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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 May 1, 2007, 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 May 1, 2007, 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 May 1, 2007, 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 May 1, 2007, 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 May 1, 2007, 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 May 1, 2007, 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 May 1, 2007, 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 May 1, 2007, 8:38 AM | Permalink

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