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Google is a Loser in a French Court, Again

For the second time in about two weeks were blogging about Google losing a trademark-infrigement case in France. News.com is reporting that a Paris District Court today ruled against Google in a October 2003 lawsuit filed by high-end fashion deisgner Louis Vuitton.

Google has been ordered to pay $257,430 (200,000 euros) for trademark counterfeiting, unfair competition and misleading advertising.

Louis Vuitton applauded the ruling, highlighting the danger that some sponsored search results tied to its name can promote counterfeits. "It was absolutely unthinkable that a company like Google be authorized, in the scope of its advertising business, to sell the Louis Vuitton trademark to third parties, specifically to Web sites selling counterfeits," a company representative said in a statement via e-mail.

"This milestone ruling grants protection for the first time to both consumers and brand owners by finding that Google's Adwords and Premium Sponsorship services as misleading

More in the article, Google loses trademark case in France.

On January 20, we posted about Google losing a trademark case filed in France by Le Meridien Hotels and posted a translation of that decision a few days later.

Search Advertising Comes of Age

John Markoff and Nat Ives from The New York Times take a two page look at search advertising in: Web Search Sites See Clicks Add Up to Big Ad Dollars.

The article says that web advertising has come of age since several Super Bowl advertisers are also Google advertising "regulars."

"In the past, advertising has been hard to track and hard to make accountable," said Tim Armstrong, Google's vice president for advertising sales. Now, he said, advertising has become a dialogue with the consumer.

Also, positive comments about search advertising from a Berkeley professor.

"You're seeing advertising move into advertising that people can seek out, and moving away from mass advertising," said Peter Sealey, a former Coca-Cola marketing executive who now teaches at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. "In the context of that shift, this little niche of Internet search will be a huge beneficiary."

Bill Gross, the founder of the first pay-per-click company, GoTo.com (which became Overture and now owner by Yahoo!) tells The Times that he never thought that keyword/ppc advertising would become as big as it is.

"I thought that the Internet was fantastic, and I was sure that it would become the ultimate direct marketing tool," he said yesterday. "But I had no idea that pay-per-click would ultimately be this big."

Gross launched his latest search effort, Snap.Com in 2004.

Time-Warner Owns More than 5 Million Shares of Google

The Reuters article: Broadband boosts Time-Warner profit discusses the media conglmerates latest earnings and also points out that T-W is a major shareholder of Google stock. If you check the SEC filing you'll find a section about Google.

Further, in relation to Google, in May 2004, America Online exercised a warrant for approximately $22 million and received approximately 7.4 million shares of Series D Preferred Stock of Google Inc. Each of these shares converted automatically into shares of Google’s Class B Common Stock immediately prior to the closing of Google’s initial public offering on August 24, 2004. In connection with this offering, America Online converted 2,355,559 shares of its Google Class B Common Stock into an equal number of shares of Google’s Class A Common Stock. Such Class A shares were sold in the offering for $195 million, net of the underwriters’ discounts and commissions, resulting in a gain of approximately $188 million. Following this transaction, America Online holds 5,081,893 shares of Google’s Class B Common Stock...The Company does not consider its remaining interest in Google to be a strategic investment.

Two major "institutional shareholders", Fidelity Management and Capital Research & Management own approximately the same amount of shares.

Search Marketing To The Hispanic Market

Nacho Hernandez, one of our forum moderators and a regular SES speaker, has preached for ages that the Hispanic market is a largely untapped one by search marketers. Gaining Web Site Traction With a Spanish Flare from MediaPost hands out some numbers to back the idea that online marketers need to be tapping into Hispanics. Meanwhile, also considering checking out hispaSEO -- a directory of SEM firms that deal with Spanish language web sites that was started at the end of last year. Also see our forum thread SearchInsider's "Gaining Web Site Traction With a Spanish Flare" to discuss that article, plus our SearchDay article from earlier this year, Search Marketing & the Spanish Speaking Internet.

