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August 2009

Google News Incorporates Search Suggestion Feature

Google Suggest, a query suggestion tool, has been added to Google News. The algorithm for the feature has been tweaked to feature news-related suggestions. The feature has been added to Google News in English, French, Italian, German and Spanish.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 31, 2009, 9:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yahoo! Sets More SearchMonkey Features to Default

Yahoo! is expanding the number of SearchMonkey features set to default-on in their search results. The update is the result of the completion of testing microformat templates.

Now, sites that provide structured data according to Yahoo!'s specified formats will automatically get SearchMonkey default-on status, allowing an enhanced result to be displayed in the SERPs.

Enhancements can include:

• Video
• Documents
• Games
• Products
• Local Businesses
• Event
• Discussions
• News items

Yahoo! is also turning on SearchMonkey defaults for Entertainment and Social Networking sites. Look for enhanced results from sites such as Netflix, IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes, Friendster and Britannica.

The new defaults join a list of previously set SearchMonkey defaults. Facebook, Wikipedia, Citysearch, Zagat, Yelp and LinkedIn SearchMonkey apps have already been set to default.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 31, 2009, 4:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Google and SpotMixer Expand Partnership to Include In-Stream Video Ads

Google and SpotMixer are teaming up to provide do-it-yourself in-stream video advertising. The ads can be produced for viewing on YouTube or the Google Content Network.

The feature is free unless you want a professional voice-over. Those services begin at $50.

This isn't the first time Google and SpotMixer have partnered up. This past January, they paired up to offer DIY TV ads.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 31, 2009, 3:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Global Search Market Tops Over 100 Billion Searches a Month

comScore has just released a study of the global search market that shows more than 113 billion searches were conducted in July 2009. This represents a 41 percent increase compared to a year ago.

Google attracted significantly more searches than any other search engine with 76.7 billion searches conducted, giving it 67.5 percent market share. Yahoo! ranked second worldwide with 8.9 billion searches (7.8 percent share), followed closely by Chinese search engine Baidu with 8 billion searches (7.0 percent share). Most of the top search properties worldwide experienced significant growth in search query volume versus last year, with Russian search engine Yandex growing at the fastest rate (94 percent) among the top ten.

It is worth noting that Europe accounted for the highest share of searches at 32.1 percent, followed by Asia Pacific (30.8 percent) and North America (22.1 percent). Among the five global regions, Latin America exhibited the heaviest search behavior per person with an average of 13 search usage days in July and 130 searches per searcher. Europe had the second highest overall search volume per person (117 searches per searcher) while North America exhibited the second heaviest frequency (12.5 search usage days per searcher).

This makes it as important to attend SES Berlin November 24-25, 2009, as it does to attend SES Chicago December 7-10, 2009. Why?

As Mike Grehan, the newly-anointed VP and Global Content Director at SES, SEW, and ClickZ, told me earlier this month, search isn't a static topic. The changes in the industry are accelerating. Can anyone afford to be behind the times in this new era?

Mike Grehan, the new VP and Global Content Director, ties social media to search, SES San Jose 2009

Posted by Greg Jarboe on August 31, 2009, 3:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Global Searches Increase by 41% Compared to a Year Ago

comScore has released global search market data showing that search is still on the rise in a big way all across the world. Overall, more than 113 billion searches were conducted in July 2009, up 41% compared to the year prior. Google dominated the market with 76 billion searches. No other search engine came close to that number of searches.

All the major search engines saw increases except for AOL. Yahoo! and Baidu were the only search engines to see single digit growth, while Russian search engine Yandex grew a whopping 94%

Europe enjoys the highest share of searches, at 32.1%, while searchers in Latin American conduct more searches per person than the rest of the world.

What do you think of comScore's global search data? Let us know by leaving a comment below.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 31, 2009, 3:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Microsoft Lobbyists Meet to Thwart Google; Politics as Usual Ensues

Daily Finance, an AOL site, is reporting that Microsoft's lobbyists hold weekly meetings where the discussion revolves around taking on Google. In attendance are consultants and others who oppose Google. The meetings have become known as "screw Google" meetings by DC insiders.

I used to work in politics. I used to work in DC. These type of meetings happen all the time, in all sorts of industries and with all sorts of issues. It's not a Microsoft or Google thing. It's not a Democrat or Republican thing. It's a politics thing.

Google lobbyists meet to discuss Microsoft, I would assume. If they don't, then Google should fire them for being crappy at their job.

Move on, there's nothing to see here. Just politics as usual in the nation's capital.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 28, 2009, 3:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Proposed Bill to Give White House Authority to Control Internet in Emergency

A proposed Bill in the U.S. Senate would give the White House control of the internet in the case of emergency. The bill, S.773 introduced by Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) and Sen. Olympia Snow (R-ME) is pretty vague, which is alarming to internet companies and civil rights groups alike.

According to CNET, the bill would allow the White House to declare cybersecurity emergencies. It also allows the government to choose which internet companies they deem "critical." These companies would then be subject to regulations surrounding hiring employees, information that would need to be disclosed and when the government could take over their network.

What do you think of this bill? Let us know by leaving a comment.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 28, 2009, 3:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (24)

Facebook to Update Privacy Practices in Response to Privacy Commissioner of Canada

Facebook has been working with the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada to come up with solutions to concerns that the office has. The updates will take up to 12 months to implement and involve three types of adjustments.

New Notifications

Facebook will work to encourage users to review their privacy settings. The goal is to help members make sure that they're aware of the default settings and to change the settings to reflect their own preferences.

Additions to Facebook's Privacy Policy

Facebook's Privacy Policy will be updated to provide descriptions of a number of privacy practices. Included will be reasons for date of birth data collection, account memorialization for deceased users, the difference between deactivation and deletion and how Facebook's advertising programs work.

These updates will be subject to a notice and comment period by Facebook members.

Technical changes for third-party data collection

A new permissions model will require third-party applications to inform users about which types of information they want to access. It will also require third parties to get consent before data is shared. Users will have to approve access to their friends' information. However, friend data would still be protected by their individual privacy settings.

What do you think of Facebook's plans for privacy updates? Let us know what you think in the comments section below.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 28, 2009, 2:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Bing Offers Up Image Optimization Tips

Over on the Bing blog, Todd Schwartz is offering up some tips on optimizing your photos and graphics for image search. Schwartz says that Bing's top image developer recommends the following:

• Name image files appropriately - For improved relevance, make sure that the file name describes the image appropriately.
• Alternative image text (alt text) matters - For increased optimization, make sure photos are properly described with alternative text tags, and ensure that test within any images is also
• Watch frame breaking - Sites that attempt to break frames make it more difficult for the image to display correctly within search. Make sure you're testing your site against the search engines.

Wondering how important image search is? Schwartz addressed that very question as a panelist at the Image Search session at SES San Jose a few weeks back. He shared image search data from comScore for June 2009. Over 60 million searches produced more than 1 billion image searches. So yeah, I'd say that image search is pretty darn important.

What say you? Leave your thoughts on image search in the comments below.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 28, 2009, 2:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

What Was Really Burning On Google UK HQ Rooftop?

Apparently there was a fire on the rooftop of the Google UK headquarters, according to various reports.

Thanks to @jonswain for pic

With all that has happened from the UK office lately one has to wonder what was burning on that BBQ.

The secret agreement to use Google search in the BT/Yahoo portal?

The reasons for putting merchant search results in the UK listings and what exactly they are testing? The search results below suggest Google is going into the money lending business. What's next? Ringtones?

No one was hurt in the fire and no major damage was done, according to the local fire brigade. They did not know what was being burnt.

Posted by Frank Watson on August 27, 2009, 11:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Is Google Looking To Add Lead Captures Into Organic Search? Or Change The World

There has been a lot of talk about Google testing aggregating mortgage search queries - with companies in legal battles over helping Google - but as Greg Sterling notes the test is tagged merchant search on Google's end suggesting this is a move to aggregate all inbound queries that they can possibly sell directly.

We have all seen the search more boxes in the organic results for various top listed sites. But what if Google was to add their own box there and started capturing leads for everything?

Hey it would just be juggling another advertising revenue box to their layout. Yeah right! Wait for the screaming from the PPC advertisers who helped Google build their monetization model.

I understand Google has the right to make money from their site any way they want and ultimately the users may find this a good fit. Doesn't everyone trust Google? There have been numerous places that have tried and/or are trying this now - but none have Google's trust value and overall acceptance of 'doing no evil'.

But there is more to this that maybe Google has not considered. If they do move to the pay per lead model, even as an additional service with PPC still in the mix - which I tend to think is how they are seeing it - they will lose many PPC advertisers who just jump on the lead purchase method.

Google would have thought about all this no doubt. But let's look a little deeper.

Is Google looking at PPC becoming the resource of the smaller companies? If the big companies get in they will buy all potential leads at the right price and they can generally afford to pay a little more, leaving the rest to get their leads the soon to be old fashioned way.

The other thing is this move will radically shift the perception of how online advertising should be done. I have had a bunch of clients wanting me to do CPA marketing for them. If Google builds this out many advertisers may just want CPA - we could be pushed back to glorified affiliate marketers. No more CPM, no more social media marketing... everyone will just want to pay for the lead.

Bill Gross - the man who created PPC with GoTo and Overture - went off the grid promising to build a CPA model - but his snap.com efforts never really took off.

Now it seems Google is playing in the space thinking they have found another source of major income. My opinion is it will end badly. Who for I have not yet determined - but the advertisers have a history of being on the wrong end of Google changes.

Posted by Frank Watson on August 27, 2009, 4:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

U.S. Online Video Market Soars in July to 21.4 Billion Videos Viewed

Yesterday, I talked about my new book, YouTube and Video Marketing: An Hour a Day, during Business Wire's free webinar series. During the webinar, I cited comScore Video Metrix data for June that showed YouTube getting more unique viewers that month than the Super Bowl.

Today, comScore Video Metrix released July 2009 data showing that 158 million U.S. Internet users watched online video during the month, the largest audience ever recorded. Online video reached another all-time high in July with a total of 21.4 billion videos viewed during the month.

This means there are Super Bowl-sized audiences for online video each and every month. Oh, by the by, the more than 158 million viewers watched an average of 135 videos during the month of July. That's some average!

Here are some of the other stats buried at the bottom of comScore's press release:
* 81.0 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
* The average online video viewer watched 500 minutes of video, or 8.3 hours.
* 120.3 million viewers watched 8.9 billion videos on YouTube.com -- an average of 74.1 videos per viewer.
* 48.2 million viewers watched 518.6 million videos on MySpace.com -- an average of only 10.8 videos per viewer.
* The average Hulu viewer watched 12.0 videos, but they totaled 1 hour and 13 minutes of videos per viewer.
* The duration of the average online video was 3.7 minutes.

So, what does this mean to search engine marketers?

About nine days ago, comScore qSearch announced there were 12.9 billion searches in July 2009 -- on sites where search activity is observed. Yes, yes, Google ranked #1 with 9.2 billion searches that month. But, YouTube ranked #2 with 3.6 billion searches, ahead of Yahoo! with 2.7 billion searches, and Bing with 1.0 billion searches.

Now, as I mentioned during the Business Wire webinar, the search terms used at YouTube often differ from the search terms used at Google. For example, if you use the Google AdWords Keyword Tool, you'll often find find people searching for "Steve Ballmer Video." But, if you use the YouTube Keyword Suggestion Tool, you'll find that people just look for "Steve Ballmer." They already know they'll find videos, so they don't need to add "video" to a search term.

In addition, the Google algorithm is different from the YouTube algorithm.

As Google says, "We use more than 200 signals, including our patented PageRank™ algorithm, to examine the entire link structure of the web and determine which pages are most important. We then conduct hypertext-matching analysis to determine which pages are relevant to the specific search being conducted. By combining overall importance and query-specific relevance, we're able to put the most relevant and reliable results first."

As YouTube says, "After determining the content of the video using our spidering technology, YouTube combines sophisticated text-matching techniques to find videos that are both important and relevant to your search. Our technology examines dozens of aspects of the video's content (including number of hits and rating) to determine if it's a good match for your query."

So, optimizing video for YouTube search is different than optimizing web pages for Google search. This may seem perfectly obvious, but you'd be surprised by the number of people that are surprised to hear this for the first time.

So, while you try to figure out what -- if anything -- you should do differently to optimize your website for Bing, you might want to spend as much -- or more -- time trying to figure out what you should do to optimize your videos for YouTube. Oh, if they videos are on your website, then YouTube won't find them. It doesn't crawl sites looking for video to include in a search. If you haven't uploaded your videos to YouTube, they won't be found when one of the 3.6 billion search is conducted on the video sharing site next month.

I know, I know, that's not what anyone told you back in 2004 when you started putting videos on your website -- but YouTube didn't exist back in 2004. And if you think that you can avoid creating a YouTube channel, check out HuluDotCom's Channel on YouTube. Yep, even one of YouTube's direct competitors is smart enough to upload some videos from Family Guy and The Simpson's.

I actually talked about this a year ago at SES San Jose 2008 -- after speaking at a session entitled, Video Search Engine Optimization (VSEO). In fact, I mentioned back then that YouTube.com accounted for more than 99 percent of all videos viewed at Google Sites, while Google Video accounted for less than 1 percent. So, the session should have been called "video optimization" or "YouTube optimization" instead of "video search engine optimization."

Check out some of the other things I said in this interview with Li Evans.

VSEO - Video Search Engine Optimization - with Greg Jarboe at SES San Jose 2008

So, the online video market is soaring. YouTube is the market leader. And you need to upload your videos -- and optimize them -- for the YouTube Search algorithm.

Get it? Got it? Good.

Posted by Greg Jarboe on August 27, 2009, 4:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Facebook Looking At Payment Processing

So Facebook is starting to get in to the deep end of the online game - they are looking to create a virtual wallet, according to the InsideFacebook blog.

Working with mobile payment processor Zong, Facebook could be launching an online payment option soon.

This is a smart move on their part and one Twitter might want to consider as well. We have our social media programs of choice installed on our smart phones - maybe it is time to have them be able to do seamless payments. Hey mobile device as credit card has been used in Europe for years.

Facebook outlines their testing of this here. They seem serious.

Posted by Frank Watson on August 27, 2009, 3:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Italian Regulators' Investigation Against Google Essentially Proves Google Right

Italian regulators are investigating Google over complaints from newspaper publishers. The complaint is that Google bans newspapers from all of Google if a newspaper chooses to opt-out of Google News.

Google's Italian offices were searched by financial police, according to Bloomberg.

It seems that Italian newspaper publishers who are putting forth the complaint are shooting themselves in the foot (with apologies to Plaxico Burress).

On the one hand, they say it's a copyright violation to be found in Google News. On the other hand, they're complaining that they aren't found at all in Google.

So let me get this straight. A link in Google News is copyright violation. A link in Google web search results is not? I think you just proved the other side right, Italian newspaper publishers and regulators.

In this case, it's likely wise to "follow the money." Newspapers need advertising revenue to their websites, but if they're not getting as much traffic now that they've opted-out of Google News, advertising revenues have probably dropped. Instead of actually working on their business and recognizing the value of inclusion in Google News results, they simply want to make Google pay legally and likely financially as well.

Hopefully, regulators will wise up and realize the jig is up.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 27, 2009, 2:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Search Gives Back: Bazaarvoice Donates Backpacks Too!

The other day we learned about how Conductor donated backpacks to underprivileged schoolchildren in New York City. I asked for more stories of how the search community is giving back.

Well, I'm happy to report that I was promptly emailed by Bazaarvoice chiming in on how, they too, donated backpacks to kids!

Bazaarvoice donated 200 backpacks to Communities in Schools, a dropout prevention organization in Central Texas. The drive was organized by the Entrepreneur's Foundation of Central Texas. There's a picture of the Bazaarvoice team on the EFCT's Facebook page. Employees were allowed to take time off of work to give back to the community.

Great job, Bazaarvoice!

Keep 'em coming folks! Got a story to share about how search is giving back to the community? Send me a message and let me know!

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 27, 2009, 2:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Google Book Search Offers Public Domain Books in EPUB Format

Google Book Search is now supporting downloads of over 1 million public domain books through the EPUB format. EPUB is a free, open-source standard supported by some e-readers.

EPUB is text-based and allows text to automatically conform to smaller screens. Many e-readers don't render PDFs too well. Google has taken a lot of time digitizing books from print to the EPUB format.

To use the format, first conduct a search for a public domain book within Google Book Search. Then look for the "Download" link in the top right corner. Click on it and a menu will pop up. Select "EPUB"

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 27, 2009, 1:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Query Bing from Your Cocoa Apps: Microsoft Releases Bing iPhone and Mac SDK

If you develop applications for the iPhone or for Mac, you now have the ability to query Bing in your application. Microsoft has released a Bing iPhone and Mac SDK. You can download the SDK from Codeplex.

Over at the Bing developer blog, they're touting the advantages of the SDK:

• The ability to easily query Bing from within your Cocoa or Cocoa Touch application.
• Perform both synchronous and asynchronous queries.
• Search Bing for Web, Image, Video, News, and Phonebook results.

