if you're hoping it will pass PageRank:


  • "Does the directory reject urls? If every url passes a review, the directory gets closer to just a list of links or a free-for-all link site."

  • "What is the quality of urls in the directory? Suppose a site rejects 25% of submissions, but the urls that are accepted/listed are still quite low-quality or spammy. That doesn't speak well to the quality of the directory."

  • "If there is a fee, what's the purpose of the fee? For a high-quality directory, the fee is primarily for the time/effort for someone to do a genuine evaluation of a url or site."

  • "If you put on your user hat and ask 'Does this seem like a high-quality directory to me?' you can usually get a pretty good sense as well, or ask a few friends for their take on a particular directory."

Cutts also suggests putting on a "user hat" when considering the kind of user experience paid, irrelevant links would create. As Google's quality guidelines suggest, sites should be made for users, not search engines, so Cutts is not talking about buying links that are relevant to a site to drive traffic.

Hat tip to v7n, via SEL.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 3:32 PM | Permalink

Is Segmentation Next Big Thing In Web Marketing?

There have been two major pieces on segmenting your traffic written over the last week at the blogs and news sites I read. Both very insightful and detailled.

It is an important element in the marketing mix, though at times a tricky one to apply to search.

Rand Fishkin at SEOMoz does a good job segmenting the intent of search from various sources and the visual ads are a nice touch.

Jennifer LeClaire, in an article over at NewsFactor, outlines segmenting visitors which when read after Rand's article shows further reach and analytics to use.

Posted by Frank Watson on 2:01 PM | Permalink

The Greening of Search Engines

Call it a sign of the times, a cheap marketing ploy or both mixed together. Search engines are touting their environmental friendliness in many ways, vying for the hearts of users by tapping into their desire to save the world.

The latest ploy comes from Yahoo is trying to find the "Greenest City in America" with its Be a Better Planet initiative, which aims to find the most environmentally conscious city and reward it with a fleet of taxicabs. Cities earn points when their citizens ask and answer environmental questions on Yahoo Answers, conduct environmental searches on OneSearch, or take the "Green Pledge" on the new Yahoo Green mini-site.

To kick off the contest, Yahoo co-founder David Filo, Global Green CEO Matt Peterson, and actor Matt Dillon will make an appearance in New York City today, announcing the donation of a fleet of hybrid taxis to the city.

Google, no slouch in the environmentally friendly marketing department, has long touted its commitment to use solar energy to power its headquarters and datacenters. Its Summer of Green site launched last summer with environmentally friendly hotels and vacation spots highlighted on Google Maps.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 9:55 AM | Permalink

Starting a New Link Campaign

So you are starting up a new link campaign, and you want to know where to begin. I always fall back on the same approach. There are two basic questions you need to be able to answer:

  1. What unique content do you have on your site that someone might want to link to?
  2. Who are the people that might link to you?

It turns out that the two questions interact. Based on the people in your space, or related space, you might change the content you develop. That said, here are the five things I think about when I first start a new link building campaign:

  1. I always start by identifying who the major media people are in the space of our clients. I do this without yet worrying about their potential to link to us. This would be a complete list of traditional media, bloggers, government, school, and hobbyist sites that are related to our client.
  2. The next step is to prioritize the list ranging from top tier players to lower tier players. I will take links from any of them, but getting a link from a top tier player is worth more effort.
  3. Now I re-examine the current and potential content of our client's site to see how it matches up with the needs and interests of the top tier targets.
  4. If it's necessary (and it usually is), I put in place a content development plan to implement the right types of content to match up with the best targets. Several new articles may need to be written. There is no need to go off the deep end here. If there are 5 or 6 really great high value targets, develop new content for the 2 or 3 easiest ones to approach.
  5. Once this is in place, you can begin the process of contacting your targets, and getting them interested in the unique cool content that you have.

Good link building always starts in the same place. Identify the targets.

Posted by on 8:27 AM | Permalink

Tomi Poutanen Talks About Social Search

The latest in my rounds of interviews was with Tomi Poutanen at Yahoo. Tomi is the senior director of product management for Yahoo Answers and del.icio.us. Our conversation focused on the varying roles of algorithmic search and social search.

For example, we talked about which types of search problems each type of search handles better. Social search (in this case Yahoo Answers) is better for subjective queries, such as "what is the best restaurant in Seattle." Or social search (in this case del.icio.us) handles queries like "new york hotels" better because it will return a list of the hotels that have the most tags on them by users, instead of the most powerful affiliate marketing sites.

It's very engaging to ponder the impact of social search on the overall search environment. I have long believed that the best of both worlds is a possibility, with an editorial layer over algorithmic results. The editorial layer would have to be willing to engage in active pruning of bad or questionable stuff.

However, I don't know if anyone will ever build anything like this, because of the economic challenges (how do you make enough money with all the overhead of the editorial staff?). But it would be great to see it. In the meantime, there is a place for social search. Del.icio.us has an Alexa ranks of 186, and Flickr has an Alexa rank of 43. No matter how you slice it, that's an impressive traffic level.

Posted by on 8:24 AM | Permalink

May 11, 2007

Search Headlines & Links: May 11, 2007

Want a snapshot of the day's search marketing news? Here we've collected today's top news stories posted to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with search-related headlines from around the Web:

From the SEW Blog:

Headlines & News from Elsewhere:

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 11:12 PM | Permalink

Exalead Enhancements to Image Search

French search provider, Exalead has been actively rolling out new features as of late. Not to long ago the company offered a Wikipedia vertical search engine. Now the company is offering an enhanced image search capability that integrates facial recognition software from LTU Technologies.

The Exalead image search offers searchers a variety of ways to rapidle narrow their image searches. The menu of choices offers these options:

  1. Size
    • Small
    • Medium
    • Large
  2. Content
    • Face
  3. Wallpapers
    • 800x600
    • 1024x768
    • 1280x1024
  4. Image color
    • Color
    • Grayscale
    • Black & White

The other image search engines I checked (Google, Yahoo!, Live Search (Microsoft), and Ask) do not offer a similar capability. Ask does offer some narrow your search options, but not nearly as extensive, and the others offer none.

Overall, this looks like a nice enhancement to image searching from Exalead.

Posted by on 1:27 PM | Permalink

Search-Related Legal Updates

Santa Clara University law professor Eric Goldman, on his Technology and Marketing Law blog, has updates on several search-related laws or lawsuits this week.

  1. Broad Matching Doesn't Violate Injunction – In the Rhino Sports v. Sport Court case in Arizona, the courts have gotten broad matching right for once, Goldman says. Rhino Sports agreed in 2002 to a permanent injunction from using "sport court" in commerce, and last year, Sport Court saw that Rhino Sports' ad was showing up in a search for "sport court." The judge correctly pointed out that Rhino Sports was using Google's Broad Match, and was not targeting the term "sport court," and so was not in contempt of the order.
  2. Utah Trademark Protection Act Updates – It seems Utah's legislators will hold off on implementing the state's Keyword Protection Act "for at least a couple of months." That's probably the best plan, since the law is both unenforceable and would not achieve the desired results.
  3. Another NY Court Says Keyword Triggering Isn't TM Use in Commerce – In the Site Pro-1 v. Better Metal case, a court has determined that keyword triggering and metatag usage isn't a trademark use in commerce, so it's ok for companies to bid on others' trademarked terms. The legal debate's not over, since other courts have ruled the other way, but this is one more vote on the side of sanity.
  4. Social Networking Sites and the Law – In preparation for an undergrad event looking at laws that pertain to social networking, Goldman has put together a brief summary of the legal issues involved. Two of the biggest issues are people creating fake profiles of others, and sexual predators on social networking sites.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 12:09 PM | Permalink

News from the Google Shareholder Meeting

Google held its annual shareholder meeting yesterday at the Googleplex, and Andy Beal has done a great job in breaking down what happened there, in four easy pieces:

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 11:44 AM | Permalink

From Online Research to Offline Shopping

A new report from Accenture reveals that the majority of product research happens online, while the majority of purchases resulting from that research happen offline in local physical store locations.

Specifically, the report notes that 67 percent of survey respondents prefer to make purchases in physical stores while 69 percent research product features online and 68 percent compare prices online. Combining these variables, 58 percent said they locate items online before going to a store to purchase, while only 13 percent said the Internet plays no part in their offline shopping.

The Kelsey Group research indicates that with purchases over $500, where the Internet is the starting point, over 90 percent of the transactions finish offline. comScore meanwhile reported last year that 63 percent of search related purchases happen offline; and The U.S. Census Bureau reports that e-commerce represents only 2.5 percent of U.S. retail spending.

Many business models have developed with these findings in mind including NearbyNow, Yokel, ShopLocal, and StepUp Commerce. Each puts varying levels of product and inventory information online in a searchable fashion, for offline local shopping. ShopLocal deals with big box retailers; NearbyNow with shopping center retailers; and StepUp with small businesses. Collectively, all three mostly cover the gamut of retail segments.

StepUp is probably the furthest ahead of the game in terms of providing real time inventory feeds that it gets from small businesses. StepUp's ability to reach a large and fragmented base of small businesses was a driving factor in Intuit's acquisition of the company, Google's partnership with the company; and the melding of all three, in the Google AdWords integration into QuickBooks.

We're getting closer and closer to more reliable data served in easier to use formats by these and other companies that may eliminate the need for the store phone call - a commonly used method, even to double check information gained online. But even a call to the store is an imperfect art, given often-times busy store clerks; or the latency and general human error factor in communicating how much a specific item costs, or how many are on the shelf.