Google Satire Times Three

Spotted via John Battelle, Through The Looking Glass Pt. II: The Google Guys is a satirical stream-of-consciousness style look at Larry and Sergey doing Davos. A sampling:

• I enter the chamber where they are holding court and survey a spread of the best chocolates, wines, cheese, pretty much anything. Come. Eat. Be a Shiny Happy Person...
• How about Sergey and Larry action figures, fighting the evil overlord Bill with their sunshine superpowers and mega Power Rangers dual mind...
• We're in GoogleLand, which is a higher level of dream than just Davos. It has its own reality distortion field, its own laws of gravity....
• It's actually not fair that there are two GoogleGuys. As a challenge, they should give Larry to Microsoft and play more fairly...

Meanwhile, The Onion predicts in infographic form what Google will be doing this year. A sampling:

• Google Good Men, as good men are hard to find
• Google Apartment, for finding lost shoes, wallets and keys
• A patent on the concept of finding things
• Add a "I'm Feeling Unlucky" button to the home page

Finally, at Fark.com, people with too much time and PhotoShop have been making things strange and wonderful with the Google home page. Winners so far:

• Google Zen
• Google People Who Will Sleep With You
• Google Treasure Hunt
• Google Security Wand
• Google Colon: Search your lower GI tract for things that shouldn't be there
• Smeagle, for finding precious
• Googel: Serch phonetically for werd you don't know how to spel
• Google Ex-Girlfriends

Feeling Like Google Dance Time

The days of Google Dances, the monthly changes that used to shake up Google's index, have long gone. But that doesn't mean that the company doesn't keep tweaking and changing things that can have an impact on search results, sometimes in a big way. And one of those big ways seems to be happening, based on chatter on our forums. Here are a few threads you might wish to check out:

• Major Google Changes: Latent Semantic Analysis?
• Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI)
• Compilation of Anti-Sandbox Tactics

Also see:

• Google Assigning Less Weight to Links? where Barry Schwartz recaps chatter on other forums.
• Google Latent Semantic Indexing Technology from Aaron Wall trying to provide some background on LSI and what to do if it really is being used to some degree by Google. Not all agree on this.

SEO For Video Search

Spotted via SearchViews, Video Search and Online Marketing from Search Engine Journal is a brief look trying to rise to the top of Yahoo Video and other video search services.

Google Annual Shareholders Meeting On May 12

The Buygoogle blog has news that even though the Google Investors Relations FAQ doesn't yet have the date of its annual shareholders meeting posted, the first one will be May 12 in Mountian View. Nathan at InsideGoogle has a copy of an email sent out from Google confirming the date.

Safa Sez: Search Worth $14 Billion In 2007, But No One Amazed

Piper Jaffray analyst Safa Rashtchy has been covering the paid search space for ages, offering one of the earliest independent predictions of future spending. Rashtchy's Golden Search Turns Platinum from MediaPost looks at how his March 2003 projection that search would hit $7 billion was greated with amazement, while his recent November 2004 estimate increasing that figure to $13.5 billion seems to have caused hardly a ripple. Why? "I think search is now accepted as a big business," Rashtchy said. In this article, a closer look at his latest estimates -- though as always, I dispute that "contextual search" is search or that those figures should be lumped in with search.

Deepy Aims For Broadband Searchers

Billed as a search engine for broadband users, Deepy provides access to Gigablast-powered search results along with a "View TextShot" feature that lets you preview a page before viewing it. It's somewhat similar to the binoculars feature at Ask Jeeves that lets you see a preview of a web site. Much more similar is the preview feature that Vivisimo offers. Pretty cool is the "Jump to keyword" feature that lets you jump to your keywords in the preview. Tabs at the bottom of the page also let you jump to the next page of results without a reload page delay -- or at least, much of one. To learn more, check out entries on Deepy's blog. Image results, by the way, come from Picsearch.