I'm not a software developer, but my husband develops for all sorts of languages, libraries and frameworks, so I asked him what the significance of this SDK is.

He told me that instead of having to study a search engine and write your own code to meet its expectations, you can call the Bing SDK, which does a lot of the work for you.

What do you think of Microsoft releasing a Bing SDK for Mac development? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 27, 2009, 1:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yahoo! Enables Inline Viewing for Video Search

Yahoo! has introduced a somewhat controversial feature into their video search: inline viewing. The feature allows searchers to view videos directly on the search results page instead of taking them to the site where the video is hosted.

Of course, if you are one of those sites, you want that traffic to your site. But with the large number of videos that are embeddable, it means that videos are being viewed off-site anyway.

If you want to use the inline viewing feature, simply click "Play Now" under the thumbnail of the video search result you wish to see. A larger overlay window will appear, containing the selected video.

Bing also enables inline viewing, but as a preview. This is relevant since Yahoo! and Bing are working on getting their recently announced search deal approved by government antitrust regulators. In the meantime, Yahoo! pursues competitiveness in search, a smart move in case the deal doesn't get approved.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 26, 2009, 2:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Google Gets Spammed with Searches for "White People Stole My Car"

Via NowPublic.com, Google has been spammed with searches for "white people stole my car." The effort has been so big that the phrase has been showing up on Google Trends for a few days.

The term, when search, leads to sites that contain viruses and even more spam. According to Google Insights, the phrase began being "searched" August 19.

There are also reports that when people searched for "white people stole my car," Google returned with "Did You Mean: black people stole my car?" But I find that part to be a bit far-fetched and unlikely to have actually happened.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 26, 2009, 1:57 PM | Permalink

Long-Winded? Woofer is the Anti-Twitter

Do you like to talk? Do you use more than the average number of words other people use a day? Do you get blank stares and/or smile-and-nods as you go on and on about how cute your baby is? Then you're probably just a little frustrated with Twitter's 140 character max.

Don't worry. A new site is out there to help you update in all of your long-winded glory. Woofer (found at Woofertime.com for all you direct URL typers) dubs itself as a "macroblogging" service that has a minimum of 1400 characters. Don't adjust your screen. That's 10 times more than you get with a Twitter!

I decided to take a stab at the challenge of a 1400 character Woofer. After all, I am a professional writer. Here's what I came up with:

I'm not sure why they decided to name this Woofer. I'm not offended by the name. I first typed in Woofer.com which was a site about audio services, which makes sense. You know, subwoofer. I think the choice of a dog as a mascot is an appropriate, if obvious, one. I'm not totally sure what breed of dog that is. It kind of looks like a Bulldog-Chihuahua mix. A weird mix indeed. Probably heavy on the Chihuahua. Because if you're going to think about the concept of Woofer requiring a lot of characters, you naturally think "What breed barks a lot?" And definitely, Chihuahuas bark a lot. Though, many would say it's more of a "yapping." Which begs the question. Why didn't they name this "Yapper." I suppose that would have offended some long-winded people. But really, is Woofer any less offensive? Either way, you're kind of calling people who talk a lot dogs. Then again, Twitter users are called Twits. I'm pretty sure i'd rather be called a dog. Though, it is kind of funny to think of the "power users" of Twitter as just little birds that hang out at your outdoor table at Panera just hoping you'll drop food for them to eat. Then again, a few months ago, we took my dog with us to lunch and put out some cheese for her to eat (she loves cheese) and rolled our eyes as she was scared of a teeny tiny bird came along and stole her cheese. She's a golden-spaniel mix. She's like 100 times bigger!

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 26, 2009, 1:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

The Number One SEO/PPC/SMM Marketing Tip You Will Ever Learn

Have a good product.

You could have a great ad position, great landing page copy, and the best conversion rate in all the land, but it won't matter unless you have a great product.

It's something I've known for a long time, but now Joel Spolsky is unknowingly backing me up in his latest column for Inc. Magazine. Spolsky wrote about the first few years of his company, Fog Creek Software and how they made very little money because their business model was out of focus. They were busy making (or trying to make) distribution deals and an affiliate program. But the company took off when they made their software better.

When you focus on making a product better (i.e. filling a consumer need), people take notice.

I was watching Shaq Vs. last night. It's a program about NBA superstar Shaquille O'Neal challenging other sports stars to their own sports. Last night's episode featured Olympic gold medalists Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh. At last year's Olympics, viewers noticed a strange taping on Walsh's shoulder. It turned out that Walsh was wearing Kinesio tape to help support her shoulder after undergoing surgery for a torn rotator cuff.

KinesioTaping.com went from 600-700 visitors a day to 345,000 per day, according to the New York Times. Yes, the Times gave them a much-coveted backlink and you can bet your bottom dollar that wasn't the only one they got as a result of the coverage.

The goal of SEO isn't SEO. The goal of SEO is sales. You'll get a heck of a lot more sales when you've got a solid product.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 26, 2009, 1:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (10)

Conductor Donates 23 Backpacks to Volunteers of America

SEO measurement and tech firm Conductor has donated 23 backpacks to Volunteers of America's Operation Backpack. VOA in turn donated all collected backpacks to homeless shelters.

Last year, 7,000 New York school kids were the recipients of backpacks from the Greater New York affiliate. This year's goal is 11,000.

Who knows, maybe some of these kids will grow up to be SEO's?

We love to hear about the search industry doing great things in the community. So if you're doing something inspiring, contact me - I wanna hear about it!

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 26, 2009, 1:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

SEO Remains Steady While PPC, Email and Direct Increase

Engine Ready has released another study revealing the growth rates among various traffic referrers. While SEO showed the least amount of growth in conversion rates and value per visit, it also showed the least amount of decline in order value, which is significant in this economy.

For conversion rates and average value per visit, the data mimicked results from an earlier study conducted in 2008: big growth across the board, except for SEO.

But when Engine Ready took a look at the average order value (AOV), things had changed. PPC was no longer the highest AOV, surpassed by direct access/bookmark as well as other referrers.

SEO declined the least, which supports the theory that these changes are a reaction to the economy. While SEO does cost money if you hire a consultant or retain an in-house employee, there are no extra charges for ad buys as there would be for PPC.

What do you think of Engine Ready's study? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 26, 2009, 12:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

360i Report Outlines How Google Caffeine Differs from Old Google

If you've been following Google Caffeine, you know, the new search architecture the search giant has been teasing search marketers with, then you may not be sure what to expect when it's eventually rolled into the main search. Some of us didn't see anything new, others saw big changes.

The folks over at 360i did a bunch of heavy lifting and have released a report comparing Caffeine to the old Google, which they have appropriately nicknamed Decaf.

360i analyzed 40 retail keywords as follows:

• 10 major retail brand names (keywords)
• 10 retail head terms (single keywords)
• 10 retail torso terms (two-word phrases)
• 10 retail long-tail phrases (four-word phrases)

They came up with the following conclusions:

1. Domains and rankings will fluctuate.
2. The index size of single keyword search relevance will increase, meaning more competition.
3. Long-tail becomes more relevant.
4. Caffeine is faster. You'll get results (SERPs) in half the time, on average.
5. Universal (aka Blended) results will increase
6. Social media listings will increase, primarily due to a lift in YouTube listings.

With just 40 keywords, this report is certainly not comprehensive, but it is an interesting profile of Google Caffeine. Personally, what I have seen is almost the exact opposite from Google Caffeine: less universal, not much fluctuation on rankings, and smaller index (perhaps for testing purposes). I have seen it faster. But again, the index sizes I've personally seen were smaller, hence, faster results.

I don't dispute the report or what others have seen that agree with the report. My conclusion is this: Your mileage WILL vary. Do your homework. Study your keywords. Be ready for the implementation of Google Caffeine.

It's been two weeks since Google unveiled caffeine. What are you seeing? Let us know by leaving a comment.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 25, 2009, 4:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Google Maps Adds Arterial Roads to Traffic Layer with Data from Your Phone

If you commute along a heavily-trafficked highway, you've probably often thought - and tried - alternate ways home. This is a trial-and-error method that can be quite frustrating. Many times, such as rainy days, when traffic is bad in one place - it feels bad everywhere.

But Google Maps is hoping to alleviate some of that frustration by adding arterial roads to its traffic layer. If you don't typically use the word "arterial" when considering your commute, just know that it means more roads are covered in the traffic layer.

Now, you can know if an alternate route is going to be better or if its suffering from the similar clogged conditions your regular route is suffering from.

Here's a screenshot of traffic conditions in the Metropolitan Washington, DC area, taken at around 3:30pm. Notice the calm before the rush hour storm. Go home now if you have flex hours!

Google says one of the reasons its able to provide this kind of data is because of crowdsourcing. If you're not familiar, crowdsourcing is based on the concept of the "wisdom of the crowds," where multiple people contribute to a project. In this case, you may have been contributing without even knowing it.

If you use Google Maps on a phone with GPS and turn on "My Location," your phone sends data to Google about your position and speed. Google uses that data to help develop its traffic reports.

If you want to opt-out, follow these instructions. Of course, you'll lose the ability to associate your location with Maps and mobile applications that use geolocation features.

Google says there are privacy protections added in, but excuse my skepticism as they were just court-ordered to hand over the name of an anonymous blogger in a libel suit. Plus, Google is in the process of combining all your accounts, so your AdWords and Google Portfolio can be attached to your location and speed info! Get excited.

I'm pretty sure the smart people of Google could figure out an opt-out option that would allow people to disallow information about the speed they are going and other private details, while still being able to use My Location. If they did so, I'm also pretty sure they would still have plenty of people willing to give them the data.

I guess I'm glad they're being transparent about it?

What say you? Leave a comment. That's an order.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 25, 2009, 3:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

YouTube to Monetize Individual Viral Videos (Maybe, If They Want To)

One of the questions asked during the JK Wedding Dance phenomenon was why the owners of the video did not get paid. After all, YouTube, Sony and Chris Brown (artist behind the song) benefited monetarily in a way that they would not have had the video not been made.

Now, YouTube is answering that question. Future JK's can get paid. Maybe. It's all part of an expansion of YouTube's Partner Program. In a post on the YouTube biz blog announcing the expansion, Shenaz Zack, Product Manager wrote:

Now, when you upload a video to YouTube that accumulates lots of views, we may invite you to monetize that video and start earning revenue from it.

How will they decide who they may or may not invite?

To determine whether a particular video is eligible for monetization, we look at factors like the number of views, the video's virality and compliance with the YouTube Terms of Service.

Looking into my crystal ball, I can see Tweets, Facebook updates and blog posts of people wondering why *they're* video was not invited to be monetized while some other dude's video was chosen and they're so similar!

Actually, I can see why JK would not receive an invitation. They illegally used a copywritten song! GASP!

If you still hope to be monetized for your forthcoming YouTube fame, you gotta sign up for the YouTube Partner Program. You'll get paid through your Google AdSense account (which you can sign up for if you don't have one).

Got an opinion about the Partner Program expansion? Leave a comment below.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 25, 2009, 3:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yahoo Updates Search Results Pages

Yahoo is rolling out some changes to its search results pages, with a new three-column design that highlights Yahoo apps, related searches, and more filtering options.

The changes are being tested with a random set of Yahoo users, and are expected to roll out to all users later this year.

In the left-hand column of Yahoo's search results, users will be presented with results filtering options. These include links to searches on related concepts, the ability to limit results to those from Yahoo pages or other third-party sites, or filtering results based on type of content.

Yahoo has also made some enhancements to Search Assist, the well-received query-refinement technology launched in 2007. Search Assist refines queries by providing related topics as searchers type to assist them in finding the right search term that will deliver the most relevant information. Some of the "related concepts" data from Search Assist is also being exposed in the left-hand column, and Search Assist is also being added to search boxes elsewhere on Yahoo's network.

It may seem surprising to see Yahoo rolling out search updates after it announced last month that it was getting out of the search business. There are two answers to this question. The first is that these technologies have been in the works since before the deal was made, so it only makes sense to see them through.

Besides that, Yahoo has said it will continue to innovate in the user interface part of search, even when it begins using Bing's index and results. These changes would fall into that category, Yahoo hopes they will provide a way of differentiating it from Bing.

Yahoo also updated its Mail and Messenger applications. Among those changes are moves to make Yahoo Mail more intertwined with social media. Users will be able to see what their friends and family are sharing online in various social media sites, right from their Yahoo Mail inbox.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on August 25, 2009, 9:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Smart Move: Yahoo Acquires Major Arabic Portal Maktoob

Yahoo's announcement of their acquisition of major Arabic portal Maktoob may be the smartest move the company has made in some time. Maktoob gives them deep penetration in to the Middle Eastern market - a rapidly growing and desired market.

"This acquisition will accelerate Yahoo!'s strategy of expanding in high-growth emerging markets where we believe Yahoo! has unparalleled opportunity to become the destination of choice for consumers," said Yahoo! chief executive officer Carol Bartz. "Access to information and communications tools can positively impact people's lives in many ways, and with the acquisition of Maktoob.com and our investment in the region, the Arab world will soon get a Yahoo! experience in Arabic with relevant local language content, programming and services."

Maktoob reaches 16.5 million unique users in a space where global marketers are looking for more quality access. Yahoo's purchase of Maktoob makes access to this wanted population easier for marketers looking to push their reach into the Middle East market.

The Yahoo press release noted:

"While Internet usage in the Middle East has grown more than tenfold since 2000, most markets are still in the early stages of adoption. According to the World Bank, there are more than 320 million Arabic speakers worldwide, while less than one per cent of all online content is in Arabic.

With Yahoo! and Maktoob.com's combined audience and platform, advertisers will have access to the reach and sophisticated targeting capabilities they need to effectively engage with the region's online consumers. Spending on online advertising is expected to grow by 35 - 40 percent this year in the region, according to Madar Research.:

Maktoob.com was founded in 2000 by Samih Toukan and Hussam Khoury as the world's first free Arabic/English Web-based email service, and since then has grown to be the leading Arab online community in the region.

"Yahoo is acquiring Maktoob.com for the strong brand and audience it has built over the last nine years and the passionate team they have assembled, which we believe is the strongest in the region," said Keith Nilsson, senior vice president, Emerging Markets, Yahoo! "We see great growth potential in both audience and advertising in the Arab world and combining with Maktoob.com will allow us to quickly build our presence there with high quality products. This is a big win for publishers, advertisers, and consumers in the region."

This acquisition is part of Yahoo!'s larger strategy to grow its business throughout the world's emerging markets by connecting consumers with the content and services that matter most to them in their local language. The company's Emerging Markets business group, headquartered in Singapore, is responsible for Yahoo!'s fastest growing markets such as South East Asia, India, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East. Yahoo! has a strong track record of delivering great Internet experiences and helping fuel Internet adoption through partnerships with local developers and content providers.

Posted by Frank Watson on August 25, 2009, 6:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Blogs Increase Traffic, Links and Indexing According to Hubspot Study

Ok, you've heard of this blogging thing, heard it might help your business but you're just not sure if it will *really* bring results. A new Hubspot study will have you publishing a blog faster than you can say "55% more visitors."

Why would you say that? Because that's the average increase in visitors to small business websites as a result of blogging, according to the study.

That's not all.

Small businesses with blogs experienced an average of 97% more inbound links and 434% more indexed pages.

So, yes, blogging has SEO value. All of this, as you can imagine, gives a nice little lift to conversions as well, though the study didn't have hard numbers on that.

What are you waiting for? Go get your blogging on! (Then come back and read more. Perhaps, more about blogging. Say, for example how Social Networks and Blogs have surpassed email in popularity or how Blogging is helping at least one newspaper weather the current print journalism crisis Oh - and don't miss out on SEW expert Ron Jones' two part series on blogging (part 1 and part 2).

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 24, 2009, 5:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (11)

Swiss Official Calls for Google Street View to Be Shut Down

Hanspeter Thür, Switzerland's federal data protection commissioner, is not remaining neutral on the issue of Google Street View, according to the New York Times. Thür wants Street View to shut down because he says that faces and license plates haven't adequately been blurred out.

Google says that it would not shut down Street View, instead going the "meet with the public official" privately route, which is basically their M.O.

This is just the latest in many complaints Google has received over Street View, which uses vehicles to roam locations and take images. In March, we learned that Google was complying with takedown requests in the UK by blacking out images.

Google is also working with the EU over how long they should be able to keep the unblurred copies of the images they take.

Google won a lawsuit brought by a Pittsburgh couple who claimed their house was devalued as a result of Street View.

Meanwhile, US military bases are a different story. The Pentagon put the kibosh on imaging bases for what I hope would be obvious security reasons.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 24, 2009, 4:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

LookSmart Launches Optimal Pricing PPC Model

LookSmart has introduced a new pay-per-click pricing method they've dubbed Optimal Pricing. The model prices according to traffic type, quality, and volume based on aggregate keyword search traffic on the LookSmart Advertiser Network.

"LookSmart is focused on delivering search advertisers the most effective advertiser networks and services for reaching customers outside of the big three search engines; building Optimal Pricing into the AdCenter platform is a major advancement to that end," said Ted West, CEO and President of LookSmart. "Optimal Pricing is consistent with our longstanding track-record of innovation and improved search advertiser performance."