The key to solving this problem could be tighter integration of online experiences with in-store inventory management and point of sale software systems, in order to offer true online real time inventory data. Optimizing the data for searchability will also represent an important challenge; and new local product search site Krillion deserves a nod for the SEO efforts it is applying to literally millions of individual product listing pages.

Intuit's stake in the point of sale software market positions StepUp to integrate reliable data with its online product and inventory search product, which could push forward the ties between online research and offline shopping. The tracking benefits inherent in a tighter feedback loop between the two will also enable more affective ROI assessment for online advertisers, which has traditionally been a fallback of the online-offline purchase funnel.

A tighter integration could also, importantly, improve the user experience and effectively drive adoption of local online product research and in store buying beyond the levels portrayed by Accenture and others.

For local advertisers - especially in high consideration product categories such as major appliances and high-end consumer electronics - this means there is an opportunity to increase store foot traffic through more effective and data-rich online advertising.

Posted by Mike Boland on 2:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

May 10, 2007

Search Headlines & Links: May 10, 2007

Want a snapshot of the day's search marketing news? Here we've collected today's top news stories posted to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with search-related headlines from around the Web:

From the SEW Blog:

Headlines & News from Elsewhere:

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 11:36 PM | Permalink

So...Should We, or Shouldn't We?

It seems that a debate has emerged about the importance of "the small stuff" in SEO. Over at Search Engine Land, Jill Whalen wrote a column, Don't Sweat the Small SEO Stuff, advising SEOs not to let worries over minor on-page details distract you from more important issues, or prevent you from doing anything at all.

Meanwhile, over at the Bruce Clay Blog, Lisa Barone has a differing opinion on the importance of the so-called minor details, in Sweat The Small Stuff: Search Engine Optimization Is In The Details.

Whalen says that small stuff can be a waste of time, if you're ignoring the big stuff, or letting worries over the small stuff paralyze you:

It's critical to look at the big picture for your SEO campaign, as opposed to sweating the small SEO stuff.

The important things I'm talking about are stuff like the age, popularity, and authority of your site, as well as its usability and overall appeal to its target audience.

By the small stuff, I mean the picky details that paralyze people. Things like how many words or characters should be in a title tag. Or in what order those words should be placed. Or how many times a keyword phrase should be in the copy. Or how many keyword phrases any page can be optimized for. Or should commas be used in the Meta keyword tag. Or should file names have hyphens in them. Or should headlines use H1 tags (or H2 tags, or whatever).

Guess what? None of that stuff matters!

Whalen is not suggesting those small things should be ignored, but she is stressing the importance of addressing larger issues first, and then returning to the "small stuff" later on, if you choose to.

Barone agrees that the small stuff is not going to make or break a campaign, but she insists they are too important to forget about:

The details are important. If they play any part in the search engine's algorithm, they should be part of your search engine optimization campaign. Why? Because if you're ignoring them and your competition isn't, it puts you at a disadvantage. You can't afford that.

I'm going to say it again, mostly because I can: The details are important. The details are what give you that final push to overtake your competitors.

Barone subscribes to the school of thought that "anything worth doing is worth doing right," and points out that skipping the details leaves you with a good site, at best.

Obviously, both Whalen and Barone make good points, and they're not really disagreeing on all that much. They agree that things like age, popularity, and authority are more important to search engine rankings, and that fretting over the "small stuff" is not a productive way to spend your time.

The main difference in opinion comes down to whether the small stuff should be skipped over, or done with care while understanding they are not the most important things that need to be done.

I'm of the opinion that every incremental thing you can do to improve your site is worthwhile, even if it helps in a very small way. The important thing is to keep the effort required to do the small things in line with the potential return, and to prioritize your time to make sure the big stuff gets done first.

Should we, or shouldn't we, sweat the small stuff? Share your thoughts in the SEW Forums.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 5:36 PM | Permalink

Event Search Engine: Oyaka.com

Launched last year, Oyaka.com is a clever concept - a search engine for events. Have a date in mind, go here and see what events are listed in your area. Want to know when or if your favorite musician is playing - try here. Hey they even have alerts when new info or tour dates etc. are added.

I came across this because they have sponsored a competition over at another clever site: MyIdolWorld.com - an online attempt at an American Idol type thing. Interesting and amusing - the talent levels are varied but fun. Oyaka is one of the main sponsors and the partnership should work for them both.

I will keep an eye on these two and see what happens over the coming months.

Oyaka describes itself well:

"We are a young, enthusiastic, and creative team who loves everything under the sun! We love sharing, we love working hard and we love to come up with new and innovative ideas. Oyaka is for people who like us want to take advantage of any opportunity that makes life a little easier. Oyaka is a One Stop Comparison Meta-Search Engine using advanced web technology to bring its users millions of event and movie tickets from all over the web with speed and reliability.

Oyaka is a tool that provides a new way to search for event tickets, movies, and share thoughts and ideas. We have launched our platform to a vast community of fellow web surfers who love to see just how far the world of technology can take them," the website states.

Posted by Frank Watson on 3:51 PM | Permalink

WebSideStory Rebrands itself as Visual Sciences

We covered the announcement by WebSideStory that they are rebranding themselves as Visual Sciences earlier. The message from the company is that their "decision to use one brand — Visual Sciences — going forward is symbolic."

At a deeper level, however, I do think it says something about the company's orientation. Leaving behind a well known brand is generally something you do when you want to change your image and positioning.

The prior brand, WebSideStory was a highly respected brand in the analytics industry, but the Visual Sciences brand brings to mind higher end analytics solutions for sites with more complex needs.

That said, it seems clear that the Visual Sciences remains committed to the existing products, such as HBX Analytics. In fact, they also co-announced the release of HBX Analytics 4. The major features in this release include:

  1. Active Segmentation for E-Commerce Order Data
  2. Product Placement Analysis
  3. Report on Multiple Store Fronts within on Account
  4. Enhanced User Administration
  5. Commerce Custom Variables
  6. User Interface Enhancements
  7. Visual Workstation for HBX provides:
    • Custom reporting
    • Ad-hoc analysis
    • Interactive data visualization capabilities

I would expect Visual Sciences to continue to support and enhance their entry level products, and to look to provide a consistent migration path for companies that want to progressively get deeper and deeper into web analytics.

Posted by on 1:27 PM | Permalink

Google Cleans Up Google News

Some recent housecleaning at Google News has resulted in the removal of some controversial foreign news sources that appeared to be gaming the Google News algorithm to drive traffic to their AdSense-heavy site.

One Romanian site, Playfuls.com, had been highly prominent in Google News search results, to the point where as many as ten stories from the publication made the front page, as illustrated by WebProNews in March.

As pointed out by news aggregator Texyt, Playfuls has been recently been removed from the Google News index.

A Google spokesperson confirmed the move, saying "To ensure a high quality service for our end users, we periodically review our index of news sources, particularly following user complaints, and have recently removed some sources that do not meet our criteria as news organizations, including Playfuls.com."

The spokesperson declined to discuss Playfuls' situation specifically, but offered the guiding principles it uses when considering a site for inclusion, and thus for removal:


  • The source offers information that is updated regularly

  • It is managed by an organization (not an individual) and includes organizational information on its site

  • The source does not include hate speech or pornography

  • The source does not allow open posting of content without editorial review

  • The source's website is technically conducive to inclusion

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 12:33 PM | Permalink

Bid4Spots Radio Ad Auction Launches in U.K.

Bid4Spots, a competitor to Google Audio Ads, announced plans to launch an auction for remnant radio ads in the U.K. this fall. The company, which has been selling radio ads in the U.S. for two years, expanded into online radio ads in November.

The company holds weekly auctions for unsold inventory on more than 2,300 radio stations in the U.S. It uses a "reverse auction" format, where advertisers set a maximum CPM bid they are willing to pay, and the media owners compete for advertiser money, bidding down the price of available inventory until an advertiser accepts their bid.

A similar model will be used in the U.K. marketplace. Bid4Spots U.K. is being advised by U.K. radio specialist RadioWorks. Paul Mitchard, a U.K. radio advertising veteran, has been appointed to manage operations.

The reverse auction model works for radio stations, since any space not sold by the end of the week before it airs would otherwise go unsold. The stations can decrease the cost of ad space at their own pace, and can end the auction at will, so regular advertisers are less tempted to bypass regular contracts to see if they can get a better deal on auctioned ad space. It also keeps the final terms of the remnant sale confidential.

Advertisers are able to pick up radio spots at a discount, and not commit to long-term ad buys. They can also maintain a level of control over audience quality.

Google Audio Ads is an AdWords product created from Google's acquisition of dMarc Broadcasting. It is currently in beta in the U.S., with ads currently delivered to more than 800 stations in 19 of the top 25 markets. Google expects to significantly expand that footprint once the test is completed. Google also struck a deal with ClearChannel last month that adds more than 675 radio stations to the program.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 11:57 AM | Permalink

Last.fm and Music Video Search Tools

Online radio station Last.fm is expected to add a video section to its site this week that will allow users to create their own personalized video channels. Last.fm is partnering with a number of major producers such as EMI and Warner as well as independent labels. Last.fm's goal is to allow users to essentially set up their own video channels that will play the music videos of their choice.

Users who look for music videos of their favorite bands are often disappointed by the search results. Instead of getting the band, the results yield teenagers covering the band with their own amateur videos. Improved results are a must for music video fans.