GoFish Multimedia Shopping Search: IceRocket Deal & Closer Look

Multimedia shopping search engine GoFish gained its first significant partnership this week, now providing the multimedia results for meta search engine IceRocket (this PDF press release has more details). Significant is a relative term, of course -- while IceRocket counts billionaire Mark Cuban as an investor, it has practically no usage or brand reach compared to one of the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo or even Ask Jeeves.

How about some more about GoFish? We've covered it briefly here, GoFish For Meta Music Searching, but I took a closer look for this post. On the site, you'll find Audio, Video, Mobile and Games tabs. Going in turn:

Audio: Dominated mostly by bringing back matches for online music stores or audio book information. Who are the providers? GoFish didn't provide a list as requested. Looking at the site, Napster, MusicMatch, iTunes and Buy.com are just some of the music partners I've spotted. There may be many more -- and a list explaining exactly what GoFish taps into would be very useful. Audio book listings seem to come from Audible.

In short, this seems like a nice way to meta search for music you may want to buy. For example, here's a range of options for purchasing Aimee Mann's I'm With Stupid album. But when it comes to buying individual songs, choice might get more restricted, as this example for Long Shot from that same album shows.

Video: Searches here seem to be dominated by places where you can buy DVDs online, so it feels like more of a DVD shopping search engine. But some multimedia videos that can be purchased are also shown.

The key thing is, unlike a Yahoo Video or AOL's Singingfish, the content here is not originally crawled nor for free. This is more a meta search for places where you can buy video content. What would be cool is if it did meta search of some of the many free video search sites that are out there. Gary has a roundup of these here: A Look At Other Video Search Tools.

Mobile: Ringtones, wallpaper, games for your mobile or cell phone -- searching here brings back matching results. So if I want the Thunderbirds theme for my phone? Here are matching results. And as with audio and video, the results are from places where I can purchase the content, not get it for free.

Games: Like the other categories, do a search here and you'll get back matching computer game products from various vendors for sale.

In the end, calling GoFish a multimedia meta search site would be a misnomer. This is a shopping site for multimedia search -- and very promising, if you're looking to purchase that type of content. I'd like to see a list of all the providers it taps into, or at least a sampling of major partners.

Search Forums Roundup: Feb. 4, 2005

Today's SearchDay, Search Engine Forums Spotlight, features our weekly links to this week's hot topics from search engine forums across the web: Yahoo Testing Contextual Search Tool - MSN Launches Search Engine - Turning AdWords On/Off - Does Adsense Help With Link Building? - Hand Coding vs. HTML Editors, and more.

Expect Convera's New Public Web Engine by Mid 2005

In early December I blogged about Convera, a popular player in enterprise search, planning to launch a publicly available open web engine. Today, I spotted a news release from Convera with news that they will release the new service in the next two quarters.

MSN Search's RSS Feeds

When I did my write-up on the new MSN Search site, I'd mentioned that RSS feeds of search results were available but clunky in how to get them. That's because at the time of the write-up, MSN had told me that they didn't have any special links you could use to get them. But that quickly changed once the launch actually happened. Do a search, and at the bottom of the results page you should find an orange RSS box. Use that to subscribe to a feed of that search.

What exactly do you get when subscribing? The top results for the first page of the query you are monitoring. The feed then checks back on whatever schedule you've set with your feed reader to recover any new entries. Say you check once per day. If two new sites rotate into the top results, then you'd get sent a post of each individually.

Important note! If you are outside the US, even if you subscribe to US results, you'll still get those related to the country you are in. For example, I'm in the UK. I can override MSN trying to force me to the MSN UK site as I've written before. But I can't do this within my feeds.

MSN says it's aware of this bug and hopes to correct it in the next few weeks.

Disabling Google Ads With Bots?

Botnets strangle Google Adwords campaigns from The Register looks at how bots might be used to generate views of ads on Google but not clicks. Why? A low clickthrough rate might get the ad disabled, making it easier for a competitor to then come in at a lower price.

How Much Are Top Rankings Worth?