Optimal Pricing also uses advertiser campaign objectives and network structure to give each advertiser an opportunity to bid on the most valuable traffic at all price points. The goal is to provide a better cost-per-conversion for their customers.

What do you think about Optimal Pricing? Let us know by leaving a comment.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 24, 2009, 3:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Wolfram|Alpha Hard at Work Three Months After Launch

It's been three months since Wolfram|Alpha launched as a search engine for structured data. But they haven't just sat back and hoped WA took off. No, they've been hard at work attempting to improve upon their search offering.

Most of the work has centered around two things:

• Things that searchers want that Wolfram|Alpha doesn't know yet
• Questions that Wolfram|Alpha doesn't understand (aka linguistics)

While this presents challenges, founder Stephen Wolfram sees the glass as half full.

"The good news is that there's been very little that's come through that wasn't already somewhere on our to-do lists. They're long lists. But we can now be confident that they're good lists," Wolfram wrote on the official WA blog.

And they're already checking things off those lists. They're understanding the linquistics problem better and have reduced the "fall-through rate" of misunderstood queries by 10%.

Here's what else the WA team has been up to - all of this since launch:

• Codebase has grown by a staggering 52%--adding well over 2 million lines of Mathematica code.
• Classified 54,233 of feedbacks as bugs or suggestions. Of these, 31,006 are now in the implementation queue, consolidated to about 5800 to-do items.
• 3,907 people who have submitted bugs have been told they've been fixed.
• To-do list has grown from 250 per week to 600 per week.

What do you think of Wolfram|Alpha's progress? Let us know by leaving a comment.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 24, 2009, 1:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Nicholas Fox of Google AdWords Invites You To Shape Future of Search Advertising

Nicholas Fox, the Business Product Management Director of AdWords at Google, gave one of the three keynote speeches at SES San Jose 2009. Yes, yes, he provided a glimpse of where he saw search advertising headed in the near future. And that included finding what you were looking for without using keywords, richer media formats, and cost-per-acquisition.

All these were headline grabbers. And you can see the media response by reading:

Paul Krill article in the San Francisco Chronicle, "Google exec provides glimpse into future of search-based advertising."

David Needle's article in Internet News, "Google Looks Beyond Keywords."

Rebecca Lieb's article in ClickZ, "Keywords Out, Networks In."

But I think there was another big story hidden beneath the headlines. Fox also invited attendees to help Google shape the future of search advertising. And he provided a URL (http://www.google.com/seskeynote2009), which will redirect users to a Google forum where they can provide feedback on the future of search advertising as they see it.

If Google gets more friendly with search engine marketers, then Microsoft will have a much tougher time taking more market share. This is a significant development.

Following his keynote, I interviewed Fox about what he had said in his keynote about keywords, richer media formats, and cost per acquisition. More importantly, we talked about his invitation to attendees to help shape the future of search advertising.

Nicholas Fox, Google, on future of search advertising at SES San Jose 2009

As of this morning, there were more than a dozen messages in the SES Keynote Feedback Forum, including ones by Mona Elesseily and Andrew Goodman of Page Zero Media and Joe Cibula of InverSearch. Check it out.

Posted by Greg Jarboe on August 23, 2009, 10:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

YouTube App for Windows Mobile and Symbian S60 Adds More Languages

YouTube has added five languages to its application for Windows Mobile and Symbian S60 phones. The new languages are:

• Brazilian Portuguese
• Polish
• Russian
• Swedish
• Czech

This brings the total languages supported by the YouTube mobile application to 12. The other 7 are US English, French, UK English, Italian, Spanish, German, and Dutch.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 21, 2009, 6:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Google Rolls Out Updated Image Search to Additional Phones

Back in March, Google updated its mobile image search but just for iPhone and Android devices. Now, Google says just about every feature phone in 38 languages is getting the update. The update includes larger thumbnail images as well as search filters.

Something to know about the results is that when you click on an image, it takes you to a detail page on Google image search instead of to the page where the image is hosted.

To use Google image search on your phone, simply browse to Google.com and select "Images." You can also just click "Images" after you conduct the search.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 21, 2009, 6:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Rumor: Bing and Wolfram Alpha Strike a Search Deal

If a new blog post at TechCrunch is true (and that's generally about a 50/50 chance), then Bing has struck yet another search deal - this time with Wolfram Alpha. According to the rumor, Bing would make use of Wolfram Alpha to incorporate structured data to its search offering.

Hmm, who else is going after structured data? Oh right, Google with its oh-so-flawed Google Squared.

While I'm sure all the geeks at Microsoft could have coded up a worthy structured data feature, it's smarter, easier and quite possibly faster just to partner up with Wolfram Alpha.

However, Microsoft would not confirm the rumor. So stay tuned!

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 21, 2009, 5:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Blind Search Test: You Might Be Surprised at Which Results You Prefer

Last night, I began playing around on BlindSearch, which returns results from Google, Yahoo! and Bing, but doesn't tell you which one is which. Then, you vote for the results you like the test and it reveals which search engine you chose.

BlindSearch was developed by a Microsoft employee, but not on the company dime or time. (Plus, if it was designed to trick you into liking Bing, it would be entirely too easy to prove that it was tampered with.)

I searched for things I've been searching lately. Waterproof watch, flip flops, Bahamas. (My family is going on a cruise this fall.) I was surprised at how many times Yahoo! results were the ones I liked.

Then I searched topics I'm very familiar with. "Thyroid cancer" (was diagnosed over 6 years ago) and "Synthroid" (which keeps me alive). The best search engine was Bing. This was also the results I felt the strongest about my vote. I know exactly which sites I would want to send people to if they got thyroid cancer and Bing ranked them the best.

It made me think - why am I searching on Google so much when the results I trust the most on topics I'm an expert on - are on Bing?!

On topics where I'm more of a casual observer, though, it was difficult to even choose a clear winner. the results are virtually identical for so many searches. The idea that Google is superior is definitely a myth.

It's clear that we're at a crossroads in search. Too many searches must be refined and the results the Big 3 engines are giving us are pretty much the same. Whoever is able to reduce task time in search will emerge as the next winner.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 21, 2009, 4:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Bing's Conversion Rates are Awesome; Volume, adCenter, and Agency Relations Not So Much

Today I had the great privilege of meeting with Bing Director Stefan Weitz and local search marketers here in Raleigh, NC. There was a consensus that Bing had a better conversion rate - by far. But there's a couple things still holding search marketers back: volume, adCenter, and agency relations.

The volume of traffic sent by Bing is just so small compared to Google and Yahoo! Anyone who follows the search industry understands why. Google gets a majority of the searches. It's clear that marketers want more traffic from Bing, especially if the conversion rate can remain higher.

If that happens, Bing would do well to overhaul adCenter. SEMs do not like it. What they really want is the best of Google and the best of Yahoo! Even though the new deal with Yahoo! has adCenter as the paid search platform, hopefully Bing will integrate the goods from Yahoo! to make things easier on SEMs.

Another thing Bing needs to do is communicate more with SEMs. Google and Yahoo! reps contact search marketers frequently, but adCenter is just crickets. However, when you're not bringing in as much money as Google and Yahoo! (at least on the search front), it's harder to staff up with account reps. It's your classic catch-22, chicken and egg situation.

The disparity between ad spend on Google and ad spend on Bing seems disproportionate to the difference in market share between the two. This should not be, especially when Bing's conversion rates are higher.

As Frank Watson pointed out today in his expert column, part of this lies on search marketers. If you're getting higher conversion rates but fail to advertise because you don't like a platform, then you're leaving money on the table.

What are you seeing in terms of conversion rates and Bing? Tell us your Bing stories in the comments below.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 21, 2009, 4:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Twitter to Launch Opt-In Geolocation Feature

Twitter has announced plans to roll out a geolocation feature. It will also be included in Twitter's API so developers can make use of it. Currently, Twitter apps rely on either location info provided in profile settings or the device that's being used. Now, they'll be able to grab more robust location data from Twitter.

It's set to off as default, so if you want your Tweets to be associated with location, you'll need to opt-in. There are good reasons to do so.

Networking in your area or finding people at a conference you're attending are two examples of why you'd want to turn location on. If you're a parent like me and you're out with the kids, then you might want to turn it off when you're with them.

What do you think about the new geolocation feature Twitter is planning? Let us know by leaving a comment.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 21, 2009, 1:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Facebook to Allow Simultaneous Twitter Updating, But Only for the Rich and Famous

If you're important enough to have a Facebook Page (as opposed to an individual profile like the rest of us), then you're getting the ability to simultaneously update Facebook and Twitter - directly from Facebook.

Ok, to be fair, Facebook pages include organizations such as LIVESTRONG who actually have important things to say than, say, celebrities talking about red carpet events or their jeans.

Still, it would be nice if that functionality would roll out to the rest of us - not as an application, but as a bonafide Facebook feature. And hey, with that recent FriendFeed acquisition, that shouldn't be too hard, right?

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 20, 2009, 11:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Google Enterprise Labs Launches Side-By-Side Search Tool

If you're using Google Enterprise to fuel your search, then a new feature can help you tweak the search results you're getting. The feature is called Side-by-Side search and it's been released in Enterprise Labs.

You can use the tool for a variety of comparisons including existing search with Google Search Appliance or two different back=end Google Search Appliance settings.

With side-by-side you can test Google's enterprise search against other company's offerings. I'm guessing Google's confident enough to think they'll consistently win on the comparisons.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 20, 2009, 3:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Number One Google Killer: Google

Have you noticed lately that Google wants to keep connecting all of your logins on various products together? You're not alone. Have you wanted to keep them separate but Google won't let you? You're still not alone.

I've been talking extensively lately with my former boss, in-house SEM Al Scilitani about this very problem. It seems that Google keeps forcing him to combine all of his Google accounts together. That means he would need to use the same login for Google AdWords, which he needs for professional means, as he would to access his portfolio on Google Finance.

Google tells him that if he wants to keep them separate, he needs to create a separate email account. I tell Al not to trust that. Here's why:

Recently, I created a new YouTube account. I wanted to have two: one personal and one professional. I used separate Google email accounts. But every time I sign into the professional one, it automatically redirects me to the personal account. Not cool.

Everyone likes to speculate about whether Facebook or Bing or Twitter is the Google killer. But with actions like these, who needs competition? If Google keeps messing with our trust and privacy, they might turn out to be their own worst enemy.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 20, 2009, 2:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (11)

Assert Ownership Over Your Online Identity with PeoplePond Profile

One of the new exhibitors at SES San Jose 2009 was PeoplePond. The company offers a unique Internet service that provides personal brand visibility, reputation management and identity verification services.

Today, PeoplePond announced that profile authors can now prove and demonstrate ownership over many of their social media accounts when they subscribe to PeoplePond's Identity Verification package. This includes social media accounts on Facebook, Flickr, MySpace, Picasa, Twitter and YouTube.

PeoplePond's Services Verification is the first of other new capabilities PeoplePond plans to launch during the upcoming weeks to make it easier for people to create a verified and trusted position from which to promote their personal brands and online assets. Each PeoplePond profile is designed to provide the owner full control to implement a search engine optimization strategy that boosts visibility for their entire online identity.

Additionally, the PeoplePond Identity Verification service confirms to profile visitors that the profile owner has proven they are who they say they are. This takes the teeth out of online identity thieves by providing a bona fide point of reference for online identity.

PeoplePond is part of the Cranberry Venture Partners, LLC network of Web sites. Cranberry is home to a team of developers led by David McInnis, who is best known for founding PRWeb.

Posted by Greg Jarboe on August 20, 2009, 2:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Google Chief Economist Says Conversion Rate Doesn't Vary Much by Ad Position

Google's Chief Economist Dan Friedman Hal Varian and his team have conducted research on whether ad position affects conversion rate. Their conclusion is that it doesn't much. I have a feeling "much" is subjective among SEMs.

Their research showed that for search results pages with 11 sponsored ads, conversion rates "only" varied 5% from first place to last. So, if an ad gets a 1% conversion rate in the first place, the worst it would get is 0.95%.

Friedman Varian wanted to emphasize that ad position is affected by ad quality. Therefore, ads with higher ad position are likely better quality and more likely to have higher conversion rates. In other words, don't compare apples to oranges when testing ad position. You would need to test the same ad across various positions.

What do you think of Friedman's Varian's research on the correlation between conversion rate and ad position? Do you agree with his findings? Should a 5% variance really be considered low? Tell us your thoughts in the comments. (Comment position is first-come, first-served.)

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 20, 2009, 3:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Google Insights for Search Expands to 39 Languages, Adds Features

If you don't speak English (you're probably not reading this), but you'll be able to use Google Insights for Search if you do speak one of the 39 languages that now have access to the tool. They are: Bulgarian, Catalan, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English (US, Australian and UK), Estonia, Filipino, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil and Portugal), Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukranian and Vietnamese.

Google Insights for Search launched last August and shows stats on keywords that you enter in. It's kind of like Google Trends on steroids.

Google is also adding some features to Insight for Search. There's a new forecasting feature that makes predictions based on historical data and search patterns.

Another new feature is an animated map. This allows you to view how a search term has trended over time in various locations. Look for the "View Change Over Time" link under the map.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 20, 2009, 2:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

70% of Canadians Have to Search Again

New data from Hitwise shows that Canadians are having a hard time finding what they're looking for in search. Up to 70% of Canadian searches are dubbed "unsuccessful" meaning the searcher needs to query again.

They often do better if they include the word "Canada" in it. According to Hitwise Senior Online Analyst Heather Hopkins:

• The success rate for searches for "walmart" was 88.83% while for "walmart canada" it was 92.54%.
• The success rate for searches for "home depot" was 84.25% while for "home depot canada" it was 92.33%.

The data comes from search data of the twelve weeks ending June 27, 2009.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 19, 2009, 4:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

People Still Talking About Charlene Li Keynote at SES San Jose 2009

Almost a week later, people are still talking about the Charlene Li keynote at SES San Jose 2009. It was entitled, "How to prepare for the future of search."

If you weren't there, it's difficult to give you a flavor of the discussions that were triggered by Li's comments. But we tried something different and interviewed some of the conference attendees immediately after the keynote -- along with interviewing Li, the co-author of Groundswell, to get her to expand on some of her remarks.

Below is a video that has just be uploaded to SESConferenceExpo's Channel on YouTube. Hopefully, this will enable to get an idea of why SES keynotes aren't always lectures by a sage on the stage. They can also be round-table discussions moderated by a guide on the side.

Marketing is going through a similar change. As Li says, companies must create relationships with users of the social media space in order to foster more trust and authenticity. And Pattie Simone of Womenentrepreneur.com and Lisa Buyer of The Buyer Group discuss what this means to them and their clients.

Charlene Li, co-author of Groundswell, and the future of search at SES San Jose 2009

The impact of social media like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter on the future of search will be profound. But it's hard to predict. That's what makes this a discussion that extends beyond a specific conference held on any given week.

Posted by Greg Jarboe on August 19, 2009, 1:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Bing Only Search Engine in Top 5 to Gain in July 2009 (And For Two Months Straight)

comScore has released their search market share rankings for July 2009 and Bing continues to gain share. In June, they gained 0.4% share and last month, they gained 0.5% share. That's almost 1% since launch, which I personally find impressive.

Google and Yahoo! are the losers, both losing 0.3% in share last month. Ask and AOL held steady with no gains or losses.

Bing was also the only search to grow its total search queries in July 2009. This also happened in June, when Bing was the only one to gain. Bing saw 3% gains in search queries in June, followed by a 2% increase in July for a total of 5% increase in just two months.

Meanwhile, YouTube's growth slowed last month to just 1%. YouTube has been on quite a tear recently and experienced a whopping 7% growth in June. The JK Wedding Dance video was huge in July, so perhaps they're reaching market saturation.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 19, 2009, 12:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

SES San Jose 2009 Attendees Give Conference & Expo High Marks

SES San Jose 2009 ended last week, but attendees are still talking about the conference and expo. And they're giving the event high marks.

You can get a sense of that by looking at the photos in the SESConferenceSeries' photostream on Flickr. For example, hundreds of marketers attended the Extreme Makeover: Live Site Clinic on Thursday, August 14, 2009. It was moderated by Elisabeth Osmeloski, Director of Online Media at Advertures in Search, and speakers included Matt Cutts, the Software Engineer Guru at Google, Tiffany Lane, Search Quality Team at Google, and Greg Boser, President of WebGuerrilla LLC at the session.

You can also get a sense of the quality of the conference content by watching the YouTube videos below that feature attendees of SES San Jose 2009. Each was handed them the microphone and asked what they thought of the event.