The music video search niche is being filled by a growing number of tools for the music video enthusiast. There is a nice round-up of the burgeoning music video search tool universe by Josh Lowensohn in Webware. Three tools are reviewed: MusicTonic, Middio and iLike. Overall these music video search tools rely on scraping YouTube and Google videos and repackaging the results with their own interfaces. By pre-filtering the input to include videos from specific content provider channels, they are able to give improved results. The UI of each of these sites has different features and functionality. For example, with Middio it is possible to convert YouTube videos to iPod format. It will be interesting to see which in the long run captures the users.

Posted by Amanda Watlington on 7:25 AM | Permalink

WebSideStory Rebrands as Visual Sciences

WebSideStory has consolidated its product lines and rebranded as Visual Sciences, the company it merged with in February 2006. The Visual Sciences name reflects the company's expansion beyond Web analytics to other channels.

“We remain committed to Web and Internet channel analytics and are expanding our application footprint. Our clients have made it clear they wish to use our real-time analytics capabilities to better understand all of the customer interaction data in their enterprises. The Web is one of the most important, but not the only, channel of this interaction,” Jim MacIntyre, Visual Sciences' CEO, said in a statement.

MacIntyre, a co-founder of Visual Sciences, took the reins from WebSideStory CEO Jeff Lunsford in October. A series of executive shakeups followed, with the December departures of CMO Rand Schulman and Steve Kusmer, GM of search and content solutions. Just this week, Eric Peterson, VP of strategic services, left the company to build a Web analytics consulting practice.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 12:55 AM | Permalink

Google Launches New "Geo" Blog

Google has started a new blog focusing on Google Earth, Maps, Local and APIs. Lat Long Blog will chronicle Google's efforts to build the "geoweb," according to John Hanke, director of Google Earth & Maps.

I don't think that there is agreement on what the geoweb is, but I think there is a lot of enthusiasm and energy across many fronts to make it happen. I expect the "it" will evolve substantially over the next few months and years as we (the geo ecosystem on the web) collectively figure out how "earth browsers," embedded maps, local search, geo-tagged photos, blogs, the traditional GIS world, wikis, and other user-generated geo content all interrelate.

Google's geo products and services include the My Maps custom mapping features of Google Maps, as well as geo searches, which surface user-created geographic information in local searches in Google Maps and Google Earth. The blog cites two examples of geo searches: windsurfing near San Francisco and Jerry Seinfeld in NY.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 12:29 AM | Permalink

May 9, 2007

Search Headlines & Links: May 9, 2007

Want a snapshot of the day's search marketing news? Here we've collected today's top news stories posted to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with search-related headlines from around the Web:

From the SEW Blog:

Headlines & News from Elsewhere:

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 10:07 PM | Permalink

Coverage from SEW Live -- Columbus

Our latest SEW Live event took place today in Columbus, Ohio. Elisabeth has of course been busy running the show, and I'm home in Connecticut, but thankfully, WebProNews was at the event in force, writing stories and continuing their fine event video coverage. I've linked to their stories below, as well as any other posts I've found from people who attended.

If you were there, share your thoughts in the SEW forum, or e-mail me a link to your blog where you've posted about it and I'll add it to the list.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 9:41 PM | Permalink

Social Media Marketing Do's and Don'ts

At Search Engine Strategies in New York last month, some top social media marketers shared the tricks of their trade. In today's SearchDay, Social Media Marketing Do's and Don'ts, Eric Enge offers the compiled wisdom of Rand Fishkin, Neil Patel, and Andy Hagans, from the Search Marketing Optimization session.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 4:49 PM | Permalink

Search Marketing Expo is Coming Fast!

Now that we're into May, it's less than a month before the first Search Marketing Expo (SMX) event in Seattle on June 4th and June 5th. It's the first search marketing trade show put together by Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman since they left Search Engine Strategies and this site.

SMX Advanced is targeted to a focused audience of 500 or so advanced search marketers, with networking as well. The idea is that a more focused and relaxed environment should help further strengthen and expand the connections across leaders in the SEO industry.

For many of us, this is almost a pilgrimage. This is Danny's first SMX show and lots of people are going just to be a part of that. That's what makes the "advanced" theme of the show so fitting, as the people who know Danny best will be there in droves.

Posted by on 3:07 PM | Permalink

Yahoo and Microsoft: A deal made in heaven or hell?

It appears that the on-again, off-again merger talks between Yahoo and Microsoft have cooled once again, but they're not officially dead. And Google's acquisition of YouTube for $1.65 billion and pending acquisition of Doubleclick for $3.1 billion certainly make a deal between the #2 and #3 search engines more likely today than six months ago. But do Yahoo and Microsoft really need each other?

PC Magazine has got dueling opinions, with John Dvorak offering that this is still a bad idea, explaining that 1 + 1 would probably equal far less than 2. Lance Ulanoff, on the other hand, thinks the idea makes perfect sense. Check out their debate.

Posted by Greg Jarboe on 1:44 PM | Permalink

Yahoo Enhances Travel Maps

Yahoo has added some mapping features to Yahoo Travel, using AJAX to add layered images right on a Yahoo Map. For example, a map of the Boston Freedom Trail can be overlayed on a map of the city. Or a map of the Philadelphia International Airport can be matched to the highway map.

The opacity of the layers can be adjusted, so a user can choose to see one or the other map, or a mix of the two.

Greg Sterling has more details at his Screenwerk blog, and says that he expects the functionality to be extended to other parts of Yahoo, including local search, in the near future.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 1:34 PM | Permalink

Microsoft Takes Stake in CareerBuilder

Microsoft has acquired a minority equity stake in job search engine CareerBuilder, owned jointly by newspaper companies Gannett, Tribune and McClatchy.

In addition, the 3-year-old agreement to display CareerBuilder results on the MSN network was extended through 2013. The agreement continues to be performance-based, with payments determined by the quality and quantity of traffic delivered by MSN. Under the agreement, CareerBuilder will pay MSN up to $443 million over the course of seven years to serve as the exclusive job search engine on the MSN Careers channel.

Microsoft will also begin deploying CareerBuilder results abroad, expecting to launch CareerBuilder on MSN sites in most European countries by the middle of 2008 with several rolling out by the end of 2007.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 1:20 PM | Permalink

Yahoo Auctions to Bid Adieu

June 16th will see the closing of Yahoo Auctions in the US and Canada, according to the Yahoo website.

The services will continue to be offered in the Asian market, the site reported.

Since Yahoo China was sold to Alibaba last year, and Yahoo holds a 40% share in Alibaba itself, the Asian market seems to be a region Yahoo has shown a desire to expand in, rather than cut back.

Posted by Frank Watson on 12:49 PM | Permalink

Google Print Ads Now in AdWords Console

Andy Beal at Marketing Pilgrim has posted screenshots of the new Google Print Ads interface in the AdWords console. Google announced last month that the program would enter an extended beta this month.

The new tab offers advertisers the ability to buy print ads in participating newspapers, including the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and LA Times. The console includes a date range for the campaign, weekly budget, and the ability to select newspapers by schedule, circulation, or relative cost.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 11:33 AM | Permalink

Travel Search Overview: Informative or Commercial?

In the United States, the summer travel season is about to begin and the most used method for booking and researching travel options is the web.

Yahoo Travel has geared up to meet the demand, as well as launched a new Trip Recommendation module to boost their position in the space.

The last time Search Engine Watch looked at Travel search engines was in 2005. I had a look to see how the sites mentioned were doing.

Allcheckin.com, the UK engine, did not stand the test of time - though you would have thought someone would have at least made a deal for forwarding the traffic for some affiliate money....

AOL Pinpoint Travel is still there but now it is powered by Kayak.

DoHop.com seems to be hanging in there. The site is clean and loads quickly and the travel guides are informative.

Expedia and Kayak are thriving. IgoUgo is still here and I have noticed it has an aggressive affiliate push.

Mobissimo, Orbit, Travelocity and SideStep all appear to be healthy.

Travelazer has become a custom Google search engine. TripAdvisor is growing its content and branding.

FareCompare is a newer entry and I met someone from the site at NYC SES. They seem to be committed to expansion and have a user friendly interface.

The online travel industry is always going to be competitive. Comparison and aggregator engines will be a big part of this space, but as Yahoo is developing now - the future source of the traffic may come from online communities discussing and sharing travel ideas.

Jasper Malcolmson, director of Yahoo! Travel, said "by tapping into the collective intelligence of other like-minded travelers, there is a greater ability to plan and take truly memorable trips -- no matter how near or far you want to go."

Combined with speciality engines like WhatsOnWhen the travel industry looks like it will continue to grow.

Posted by Frank Watson on 11:12 AM | Permalink

Gates Plans to Spend Remaining Time Focusing on Search

Microsoft chairman and founder Bill Gates said yesterday that he plans on spending his remaining 15 to 18 months of active duty at the company focusing on building the company's search programs, in a broad sense. Gates announced last year that he would leave his day-to-day duties at Microsoft by the end of 2008, to focus on his philanthropy.

Speaking at the company's annual Strategic Account Summit for large advertisers and partners, Gates described an evolution of search from being destination-based to being more integrated into the online experience.

When people go to the Internet, they have a task in mind. And it's not just to see a list of links. This is not a, 'Hey, I'm paid to go do treasure hunts.' They want to organize a trip, or learn about a topic, and the idea that we can capture things at that task level, and through the magic of software make that far better. And in particular when it's where you want to buy something, that the people who want to buy something that the people who want to advertise, who want to offer up that maybe they're the place that you want to do business with, I think we can make that far better.