How much is being in the top results of a search engine worth? Wired tries but doesn't really get an monetary answer to the question in Googling the Bottom Line. Yep, we know that top rankings can generate traffic. A Oneupweb study of 30 clients done for Wired found that getting on the second or third page of the results increases traffic five times in the first month, nine times in the second. Move to page one, and it's even better -- I think.

The study says traffic will triple in the first month, then increase six times in the second. So my traffic goes up five times if I'm on the second or third page but only three times for being on the first page. Yes, that's exactly right, according to the study. Here are the figures:

So when the report concludes:

Oneupweb performed this study hypothesizing that being in the top 10 results is better than being in the top 30—and being below the top 30 is like being invisible. Clearly, the study establishes that trend.

The figures seemingly say the opposite. Want more traffic? Get on the second or third page of results!

That flies completely against what every search marketer knows from seeing their own stats. Fall from the top ten, and your traffic falls off as surely as gravity pulls things to earth. So I called Oneupweb to try and better understand what is going on. Here are the caveats.

First, traffic is based solely off of natural search generated referrals. They looked at how much traffic a site got from non-paid Google search results one month, then compared to the next month.

Sites coming into the second and third page of results started out with less traffic. So when they arrived, the increase was more dramatic. That's the reason Oneupweb says the 2nd/3rd page results are higher.

Specifically:

• Sites entering the 2nd/3rd page started at 7 visitors per keyword on average, then rose to 36 visitors per keyword.
• Sites entering the 1st page started at 14 visitors per keyword on average, then rose to 46 visitors.
• Since the 1st page sites already started with more traffic, the gain on a percentage basis was less dramatic.

But here's another confusing aspect. The report also says:

When Oneupweb reviewed the list of sites achieving a top-10 position for a particular search term, we noted that more than 75 percent debuted there, without previous listings on Google pages 2 or 3.

and:

In keeping with the industry’s rule of thumb, Oneupweb confirmed that websites falling below page three don't sell. In our research, not one sale was recorded for a site below Google page three for the time period.

So...

• More than three-quarters of the sites that hit the first page of results "debuted" there...
• Which means they were originally buried below the first three pages of results where no traffic is generated...
• So how did that group of sites end up having more natural search traffic to begin with than the 2nd/3rd page group?

One more thing to complicate matters. Say you were a site that debuted on the 2nd or 3rd page of results. The next month, you move to the first page (as anecdotally can often be the case). The gain you get is still recorded as part of being in the 2nd or 3rd page of results -- even though you really were on the first page.

Given that, it seems no wonder you have a nine time increase in the second months. A number of sites making the jump onto the first page of results probably fueled this.

One more excerpt from the study I had to pull out:

Oneupweb's study demonstrates a clear benefit to being listed on the first three pages of Google results and may even prompt online retailers to target Google’s first page.

I don't know anyone period, retailer or not, who doesn't already want to be on the first page of Google's results. They don't need a study to prompt them :)

Back to the Wired article. Can this traffic a make-or-break an online business? Depends on the business. If you've built your business around getting only free search traffic, yes, it can be make or break, as many found during the big Google Florida Update in late 2003. If you do a mix of paid and unpaid listings, the unpaid listings save you money -- but they probably won't break you if they go away.

For another look at page position and visibility, see the iProspect study from last year. It found:

• 22.6 percent of search engine users end their search after viewing the first few results returned
• an additional 18.6 percent stop after reading the entire first page of results (41.2% cumulative)
• 25.8 percent more abandon their search after the first two pages
• 14.7 percent (81.7% cumulative) wait until they view three pages

More Google & Yahoo Employee Blogs

I posted earlier about a list of Google and Yahoo employee blogs. Here are two more spotted via Nathan at InsideGoogle, one for Google, one for Yahoo. And Microsoft employee blogs? Nathan notes blogs.msdn.com is the place for them.

Google Pitches Blogger On AdSense; Blogger Not Amused

Spotted via Anil Dash, Google's AdSense spam from Overstated documents how Google's trying to enlist Blogdex and other popular blog sites to carry its AdSense listings.