Greg Alexander, The Net Impact, on attending SES San Jose '09

Aditi Jasra of Web Analytics World describes attending SES San Jose '09


Ryan Guerra shares his experience attending SES San Jose 2009

Tiffany Phan, CEO Training, describes her experience at SES San Jose 2009

Michael Balistreri, iMOS, describes his first experience at SES San Jose 2009

Lauren Balistreri, iMOS, on attending SES San Jose 2009

Patricia Santos Fontes, Globo.com and Ines Goncalves, Google on being at SES San Jose 2009

Now, if you've just received the email from Jackie Ortez asking you to fill out the SES San Jose Survey, please take the time to respond. The organizers of the conference use the feedback from attendees to get a better perspective on the event. As Jackie says in her email, "Your opinion is highly valuable to helping us continue to improve the SES conferences."

Over the past couple of years, I've seen speakers and whole sessions dropped because attendees didn't give them high marks. So, treat the SES San Jose Survey seriously -- because the results are really, really taken seriously.

Posted by Greg Jarboe on August 18, 2009, 4:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Netmining's New Ad Network Brings Optimization to Behavioral Ads

Netmining is a website optimization company that began in Europe. It was acquired by Innovation Interactive, parent company of 360i and SearchIgnite, which is now launching Netmining's optimization suite in the U.S.

But that's not all, they're taking the technology and applying it towards a new behavioral ad network.

On a recent call, Innovation Interactive CEO Will Margiloff explained to me that the ad network works by analyzing all traffic that comes to a website. It gives each visitor a "score" based on the pages viewed and how long they viewed them.

Then, it takes that score to serve up ads relating to the product they showed the most interest in, when that visitor is browsing other sites displaying the behavioral ads.

"While most marketers optimize the advertising driving traffic to their site, very few fully optimize the customer experience after a visitor lands on their site," said Will Margiloff, CEO of Innovation Interactive. "Netmining enables our clients to capitalize on their marketing efforts by helping them continually engage with customers on a more informed level and convert more of the traffic that comes to their site into leads and sales."

Advertisers that participated in the beta version of the ad network are already seeing results.

"The Netmining Evolution ad platform is driving hotel bookings over 110% more efficiently compared with other ad networks," said Marina MacDonald, Senior Vice President, of Red Roof Inn. "They continually deliver high-performing display campaigns that help us increase revenue and conversions from our website visitors."

What do you think of Netmining's new ad network? Share your first impressions in the comments below.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 18, 2009, 3:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Google Maps Adds Countries to Map Maker and Street View (Plus, View LEGO Land!)

Google Maps has made some updates that give them a more worldly view. First up, some European countries are gaining access to Map Maker. They are: Albania, Belarus, Kosovo, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Romania, and Serbia. Also getting the update is Malaysia, which, of course is in South Asia.

Meanwhile, folks in Taiwan, Switzerland and Portugal now have access to Street View in Google Maps.

But that's not the only Street View update. Be a kid again by exploring Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca,Thunderhill Raceway Park, San Diego State University and LEGOLAND California, now available in Street View as well.

Want to have your business featured in Street View? Google is now accepting applications to the Street View Partner Program.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 18, 2009, 2:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Google Plans to Update Font Faces in AdSense

Google AdSense has been testing different fonts and has found that various fonts fare better than others depending factors such as size and character width. As a result, they are planning a font face update. Here's what to expect:

Arial: 728x90, 336x280, 120x600, 120x240
Verdana: 300x250, 160x600, 468x60, 250x250, 234x60, 125x125, 180x150
Times New Roman: 200x200

The changes only affect ad units in Latin-based characters and only ads that have been set to "AdSense default" for the font face. The AdSense team recommends conducting your own testing once the changes are in place, in order to get the best performance for your site.

What do you think of the font face changes in AdSense? Tell us in the comments.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 18, 2009, 2:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Learn SEO for PDFs at eSeminar Hosted by Acrobat User Community

The Adobe Acrobat User Community (AUC) is hosting an eSeminar on how to optimize PDFs for search. The eSeminar occurs this Wednesday, August 19, 2009 at 10:00am PST and it's FREE! (I know you like free.)

Here's what the AUC says you will learn at the eSeminar:

• Determine the best way to create a PDF for on-screen viewing and quick downloading
• Create and share custom presets designed to balance file size with quality based on the type of file and use cases.
• Optimize your PDF files for optimal indexing and search results display by Google, Yahoo and Bing.

To learn more and register, click here.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 17, 2009, 4:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Hunch Quickly Does Away With Spotlight Search in Favor of More Standard Results Page

Hunch has been around for a couple of months and is already doing away with their original search format. Instead of a menu popping up to help you search, now you just type and submit. Then, a list of results pop up. Hey that sounds familiar.

To be fair, the results are still different. They're links to answers, all of which are hosted on Hunch, which after all is the *other* decision engine.

I tested out the new update with "tennis." But why does a result for sports underwear pop up?

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 17, 2009, 4:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Bing Allows Search of Domains on a Single IP Address

Here's a great tip via Google Blogoscoped (even though this tip has to do with Bing). Want to find out if any other domains are associated with your domain's IP address? Bing allows you to find out.

Use a site that looks up the IP address of a domain such as IP-Address.com. Then plug the IP address into Bing, preceded with "ip:".

To try it out, I used a local tv site, WRAL.com. Their IP is 216.27.85.170. You can see other sites share the same IP. (The sites are associated with sites that the parent company of WRAL.com owns.)

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 17, 2009, 3:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

6 Google Updates: AdSense, Street View, Reader and More

Got a case of the Mondays? Here are 6 Google updates to keep your mind curious through the 3pm slump.

Google Maps has added Picasa photos to Street View.

Google AdSense is conducting email interviews to get a better sense of what publishers want.

Also, AdSense has launched a Category Filter beta for English-languages feed ads.

YouTube recently ran a 1,024 recipe multivariate experiment and lived to tell about it.

Google Reader has introduced new Sharing options, including the ability to share with Facebook and Twitter.

Google Books has added Creative Commons options for its partners.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 17, 2009, 2:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A Chat with Michael Fischer of Coldwell Banker Real Estate

I have seen the future of YouTube, and it works!

Last week, I had "A Chat with Michael Fischer" at the Social Media & Video Strategies Forum in San Jose. Fischer is the Senior Vice President of Marketing at Coldwell Banker Real Estate LLC.

We talked about coldwellbanker's Channel on YouTube, which offers consumers a new way to search for and interact with real estate information and listings. Named Coldwell Banker On Location, the channel was created back in May.

On Location is the first branded YouTube channel to use dynamic IP lookup to search for videos, which automatically serves up local results when visitors first hit the site. To create On Location, Coldwell Banker Real Estate closely collaborated with both YouTube and Google to develop what is arguably one of the most comprehensive and immersive brand channels on YouTube.

And I'm kicking myself for not mentioning this YouTube channel in my book, YouTube and Video Marketing: An Hour a Day, which I finished writing in May. It's like visiting Boston in April 1912 and missing a trip to Fenway Park, which had just opened that month.

Two areas of strategic focus set Coldwell Banker On Location apart from other real estate Web sites. First, it showcases the power of video to bring real state more vividly to life -- offering behind-the-scenes looks at towns and neighborhoods, smart tips and timely news on real estate topics, and video listings of homes for sale. Second, content posted to On Location has a strong emphasis on local information and insights, so consumers can dig deeper into the areas of the country that interest them most.

Supporting this highly localized perspective is one of the more unique aspects of Coldwell Banker On Location -- the ability to search for videos through a special map feature that has been developed specifically for the site. The map "widget" is a prominent feature at the top of the On Location site and the main starting point for consumers searching for a home, a specific area of the country or more information on a real estate topic.

Visitors to the site are automatically shown video search results from their own area / zip code. Then by clicking the link "Browse By Map," consumers can enter the city / state or zip code of their choosing - which pulls up all videos posted to On Location associated with that area. These video results are displayed as icons on the map.

Each search returns a wide range of video results, including video listings, spotlights on that local community and Coldwell Banker sales associate/representative profiles. Consumers can click through to view specific videos - as well as connect back to the main Coldwell Banker Web site to learn more about a specific property for sale.

At the end of the session, I interviewed Fischer about some of the Coldwell Banker Real Estate agents who add their individual personalities to the YouTube video experience.

Michael Fisher of Coldwell Banker discusses Coldwell Banker's successful viral marketing campaigns

Some of the video and written content for On Location is supplied by a select group of content providers, including the Associated Press, CNN, Reel Productions TV, This Old House and TurnHere. Coldwell Banker On Location complements the company`s main Web site at www.coldwellbanker.com - including the "Learn" section which features educational content as well as news articles and updates on the real estate sector. It extends the company`s social media strategy, which includes Facebook pages for the brand and its two founders, Colbert Coldwell and Arthur Banker, a Twitter feed and profiles on Flickr and FriendFeed.

In addition to using YouTube as a platform, Coldwell Banker Real Estate is using Google's ad networks and channels to promote On Location. This includes both Google and YouTube search ads, YouTube banner promotions and Google TV.

Development of the On Location site was a collaborative effort by Coldwell Banker interactive agency partners, FD Kinesis and Bootstrap Software, Inc.

I am especially impressed that the the nation's oldest real estate organization is also the most innovative. Coldwell Banker Real Estate is not only thinking outside the box when it comes to YouTube, it is also thinking outside the website when it comes to video marketing.

Posted by Greg Jarboe on August 16, 2009, 9:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Google AdWords Releases New Search Ads Quality Guide, Display Ad Builder Templates

Google AdWords has released a couple of important updates that you'll want to know about. First up, there's a new Search Ads Quality Guide. This is an introductory guide for understanding Quality Score and how you can improve it.

Secondly, the Display Ad Builder is getting new templates. They are a set of templates designed around an "Elegant" theme. You can find the new "Elegant" set under the "General" category.

Display Ad Builder currently has over 90 templates available in more than 40 countries, including rich media and video ads. Display Ad Builder was launched last October.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 14, 2009, 2:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Twitter to Officially Adopt ReTweeting (And You Might Not Like It)

Twitter is planning on making the act of ReTweeting an official Twitter feature. Right now, it's just some crazy phenomenon started by users. It wasn't all that far-fetched, really. People have been using @username to respond to comments on blogs for years.

However, Twitter plans to post those ReTweets in a different way. The ReTweet will appear as a regular Tweet, with the avatar of the original Tweeter and everything but underneath, it will say "ReTweeted by so and so" in tiny text.

I do not like this idea at all. Neither does Dan Zarella, arguably the most knowledgeable of the ReTweeting trend. He has done studies on ReTweeting. He is a big ReTweeting geek (that's meant with the nicest sentiments).

Writing on his blog, Zarella explains:

I follow people because I trust and enjoy their point of view, I don't nessecarily trust the POV of people I don't follow, so using the original poster's picture and name in my timeline destroys any social proof the ReTweeter may have lent the Tweet.

I agree. I want it to be obvious when something is a ReTweet. I think I even pay attention to ReTweets more because the nature of a ReTweet is something cool and/or newsworthy or something we wish we'd said but didn't think of it.

Having said that, many people ReTweet using the "via" formula. This happens automatically with some desktop clients. The designer behind the Twitter adoption of ReTweeting does and therefore, that must explain why she designed the new feature that way.

Twitter should just add a simple feature that allows BOTH. Let those who wish to ReTweet do so and those who wish to Via do so. Plus, Twits should be allowed to decide how they would like to view the shared Tweets. Doing away with a popular format that most likely helped spread the use of Twitter does not seem like a smart move to me.

But what's YOUR opinion? Comment below.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 14, 2009, 2:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Bing Shopping Doing Very Well Since Launch

New Hitwise data is showing Bing Shopping's market share growing by 169% over 2 months. The first week of Bing's launch, Shopping debuted at 4.04%. Last week, Bing Shopping came in at 10.86% in the comparison shopping niche. That's an awesome rise that anyone would like to see in their niche. Now, the charts for you visual people out there:

What do you think of the success of Bing Shopping? Chart your comments below.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 14, 2009, 1:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Google Tests Ads with Images in Sponsored Links

Major hat tip to Al Scillitani who noticed that Google has added images to paid search ads. This seems to be a test as I couldn't personally duplicate it.

The ads with images don't have description text. There's simply a link, a price and the brand. Here's Scillitani's screenshot (click to enlarge):

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 13, 2009, 12:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

Matt Cutts of Google Joins Extreme Makeover: Live Site Clinic at SES San Jose

Matt Cutts, the Software Engineer Guru at Google Inc., will be joining the panel during the Extreme Makeover: Live Site Clinic at SES San Jose 2009 on Thursday, August 14, 2009, from 10:30 to 11:45 a.m. The session will be held in Room C at the McEnery Convention Center.

Cutts will be joining Moderator Elisabeth Osmeloski, Director of Online Media at Advertures in Search, and speakers Tiffany Lane, Search Quality Team at Google, and Greg Boser, President of WebGuerrilla LLC at the session.

In case this is your first SES conference, Cutts works for the Search Quality group in Google, specializing in search engine optimization issues. He is well known in the SEO community for enforcing the Google Webmaster Guidelines and cracking down on link spam. Cutts also advises the public on how to get better website visibility in Google.

Cutts joined Google as a software engineer in January 2000. Before Google, he was working on his Ph.D. in computer graphics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has an M.S. from UNC-Chapel Hill, and B.S. degrees in both mathematics and computer science from the University of Kentucky. Cutts wrote SafeSearch, which is Google's family filter. In addition to his experience at Google, Cutts held a top-secret clearance while working for the Department of Defense, and he's also worked at a game engine company. He claims that Google is the most fun by far. Cutts talks about webmaster-related issues on his site at http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/.

This interactive session takes volunteers from the audience and examines their websites live to provide general feedback about improving them to gain more traffic from search engines.

I interviewed Matt at SES San Jose 2008 -- back before he'd shaved his head on a bet with his team at Google. He talked about his job interview at Google in 2000. The video interview is one of the most popular on SESConferenceExpo's Channel on YouTube.

Matt Cutts, Google, discusses mobile search at SES San Jose 2008

The Extreme Makeover: Live Site Clinic was already on a lot of people's list of must-attend sessions. But, with Cutts added to the panel, get there early just to get a seat.

Posted by Greg Jarboe on August 13, 2009, 2:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Bing Increases Cashback for Select Merchants in Back-to-School Promotion

Bing is running a back-to-school Cashback promotion that increases the percentage of cashback from participating retailers. Here's a list of some of those retailers:

• Drugstore.com - 20%
• Eastbay - 50%
• eBags - 22-40%
• HP - 15%
• Sears - 4-32%
• Circuit City - 12.5%
• Shoebuy.com - 20%
• TigerDirect - 10% or 12.5%
• eBay - 10%
• Dreamway Trading - 40-50%
• RadTech - 40-50%
• TrimLife - 50%
• Virtual Exchanges - 30-50%

No set date was given as to when the promo will end. Retailers can also cancel the promo at any time.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 13, 2009, 1:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

SEMPO Adds Two New Working Groups: San Fran and the ATL

SEMPO (Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization) has announced two new working groups for search marketing professionals. The new working groups will be located in Atlanta and San Francisco.

"We're excited about adding San Francisco and Atlanta to our list of SEMPO's local working groups, which are a very effective vehicle for addressing the local search community's challenges and opportunities," said Geoffrey Shenk, Managing Director of Kenshoo and Chairman, SEMPO North America. "They are becoming an increasingly popular way for SEMPO members to share ideas and expertise and, in the end, they benefit the SEMPO organization and the SEM industry."

There are 5 other working groups in the following cities: Arizona, Boston, Chicago, Colorado and New York.

Personally, if I were to add to these 7, I would add Raleigh-Durham and Dallas-Fort Worth.

Where would you add a search marketing working group?

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 13, 2009, 1:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Study Shows ROI Improvements in Bing Over Live Search

Organic, Inc. has released the results of an ROI study of Bing. The study was conducted using Organic's proprietary analytics models: Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI) and Spend Plan Optimization Tool (SPOT).

The study compared Bing's performance to Live Seaerch's over a two week period. A 23% lift in ROI was found.

"Just to give you perspective, we get excited about a 5 percent lift in ROI on any given search initiative," said Steve Kerho, SVP of Media, Analytics, and Marketing Optimization, Organic. "A 23 percent lift in ROI translates to millions of dollars a month in returned marketing value."

Organic says that Bing's user interface is likely responsible for the lift. While a two-week study is hardly conclusive and comScore data shows little market share increase for Bing, this study shows that Bing could in fact be more valuable to marketers and searchers even if/when no market share is gained.

What do you think of Organic's study? Let us know by leaving a comment.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 13, 2009, 12:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

iGoogle Gets All Facebook-y with Social Gadgets

iGoogle has a new feature called Social Gadgets and it smells like Facebook spirit. You can add social games, share news, update your status - sound familiar?

They're only launching 19 social gadgets initially, but iGoogle has traditionally been pretty open, so expect this to expand.

It's becoming clear that Google itself might see its biggest threat as Facebook, especially with the social network launching real-time search of its live feeds this week. Facebook web search is also fueled by Bing, which is set to become the 2nd biggest search engine with its deal with Yahoo!

In the words of Charlie Crews, character in the now-cancelled series Life: "It's all connected."