I mean, after all, today if you want to do a certain type of transaction, there's probably a specialized Web site you don't know about that's far better than just the general, say, search way of going about. Why can't we take, by using a platform-type approach, the best of those dedicated sites and bring them in so that you don't have to click on a tab or anything, you just type your words, and get that domain, those people who are expert are somehow incorporated into that.

So broadly thinking, it's about search, it's about buyers and sellers, and that will be my biggest thing. There are some things about getting the tablet driven into the mainstream, and about dramatic things in Office. And some of these will actually be the projects Steve is likely to pick for me to put my part-time work into, even after mid-2008.

Gates is echoing the message sent by Steve Berkowitz, SVP of Microsoft's Online Services Group, at the Search Engine Strategies conference in New York last month. During his keynote speech there, Berkowitz stressed the distinction between "destination search," where a user goes to a search site like Live.com or Google.com to conduct a search, and "convenient search," where a user searches wherever they are, such as on a page within the MSN portal, using instant messaging or e-mail applications, or from another site or service.

"I believe it's going to be about where you take the experience of search. I think that's more of what you're going to see us continue to do. To create innovative ways to deliver search in the experience you are. I see Microsoft having a great ability to do that," Berkowitz said.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 10:55 AM | Permalink

User-Generated Videos On Your Domain?

Do you already produce or license video content for your site? Do you incorporate user-generated content and sharing tools now? Then encouraging your visitors to share video content on your domain seems like a natural progression.

Yet today we all equate video sharing with the portals. Sites like YouTube, Metacafe, Revver and Break have achieved critical mass, with YouTube far in the lead. They attract professional and amateur video contributors, who all host freely on these sites. Viewers know they will be able to search within these communities and find something that intrigues or amuses them.

While these video portals are doing well today, their predominance may not last forever.

A few days ago, YouTube announced that it would start paying some of its amateur contributors who brought in high traffic. While other sites had paid for non-professionals before, the market leader joined the fold too. (See earlier SEW posting.)

We're not cheerleading for particular services, but there are some low-end options for publishers. vSocial released a free service last year. CEO Mark Sigal says that nearly 600 users have created mini-YouTubes through his service so far. Vidiac provides another free option for small sites. Further up the food chain are services like VideoEgg, which powers some selected social networks.

It's worth trying to create more social engagement and loyalty on your site. At some point, the tide will turn.

Posted by on 1:30 AM | Permalink

May 8, 2007

Search Headlines & Links: May 8, 2007

Want a snapshot of the day's search marketing news? Here we've collected today's top news stories posted to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with search-related headlines from around the Web:

From the SEW Blog:

  • Setting Up Search in Large Organizations
    Melanie Mitchell, VP of SEO/SEM at AOL, offers the first of a three-part series about her experience building the in-house search practice of AOL.
  • New Release of Google Analytics
    With this release, Google Analytics closes the gap between their solution and that of many of the more expensive analytics products.
  • More Search Marketers Weigh in on Paid Links
    Li Evans has collected the opinions of 10 search marketers on buying links for clients, and on sites that sell links but don't indicate they're paid links.
  • blinkx Adds French VODEO.TV Content
    Through a partnership with VODEO.TV, a video-on-demand French language portal, video search engine blinkx has added 1500 hours of French television content to its index.

Headlines & News from Elsewhere:

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 6:02 PM | Permalink

Setting Up Search in Large Organizations

Creating a search marketing strategy for any company can be a daunting task. That's especially true when the company has more than 50 different brands and products, hundreds of millions of Web pages, different conversion metrics and different strategies.

In today's SearchDay, Handling Search Marketing in Large Organizations, Melanie Mitchell, VP of SEO/SEM at AOL, offers the first of a three-part series about her experience building the in-house search practice of AOL.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 4:30 PM | Permalink

New Release of Google Analytics

Google Analytics has come out with a new major release. With this release, Google closes the gap between their solution, and that of many of the more expensive analytics products.

Major new features include:

  1. Customizable Dashboards
  2. Emailing of reports
  3. Improved Segmentation Capabilities
  4. A general overhaul of the UI

I spoke with Brett Crosby yesterday, and he stressed that Google was looking to provide a broader range of functionality to enterprise class customers. The implementation of dashboards is one of the new features that addresses that need. Dashboards allow you to implement different data presentations for different users. Now, with Google Analytics, you can have your business analyst crawling through the deep data, and your CEO getting the simple summary report that they need (without the need for the CEO to get lost in the details).

Here is a screen shot of the new dashboard:
070508-ga3.jpg

Another former major weakness of Google Analytics was the lack of an ability to email out reports. This functionality has also been added to this new release. This is another feature designed to make life easier for those in your organization that want to receive data, but don't want to have to login to get it.

This can be really key in helping the senior executives of the company appreciate the value of a web analytics solution, and the investment their company makes in it. While Google Analytics is free, the time people spend working with analytics is still an investment, and it needs justification. Getting senior executives the data they need with no muss or fuss is a quite valuable thing to do.

As I mentioned above, Google has also added segmentation capabilities to the product. Segmentation allows you to separately measure the behavior of different groups of visitors. This can be an invaluable tool in helping you optimize your site design. Looking at the behavior of different customer groupings allows you to target your site to the known characteristics of a group of users. This is a very powerful concept.

Here, you can get a look at the new Visitors Overview report, which shows some of the segmentation capabilities:
070508-ga1.JPG

As you can see from the first two screen shots, the UI has undergone major changes. In addition, the process for selecting a date range has been simplified, and made more elegant. Check out this screen shot:
070508-ga2.jpg

Existing users will be updated over the next few weeks, and new users will start with the new version. Existing users will be able to access both the new version and the old version for 30 days. In addition, historical data will still be available in the new version.

Based on what I have seen so far, these are major steps ahead for Google Analytics. The lack of dashboard capability and the inability to email out reports were two big limitations in Google Analytics to date. Now these limitations are gone. Google Analytics already works with some major enterprise vendors, such as Agency.com, Deckers, RE/MAX, and others. This should enable Google to capture more larger enterprise business.

Note that there continues to be pieces of functionality available from vendors that charge for their products, that is not present in this new release of Google Analytics. But this release does narrow the gap in key areas.

Posted by on 1:30 PM | Permalink

More Search Marketers Weigh in on Paid Links

The debate over whether paid links should count in Google's ranking algorithm has been going strong, sparked most recently by Google's spam-buster Matt Cutts. It's been picked up in most search marketing forums, including SEW's.

Last night, Li Evans posted the collected opinions of 10 search marketers: Andy Beal, Christine Churchill, Anne Kennedy, Debra Mastaler, Greg Meyers, Lee Odden, Chris Sherman, Bill Slawski, Shari Thurow, and Frank Watson. Li asked for opinions on buying links for clients, and on sites that sell links but don't indicate they're paid links. It's an interesting look at the issue from varying perspectives.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 11:16 AM | Permalink

blinkx Adds French VODEO.TV Content

Through a partnership with VODEO.TV, a video-on-demand French language portal, video search engine blinkx has added 1500 hours of French television content to its index. Under the terms of the agreement , blinkx will transcribe and index VODEO.TV's video content. This will make it easier for French language users to find and watch video content. VODEO.TV's online video content includes documentaries and television programs on nature, travel, science, current affairs and sports. VODEO.TV audiences view or purchase programs via remote loading, streaming or DVD-on-Request.

Posted by Amanda Watlington on 10:03 AM | Permalink

May 7, 2007

Search Headlines & Links: May 7, 2007

Want a snapshot of the day's search marketing news? Here we've collected today's top news stories posted to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with search-related headlines from around the Web:

From the SEW Blog:

Headlines & News from Elsewhere:

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 9:51 PM | Permalink

Press Releases Can Be Good, But When They're Bad They're Ridiculous

I was checking my various sources of news this afternoon and came across a couple of PR articles at eMediaWire that seemed of interest - but turned out to be self-promoting garbage.

First there was a release about the recent SEO World Championships (I am not giving them links). Now okay I may have been too busy to hear anything about this ... so I click and read about it. Apparently the competition involved a Google bomb campaign for Global warming awareness 2007.

When the top 5 are people you have never heard of and only the winner was a US (and Phillipines) entrant it makes you wonder. But hey you can call it anything you want and limit entries to the event to your small group of friends - though it should really be called something like SEO World (of Peter's friends) Championship.

Unsuspecting customers will see this through a search or a link from one of the top finishers to the article and get a very slanted view of who they should hire. This is better than a bait and switch - it is just a bait.

The second article was topseos.com's list of the top 30 rankings for seo, sem, and many other categories. The lists include some very prominent names but are interspersed with companies I have never heard of (not saying they are not good), while many of the well-know and respected companies are not mentioned at all.

I checked out the site and basically it is an aggregator site for links and banner ads. If you are an advertiser you make their rankings.

I think I am going to start the 2007 Pinocchio Awards. Email me any sites or awards or press releases etc. that you think are stretching the truth. Points will be given for outrageousness of the lie, best twisting of reality and blatant cronyism.

Posted by Frank Watson on 2:12 PM | Permalink

Web Analytics Shootout Data Released

Stone Temple Consulting (STC) has released the first findings from its 2007 Web Analytics Shootout: a competitive comparison of 7 Web analytics vendors, whose software was run head to head across 4 different sites.

Analytics packages included in the study were Clicktracks, Google Analytics, IndexTools, Omniture SiteCatalyst, Unica Affinium NetInsight, WebSideStory HBX Analytics, and WebTrends. Data recorded included Visits, Unique Visitors, Page Views, as well as a variety of content groups. The traffic data varied significantly between packages, which STC President Eric Enge attributes to factors like implementation decisions, and first-party vs. third-party cookies and their deletion rates.