You do have to chuckle, though:

They've been pushing really hard for me to put AdSense on Blogdex, presumedly because it has high PageRank.

No, they want the site because they think it's popular among people visiting it. PageRank is just how popular the site is in terms of links pointing at it. If they only wanted high PageRank sites, Google would just go out and make whatever sites they want to have high PageRank scores. That wouldn't mean people are visiting them, though.

There's also some confusion between a pitch to carry Google AdSense ads -- ads that actually appear on the site -- and the new Google Referral program that pays for leads to others who are willing to carry the ads.

Anyway, some fun reading of the actual letters Google is sending out, along with a marketing PowerPoint presentation that's heavy on the "we want bloggers" pitch.

You gotta feel a little sorry for Google. As Anil points out, first Google took flak for not letting bloggers into AdSense. Now they get flak for going after them.

SMA-UK Takes Flak Over Lack Of Updates

The honeymoon is over for SMA-UK, as SMA-UK get's a Kickin' in the Forums over at Threadwatch notes. The failure to update the site with information has drawn criticism. SMA responds in the thread above, saying things have gone slower than wanted -- but that the group only wants to update when it has real news to report.

Certainly an update on the kick-off meeting that was held back in December would be a good addition. I noted back in January that this happened but had yet to appear on the SMA-UK web site.

Posting the mailings that have gone out to the SMA-UK interest group would also help. That let me know that SMA-UK was at the halfway post, as I also reported in January. But visiting the site, you'd never know this.

There is plenty going on, as the Threadwatch comments reveal as various people within the SMA-UK working group respond to critics. Even better would be for this news to be on the SMA-UK site itself.

Yahoo Seeks SEM Manager

Nice mention by Barry of Yahoo wanting someone to do search engine marketing for its own properties. It's not the first search engine to do this. Others like LookSmart and Inktomi have, as well. It's not even that new for Yahoo. I've written before about it running ads on Google and a campaign on European search engines to drive traffic. Question is, will the Yahoo SEM person go black hat on getting traffic from Google?

Australians To Gather And Talk Search Marketing

Search Engine Room being held April 12 in Sydney will cover various aspects of search marketing in an all-day agenda. Cost is $475 Australian.

Google AdWords Review 2004

Dave Krane, Google's acting vice president of corporate communications, has posted a link off his personal blog to what looks like an internal slideshow made up for Google employees celebrating and informing them about the Google Adwords program that pays the bills.

Gruuve Offers Multimedia Search

Got an email from GRUUVE, a multimedia search engine that says it crawls the web to find audio, video, image and text files organized by artists. Over 20 million files are said to be indexed, so far. Worth a look. Some things are impressive; some not. Gwen Stefani has no discography, it appears. Audio and video listings are sparse, to say the least. Showing PowerPoints files would have been cool if the Gwen that created them was Orange County's-own Gwen Stefani, but they aren't. But the photo listings were pretty cool, as were the Topix-powered blog & news listings.

Average Keyword Prices Drop For First Time Since September

The Keyword Price Index from Fathom Online for January showed a 3 percent drop from last month, the first decline since the index began in September. The average keyword price dropped from $1.70 in in December to $1.64 in January. The chart below gives a per category breakdown:

The mortgage and broadband categories were the only ones to rise. Mortgage is now the only category to consistently show month-to-month rises since the index began.

The wireless category saw a severe drop. After months of being around the $1.09 mark, it dropped to $0.79. Fathom speculates this might be to do a drop off in giving phones as gifts, now that the holiday shopping period has passed.

Below, a graphical look at the prices over time. Prices for the mortgage category are broken out from the others, so that you can better see trends:

SEM Firms Get Specialized

What to do when search marketing firms seem a dime a dozen? Specialize. Over a year ago, we saw Local Launch dive to focus on local search. SEO PR has been out for even longer focusing on search as a public relations tool. Here's a recent example, from ClickZ: Icrossing Moves Beyond Search. The company is branching out into reputation management and monitoring.