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 13, 2009, 12:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Google Services for Websites Adds New Features

In March, Google began bundling tools together for web hosting providers who can in turn provide it to their customers. It's called Google Services for Websites and they've added a few new tools to the mix:

Web Elements allows customers cut-and-paste maps, real-time news, calendars, presentations, spreadsheets, YouTube videos, conversations and custom search on their sites.

Page Speed does exactly what you think - helps site owners measure speed and makes recommendations for making things run faster.

Tips for Hosters Wow, they really know how to name these things. Yes, this page offers tips for web host providers for helping their customers develop better sites and use tools like Google Analytics and Google Translate. There's also offer info on platform costs on referral fees.

What do you think about these additions to Google Services for Websites? Let us know by leaving a comment.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 12, 2009, 3:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Josh Groban Fans & Grobanites Finding Clay Shirky Video Interview at SES San Jose

Truth is stranger than fiction. Yesterday, Clay Shirky gave the keynote speech at SES San Jose 2009. In his keynote, he discussed the Grobanites for Charity, which works with Josh Groban fans and the Josh Groban Foundation to raise money and support underfunded charities.

If you don't know who Josh Groban is, ask your daughter or mother. He is a Grammy-nominated U.S. singer-songwriter.

The video interview with Shirky was uploaded to YouTube yesterday.

The Deon Designs blog embedded the video in a post entitled, "Clay Shirky discusses the shift in user behavior in a Web 2.0 World at SES San Jose 2009."

This triggered a large number of tweets -- and 28% of the views the video has received so far have come from Twitter.

Another one of the external links to the video is from the Josh Groban Official Message Board.

Oh, and the first comment on the video came from freim93, who said, "Very cool shout out to the Grobanites!!!!" The second comment came from Rocker742, who says, "Yeah!!! Grobanites for Charity rocks!"

And 16% of the views of the video can from YouTube Search. And the top search term is "Josh Groban." The second term is "SES San Jose."

So, Shirky is an adjunct professor at New York University in the graduate interactive telecommunications program, where he teaches courses on the interrelationships of social and technological networks, particularly how they shape culture and vice versa.

But, this video interview with him could be just another example for his course. Check it out. This is the link between search and social that everyone has been talking about.

Clay Shirky discusses the shift in user behavior in a Web 2.0 World at SES San Jose 2009

Posted by Greg Jarboe on August 12, 2009, 12:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Top Stories from SES San Jose and Social Media & Video Strategies

Both SES San Jose 2009 and the Social Media & Video Strategies Forum got underway today. So, there were lots of stories. Here are the top ones:

Barry Schwartz of the Search Engine Roundtable posted Keynote: Clay Shirky, Author of Here Comes Everybody. Search Engine Rouhdtable is using a live blogging tool to provide the real time coverage. Check out Barry's story and the tool.

And if you want to hear Shirky's keynote, head over the WebmasterRadio.FM, where they've uploaded Clay Shirky Keynote at SES San Jose 09.

WebProNews Videos posted Breaking News: Matt Cutts Explains Caffeine Update. Yes, yes, Cutts talks about the project called "Caffeine" that will re-write the architecture for Google's Web search. But, you will also want to check out his new bald is beautiful look.

Lori Ho of the adCenter Blog posted From SES San Jose - Search: Where to Next? Recap. She writes, "The usual suspects are here and the conversations are buzzing - one topic that keeps coming up over and over again is the question 'Where is Search going?'."

Trevor Claiborne of the Official Google Website Optimizer Blog posted Conversion is the word at SES San Jose this week.

I interviewed Mike Grehan, the newly-anointed VP and Global Content Director at SES, Search Engine Watch, and ClickZ, about the link between search and social. Oh, we also ask about Stickie the Shoehorn. Check out the video interview below.

Mike Grehan, the new VP and Global Content Director, ties social media to search, SES San Jose 2009

Derek Edmond of the aimClear Blog posted SES San Jose C-Suite Track #1: The Adaptive CMO. Edmond covered the solo presentation by Brian Featherstonhaugh, Chairman & CEO of OgilvyOne Worldwide.

Adam Singer of the Online Marketing Blog posted SES SJ: How To Optimize For Search & Engage The Community. Singer not only covered my solo presentation, but he also got me to share my "secret sauce" with him over lunch.

Cindy Kerber Spellman of SearchFuel posted At SES San Jose? Check Email, Tweet & Catch up on SearchFuel @ Blogging Centers. She says, "great things are brewing in the Silicon Valley this week."

Last, but not least, Blair Vincent of Idearc Search Marketing wore a golden cape to promote Superpages.com over at the exhibit hall of SES San Jose 2009. Hey, I not making this stuff up.

Posted by Greg Jarboe on August 12, 2009, 12:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Twitter Suffers More Downtime, Attacks

Twitter went down again, and a message on their Status page points to another attack:

Update (12:17p): We're back up and analyzing the traffic data to determine the nature of this attack.

Yesterday, Twitter was dealing with malware affecting user accounts. And of course, last week's DoS attacks exposed just how vulnerable Twitter is.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 11, 2009, 4:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Hadoop Founder Leaves Yahoo! for Cloudera

Doug Cutting is leaving his job working on Hadoop at Yahoo! to work on Hadoop at Cloudera, a Silicon Valley Startup. Cutting founded Hadoop, an open source framework designed to break up large sets of data in order to make them more easily manipulated. Yahoo! obviously uses Hadoop, but other companies such as Facebook uses it as well.

Many are perceiving the exit as a reaction to the Microsoft-Yahoo! deal, but Cutting told the New York Times that is not so. He said he wants to move from simply tuning Hadoop for Yahoo! to tweaking it for more diverse applications. That certainly sounds plausible, but it won't fully quell the suspicion.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 11, 2009, 3:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Delicious Founder Regrets Yahoo! Sale, Launches Twitter Tool

Ben Parr over at Mashable dugg up the news (no pun intended) on Delicious founder Joshua Schachter regretting ever selling Delicious to Yahoo! He said:

I wish I had not sold it to them. The cash and freedom do not even come close; I would rather work on a big, popular product.

With all due respect to Schachter, who by the way now works at Google, even if he never sold Delicious to Yahoo!, there's no guarantee the social bookmarking site would have grown to be anything more than it has become.

Let's face it. No social bookmarking site has really be able to truly take on Digg in a significant way. The sale of Delicious to Yahoo! was fairly appropriate because Delicious is to Digg like Yahoo! is was to Google.

Plus, saying you'd rather work on a big, popular product sounds like the thousands who move to Hollywood to work in show business. Many of them do not care about the craft of acting or music, they just want to be famous. The tabloids are full of evidence that it's a hollow way to live. But, I'll give Schachter props for at least admitting that it's not all about the cash and "freedom."

Despite working at Google, I guess the "big, popular tool" Schachter really wants to work on is Twitter, yes, something someone else created. TechCrunch reports that Schachter has released a Twitter conversation thread tool.

It's only slightly ironic since Schachter tweeted that he hates Delicious's new Twitter integration.

Some people are just hard to please.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 11, 2009, 2:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Protect Your Data By Moving to the Google Opt-Out Village

The Onion reports:

Google Opt Out Feature Lets Users Protect Privacy By Moving To Remote Village

via Google Blogoscoped

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 11, 2009, 2:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

SES San Jose 2009 Kicks Off with Over 5,000 Attendees

The Search Engine Strategies (SES) San Jose Conference & Expo and Social Media & Video Strategies Forum both get underway on Tuesday, August 11, 2009. More than 5,000 attendees have already registered to attend.

I caught up with Matt McGowan, Vice President and Publisher for Incisive Media's Interactive Marketing Group, including SEW, ClickZ and SES, and asked him to provide an overview for the week.

Now in its 11th year, SES San Jose is organized and programmed by the SES Advisory Board and SearchEngineWatch.com, the leading authority on Search Engine Marketing (SEM). The conference will be packed with 70+ sessions covering PPC management, keyword research, SEO, social media, local, mobile, link building, duplicate content, multiple site issues, video optimization and usability, while offering high-level strategy, keynotes, an expo floor with 100+ companies to help you grow your business, networking events and more. My video interview with McGowan is below.

Matt McGowan welcomes you to SES San Jose 2009, highlights a week of Search Engine Strategies

Of course, I am just following in the footsteps of WebProNews Videos, which did a preview of the event last week. Check out their video interview below.

WebProNews to Cover SES San Jose 2009

Although there will be blog, Twitter and video coverage of SES San Jose, the Social Media & Video Strategies Forum, and the Local Search Summit this week, experienced attendees know there's nothing like being there. Still, if you want to listen in to the keynote presentation by Clay Shirky, author of "Here Comes Everybody" on WebmasterRadio.fm on Tuesday morning at 9:00 a.m. Pacific Time.

Posted by Greg Jarboe on August 11, 2009, 1:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's So On: Facebook Rolls Out Live Feed Search to All Users, Includes Real-Time Updates

Just hours after announcing its acquisition of FriendFeed, Facebook came out with more big news: it's rolling out its new search to all users.

Now, you'll be able to search the live feeds of your friends and everyone. Of course, everyone only includes those who allow their updates to be visible to the public.

Also, since the search is rolling out, some users will have access to it sooner than others. Expect this to resolve within a few days.

Like the newly acquired FriendFeed and Twitter-the-competitor, one of the best features about this is real-time updates of search results. If you're viewing the results and a new update is relevant to your search, Facebook will let you know. (This already happens when you're viewing your live feed and your friends update their statuses.)

Two things I don't like: (1) the UI and (2) the fact that when you conduct a new search, you have to select "friends" or "everyone" again to search the live feed - even if you were already looking at live feed results.

Check out this search for Flavia Pennetta, an Italian tennis player who won the LA Women's Championship this past Sunday:

This is truly significant because now people can start using hashtags with Facebook just like they do on Twitter. I think search has been one of the driving forces behind Twitter, but Facebook has a much larger user base. Plus, Facebook didn't completely go down during the DoS attacks last week.

Some are even saying that the new search war is Google v. Facebook. Josh Catone over at Mashable is pointing out what Google has to lose, despite its massive strength.

What do you think of the new Facebook search? Let us know by leaving a comment below.

P.S. Connect with me on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/nathaniajohnson

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 11, 2009, 1:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Meet the New Google. Not That Much Different from the Old Google.

Ok, so you big time search geeks are going to notice the changes in the new Google architecture. But the vast majority of people? Probably not so much. I know Google said the changes would only be noticeable to "power users" but since they don't always make announcements about what they're testing (or when algorithm updates occur), I thought there would be something more to this update. (Yes, I know this is an architecture and not *necessarily* algorithm.)

What you'll want to know that there is a slight de-emphasis on Wikipedia (by about 1 ranking on several searches), which should make many SEOs happy. There's also a noticeable demotion of universal search, but that could change with use by testers, so keep an eye on it.

It is faster - many times over twice as fast, but this could be the result of using a smaller data set for the preview. Also, whenever it's faster, there are far fewer pages indexed, further suggesting the smaller data set theory.

The new Google also leaves out the icons for commenting, promoting, and removing results, but those are only available when you're signed in anyway.

On the flip side, there's some switch-up of the top ten, which can be frustrating. But that's all in a day's work for the average SEO. (I've watched sites shift around in the SERPs in a single day.)

Check out these comparison searches below. Click on an image to enlarge. Old Google on the left, New Google on the right.

Mobile Phones:

News stays. Brands switch up. Shopping and Books results on old Google noticeably missing from New Google.

New York Yankees:

Wikipedia gets demoted in new Google. YouTube, Book, and Image results are killed.

Baseball scores are one thing, but I wanted to see how the new Google treated real-time search. So I chose a trending topic on Twitter, the Teen Choice Awards which aired Monday night.

Teen Choice Awards

Video results get pushed up, but no new emphasis on real-time search, such as Tweets. Blog results get nixed.

The new Google is so, er, familiar, that you have to wonder if it's just a fake punt in a pre-season NFL game (eh, hmm, A.J. Trapasso). This will keep SEOs (and YaBing) busy trying to figure out what's changed. We'll be reviewing the tape and prepping the playbooks, but is it all just smoke and mirrors?

Matt Cutts says no and that this is mostly just code-based. But he also said that code changes all the time at Google, so why the announcement? Why the developer preview? They couldn't test any of this the way they experiment with everything else?

Additionally, Google wants feedback on whether the results are different. The cynic in me just has to wonder if this isn't just part (or wholly) distraction.

It wouldn't be the first time.

Google Wave was unveiled the same day as Microsoft made their Bing announcement. It was also released to a developer preview and is thus far not living up to its own hype. Plus, they pushed Google Squared out soon after Wolfram Alpha launched, despite the obvious reality that it's not ready for prime time.

What Google's intentions are with the new architecture, they're being as cryptic as ever. You can hardly blame the company, when they need to keep proprietary secrets, but with such subtle changes, you have to wonder what (if anything?) is really going on here.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 10, 2009, 11:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Google Unveils New Search Architecture, Releases Developer Preview

While Microsoft and Yahoo! have been spending time hashing out a new search deal, Google has spent the past few months secretly working on a new search architecture. The new architecture is only seen by "power users" and web developers.

Now, they're ready to test the architecture with a web developer preview. You can take the new search for a spin at http://www2.sandbox.google.com/.

Here's the type of feedback Google is looking for, per the Google Webmaster Central blog:

Right now, we only want feedback on the differences between Google's current search results and our new system. We're also interested in higher-level feedback ("These types of sites seem to rank better or worse in the new system") in addition to "This specific site should or shouldn't rank for this query." Engineers will be reading the feedback, but we won't have the cycles to send replies.

To give feedback, click the link at the bottom that says, "Dissatisfied? Help us improve." When you give your feedback, include the word "caffeine" at some point in the text box before submitting.

Of course, here at SEW, we'll take any type of feedback. Take to the comment section below to let us know your opinion about Google's new search architecture.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 10, 2009, 10:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Facebook's FriendFeed Acquisition Could Have Implications for Search (Yes, Search)

Facebook has acquired FriendFeed, a social media aggregator. As Facebook has looked recently to improve and expand features like its live feed and search, this acquisition makes a lot of sense.

FriendFeed makes it easy to share social media updates such as Tweets, blogs, and yes, Facebook updates all in one place. Facebook also enables updates, but through applications and APIs. In other words, it's just a heckuva lot easier on FriendFeed.

The implications for search could be big. Facebook has been testing search for its live feed. This is most obviously an attempt to compete with Twitter, but the FriendFeed acquisition could be a game-changer.

FriendFeed has already incorporated real-time search site-wide. Bringing that functionality to all of Facebook, with its 250 million users and tons of fan pages and marketing conducted by brands could mean people finding what they're searching for on the site where they hang out socially. Recent data has shown search on social media sites to be on the rise.

Oh yeah, did I mention FriendFeed was founded by a couple of ex-Googlers?

FriendFeed has always had the potential to change the face of search, but the site wasn't picking up in popularity like Twitter and Facebook. For Facebook, this could speed up the implementation of real-time search, which they really need to do. The acquisition looks like a win-win for both parties.

If you're not already marketing on Facebook, this acquisition is a pretty big sign to begin doing so - and sooner rather than later.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 10, 2009, 3:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Marin Software Adds Features, Experiences Client Growth in Tough Economy

Marin Software has added new features to its enterprise paid search management application, Marin Search Marketer. The new additions employ advanced ROI-based campaign management features to help search marketers move beyond a singular focus on bid management.

"Today's search market place is highly dynamic with growing competition, the ever-present need to drive additional traffic, as well as ongoing quality score and match type changes," said Chris Lien, chief executive officer of Marin Software. "To maximize overall search profits, one has to address all of these factors via effective campaign management, including down to the actual ad group structure."

The new features include Raw Term Expansion, Creative Auto-Tester, and Ad Group Optimizer and are available to Marin Software customers at no additional cost.

Meanwhile, Marin Software is also reporting that their client base is growing despite a tough economy. The company now boasts over 130 customers which collectively manage $500 million in annual paid search spend across 100 million keywords using their proprietary software.

"Marketers today need to every means possible to acquire and retain new customers," said Lien. "Paid search has always been the marketing technique that allows brands and companies to attract the most new customers to their sites, efficiently and cost-effectively, and we're pleased that so many high profile companies and brands have adopted our enterprise-class solution to help them realize the most return on their search marketing investments."

Marin's recent client additions include Angie's List, HealthCare.com, InsuranceQuote, and People Search Media. Agencies who've recently signed on include Draftfcb, Ionic Media, Neo@Ogilvy, Salmat Digital, and Tightrope Interactive.

These join an existing client base that includes Razorfish, Reply.com, Trouvé Media, and Zip Realty.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 10, 2009, 3:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Acquisio Acquires Landing Page Maker Emovendo

Acquisio, a provider of paid search management software, has announced the acquisition of landing page maker Emovendo. The acquisition includes Emovendo's flagship product PageVester, a landing page application.

"We're thrilled to announce the latest addition to our offering. This is an important milestone. Our customers will soon be able to gain control over the part of their marketing campaigns which has been in the hands of IT for so long, the infamous landing page" said Marc Poirier, Co-Founder of Acquisio.

Now search marketers using Acquisio's SEARCH platform will be able to control the entire cycle of a paid search campaign.