While none of them can be said to be more accurate than the others, any analytics program, implemented properly, can provide useful traffic data that can be compared to itself to produce useful results, Enge said.

"As Jim Sterne is fond of saying, if your yardstick measures 39 inches instead of 36 inches, it's still great to have a measurement tool," Enge writes in the report. "The yardstick will still help you measure changes with a great deal of accuracy. So if tomorrow your 39 inch yardstick tells you that you are at 1 yard and 1 inch (i.e., 40 inches), you know you have made some progress."

In addition, the report was able to highlight tendencies of each package to report high or low. For instance, HBX Analytics had a tendency to report lower traffic numbers, while Clicktracks and Google Analytics tended to report higher. These were not absolute in all cases, cautions Enge, but they do give you something to compare to understand the nature of the yardstick you're using, he said.

The various packages measured pageviews more consistently, since that metric is not as affected by the way the software is set up, or by cookie deletion among visitors.

The Interim Report also contains an analysis of third party cookie deletion rates compared to first party cookie deletion rates, showing that third party cookies get deleted at a rate that's 13 percentage points higher than first party cookies. So if first party cookies get deleted 3% of the time, third party cookies would be deleted 16% of the time. Cookie deletion can greatly affect accuracy in counting unique visitors, and visits, and understanding whether or not a user is a repeat visitor.

There is much more granular data to be found in the report, which is available at the Stone Temple Consulting site. STC is also working on a final report from the study, to be published in July, which will include an analysis of the features,
functions, and usability of the 7 packages.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 10:55 AM | Permalink

Selling or Servicing?

Lee Odden recently interviewed Gord Hotchkiss, and the interview covered some interesting ground. In particular, Gord talked about how Google's moves towards personalization are going to affect SEO in the future. In response to Lee's question: "Will this finally force SEOs to focus on optimizing for users?", Gord said:

Yes, as I mentioned above. And that's why it's healthy. There's still a world of value SEO's can add by optimizing for users, and helping marketers understand how online viral linking can happen and, when it does, make sure that it's happening in a way conducive to being recognized by search engines. This makes SEO more complex, not less so, and as Danny Sullivan has said on a number of occasions, complexity is great job security. If you went to 100 sites at random, I would say 99 of them are not doing SEO right, or at least, not getting full value from it. And that includes a number of companies with in-house SEO staff. This is no knock on in-house SEO, it just means we all have to up our game, both in-house and external agencies.

I agree that this change is coming. I think it remains to be seen how quickly this change will come, and also just how much impact it will have on link building. If you already use a conservative approach to link building then it probably does not change anything for you at all on that score.

But let's break down this notion of "optimizing for users" a bit. I think we all need to ask ourselves what we think about when we are working on our web pages. Are we thinking about selling to our visitors? Or, servicing them? As soon as you decide that you are selling to them, you have begun heading for trouble.

Selling is an old concept that implies hard sell tactics. Hit them with the message. Make them feel urgency. Buy now! You will get an extra 10% off if you make the decision in the next 25 seconds!

Today's consumer is way too powerful for that approach, and they are getting smarter every day. Finding out what your competitor is doing can be accomplished in less than a minute. When consumers are looking for something in an area they are not familiar with, the web is a very powerful research tool. People can quickly check out 3 or 4 web sites to learn what they need to know, before making a buying decision.

How can you leverage that? By servicing them. Provide the best, and most accessible, information. Teach them what they need to know to become a smart buyer. Provide useful tools. Do a good job with this, and you will begin to build a relationship with that person, and trust. If they learn everything they need to know on your site, your chances of moving to the next step with them is greatly increased.

The same strategy applies to repeat buyers too. Make sure they have the tools they need to make their decision process easy too.

Whether you are selling leads, providing services, selling products, or whatever, it doesn't matter. The big winners will focus on servicing their users, not selling to them.

Posted by on 10:06 AM | Permalink

Online Journal analyzes Belgian newspaper dispute with Google News

Jason Fry of The Online Journal, aka The Wall Street Journal Online, has an excellent analysis of the Belgian newspaper dispute with Google News entitled, "A Reality Check for Newspapers. The subhead of his Real Time column captures the gist: "In Pursuing Google, Belgian Publishing Group Dreams of Vanished Past for Content Creators."

Posted by Greg Jarboe on 8:48 AM | Permalink

Sphere revamps its blog search site

Dan Farber of ZDNet reports that Sphere has revamped its blog search site. It is now focusing more on current activity from the last 24-hours or seven days, and surfacing related content to search queries from Sphere widget partners, such as the New York Times, GigaOM, Access Hollywood and TechCrunch, and other sources.

Posted by Greg Jarboe on 8:36 AM | Permalink

May 6, 2007

Technorati includes "Authority" ranking of blogs

A tip of the hat to Ed Kohler over at Technology Evangelist for spotting that Technorati has a new way to rank blogs. Before last Friday, Technorati's ranking was by the number of inbound links. Now, it's by "Authority."

How do you calculate Authority? As Dorion Carroll explains, "Technorati Authority is the number of blogs linking to a website in the last six months. The higher the number, the more Technorati Authority the blog has."

Isn't that the same thing by a new name? No, it isn't. As Carroll goes on to explain, "It is important to note that we measure the number of blogs, rather than the number of links. So, if a blog links to your blog many times, it still only count as +1 toward your authority."

So, for those who are focused on ranking, ranking, any ranking, how has this new definition changed The Technorati Top 100?

Engadget ranks #1. Boing Boing ranks #2. Gizmodo ranks #3. Techcrunch ranks #4. The Huffington Post ranks #5.

The Official Google Blog ranks #13. GigaOM ranks #33. The Topix.net Weblog ranks #35. Scobleizer ranks #38. Google Blogoscoped ranks #57. ShoeMoney ranks #60. Valleywag ranks #64. Micro Persuasion ranks #66. Matt Cutts ranks #72. Search Engine Land ranks #78. And the Online Marketing Blog ranks #96.

So, the change in Technorati ranking won't have the same impact as the Florida update to Google's algorithm did back in the fall of 2003. But I'm sure that it will cause more than a few ripples in the search engine industry.

Posted by Greg Jarboe on 11:06 AM | Permalink

May 4, 2007

Search Headlines & Links: May 4, 2007

Want a snapshot of the day's search marketing news? Here we've collected today's top news stories posted to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with search-related headlines from around the Web:

From the SEW Blog:

Headlines & News from Elsewhere:

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 5:43 PM | Permalink

Local.com on a Roll

No, that's not a menu item at Venture Frogs restaurant (the San Francisco bubble-era eatery that featured dishes named after tech companies).

Local.com has announced new enhancements to its SERPs including:

· Sort search results by rating, distance, business name and category
· View search results within a defined radius
· Filter results by related categories and nearby cities
· Sort by star ratings and read user reviews
· Access recent searches, which are now automatically saved for easy reference

This comes days after launching its Local Verified annual fee-based paid placement product, and weeks after launching the LocalPromote landing page product.

The SERP improvements should help the company continue to gain traction among users, as the site experience has improved a great deal. Although many of these features bring the site on par with the top local search destinations, rather than above or beyond, as pointed out by Greg Sterling. This has also included a move away from banner ads, to a more text ad oriented SERP.

On the advertiser end, LocalPromote will bring more small businesses online, in line with the webification trend that is driving a lot of product development in the local search space. It's an attractive landing page tool that takes a lot of the guesswork out of establishing an online presence for the majority of small businesses that aren't inclined to go out and build (or commission) a website.

This should help Local.com expand its addressable market, and the pool to which it can upsell a growing stable of ad products and formats.

Posted by Mike Boland on 3:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Is Microsoft Driving Low-Quality Traffic to its Search Ads?

Earlier this week, Microsoft updated its terms of service for adCenter, with some key changes:

Microsoft may use matching criteria other than keyword searches to display your advertisements.

Microsoft may display your advertisements on its network of advertising channels operated by the Microsoft network of participating websites and other distribution outlets.

In a thread discussing the changes in the Search Engine Watch forums, user Mel66 notes that she's seen some other uses of "criteria other than keyword searches." Apparently, Microsoft is running ads through IntelliTXT, the much-maligned inline text ad provider. Mel66 clicked through on the ad to find it pointed to a search results page with one of her PPC keywords on it, which she believes is related to a recent drop in performance of those ads:

I wondered why we had a pocket of keywords with huge leaps in clicks and no resultant increases in conversions. This sucks. Is MSN really so desperate for traffic that they've resorted to running crappy ads for their own search results???

What this amounts to in my book is MSN running their own garbitrage ads. You click on an ad and get a page with more ads on it. This is bad, bad, bad, folks.

Mel66, whose real name is Melissa Mackey, is the search marketing director for MagazineLine, the magazine subscription division of American Collegiate Marketing. Mackey happened across a publisher site running IntelliTXT ads, and one of the keywords was "magazine," which is one of the keywords Mackey targets in her adCenter campaigns.

The IntelliTXT ad included a Live Search box, with "magazine" pre-filled, which links to the Live Search results page for the keyword:

IntelliTXT.gif

The ad is part of a campaign by Microsoft to bring new users to Live Search by highlighting the relevance of certain queries.

"We turned off Yahoo's content network over a year ago, partly because of IntelliTXT and its poor results," Mackey told SEW. "What makes this even worse than that is that it looks like MSN considers this type of ad to be search, not content. We have opted out of MSN's content network."