SciNet For Science & Tech Info

Looking for science and technology information? You might check out SciNet, a long standing service that provides search results focused to this area. It lists thousands of sites that have been submitted over the past years plus has a collection of photos in different scientific areas -- though unfortunately, you can review these via thumbnails all at once. This site also offers original content on various topics.

Search Engine Optimization For New MSN Search

In our SEO for MSN thread in the forums, members are looking at the new MSN Search site and discussing what seems best to improve rankings there. Looking for tips or want to contribute? Stop by!

Google Local Moves To Home Page But Stays In Beta

News from Google that its Google Local service has now moved to the home pages of the US-based Google site and Google Canada. Previously, the service was only accessible to those who knew to go directly to the Google Local site or who saw Google Local results inserted into Google through a OneBox display.

Despite the move, the service remains in beta. First launched as a Google Labs project in September 2003, then released as a formal beta in March 2004, Google Local has been in development for between a year and two and a half years, depending on what start date you go with.

Either way is a long time and adds further fuel to the fire of Google not knowing how to get products out of beta. More telling is the fact that Google previously had suggested that Google Local would only make it to the home page when the beta process was over. From my story about Google losing its tab interface last year:

Google Local Search, rolled out earlier this month, does not appear as a search link on the home page. Google doesn't believe the service is yet developed enough for this type of visibility to be given.

"This is a long way from its lab launch, but it's still a product that's in beta," said Marissa Mayer, Google's director of consumer web products, when talking with Search Engine Watch editors about the local launch earlier this month. "When we are more comfortable taking it out of beta, I think then we'd be really look at adding a tab."

So why does Froogle, also in beta, get home page visibility? That product was launched well over a year ago, and recently Froogle was upgraded. Apparently, this tipped the scales in its favor.

For more on Google and its growing beta problem, see NYT On Yahoo's US Gains & Google's Endless Betas, More On The Endless Betas Of Google, and if you're a Search Engine Watch member, my Breaking Out Of Google's Beta Limbo that charts when major Google services were launched and how they they were (or still are) in beta.

For those keeping score, it's now 5 of 7 major services on the home page -- or 71 percent -- remaining in beta. That's if you're a Google Desktop user. If you're not, then it's 4 out of 6 major services in beta or 66 percent.

For more on Google Local, see these past articles from Search Engine Watch:

• Local Search Part 2: Google & Mobilemaps Bring Back Geosearching: On Google's local product that first appeared in September 2003.
   
• Google Pushes Local Search Into the Limelight: On Google Local moving out of Google Labs in March 2004.
   
• Google Enhances Local Search: On changes made to the service in September 2004 but problems that still remain.
   
• New Google Local Sites: On Google Local sites beyond the US and Canada
   
• More On FAST Beats Google For AOL Local: On major Google partner AOL deciding against using Google's local results.

Yahoo Testing YQ "Search By Example" Tool

Yahoo is launching a new tool that lets you submit all or part of a web page that you're viewing as a search query, rather than the traditional method of typing words into a search box. The tool, called Y!Q, analyzes the content you've submitted and extracts the most relevant terms from the page, and presents results accordingly.

It's an interesting idea. Northern Light used to allow searchers to cut and paste an entire web page as a search query, but you had no way to refine results. Y!Q allows you to tweak results in several ways, even letting you add subsequent search result pages into the mix with just a click of a link. Today's SearchDay article, Yahoo Offers New Contextual Search Tool, describes this cool new utility, available for both Internet Explorer and Firefox browsers.

Want to discuss? Would adding sponsored links make this a threat to Google AdSense? Join the discussion in our forum thread, Yahoo Testing Contextual Search Tool.

Topix.net and NY Times Announce Deal

Topix.net has made a deal with the New York Times. The AP is reporting that The Times has purchased the right to have some headlines featured on various Topix category pages (aka channels).

The New York Times will have three of its story headlines featured at the top of 80 categories for an undisclosed price. All but a few of the topics are focused on New York City and New York state.