Alexandre Pelletier, founder and former CEO of Emovendo, explained, "Not only does PageVester allow users to rapidly build and deploy professional landing pages, it also supports the creation and management of A/B tests with Google Website Optimizer".

Marc Poirier added "Tweaking ad copy and bids is essential stuff, but it will only take you so far. You need to work on post-click activity. This is where PageVester comes in. It delivers instant value to its users by simplifying landing page creation and A/B test implementation."

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 10, 2009, 2:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

AdGooroo Adds Three New Features to Search Marketing Tool

AdGooroo announced today at SES San Jose that they've added three new features to their search marketing tool, SEM Insight. One of the features is called Budget Analyzer and it helps track what competitors are spending on paid search impressions, clicks, click-thru rates (CTR) as well as their total spend.

"With the addition of Budget Analyzer to SEM Insight, advertisers can now see not only their competitors' search traffic, impressions and other optimization efforts, but also what they spend," said AdGooroo Founder and Chief Gooroo Rich Stokes. "Enabling marketers to see how competitors spend their ad dollars online offers a leg up on the competition and the ability to achieve the greatest possible return on their search investment."

The other two tools are AdWords Data Calibration and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Traffic Estimator. These features allow SEM's to import Google AdWords campaigns with the purpose of improving budget estimates. They also assist in obtaining competitive intelligence data such as organic search clicks and paid search CTR.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 10, 2009, 2:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yahoo! Shopping Launches Deals Site

Yahoo! Shopping has launched a new site featuring deals and online coupons from around the web. It's called....wait for it....Yahoo! Deals. Find it at http://deals.yahoo.com.

Online couponing has been on the rise for awhile, but the momentum increased when the economy went south. A Yahoo! survey shows that 43% of participants are using coupons more than they did a year ago. It also showed that if online coupons were easier to find, 76% of women would be motivated to use them more.

Even more, 59% reported feeling good when they use coupons. When people feel good about buying your product, that's a huge association.

Here's what you can expect to find on Yahoo! Deals:

• Grocery coupons for all kinds of kitchen staples, provided by Coupons.com
• Offers for local chain and neighborhood restaurants, retailers and service providers provided by Valpak
• Exclusive deals from new partners including Visa and Next Jump; Ecobunga! and Greenzer (for eco-friendly products); TechBargains.com and LogicBUY (for computers and electronics); plus coupons and deals on a variety of products from CouponAlbum, CouponMountain, BradsDeals.com and Dealnews
• Video stories on consumer shopping trends and savings tips provided by Inside Edition
• The gas finder module that helps users find the cheapest gas by zip code
• Improved search function to help users quickly find deals from across the site
• New social features that allow savvy shoppers to share deals with friends via email and popular social networks, and to save deals for later use
• A new community feature that lets users post or read comments on each deal

"Frugality is the new 'cool,'" said Greg Hintz, head of Yahoo! Shopping. "We now know that couponing and bargain hunting are losing their stigma and are now a regular habit for many people. Our goal at Yahoo! is to be the center of people's online lives and we're making Yahoo! the easiest place for consumers to find and manage the coupons and deals that are relevant to their lives."

Yahoo! Deals also has a Twitter account set up for easier deal-tracking. Follow @yahoo_deals.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 10, 2009, 1:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Publicis to Buy Razorfish from Microsoft

Microsoft unloaded a potential conflict of interest today when it agreed to sell Razorfish to Publicis for $530 million.

Microsoft had picked up Razorfish (then known as Avenue A | Razorfish) as part of its 2007 acquisition of aQuantive. That put Microsoft in a position where it was selling ads to itself, and buying ads from its search engine competitors.

Publicis helped Google out of a similar situation last year when it bought Performics from Google. Performics came to Google with the acquisition of DoubleClick.

Razorfish will continue to operate under its brand name and will be part of VivaKi, a Publicis entity that includes Digitas, Starcom MediaVest Group, Denuo, and ZenithOptimedia. Razorfish's management team, including CEO Bob Lord, will remain in place, according to a joint statement issued by Microsoft and Publicis.

The deal includes a 5-year deal where Publicis will get preferred rates on Microsoft's advertising properties, including its Bing search engine, as long as it meets certain ad-buying quotas.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on August 10, 2009, 12:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Microsoft adCenter Addresses Accusations of Illegal Pharmacy Advertisements

Earlier this week, a report from LegitScript.com and KnujOn stated that 89.7% of Bing's ads for online pharamacies were from illegally operating pharmacies. Microsoft's adCenter has responded by saying the report is true, but the number of violations is substantially lower.

adCenter uses PharmacyChecker.com to verify pharmacy advertisers. PharmacyChecker.com is a competitor of LegitScript.com.

Microsoft says that the illegal pharmacies essentially hacked the system:

Based on our initial findings, we believe the advertisers noted in the report found a way to work around the PharmacyChecker.com verification process after being validated to advertise on Bing. These rogue advertisers manipulated the system by "hijacking" and/or misusing landing pages. Our internal teams are continuing to investigate how these advertisers sidestepped the policy.

adCenter is taking several steps to address the problem, including:

• All pharma-related keywords have now been manually reviewed to sweep out any advertisers who are in violation of our policies
• The editorial team is validating the claims in the report around "hijacking" and misuse of landing pages
• The quality and editorial teams are reviewing our processes to document how these advertisers made their way onto our system. This documentation will likely lead to changes in process as well as product requests moving forward

What do you think of Microsoft's response to LegitScript's report? Do you think they'll be able to stop the "hijackers"? Share your thoughts by leaving a comment below.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 7, 2009, 5:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

CitySquares Incorporates Facebook Connect

Fast-growing local search engine CitySquares has incorporated Facebook Connect. Now, you can use your Facebook account to sign into the site.

When you do, you can invite Facebook friends to CitySquares and control which information from Facebook you want visible on the local site (name, hometown, birthday, etc.)

The CitySquares teams plans further integration of Facebook Connect in the future. It will include enabling users to update their Facebook accounts when they rate a business.

Ben Saren, CitySquares CEO, says it's all part of recognizing the close relationship between social and local.

"The Local Web and the Social Web are related," wrote Saren on the CitySquares blog. "OK they're not sisters, but they're definitely cousins. The now and the future of local will see much more social features and functionalities."

As such, adding Twitter integration is also in the works.

"There's a whole strategy we're going to evolve that into for community and neighborhood pages, to effectively create a waterfall of real-time locally relevant information that both pulls content in, and distributes content out. I know that sounds a little too conceptual, but hang in there - you'll see what we mean very soon," explained Saren.

What do you think of the relationship between local and social? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 7, 2009, 4:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Bing Adds UFC Fighters to Instant Answers

If you're into UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship), then you have a new way to get quick info on the mixed martial arts organization. Bing has added UFC athlete information to its Instant Answers feature.

Simply type the athlete name into the Bing search box and you'll get the Instant Answer:

This update to Instant Answers isn't perfect, though. Searching for Kevin Burns turns up this result:

But if you search Kevin Burns MMA, you'll get the result:

Additionally, if you search Andrei "The Pit Bull" Arlovski - with the quotes, you won't get an Instant Answer:

But if you put the words 'The Pit Bull' in inverted commas, and make the words Pit Bull into one word Pitbull, then you'll get an Instant Answer:

You can also get that Instant Answer by just searching for Andrei Arlovski.

Instant Answers were launched on Live Search last year and carried over to Bing. There are currently Instant Answers for shopping and flight searches, Translation, MTV Movie Awards, NCAA basketball tournament, NBA and NHL.

What do you think of UFC athlete info being added to Bing's Instant Answers? Let us know in the comments section below.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 7, 2009, 3:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yesterday's DoS Attacks Included Google, Possible Cyberwarfare Suspected

As news broke yesterday about the Denial of Service (DoS) attacks affecting Twitter, revelations began to unfold about how widespread the attacks really were. Facebook slowed down and produced error pages. LiveJournal experienced downtime as well.

While Google didn't go down, they were affected. This statement from a Google spokesperson explains their involvment:

We are aware that a handful of non-Google sites were impacted by a DoS attack this morning, and are in contact with some affected companies to help investigate this attack. Google systems prevented substantive impact to our services.

While not explicitly saying they were attacked, I think it's pretty clear they're just more prepared for malicious attacks of all kinds.

Of course, they've been around for a longer period of time than Facebook, Twitter and LiveJournal. But social media sites are going to have to beef up their security, especially considering the nature of the attacks.

It turns out that the attacks were aimed at a Georgian blogger who had accounts on Facebook, Twitter, LiveJournal, YouTube and Google's Blogger. While not confirmed, it seems pretty obvious to anyone following events in the region, that Russia could be behind the attack.

As Patrica Skinner at Search Engine Journal points out, this isn't the first time Russia has been involved in a cyberwarfare attack. Plus, it's hardly a coincidence any longer that the US Marines this week were barred from using social media.

All of this comes the same week that the acting White House Cybersecurity Czar stepped down. Melissa Hathaway resigned just months after replacing the last Cybersecurity Chief, Rod Beckstrom, left the post. Beckstrom left because cybersecurity is mostly handled by the NSA, a division of the Department of Defense. Beckstrom felt that cybersecurity should be handled by a civilian agency.

Hathaway left after being marginalized by political opponents within the White House. She was a holdover from the Bush administration, who lost favor with Obama's economic advisors when she said there should be cybersecurity regulations for the private-sector.

Hopefully, this week's attacks will encourage bipartisan action on addressing what is increasingly becoming very serious cybersecurity threats.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 7, 2009, 2:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Digg Begins Rolling Out Beta Version of New Ad Platform

Digg will begin rolling out an early beta version of its new ad platform. Most Digg users won't see the ads, as they will only be rolled out to a small subset of users initially.

The ads will appear along with submitted content, except they will clearly be marked as sponsored advertising. The more an ad is voted up, the lower cost-per-click (CPC) the ad will enjoy. The more the ad is buried, the higher CPC.

Digg announced its new platform earlier this summer. The announcement came two months after canceling its exclusive ad contract with Microsoft.

What do you think of the new Digg ad platform? Will you use Digg ads? Let us know by leaving a comment.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 7, 2009, 2:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Live Certification Gauntlet at SES San Jose 2009

No one will be beaten to death. At least, I don't think there will be any physical punishment.

But on Tuesday, August 11, from 4:30 to 5:30 p.m., Market Motive U will be holding a Live Certification Gauntlet in Exhibit Hall 2 where the keynote is given.

If you've never seen one, it was common practice in the French army, especially for thieves. In some traditions, if the condemned was able to finish the run and exit the gauntlet at the far end, his faults would be deemed paid, and he would rejoin his comrades with a clean slate. Elsewhere he was sent back through the gauntlet until death.

You can witness this new form of mental punishment that compels a person to run between two rows -- a gauntlet -- of experts who ask tough questions as he or she passes.

Yes, this is what it takes to be certified in search marketing. Come watch current students and recent graduates of Market Motive U address the toughest questions under the scrutiny of the Internet Marketing Dream Team - comprised of top speakers, authors and consultants - all on one stage!

This session is open to all attendees and runs like a wild fusion between American Idol, a PhD dissertation defense, and a lightning-round news round-table show. This event will feature:
• Live site and campaign audits
• Tough on-the-spot questions
• Lightning round-type quizzes
• No holds barred critiques from the Internet Marketing Dream Team.

Each panelist will have completed up to three months of Market Motive Master Certification and will vie for faculty endorsements during this live session. You can witness each dissertation on the latest search marketing standards or submit your website or campaign for a chance for it to be evaluated by the new masters of Internet marketing.

The Dream Team Faculty includes: Matt Bailey & Jennifer Laycock on Social Media, Jamie O'Donnell on Online PR, Avinash Kaushik & John Marshall on Web Analytics, Todd Malicoat on SEO, Andrew Goodman on Paid Search, and Bryan Eisenberg on Conversion Optimization.

Posted by Greg Jarboe on August 6, 2009, 3:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Google Testing New Positioning for PPC Ads

Hat tip to SEW forum member rodhull who spotted Google repositioning PPC ads to be closer to the organic listings in the SERPs.

I could definitely tell a difference when I conducted searches on Google in Internet Explorer and then Firefox.

In IE, I could see the test with the paid search ads moved over to the left a bit:

Then in Firefox, Sponsored Listings are hanging out closer to the right:

What have you observed? Share your experience in the comments below or over at the forum.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 6, 2009, 2:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Google Releases Updated Version of Chrome (the Browser)

A new release of Google Chrome is out and there are quite a few features you'll want to know about.

First up, it's faster. When you open a new page while other pages are loading, Chrome prioritizes requests for the new page. (I usually want the older pages to load first, but whatev.) DNS caching, more efficient DOM bindings and using V* or proxy auto-config should also contribute to a quicker browsing experience.

You can customize your New Tab Page to set which sites you would like quick access to. Drag website thumbnails to give them a spot on the page. The change will remain permanent no matter what your browsing habits are.

The Omnibox, which provides suggestions based on keystrokes is optimized to help distinguish between keyword searches and websites. New themes let you dress up your browser, and HTML 5 capabilites are being built into the beta.

Have you tried Chrome 3.0? Let us know your impressions of the updated beta by leaving a comment below.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 6, 2009, 1:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Yahoo! SEC Filing Reveals Details on Search Deal with Microsoft

This week, Yahoo! submitted an 8-k filing to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission pertaining to the new search deal they've struck with Microsoft. In it are more details on how the plan would unfold.

For the first 3 years of the plan, Microsoft will pay Yahoo! $50 million annually. This is in addition to the 88% revenue share from search advertising on Yahoo! and partner sites. This type of revenue is something investors wanted. When the announcement of the deal first came out, only the revenue sharing was said to be part of the deal. This $50 million per year for 3 years makes Wall Street happier, but it's still bewildering why this wasn't mentioned last week (a possible last minute addition?).

After the first 5 years, Microsoft is permitted to cancel the Yahoo!'s exclusive control of search ads. If that were to happen, Yahoo! would receive 93% revenue share on ads on its sites. Or Yahoo! could veto Microsoft's termination, but that would mean the revenue share would be reduced to 83%.

As a result of Microsoft taking over search, they will be required to hire 400 Yahoo! employees, plus 150 more to help with transition purposes.

Yahoo! also has the option of bailing on the deal if the revenue-per-search query (RPS) is less than a certain percentage of Google's estimated RPS on a 12-month average.

They couldn't then go to Google. Last year, Yahoo! and Google were working on a search deal when Google bailed under DOJ antitrust lawsuit threats. AOL uses Google search and Ask.com has a paid search deal with Google, as well.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 6, 2009, 1:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Facebook, LiveJournal Also Experiencing Downtime Issues (UPDATE)

Update: 1:40pm EST - ZDNet has official yet vague word from Facebook:

Earlier this morning, we encountered issues within our network that resulted in a short period of degraded site experience for some visitors. No user data was at risk and the matter is now resolved for the majority of users. We're monitoring the situation to ensure that users continue to have the fast and reliable experience they've come to expect from Facebook... We are investigating potential foul play at this time.

Update: 12:53pm EST - Fox Business is reporting that Facebook has confirmed attacks on its site. No official statement published on FB blog or press release yet.

Many people and bloggers have noticed that Facebook has been slow today. Live Journal was also down. This was all happening around the same time Twitter went down due to Denial of Service attacks.

There's no concrete reason yet, but one guess is increased traffic to those sites due to Twitter being down. Another possibility is an attack on those sites as well, but that is just speculation at this point.

Keep staying tuned.

What are you experiencing? Share your experiences in the comments.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 6, 2009, 12:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Twitter Goes Down, Falls Prey to Denial of Service Attack [UPDATE]

Update 12:13pm EST - Twitter.com is finally up for many users, DoS attack still ongoing. Facebook and LiveJournal also experiencing issues.

Update: 11:26am EST - Twitter says site is back up but they're still defending against the DoS attack. I personally can't access Twitter.com, can you? Leave a comment.

Twitter went down this morning and it's not the usual fail whale situation. Instead, Twitter issued a statement on status.Twitter.com that they're defending against a Denial of Service (DoS) Attack.

A DoS attack is a malicious attempt to bring down a website or application so that its users cannot access the service.

Twitter went down around 10am EST.

Stay tuned to Search Engine Watch as this story unfolds.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 6, 2009, 11:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

My Cheese Just Moved

I've been referred to as an agent of change quite a number of times in my professional career. Not just since I moved into online marketing, but long before, when I worked in broadcast media. Much as broadcast was a very fast-moving medium, it never seemed to change direction much. You had to wait for major innovation such as cable and satellite and digital to see real change being effected.

I came online with my first internet consultancy business way back in 1995. It suited me well, although it was way ahead of its time, because, taking clients online involved a huge amount of change. Change in technology, change in culture, change in relationships.

Some people easily accept change and some people simply don't want to. If you've read the book "Who Moved My Cheese" (where the headline to this blog post is taken from) you'll know exactly what I mean.

So, having been responsible for helping to effect change with my clients for almost fifteen years online and ten off, it's time for my own big change. And that's why, seemingly out of the blue, you find me making my first of many posts to come here at Search Engine Watch.