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 1:24 PM | Permalink

YouTube to Pay Top Users

Google's YouTube will begin paying top users for the video content they submit under a new revenue sharing partner program that will let the creators share in AdSense revenue generated by their videos.

“A select group of content creators will get promotion on the YouTube platform, and we will help them monetize their content,” Jamie Byrne, VP of marketing at YouTube, told Om Malik on Thursday. “This will help erase the stigma around the user-created content, and, to be honest, these guys are media entities in their own right.”

In a post on the YouTube Blog, the company said it is extending its partner program, previously only available to big media companies like CBS, Sony BMG and UMG and the NBA, to include "thousands of mid-sized to large content creators who range from video game companies to universities to production houses."

"Up until now there's been a distinction between the content you create and the content created by YouTube's professional content partners. We want to start changing some of the perception here. Which is why we're adding several of the most popular and prolific original content creators from the YouTube community to our partnership program."

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 10:17 AM | Permalink

Yahoo Photos Shutting Down, But Who's Telling the Users?

Yahoo is shutting down its Yahoo Photos service, and encouraging users to migrate to its Flickr photo-sharing service, according to TechCrunch, USA Today, and other media outlets. The two services were among the overlaps in service mentioned by Brad Garlinghouse in his infamous Peanut Butter Manifesto.

The problem is, there's no mention of these changes yet on either the Flickr home page or Yahoo Photos, or on any official Yahoo blogs. That's no way to keep users happy, especially when you're about to force big changes on them by taking away a service they use and love. According to comScore, Yahoo Photos had 31.1 million visitors in March, while Flickr had 28.5 million.

The reports indicate that Yahoo will give users a choice of migrating to competitors' platforms as well as Flickr. It would seem that they've made that decision a bit easier for some users by the way they've mishandled this move.

UPDATE: Still no mention on the Yahoo Photos page as of Friday afternoon, but Yahoo informs me that they have posted a Q&A on the Yahoo Photos help page. That page says that Yahoo will begin the process of closing later this summer and will officially close this fall.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 10:10 AM | Permalink

Yahoo and Microsoft Planning Merger Talks?

We've seen plenty of unfounded speculation lately about Google's plans to acquire NBC, or Dow Jones. Now we've got another rumor that Microsoft is asking Yahoo to consider a merger. It's being reported by both the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal, both citing unnamed sources.

The two companies had preliminary talks last year, but that was before Microsoft built its own search ad system, and Yahoo upgraded to Panama. Now there's not a whole lot that a merger would offer either company, at least on the search side. On the content side, it might make a bit more sense, since the two networks draw different demographics. It's not likely that anything will come of these rumors, but stranger things have happened when competitors start getting scared, and merger-mania strikes an industry.

UPDATE: The idea is being discussed all over the blogosphere today, as you can see from the Techmeme coverage.

Forrester's Charlene Li says it's a great idea (on paper at least) for Microsoft, but not so much for Yahoo. She goes on to say it will never work. "Given the messiness of a full out merger – and also the limited benefit it would bring to Yahoo! – I believe that a merger won't be in the works anytime soon. More logical would be partnership agreements where the strengths of each company are shared."

Former Wall Street Analyst Henry Blodgett, in his Internet Outsider blog, says that if the two decide to merge, the best plan would be an immediate spin-off of the combined entity. "If it doesn't, both Yahoo and MSN will die," he says. That seems to defeat the purpose of a merger, though, as Nicholas Carr notes in his Rough Type blog: "Microsoft has come to believe, for instance, that advertising will be central to the software business in the future. It's not going to spin off its ad networks or search functions."

UPDATE 2: The opinions keep coming, with the majority of people appearing to think this deal makes sense on some levels, but would never happen for various reasons:

Mathew Ingram, technology writer for the Globe and Mail in Toronto, says the deal makes sense, but the idea of combining Yahoo with Microsoft is like "two icebergs, roped together":

It makes sense when you consider that Microsoft's search and related assets are running a distant — and I mean distant — third in the market. And Yahoo, for all of its faults, is a big property with a snappy new engine behind its search, which is (theoretically) supposed to close the gap with Google.

That's the “glass is half full” argument. The half-empty argument is that both Microsoft and Yahoo are lumbering behemoths with hardly an agile bone left in their sclerotic bodies. Most of their problems stem from the fact that they have accumulated immense bureaucracies — a big part of the impetus for Yahoo exec Brad Garlinghouse's infamous “peanut butter” manifesto — and a collection of legacy businesses that keep getting in the way.

They are like icebergs: not only is nine-tenths of them unseen, but they are slow-moving and difficult to steer. Impressive? Yes. Powerful? No doubt about it. But fast, or nimble or imaginative? No. Roping them together would do nothing but compound their problems.

VC Paul Kedrosky writes in his Infectious Greed blog that "the idea of Microsoft trying to buy Yahoo, while in a sense inevitable, is still desperately difficult." He notes the stark differences in company culture, but says the real issue is that this would be a huge undertaking, and a merger of this size is difficult to complete for those with experience, and next to impossible for those without:

[Microsoft] can do the deal, in other words, but the subsequent carnage may be something to behold – which Google might actually end up applauding.

UPDATE 3: The WSJ is now reporting that the talks were going on earlier this year, and have since been called off:

Microsoft and Yahoo in recent months discussed a possible merger of the two companies or some kind of match-up that would pair their respective strengths, say people familiar with the situation. But the merger discussions are no longer active, these people say. The two companies may still explore other ways of cooperating.

Well, it was fun while it lasted.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 9:27 AM | Permalink

May 3, 2007

Search Headlines & Links: May 3, 2007

Want a snapshot of the day's search marketing news? Here we've collected today's top news stories posted to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with search-related headlines from around the Web:

From the SEW Blog:

Headlines & News from Elsewhere:

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 11:55 PM | Permalink

Ask Brings the Algorithm Mainstream

Ask.com's recent offline advertising campaign is shifting into high gear to build up buzz around Ask's upcoming Edison algorithm, which Ask's Apostolos Gerasoulis spoke about at Search Engine Strategies in New York last month.

In The Algorithm is On The Move, Ask's VP of marketing Greg Ott explains that the campaign, created by Crispin Porter + Bogusky, will bring the term "algorithm" to the world outside of SEO. But it will not do it in a way that might hurt people, he says:

"No, the campaign won't go into detail about how an algorithm actually works. We don't want to make people's heads explode. We just want them to know there's something in there – think Intel Inside, Verizon's Network, Dodge's Hemi…heck, even VW's Fahrvergnugen – that's different and working to make search better for you."

The Edison algorithm is expected to combine into one engine the best of Ask's two technologies: the mainly clickthrough-based Direct Hit, acquired in February 2000, and the link analysis-based Teoma, acquired in September 2001.

Ask parent IAC reported its first quarter earnings today, including a 43 percent rise in media and advertising revenue, fueled by growth in search queries and revenue per query.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 8:21 PM | Permalink

Quintura For Kids: Another Search Engine For Kids

There have been a number of attempts to create a specialised search engine for kids. Yahoo did it - once Yahooligans now Yahoo Kids beta. Ask nearly changed to a kids site completely - or so the rumors go....

A new entry to the field is Quintura for Kids.

The space is a tough one and I think possibly one that has overreached itself. My 14-year-old uses Google... she would be insulted if she were told to use the kids' search engine.

Kids search engines should be for 3-10 year olds. After that they expect to be treated like young adults and the allure of cartoon drawings and puzzles just doesn't cut it anymore.

Posted by Frank Watson on 3:28 PM | Permalink

iProspect Launches in Norway and Denmark

iProspect, the search marketing firm, added iProspect Norway and iProspect Denmark creating the largest search marketing network in Scandinavia. This follows their recent moves in Spain.

The press release said:

Forging ahead with its global brand expansion, iProspect adds these two new locations to a list that already includes agencies in Spain, Sweden, and the Netherlands. The search engine marketing firm's plans for worldwide expansion will bring their experience and expertise to major markets.

"We are very excited about the opening of these two new offices," said Robert Murray, President, iProspect U.S. "Both iProspect Norway and iProspect Denmark are strong players in competitive markets. As iProspect agencies, they're clients will benefit greatly from our proprietary tools, process and best practices."

iProspect Norway currently works with an impressive roster of clients including: Expedia, Hotels.com and Dell. "Without question, the iProspect brand is globally recognized as the leader in the search marketing field," said Sander Alten, Director of Search Engine Marketing at iProspect Norway. "Quite simply, it has become synonymous with excellence and impressive results." Alten continued, "We are excited about being a part of the iProspect family, and bringing all it has to offer to our clients. Considering our indepth local knowledge, combined with our access to iProspect's sophisticated tools and techniques, I am confident we are now positioned to offer clients a significant advantage over the competition."

Located in Copenhagen, iProspect Denmark has a client roster that includes GE Money Bank, Telia, and Dell. "We are truly excited about becoming an iProspect agency," said Uffe Henriksen, Managing Director of iProspect Denmark. "iProspect has a reputation for exceeding client expectations. We share in their commitment to excellence, and their drive to deliver results." Henriksen continued, "I have been entirely impressed with the firm's knowledge and expertise, as well as the proprietary tools and comprehensive professional development that we will be using to produce results for clients. Our clients will reap great benefit from what we now bring to the table as iProspect Denmark."

Acquired by London-based Aegis plc in December of 2005, iProspect U.S. counsels many of the world's largest brands on both natural search engine optimization and pay per click advertising. The firm's expansion into global markets also offers its U.S. based clients a distinct advantage.