I'm extraordinarily proud to be making a major move from the agency world to the world of publishing and events by joining Incisive Media's interactive division.

I've long been associated with its three online-powerhouse brands, Search Engine Watch, ClickZ and the global conference and expo series Search Engine Strategies. As a long-standing contributor as both writer and speaker, I'm delighted to have been offered an executive position working with this hugely talented team.

And the timing is perfect. As I gaze into my crystal ball I see change, change, change in the online marketing world. No more so than in the field of search marketing. As one surge of technology that got the industry off the ground gives way to the next, change is inevitable. It is perhaps the most exciting period in search to date.

And as the industry changes, we'll change with it, covering new developments in business and technology. As will ClickZ and Search Engine Strategies. We'll look different with a new coat of paint, start to sound different, and strengthen our thought leadership in the industry.

But wait... Before I hear the gnashing of teeth from those who don't feel comfortable with change and like things just the way they are, nothing's going to happen overnight. This is subtle and gradual change, so all your usual goodies and faves are going to be exactly where you expect them to be.

But as I work with my colleagues Matt McGowan, Stewart Quealy, Anna Maria Virzi and Kevin Newcomb (names most readers and conference goers will be familiar with), we'll be spearheading new initiatives and developing the most timely and relevant content as the industry races ahead.

And for me, it's a feet-first exercise as I jump on board just as the largest search marketing extravaganza on the planet is about to begin. This annual San Jose event is the biggest and brightest of its kind on the West Coast, and is always a highlight in the marketing conference calendar.

As literally thousands of industry folk converge under the glorious California sunshine, we'll be presenting the usual vast array of tracks, sessions, speakers and topics. If it's happening in search, you can bet we'll be talking about it next week.

And I, for one, will surely be talking to as many people as I can. Search Engine Watch is the granddaddy of SEO/SEM newsletter/blogs, Search Engine Strategies is the longest running event of its kind,and ClickZ is royalty in the online marketing space. So what would you like to see change, or hang dearly to your bosom and never let go for that matter?

I'm pumped up and raring to go. And totally thrilled to be part of future new developments with the Incisive Interactive crew.

SES next week - be there!

Posted by Mike Grehan on August 6, 2009, 10:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (17)

Audience for Online Video-Sharing Sites Has Nearly Doubled

According to a survey by the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project conducted in April 2009, the share of online adults who watch videos on video-sharing sites has nearly doubled since 2006. Fully 62 percent of adult internet users have watched video on these sites, up from just 33 percent who reported this back in December 2006.

Online video has also become a bigger fixture in everyday life, garnering 19 percent of all internet users who use video-sharing sites to watch on a typical day in April 2009. This compares with just 8 percent of internet users reported use of the sites on a typical day in 2006.

The report is based on the findings of a daily tracking survey on Americans' use of the Internet. The results are based on data from telephone interviews conducted by Princeton Survey Research International between March 26 to April 19, 2009, among a sample of 2,253 adults, 18 and older.

According to Mary Madden, Senior Research Specialist at the Pew Research Center, online video watching among young adults is near-universal; 89 percent of internet users ages 18-29 now say they watch content on video sharing sites, and 36 percent do so on a typical day.

While much of the content on video sharing sites is user-generated, there is also a growing archive of professional content available through YouTube and newer network-sponsored video portals like Hulu. Efforts to lure viewers to these portals appear to be paying off, as 35 percent of internet users now say they have viewed a television show or movie online. By comparison, just 16 percent of internet users said they had watched or downloaded movies or TV shows when asked a similar question in 2007.

I know, I know, I've just written a book entitled, "YouTube and Video Marketing: An Hour a Day." But just because I'm biased doesn't mean I'm wrong.

The Pew Internet & American Life Project found that the use of video sharing sites currently outranks many other headline-grabbing internet pastimes among American adults. For example, the 62 percent of adult internet users have watched a video on online video-sharing sites like YouTube is greater than the 46 percent of adult internet users are active on social networking sites, or the 11 percent who use status updating sites like Twitter.

So, think about that as you consider which sessions to attend at SES San Jose 2009. You can attend The Next Wave for Online Video, Extreme Makeover: Live Twitter & Blogging Clinic, or both sessions.

Or, you can attend the Social Media & Video Strategies Forum, the Local Search Summit, or both events.

Based on the latest data from the Pew Research Center, online video-sharing sites are among the topics that you'll want to be able to discuss intelligently. And if you really want to master this subject, check out the YouTube and Video Marketing Workshop on Friday, August 14.

Or, you could sign up for one of the other training workshops. I know all of the other instructors: Shari Thurow of Omni Marketing Interactive, Jennifer Evans Laycock of SiteLogic, Bill Hunt of Back Azimuth Consulting, Amanda Watlington of Searching for Profit, and Cindy Krum of Rank-Mobile, LLC. There are a lot of topics that will be on the test.

Posted by Greg Jarboe on August 5, 2009, 5:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Google Maps Adds Points of Interest, Needs Some Tweaking

Google Maps has added a feature I've been wanting for a long time: points of interest. When you're searching a particular area, you'll see restaurants, hotels, historical sites, etc. marked on the map. The more you zoom in, the more you see.

Check out this map of Charleston, South Carolina, a very historical city.

At a distance, the (in)famous Market Hall and Sheds is not marked, but when you zoom in, it is.

The new feature isn't perfect, however. If you look at the area near 10th ST NW and F St NW in Washington, DC, Ford's Theatre is noticeably missing. Additionally, the "House Where Lincoln Died" and "Petersen House" are shown on opposite sides of the street, despite the fact that Petersen House IS the house where Lincoln died.

I'm sure this will all get better with time. For now, take the points of interest with a grain of salt.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 5, 2009, 4:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

AOL Adds 'Real-Time Topics' to Home Page

AOL is the latest to get into the "real-time" publishing game. They've added Real-Time Topics to each section of news on their homepage.

When you click on a link in the Real-Time Topics section, it will take you to Love.com, a site that tracks buzz and hot stories.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 5, 2009, 3:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Q&A with Marc Poirier, Co-Founder and CMO of Acquisio

I asked Greg Meyers of iGESSO, LLC to interview Marc Poirier, Co-Founder and Chief Marketing Officer of Acquisio, before SES San Jose 2009. Acquisio is one of the scores of sponsors and exhibitors that you'll want to check out when the exhibit hall is open from 10:00 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. on Tuesday, August 11, and from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Wednesday, August 12.

You should know that no t-shirts were bartered for this exclusive interview. The selection was made entirely by using an algorithm that analyzed 958 photos in the SESConferenceSeries' photostream to find the most relevant result for the term, "Marc Poirier."

Marc Poirier is a professional Search Engine Marketing expert with more than a decade experience in the Search industry. He is Co-Founder and Chief Marketing Officer of Acquisio where he leads all marketing activities.

Prior to his position at Acquisio, Marc was founder and president at Canalytics, a boutique SEM and SEO agency regarded as one of the most active Google Analytics Authorized Consultants in the world today. Prior to Canalytics, he held various e-marketing management positions for technology and software companies that include Komunik - a Relational Marketing software vendor, Cognicase - a Canadian leading IT consulting and systems integration firms, aside from being a strategic consultant at U.S. based marchFIRST.

Marc began his entrepreneurial career in 1996 while completing his Cognitive Science Ph. D. studies when he founded Webaxis Alliance, an interactive agency that worked on major Canadian websites such as sympatico.ca and canada411.ca .

Whenever the opportunity arises, Marc loves to fish and is an amateur walleye fisherman who shares his passion on his blog, http://marc.poirier.com.

Question #1: Can you explain to our audience what is the driving force behind the creation of Acquisio? Was there a specific opportunity you wanted to capitalize on?

Answer: Originally, Acquisio was a search marketing agency I co-founded in 2003. We had some level of success doing this, and in this industry, with success comes the pain of reporting. We reached a point where building our reports for all our clients would take a team of 4 people 2 weeks of non-stop mind-numbing work in Excel, and then Powerpoint or worse desktop publishing software. Not a great way to scale a business. But our clients loved their reports, and we knew it was the reason they paid their bill at the end of each month. When you are an agency, in many ways, the product you sell IS the report. So they had to be done as quickly as possible and with as much attention to detail as possible so we could get paid. But we would often make errors, or forget something, it was a total nightmare. In case anyone wonders why we have these t-shirts, well, now you know.

We always looked around for software to help automate some of this stuff, but we never did find anything that would do much of what we needed. Certainly, bid management software was NOT the answer, though we definitely had our share of experience playing with them.

At this time, the opportunity became clear that one of the things our industry needed was a productivity platform for search marketing agencies. The vision originally was to provide one login to all the engines, along with all the tools needed to launch and manage client campaigns. It had to be a white label platform. It had to be easy to use and visually appealing. And most of all, it had to save our future clients time, lots of time.

The first iteration offered an application that produced visually engaging, client-ready white label reports. We were the first, and as far as I know, still the only ones offering it. Later we designed a multi-engine bulk editor, which we designed just like the Google AdWords editor, but it support AdWords, YSM and adCenter. We were also the first to do it, but others followed eventually with similar tools.

The campaign automation platform came later. We looked at the bid management space and felt it was so outdated we couldn't just reproduce what was already there, so we spent a lot of time with our product advisory board and with our clients to design a tool that would let the marketers design business rules using every available bit of data we have to accomplish any given task automatically.

Question #2: In all of Paid Search Marketing, there are users with many different levels of experience. Can you give us some insights into Acquisio's main target market? For example, your service appears to be targeted to both Search Marketing Agencies and Individual Advertisers? Which market is this platform best suited for?

Answer: Our market has always been clear - we focus on helping agencies. We are the only SEM platform whose mission is focused on helping agencies. They share the same business model, and they have a unique set of challenges; and it's definitely not about managing bids. Our mission is to provide a platform that will make them extremely efficient.

Acquisio SEARCH attracts non-agencies as well, and we do have several very large advertisers using Acquisio SEARCH. They love it - in fact some of them tell us we offer much more value than the so-called "enterprise-class" platforms. Our product is significantly more affordable than most of them are, and while there may be some added benefits to using their product, for many large advertisers with multiple accounts, we're just a slam-dunk!

Question #3: For just about every PPC Guru in the world, the Google Adwords Editor is the most widely used Adwords management tool on the market. It's also attractive because it is a FREE Desktop Tool. What makes Acquisio more valuable than the Adwords Editor?

Answer: AdWords Editor is a great tool. But it only works for AdWords. That's a big problem right there!

We offer an almost exact replica of Google AdWords editor. It is built using Flex, so it works in your browser. I mean it really is just the same. You can edit your keywords, negatives, text ads, adgroups and campaigns exactly the same way you would in AdWords Editor.

It is "better" than AdWords editor because it also supports YSM and adCenter, in the same model. No learning curve. You can move things from one engine to the next with ease. It's a great tool.

Then of course, AdWords editor doesn't save you hundreds of hours of error prone grunt work by automatically generating private label client-ready reports at the end of each month

It also doesn't keep an eye on things for you while you sleep, triggering changes or pausing items, or even sending out alerts. Building intelligent makes a significant difference in the ROI of most campaigns.

Question #4: During this Economic down-turn, is Acquisio concerned at with the overall decline of PPC Budgets? If so, what strategies are in place to try and make the best of the situation?

Answer: Up until very recently we didn't notice anything at all, probably because we are still in hyper-growth and adding so many new clients all the time, and growing our revenue each month, it's been hard to see any downside to anything.

However last month we poured over some numbers and one of the things we did notice is that overall agencies are losing some accounts, a significant number of PPC advertisers have either gone out of business, or are in such a bad situation that they even stop spending money on paid search. It's not good.

Question #5: Can you provide our PPC audience with anything new and/or exciting enhancements in Acquisio's Development Pipeline? Are there any announcements that you would like to make to this search marketing audience?

Answer: Sure, one of them is that we just completed our first acquisition. We will be announcing all the details later on this week, but I can say it is the coolest landing page application we've seen ;-)

Some of the things coming down the pipe in the next few weeks are third party data integration. As part of this new capability comes something that has been keeping us busy for a while now: conversion and revenue attribution.

Question #6: Acquisio, as well as many other PPC Applications such as Omniture SearchCenter use API tokens to communicate to the Search Engine Accounts in real-time. What makes Acquisio's API interface any better than it's competitors?

Answer: Yes we interface with these APIs all day long, but this is the common foundation we all have. I mean maybe one thing that may differentiate us is we have several large local search agencies as clients, and some of them are Google AdWords resellers. This gives them several benefits, such as not having to pay their AdWords Quotas. Our API implementation supports API quota management for AdWords resellers.

Another thing that may be interesting is that we try to interface with the tools marketers use every day, we already have API integration with Wordtracker and some other keyword recommendation tools, and we want to continue in that direction with competitive analysis tools, web analytics tools, ad servers, and call tracking platforms.

Also, API integration to other ad networks are in the works, such as 2nd tier search engines, B2B engines, shopping engines, and when it becomes possible, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter (if they ever go there).

Finally, we will offer access to the main display ad networks when they provide API access.

Question #7: What would you say is the "secret sauce" of the Acquisio's Platform? Is it a specific tool or a combination of functions?

Answer: Acquisio SEARCH is the only productivity platform for SEM agencies. We literally save SEM agencies around the world tens of thousands of hours of grunt work every month. We are down to earth people, and we come from the world of SEM agencies.

It has always been our goal to make the business of serving SEM clients as easy as possible, and to free up as much time as we can so our clients can focus on the strategic things that make a difference for their clients.

For Acquisio, the "secret sauce" is pretty much to bring immediate and evident value to your customers. We do that pretty well I would say.

For a free demo of Acquisio please visit: http://www.acquisio.com/contact-for-demo.php

Posted by Greg Jarboe on August 5, 2009, 1:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Dig Deeper Into Airfares with Bing's Flexible Travel Search Tools

When you're planning to fly, finding the best price is usually a priority. Being flexible with your travel dates or airports can usually help in securing a lower price. Bing has some pretty cool travel search tools to help you get a great deal.

When you visit Bing.com/travel, scroll down to the "plan trips" section.

As you can see, there are two options. Search by date and search by multiple cities. You can switch between them after you conduct a search.

Let's start with searching by date. Choose two cities and click go. The results page brings up a graph marking prices for the next 30 days.

Use the sidebar to the left to add a nearby airport to compare fares.

Look above the graph and you'll see tabs for additional search options. The "grid - length of travel" option charts out fares for various departure days and trip lengths.

Click on a box and get details on the fare:

The other tab is the "map - where to travel" tab. This is perfect if you want to get away but you're not sure where. Simply add cities (on the sidebar) that you're considering and they'll show up on the map.

Currently, these tools only include select US cities. There is a link to vote for additional cities, but vote or no vote, let's hope Bing adds more cities, including international ones, soon.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 5, 2009, 1:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

125,000 People Have Attended NACA's Save the Dream Events

According to the St. Louis Post Dispatch, NACA says 40,000 people attended its Save the Dream event in St. Louis last weekend. KTVI Fox 2 in St. Louis reported the same figure in their coverage below.

According to NACA, 50,000 people attended it's event in Chicago the weekend before that. Gailann Jarocki of the Chicago Residential Examiner listed 16 lenders who were going to be on-site at the event. And WLS-TV ABC 7 in Chicago was there to document the event.

And according to NACA, 35,000 people attended the Save the Dream event in Cleveland. Although some were disputing this number, Ohio Congresswoman Marcia Fudge (D-11th District), who brought NACA to Cleveland, bristled at the mistrust and skepticism over NACA and the Save the Dream event.

"This is jealousy of the worst kind," she told WKYC in a phone call from Washington. "Every time we get something good going that's helping people, there is somebody to try to tear it down."

Now, I find it interesting that most of the people who are questioning the numbers are from organizations that should have been doing something to help homeowners avoid foreclosure, restructure home loans, and reduce mortgage rates -- but got upstaged by NACA, a national non-profit community advocacy and homeownership organization headquartered in Boston.

According to NACA CEO Bruce Marks, "The NACA homeownership program, which is without cost to those participating, is our answer to the huge subprime and predatory lending industry. NACA has conclusively shown that when working people get the benefit of a prime rate loan, they can resolve their financial problems, make their mortgage payments and become prime borrowers. NACA's track record of helping people who have credit problems become homeowners or restructuring a predatory loan debunks the myth that high rates and fees are necessary to compensate for their credit risk."

But, I also have my own reality check. My wife looked at the list of cities on the Save the Dream tour and didn't see Boston, where NACA is headquartered. But she knew a friend that needed their help, so she recommend that she call NACA's toll-free number: 1-888-302-NACA. According to my wife, her friend got help with her predatory or unaffordable mortgage.

NACA has now arrived in Atlanta, Georgia, where they will hold another Save the Dream event from Friday, August 7, until Tuesday, August 11. In other words, they've added an extra day to deal with the volume of people expected to turn out.

So, quibble about the numbers, if you want to. The reason I'm going to feature NACA's case study at the "How to Optimize for Search & Engage the Community" session in the Search & Community Track at SES San Jose 2009 on Tuesday, August 11, at 10:30 a.m. I'm doing this because NACA has exceeded the combined total of 25,000 homeowners, who participated in the first three Save the Dream events in Columbia, SC, Stamford, CT, and Washington, DC.

They've done this with an integrated marketing campaign that includes search engine optimization, public relations, social media, and video marketing.

That's a story worth telling.

And I'm going to showcase "Documentary: NACA's 'Save the Dream' - Mortgage Restructuring and Renegotiation Rescues Homeowners" during the session entitled, "What Works: Best Practices / Case Studies for Online Video," which will be held at the San Jose Marriott at the Social Media & Video Strategies Forum on Tuesday, August 11 at 3 p.m.

That's because this is a story worth retelling.

Documentary: NACA's "Save the Dream" - Mortgage Restructuring and Renegotiation Rescues Homeowners

Posted by Greg Jarboe on August 5, 2009, 7:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (37)

Flickr Updates Design of Search Results

Yahoo! owned Flickr has given a makeover to its search results page. Now, instead of scrolling through a single stream of images, you see a grid.

You can filter by size by checking your selection at the top right of the results. Also, mouseover a single result and look for an "i" in the lower right corner. Click on it for more information about the image.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 5, 2009, 2:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Google's Conversion Optimizer Popular Among Advertisers

Google is reporting that Conversion Optimizer is a hit among advertisers. Using second quarter data, the AdWords tool is on track to manage $1 billion of paid search ad spend annually.

Conversion Optimizer allows advertisers to bid on a CPA (cost-per-acquisition) basis. Google gave the example of a US-based shoe company that might bid on broad matches of shoes. Conversion Optimizer can learn to weed out traffic such as international visitors, since the company doesn't ship overseas.

Currently, you can use Conversion Optimizer if you've had at least 15 conversions in the past 30 days.

An acquisition can be anything from a product to a lead. Tell Conversion Optimizer what your acquisition is worth and it goes to work to make that happen.

Have you tried Conversion Optimizer? How is it working out for you? Tell us your experience by leaving a comment below.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 5, 2009, 1:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Delicious Updates with New Search, Email and Tweet Features

Social bookmarking site Delicious, which is owned by Yahoo!, has been updated with some snazzy new features to make your bookmarking experience easier.

New search tools have been added that allow you to search a given date range and/or filter down by tag. Search results will also display rich media content for sites like YouTube, Flickr, and Yelp.

Next up, a new category has been added to the homepage called "Fresh Bookmarks." This shows recent bookmarks that are also trending on Twitter. Notice how the number of Tweets is listed below a bookmark:

If you want the old Delicious, just click on "Popular Bookmarks."

Last but not least, if you want to share a bookmark off Delicious, you now have the ability to email or Tweet the link directly from Delicious.

What do you think of these Delicious updates? Share your thoughts below.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 4, 2009, 11:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Tweetblocker - Blocked!

Folks, the next time you come up with a great new Twitter tool and you want to get the word out to all of the world, you might want to consider if you're website is capable of handling the GARGANTUAN amount of traffic it might receive from eager to try first timers!

Case in point: Tweetblocker

A story recently published in Mashable let the caboose out early on this one and try logging on to www.tweetblocker.com and...well, good luck. It's hit or miss (at present). Tweetblocker is a free tool for Twitter users and application developers. Using advanced filtering, the app catalogs and rank the top spammers on Twitter, allowing users to easily identify spammers in the group of users they are following.

I'd love to tell you more about it but I can't access it given the mad Twitter rush to the Tweetblocker.com site. In the meantime, you might consider untweeps.com. This cool app eliminates those followers of yours who haven't tweeted in a set period of time. Try going back 30 days and see how many of your followers haven't tweeted. If this perturbs you any, then untweep them and presto, they no longer are following you.

Posted by Byron Gordon on August 4, 2009, 7:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

SES San Jose 2009 to Feature Search Engine Foosball Smackdown Rematch

If you attended SES San Jose last year, you may have seen the Search Engine Foosball Smackdown. It was a heated event between Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! Each search engine sent some of its best foosers to see who would dominate (well, at least who would dominate the foosball table).

Microsoft was knocked out in the elimination round, although that was before Bing. This left Google and Yahoo! to battle it out in the finals.

The Yahoo! team of Daniel Wong and Jake Rosenberg took home the coveted Stonetemple Cup after a tough finals match. Check out the photo by Kelsey Jarboe to see just how seriously everyone took this event.

But, that was then, and this is now.

Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft will be meeting for a rematch at SES San Jose 2009. According to Eric Enge, the president of Stone Temple Consulting, the teams have been changed as each search engine has brought in their best and brightest foosers -- and there's no telling if some of them are ringers.

Who will take home the the coveted Stonetemple Cup this year?

Will this match tell us what will be the dominant search engine of the future?

Will the matches tell us anything about the working relationship of the new tag-team wrestling team created by the Microsoft-Yahoo! deal?

Will Adam Lasnik or Maile Ohye of Google show up in cheerleading costumes?

You need to be there to know the results before everyone else has tweeted about them in the Twittersphere, posted the news for the blogosphere to comment on or Digg, or uploaded a video for the YouTube community to discover, watch and share.

In other words, don't wait to see the story on ESPN 8, "The Ocho" along with everyone else. Be in the front row to document the outcome yourself. The Tweeter, blogger, or YouTuber who posts the story first has the greatest chance of getting the most links.

Posted by Greg Jarboe on August 4, 2009, 6:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Can You Afford Not To Attend Search Engine Strategies San Jose?

Search Engine Strategies San Jose is less than a week away. As if the Micro-Hoo! search deal and what it means for you wasn't enough to get you to show up at the conference let me offer you some other key sessions that will prove to be invaluable in our current economic environment.

I had the pleasure of seeing Clay Shirky present at another conference recently and all I could say was WOW! He will leave the audience buzzing after his keynote.

Right after the keynote, I'll be presenting Always be Testing: Marketing Optimization in Challenging Times. Many organizations have limited the amount of testing and continuous improvement efforts in this poor economy, but it is a HUGE mistake. Let me ask you, 50 years ago if you had the chance to invest in General Motors or Toyota who would you have picked. Guess which one bet their business based on continuous improvement.

I am thrilled to see that the SES community is putting their skills to good use; don't miss the vitally important session - SEO for the Greater Good: Using Search to Find Missing Persons.

We all know how important it is to have web analytics today, but the challenge for many remains on how to monetize the data collected in those reports. Join me and my good friends, Avinash Kaushik, Analytics Evangelist for Google and Jim Sterne, who co-founded the Web Analytics Association, as we teach you How to Turn Your Web Analytics into a Money Making Machine. If you happen to be coming along with a colleague make sure you attend this session, while you send them to Integration: The New CMO Imperative. This session will look at how to leverage your content and brand effectively through the use of social media.

While many of the sessions focus on what you need to do to improve your results today, you won't want to miss Beyond Googling: Where Will Your Customers Be Searching in Five Years? With the growing popularity of the iPhone and other rich mobile experiences this will become a growing concern for every business.

Tuesday will end with my buddy and former client Ethan Giffin, CEO of GrooveCommerce and I doing our Extreme Makeover: Conversion Edition. Be there when we unveil the sites that were selected as we break down, how we find the challenges they are experiencing, what we would recommend to fix them and redesign the page so that they are ready to get better results.

On Wednesday, you'll have to make some tough choices. I am a big fan of helping small to medium size businesses get great results. If you are an SMB you won't want to miss Small Voices, Big Impact: Social Media for the Little Guy and Turning Simple Change Into Big Profit. Find out how small companies with even smaller budgets can freely tap the world of social media and make easy changes to improve business and increase sales.

I have the privilege to co-introduce Nicholas Fox, Business Product Management Director, AdWords, Google, for his keynote. Joining me in introducing Nick will be fellow Search Engine Strategies Advisory Board member Brett Crosby, also of Google.

If you are in the B2B space you must attend The BuyerSphere Project: Understanding B2B Buyer Patterns. You'll leave understanding how the traditional B2B buyers funnel is dead and buried and how to rethink your prospects journey.

The valuable sessions keep going all the way to the very last session of the conference, Extreme Makeover Live! Why Am I Not Making Enough Sales?. Join my colleague and analyst Brendan Regan and Darrell Benatar, Co-founder of Usertesting.com as they do a live clinic with website chosen from members of the audience. It's a shame visitors won't be able to see videos of users testing the websites with chosen during the session like you can see someone did for the Search Engine Strategies website here http://www.usertesting.com/SES_clip.html. In case you were wondering, the great folks at SES are already at work coming up with some solutions based on the wonderful advice.

My only question will you be coming along to Search Engine Strategies San Joseto get some of that great advice and then making the changes necessary to improve your business and increase sales?

Posted by Bryan Eisenberg on August 4, 2009, 4:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Google AdWords Launches Bid Simulator

If you've ever wondered what the performance of your paid search campaigns would be like with a different maximum CPC bid, then you're in luck. Google AdWords has launched bid simulator to help you do just that.

The bid simulator uses data from the previous 7 days to re-calculate the number of impressions you would have gotten if you'd had a higher bid.

SEW forum member kg84 tried out the bid simulator and had some concerns:

In theory, this is a cool tool. However, I have seen this tool recommend for many keywords, that rank very well and with optimal campaign budgets, that I should increase my bids by huge amounts (i.e. current bid $2.87 increase to $6.18 = 10 more impressions!! wow) Almost all keywords I check have suggested huge increases like that.

So, I reached out to Google and here's what a spokesperson had to say:

Shown bids are not recommendations but are simulations for various bids to give insight to the advertiser. The feature aims to show 'missed opportunity.' In this particular case, what the tool is telling the advertiser is that they only missed out on 10 impressions. Even bidding as high as $6 won't increase the number of impressions they got at their current bid.

It's an important point you'll want to keep in mind when you use the bid simulator. The simulated bids are to show what would happen if you did bid higher. In other words, they're not recommendations, just projection models. I suspect many search marketers will find the bid simulator will show that they really don't want to pay any more than they already are.

What do you think of the Bid Simulator? Let us know your impressions (pun fully intended) in the comments.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 4, 2009, 1:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Insights Into Linking Everyone Should Read

David Harry has once again given us some deep insights into the search algorithm and perceptions of linking that anyone in our industry should read.

The topic is an important one given linking is still the foundation of all major search engines. Harry gives a detailed account of the linking intent as seen through the engines, which in turn give us all a better perspective on how to do a more effective job when link building.

Great article mate. This one I will be touting at SES San Jose next week.

Posted by Frank Watson on August 4, 2009, 1:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The Few, The Proud, The Social Media-less

Apparently the Marines can protect our country, but when it comes to social media they are defenseless, as they banned use of social media - Twitter, Facebook and MySpace have been banned - effective immediately.

Thanks to Cheryl Phillips for bringing this to my attention - through Twitter.

As Phillips reported the Marine order stated:

"These internet sites in general are a proven haven for malicious actors and content and are particularly high risk due to information exposure, user generated content and targeting by adversaries. The very nature of SNS [social network sites] creates a larger attack and exploitation window, exposes unnecessary information to adversaries and provides an easy conduit for information leakage that puts OPSEC [operational security], COMSEC [communications security], [and] personnel...at an elevated risk of compromise."

I thought the Marines would have a cyber squad protecting against such activity. Guess they are just trying to stop Matthew Broderick's children from trying a modern day "War Games".

Posted by Frank Watson on August 4, 2009, 1:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

FTC to Continue Investigating Google/Apple Ties

Google CEO Eric Schmidt stepped down from Apple's Board of Directors earlier today, but the move is not enough to call off an ongoing FTC investigation. In reaction to the news, the FTC released a statement by Bureau of Competition Director Richard Feinstein:

We have been investigating the Google/Apple interlocking directorates issue for some time and commend them for recognizing that sharing directors raises competitive issues, as Google and Apple increasingly compete with each other. We will continue to investigate remaining interlocking directorates between the companies.

The FTC originally launched the investigation back in May. The investigation revolves around Section 8 of the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914, where problems arise if two companies are involved in more than 2% of each other's sales.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 3, 2009, 4:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Photo Contest Winner Featured Today on Bing

At the beginning of July, Bing launched a photo contest where the winner would be featured on the homepage. Bing features a new photo everyday with "hot spots" on various parts of the photograph linking to searches.

The winner is Jeremy Somers' image of lightning striking the skyline of Sydney, Australia. Somers was the fan favorite out of 9,400 eligible images. Check out the image below (click on it to go to Bing.com and see the larger image plus hot spots).

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 3, 2009, 3:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Google Launches Billboard Campaign to Promote Apps, Steal Microsoft Customers

Google has purchased billboard advertising along highways in 4 major metropolitan areas. The billboards are part of the "Going Google" campaign, which encourages companies to switch from whatever applications they're currently using (eh hmmm, Microsoft) to Google Apps.

Commuters in Boston, Chicago, New York and San Francisco will see a new billboard every day for four weeks. Google says the vinyl being used for each ad will be recycled.

1.75 million companies and organizations have "gone Google," according to the Mountain View, CA-based company. However, many IT departments are hesitant to switch due to security issues. They feel that whatever solution they're currently using is more secure than what Google is offering.

But this campaign seems to be directed at non-IT workers. It seems they want to get employees asking their bosses for Google Calendar and Google docs. It will be interesting to see if this approach works.

What do you think of the "Going Google" campaign? Leave a comment and let us know.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 3, 2009, 2:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Google CEO Resigns from Apple's Board of Directors

Amidst investigations from the FTC and FCC and with DOJ's antitrust head Christine Varney talking about how she wants to go after Google, Eric Schmidt has resigned from Apple's board of directors.

This has been inevitable. For awhile, the two companies didn't really compete. But now, with Google's Android mobile platform and plans for Chrome OS, Schmidt's place on the board was becoming questionable. (Schmidt did leave the room during the board's iPhone discussions, but with Chrome OS, he would barely be in attendance.)

Late last week, the FCC opened an inquiry as to why the Google Voice application was rejected for Apple's iPhone. And earlier this may, the FTC launched an antitrust investigation into the ties between the two companies.

Government investigation or not, it's wise for Schmidt to step down. There's very little left for him to contribute to as Google expands its business.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 3, 2009, 1:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

FCC Launches Inquiry Into Google Voice iPhone App Rejection

DowJones is reporting that the FCC is looking into the reason for the Google Voice application being rejected for the iPhone. They've sent letters to Google, Apple and AT&T seeking answers as to why the VOIP (voice over the internet protocol) app was rejected. The inquiry is part of a larger investigation to handset maker and carriers having exclusive deals with each other. The iPhone is sold exclusively on AT&T in the United States.

Personally, when I heard that the Google Voice app was rejected, I thought it was a giant publicity stunt by Apple and Google to show that they're not really anticompetitive. The FTC recently launched their own investigation into the ties between the two.

For its part, AT&T says it has nothing to do with the approval or rejection of apps. But they might want to revise their official answer, since they did reject Slingbox.

AT&T is likely concerned about two things - iPhone customers using VOIP instead of their minutes, plus the use of bandwidth is becoming a problem for the carrier (according to them).

Google Voice can still be used with an iPhone, but it requires calling an extra step or two than a normal phone call.

Stay tuned for this unfolding drama.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 3, 2009, 5:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

BrightRoll Unveils Performance Pricing for Online Video Advertising

BrightRoll is launching Performance Pricing models for online video advertisements. They are:

• Cost Per Engagement (CPE): cost per each user-initiated video engagement or start
• Cost Per Completed Video (CPV): cost based on successful user-initiated video completion
• Cost Per Click (CPC): cost per click on video advertisement

"Requests from advertisers seeking a broader portfolio of pricing options to better align with their plan objectives led us to release this pricing model innovation," said Tod Sacerdoti, BrightRoll's co-founder and CEO. "Performance Pricing demonstrates that there is no one right way to buy online video advertising. By letting customers pay on the metrics that most benefit their individual campaigns, we're continuing to remove inefficiencies in the video inventory buying process."

What do you think of BrightRoll's Performance Pricing? Let us know in the comments.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 1, 2009, 12:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Webtrends Acquires Multivariate Testing and Optimization Company, Widemile

Webtrends has acquired Widemile, adding their multivariate testing and optimization services to their offering. Widemile's platform provides advanced visitor segmentation, real-time reporting, intuitive wizards, and best practices training.

"Webtrends now offers the most open, elegant and powerful analytics and optimization platform available anywhere. Our customers want to further leverage the rich data set available with Webtrends Analytics, and Widemile's capabilities provide a natural path to help our customers achieve better performance and improved ROI," said Alex Yoder, Webtrends CEO.

The third-generation of Widemile's platform is known for its ease of use, algorithms and architecture, and reporting capabilities.

"The Widemile and Webtrends offerings fit naturally to address the macro challenges and opportunities facing our customers in the coming years," said Robert Bergquist, Widemile CEO and President. "The combination is a best-in-class integrated web analytics and optimization platform allowing users to plan online marketing programs with the assurance that built-in testing, targeting, and optimization solutions will maximize conversion rates."

Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 1, 2009, 12:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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