"Our firm works with some of the largest and most recognized brands in the world, many of whom have global search needs," explained Murray. "With our worldwide expansion, iProspect can now deliver a seamless global search solution that reduces the inefficiencies that often occur when marketers try to work with multiple search marketing vendors in numerous countries." Murray continued, "By having iProspect offices in major international markets, our U.S. clients get the best of both worlds -- local market knowledge combined with sophisticated tools and techniques. Together, it's a combination that provides significant benefits to our clients."

Founded in 1996, iProspect's global brand expansion is designed to answer the demands of global marketers everywhere.

"Today, search engine marketing is a global endeavor for most large companies," said Fredrick Marckini, Founder of iProspect and Chief Global Search Officer, Isobar. "And as marketers increasingly navigate a global playing field, they are plagued with two problems -- inconsistency of service and inefficiency. iProspect's worldwide expansion remedies both challenges. With the international expansion of iProspect, marketers have access to a seamless global solution that delivers consistent superior performance across an ever increasing number of international markets."

Posted by Frank Watson on 2:17 PM | Permalink

YouTube Set To Test Marketability of SciFi Film

YouTube is launching a new animated science fiction show. The interesting part of this event is that YouTube is using the show, Afterworld, to test their marketing abilities.

"And with ambitions of tapping the Internet video advertising market, the producers of Afterworld will also provide Google-owned YouTube with its first real chance to demonstrate its revenue generating potential—just as the site gears up to roll out video commercials this summer' , Red Herring opined.

"There is plenty of doubt whether Internet viewers are ready for commercials, but that hasn't stopped producers at Electric Farm, the Internet production house behind Afterworld. They are pouring millions of dollars into the show in hopes of creating a compelling web serial that will attract the Internet digerati and advertisers," Red Herring reported.

Posted by Frank Watson on 2:04 PM | Permalink

MyQuest: India's Exclusive Local Search Engine

Indian search engine, MyQuest.com, is looking to dominate the local search space in one of the world's most populus countries. Niched search is a catch phrase that is catching on.

Though the interface is a little awkward, you have to give them a nod for the effort. A lot of profitable outsourced hours must have been foregone to launch this engine.

Posted by Frank Watson on 1:54 PM | Permalink

SearchQB.com: A Great Google Custom Search Example

An innovative use of Google Custom Search - SeachQB.com - launched last week before the NFL Draft. The site plans to be "the search engine of choice for football scouts, GMs, journalists, and gridiron fanatics"

The company, Rokland LLC, has compiled their "own database of football related sites which are given preference vs. other sites, so that your results contain the most relevant web pages. At a regular search engine, if you search for the term "scouting", the first few pages of results will primarily contain URLs about boy scouts. What makes SearchQB.com different is that we already know you are here looking for football related information. Hence, if you do a search for "scouting" on our web site, the first few pages of results will primarily contain URLs about football scouting" the site explains.

Posted by Frank Watson on 1:45 PM | Permalink

Wiki Search Adds Jabber Founder to Team

Tectonic has posted an article indicating that Jabber founder, Jeremie Miller, is joining the Wiki Search project. Miller is known for founding the open instant messating service, Jabber, and for the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP).

Tectonic further indicates that "Miller hopes to combine the transparency and power of an open protocol with the efficiency of a user-editable search experience."

Personally, I am still a bit skeptical about the concept of purely human powered search. Don't get me wrong, sites such as del.icio.us provide a great experience for a wide range of types of searches, so I see plenty of room for the success of social search.

So, I would expect that a human powered search engine may do many things very well. I just think that there are also many things that algorithmic search does (and will do) better. But hey, I have been wrong before ...

Posted by on 1:39 PM | Permalink

Yahoo Brings Mobile OneSearch to Canada, Europe

Yahoo today launched its OneSearch mobile search application in Canada and five countries in Europe (U.K., Spain, Italy, Germany, and France). It's been designed specifically for mobile device users, with the goal of providing more relevant results on the first page, such as local business listings (and local ads), weather, news headlines, and financial updates.

The application was launched with the Yahoo Go service in January, and made available to WAP device users in the U.S. in March.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 1:29 PM | Permalink

Microsoft Buys Mobile Ad Firm

Microsoft has acquired Paris-based mobile ad network ScreenTonic, which serves text and display ads to mobile phones and devices in Belgium, France and the U.K. This is the third mobile ad acquisition in the last 18 months for Microsoft, following its acquisition of Paris-based mobile search and ad provider MotionBridge in February 2006, and voice-enabled mobile search provider TellMe in March 2007.

"The acquisition of ScreenTonic will be part of our long-term strategy to deliver ad experiences that map to the environment. Together, we will be able to provide relevant ads where consumers are, when they are actively engaged and communicating," Steve Berkowitz, senior VP of Microsoft's Online Services Group, said in a statement.

Microsoft expects to deploy its mobile search and ads globally.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 1:02 PM | Permalink

Google (but not Google News) indexes Belgian newspapers again

Aoife White, an AP Business Writer, reports that Belgian French-language newspapers are back in Google. In a joint statement, Google and the newspapers' copyright group Copiepresse said they had decided that Google could once again list the newspapers on the search engine.

But they are still in talks about Google News, one of the main parts of their dispute. "The Belgian French and German-language daily press publishers and Google Inc. intend to use a quiet period in the court dispute to continue their efforts to identify tangible ways to collaborate in the long term," they said.

Posted by Greg Jarboe on 12:38 PM | Permalink

May 2, 2007

Search Headlines & Links: May 2, 2007

Want a snapshot of the day's search marketing news? Here we've collected today's top news stories posted to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with search-related headlines from around the Web:

From the SEW Blog:

Headlines & News from Elsewhere:

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 11:45 PM | Permalink

Yahoo Lets Webmasters ID Non-Essential Page Elements

Using a new "robots-nocontent" attribute, webmasters will soon be able to tell Yahoo's spiders that certain elements or sections of a page are not the real "content" of the page, and so should not be included in Yahoo's index. For example, a webmaster could flag site navigation, ads, legal disclaimers, and other non-essential elements with the attribute, leaving the main content of a page to be spidered and indexed.

It's done by creating a class attribute called "robots-nocontent," which can be used on <P> tags for individual paragraphs, as well as on <DIV> and <SPAN> container tags.

Yahoo first proposed the idea at an Indexing Summit at SES New York in 2005, the same time that Google introduced the "rel=nofollow" attribute for links. The idea was floated again at the Robots.txt Summit in New York last month, where it was well-received by site owners.

For now, the attribute will only be supported by Yahoo. It remains to be seen whether the other engines accept it as a standard, as most now have with Google's nofollow attribute.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 2:29 PM | Permalink

Eric Ward Podcast

Eric Ward and I recently did a podcast about link building. In particular, we focused on personalization and Google's new spam reporting form moves.

Eric had some interesting points about the personalization movement at Google. At the moment, even with the new iGoogle announcement, there is no reason to believe that link building will fade into the distant past. In fact, it remains as important as ever. One example of this, is that Google does need to decide what to show someone that they are not currently familiar with (or who is not currently logged into a Google account).

Eric also believes that the degree of personalization will be modest. Most likely, we are not talking about a completely different set of results, but rather some tweaking based on what Google knows about the user.

This is consistent with the iGoogle announcement of earlier this week. In the press briefing on the topic, Sepandar Kamvar of Google indicated that they are looking to calculate PageRank for every person. The idea would be to use information that is known about the person (for example, their default Google Maps location, and their recent search history) as an additional filter on the search results.

Posted by on 2:01 PM | Permalink

Google may be interested in acquiring Wall Street Journal

Leon Lazaroff and Cecile Daurat of Bloomberg.com report that Rupert Murdoch's $5 billion takeover bid of Dow Jones & Co., owner of the Wall Street Journal, Barron's and Dow Jones Newswires, is sparking interest by other media companies in acquiring the 125-year-old newspaper publisher. This includes the Washington Post, Gannett and Google. Spokespersons for all three media companies "declined to comment," which is a red flag to most journalists that they, too, are in the hunt.

Posted by Greg Jarboe on 12:27 PM | Permalink

What will be the Downfall of Google?

Andrew Goodman was recently interviewed by Pandia Search Engine News. One of the things I like about the interview is his discussion about a way that Google could lost it's stranglehold on the search market. It occurs during his discussion of the increasing focus on personalization by Google.

As Andrew notes "Done right, it's a natural extension of what search ought to be". But, there are real potential issues with privacy concerns as well. If it's not done right, it could create a groundswell of concern that could be really damaging. People may become afraid to search, because their search history will be stored.

And this certainly could be a scenario that could hurt Google with this new initiative. However, I think the likelihood is pretty low - it's just not a mistake that I think Google will make.

One way to look at a potential Google downfall is to look at recent past history. How did Microsoft lost it's clear leadership of the technology market? By making their existing products, which are still incredibly important, less relevant. The focus shifted to search, and Microsoft did not get out there with it's offerings quickly enough.

This is exactly what happened to the railroad companies in the US about a century ago. There is an old business school lesson about this - the railroad companies should have thought of themselves as "transportation companies". If the railroad companies had thought of themselves in that light, they would have taken an active hand in the automobile revolution that did them in.

It repeated itself in a different way a couple of decades ago when the Japanese car manufacturers were stealing huge amounts of market share in the US auto market because every one was so concerned about gas mileage. While they remain a strong factor in the market, they lost all of their forward momentum, and the US auto manufacturers revived and became strong again.

What happened there? There is another business school lesson that covers this one - if the competitive playing field is stacked against you, change the playing field (or the rules of the game).

With companies as dominant as Microsoft was, and Google now is, changing the landscape is not something you can do by yourself. You need to wait for shifts in technology to happen, and this is something that could really take quite some time to happen. In other words, don't hold your breath. The challenge for Google will be to remain very nimble, see the broader landscape at all times, and keep the natural arrogance of a market leader in check.

On another note, I really like the way Yahoo! is playing this game right now. While maintaining a solid #2 position in search, they continue to build their destination sites up, and have a huge foothold in the social search space. There is a lot of gold in them thar hills, and they have 3 great properties with del.icio.us, Flickr, and Yahoo Answers.

Yahoo Answers was shown by a Hitwise report to have a whopping 96.10% market share in the Q and A space. Wow.

Posted by on 11:21 AM | Permalink

Citysearch Updates Site, Adds Video

IAC-owned local search site Citysearch has redesigned its site, and has added new features like improved recommendations and video.

Video on Citysearch, powered by TurnHere's network of more than 2,000 professional filmmakers, is intended to tell authentic stories about local businesses and their owners, and give users a chance to experience the ambiance and meet the owners of businesses before visiting.

Besides the video features, Citysearch has added:

  • Enhanced search and browse capabilities: Search results for specific businesses by name and across categories, or browse local information in more than 500 categories.
  • Personalized suggestions: My Citysearch offers recommendations based on a user's recent search activity and popularity of similar locations.

"Citysearch's enhancements answer consumer demand for a better local experience," Matt Booth, senior VP at The Kelsey Group, said in a statement.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 10:03 AM | Permalink

ClickZ Specifics Events in May: Web Metrics, Social Media

Two ClickZ Specifics events taking place in New York this month may be of interest to search marketers. These aren't directly search-related, but there's some overlap.

The first is taking place today, May 2, and addresses Web Metrics. Speakers include Bryan and Jeff Eisenberg of FutureNow, Sheryl Draizen of the IAB, LeeAnn Prescott of HitWise, and Frank Watson of FXCM.

On May 21, ClickZ will hold an event on Advertising in Social Media. The one-day conference looks at ways marketers can promote brands, products, and services in online social media environments.

Both events are being held at the Hilton New York, in the same hotel where SES NY is held.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 3:42 AM | Permalink

May 1, 2007

Search Headlines & Links: May 1, 2007

Want a snapshot of the day's search marketing news? Here we've collected today's top news stories posted to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with search-related headlines from around the Web:

From the SEW Blog:

Headlines & News from Elsewhere:

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 6:57 PM | Permalink

Neo@Ogilvy Partners with SEMDirector

Neo@Ogilvy, a digital media agency under the Ogilvy umbrella, will begin providing its clients with search marketing automation technology from SEMDirector. The technology, which we profiled last week, helps large advertisers manage and measure integrated search marketing campaigns.

Neo@Ogilvy recently boosted its search marketing know-how with the March acquisition of Global Strategies International (GSI), led by Bill Hunt.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 5:41 PM | Permalink

Hitwise Tracks the Storm of Online News and Media

A new report from Hitwise maps the current state of the online news and media industry. In effect, the report shows a "perfect storm" made up of search engines, portals, news aggregators, online video sites, local news sites, blogs, and social news sites. Greg Jarboe explores the report in today's SearchDay.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 5:24 PM | Permalink

Google's iGoogle Announcement

Google just announced their new iGoogle Personalized Homepage service. This announcement includes a variety of new features, and more insight into where Google is going with personalized search. A detailed summary of everything has been put up by Google Blogoscoped.

There are a few things that really stood out for me. One of these was the notion advanced by Sepandar Kamvar that Google wants to calculate PageRank for every person. Of course, the original notion of PageRank was simply a measure of raw incoming link juice. And this has already been extended with the notion of search query specific PageRank. And now, we finally have the notion of person specific PageRank. How the three will combine together should be interesting to see.

A couple of example of how this might work is that search results can be personalized based on your recent search history. If you have recently searched on "maserati", and then type in "jaguar", the auto results will receive a boost over the animal. Or if you type in pizza, and you have set a default location in Google Maps, you will get information on pizza places near you.

This is very interesting stuff. Of course, it gets complicated in a few ways:

  1. Benefiting from the functionality requires that you are logged in to your Google account. Not every one does that all the time.
  2. If you are like me, I have multiple Google accounts. Which one am I logged into at the moment? Couldn't tell you.
  3. Many machines have multiple users, such as family machines. When my daughter cames into use my computer, I am still logged in.

Another very interesting part of the announcement is the improvements in Gadget Maker. Now users are supposed to be able to use Gadget Maker without doing any programming all. Google's announcement states: "Anyone who can upload a photo or write an email can use one of Gadget Maker's seven modules to create a personalized gadget without knowing how to write code".

Here is the list of gadgets that Google is allowing non-programming types to access:

  1. A photo gadget
  2. Google Gram greeting gadget
  3. A mini-blog gadget
  4. personal list gadget
  5. personalized daily countdown gadget
  6. YouTube video favorites gadget
  7. Customizable free form gadget

There is a lot of great stuff in here, and its implications on SEO and web marketing will take quite some time to figure out.

Posted by on 1:25 PM | Permalink

Google Fights Back in Viacom/YouTube Copyright Suit

When Viacom sued Google in March for $1 billion as a result of alleged copyright infringement on YouTube, it accused Google of building a business on the backs of content owners, and turning a blind eye to the infringement.

News.com has posted a copy of Google's response (PDF), filed this week with the U.S. District Court in New York. In it, Google denies all of the allegations, and claims protection under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) Safe Harbors and fair use:

Viacom's complaint in this action challenges the careful balance established by Congress when it enacted the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The DMCA balances the rights of copyright holders and the need to protect the internet as an important new form of communication. By seeking to make carriers and hosting providers liable for Internet communications, Viacom's complaint threatens the way hundreds of millions of people legitimately exchange information, news, entertainment, and political and artistic expression. Google and YouTube respect the importance of intellectual property rights, and not only comply with their safe harbor obligations under the DMCA, but go well above and beyond what the law requires.

Michael Kwun, managing counsel for litigation at Google, told News.com and others in a briefing yesterday, ""There is a certain irony to the lawsuit. Viacom and others...were at the table when the DMCA was adopted. These are the very people who helped design this law. They are getting material taken down quickly and yet, suddenly, they don't want to live with the other end of the deal."

Viacom, in turn, said, "This response ignores the most important fact of the suit, which is that YouTube does not qualify for safe harbor protection under the DMCA. It is obvious that YouTube has knowledge of infringing material on their site and they are profiting from it. It is simply not credible that a company whose mission is to organize the world's information claims that it can't find what's on YouTube.”

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 12:22 PM | Permalink

Yahoo Panama Announcement Shows Up Multiple Account Difficulties

It gets confusing some times. A search engine sends you an email about updating some element of its product and you don't know if it is one of your clients who have just been added to the change over process or if this is a new thing being changed.

Apparently Yahoo is changing over to Panama in Scandanavian countries.

When I first got the email I thought okay new sponsored search? Now what.... when you have all sorts of international accounts (remember Yahoo gives a different account for each country) and in some cases multiple accounts in those countries... it gets tough.

A lot of the times it is obvious but you have to open the email and see what particular account or country it is referring to; other times you need someone to translate (you get the emails in many languages).

The search engines need a central page that posts the dates when changes start for every one of their products. Outline the timelines and help your customers keep track of when things will change, so they can budget time and resources. Or maybe one of our fellow SEMs wants to run with this.... could get you a lot of traffic. Dave - like that idea?

Posted by Frank Watson on 11:40 AM | Permalink

Forbes Spreads Supplemental FUD

The sensationalistic Forbes article "Condemned To Google Hell" tries to explain Google's supplemental index, but ends up spreading more FUD (fear, uncertainty and dismay).

The article chronicles an online diamond business that suddenly lost its rankings in Google and many of its pages ended up in supplemental results:

What happened? Sanar isn't completely sure. But he does know that his site has been condemned to the supplemental index, a dreaded backwater region of Google search results that goes by another name in online marketing circles: Google Hell.

Google Hell is the worst fear of the untold numbers of companies that depend on search results to keep their business visible online. Getting stuck there means most users will never see the site, or at least many of the site's pages, when they enter certain keywords. And getting out can be next to impossible--because site operators often don't know what they did to get placed there.

Matt Cutts steps in today on his blog, to debunk the idea of Google Hell and once again explain that supplemental results are not to be feared:

It's perfectly normal for a website to have pages in our main web index and our supplemental index. If a page doesn't have enough PageRank to be included in our main web index, the supplemental results represent an additional chance for users to find that page, as opposed to Google not indexing the page.

He also does some digging into the diamond site mentioned in the story, and finds that the site has been engaged in excessive reciprocal linking, which is a possible cause for its pages to end up in the supplemental results. He offers the same advice he has given in the past: "The approach I'd recommend in that case is to use solid white-hat SEO to get high-quality links (e.g. editorially given by other sites on the basis of merit)."

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 10:49 AM | Permalink

Google Ups Personalization Efforts

Google has expanded its personalization efforts for the Google Personalized Homepage, now known as iGoogle. It has also launched more widget-making tools for iGoogle, with Google Gadgets

The changes were announced at a "personalization workshop" at the Googleplex, which is well-covered by Google Blogoscoped.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on 8:38 AM | Permalink

See More Posts From:

This Week | This Month