``This is significant because even if you are the biggest and best newspaper on the Web, you still want to increase your audience,'' said Topix CEO Rich Skrenta.

More in the article: New York Times buys featured position on Topix.

Congrats to Rich Skrenta and the rest of the Topix.net team. As I said a few weeks ago, Topix.net is a resource I visit and use several times a day.

The Butler Now Has a Weblog

Ask Jeeves has launched a weblog. The AJ Weblog joins blogs from Yahoo, Google, and MANY other search providers. The first post shares some info about and photos of the new AJ offices in Oakland, CA. You'll also find links to the Bloglines popular feeds list as well as a weblog search button. A click on the Ask Jeeves weblog button sends the query to the Bloglines database. You'll find the Ask Jeeves feed here.

Google's Stock Soars One Day After Earnings Announcement

It's likely you've heard about Google's earnings announcement that beat all estimates. Today, shares of GOOG closed up more than $14 (7.33%).

Here are some numbers:
+ Earnings Q4 2004: 204.1 million or 71 cents per share, compared to net income of $27.3 million, or 10 cents per share, at the same time in 2003.
+ Revenue Q4: $1.03 billion, more than doubling from $512.2 million in the prior year.
+ For the Year 2004: Revenues were $3.2 billion, resulting in net income of $399 million, or $2.07 a share.
More numbers in the article listed below. The complete SEC filing is summarized in this news release.

Press Review:
Google Hits Record Revenue Levels (via Clickz)

On AdSense: Co-Founder and President of Technology Sergey Brin would only say, 'We've obviously started in that market very, very recently and I think we're going to see big improvements -- we're working on big improvements -- which will improve the monetization rates there.
In the fourth quarter, the company spent just $76 million on both sales and marketing.

Google's Q4 Profits Soar (via Media Post)

"The fact that they're continuing to do so well emphasized their dominance in the paid search space," said eMarketer Analyst David Hallerman. "That the name has become a verb describes how strong Google has become. That gives them the traffic."

Google sees profits surge (via News.com)

"Google had an exceptional quarter," company CEO Eric Schmidt said in a statement. "Revenues and profits increased significantly, our execution was solid across the company, and, most importantly, our relationship with our users, partners and advertisers became even stronger."

Google Tops Views, But Big Challenges Await Search Giant (via Investors Business Daily)

"Historically, there has been demand for the stock," said Youssef Squali, an analyst for Jefferies & Co. "But you're talking about 100 million shares that could potentially hit the market. The stock could fall. The jury is out."

The company, which gets nearly all of its revenue from ads, continues to cash in on the growth of paid search, or ads strategically placed on search results pages.

Some say Google's service and its founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page have become cultural icons. Add in the success of the stock -- it went out Aug. 19 at $85 a share and trades near 192 -- and Google shows no signs of slowing, says Squali. "These guys continue to benefit from unbelievable free publicity," Squali said.

Visualize A Weblogs "Neighborhood"

Findory, the "personalized" news and weblog tool (yes, you can also search the database) has introduced a new service today.

It's now possible to "visualize" a blogs "neighborhood." In other words, you can see how "connected" or "related" a specific blog is to others. The more connected, the bigger the point size. The smaller the point size the less connected. You can click here to see the Search Engine Watch Blog neighborhood or here to see Boing Boing's neighborhood.

To find "neighborhoods" for other blogs:
1) Search Findory for the blogs title
2) Find an article from the blog and click on the "title" link
3) Look for the "neighborhoods" link on the right side of the page

How does Findory determine what makes up a neighborhood? Greg Linden tells us,

Findory's weblog neighborhoods are determined by a combination of overlap in what the blogs are writing about and overlap between readers of the blogs. It is based on content and aggregate reader behavior.

Feedster's New Look

The Scott on Feedster blog notes that Feedster has just introduced a new and I must say sleeker looking user interface. It includes a list (updated every three minutes) with some of the latest search queries. If you want to compare the new UI with the old one, here's a cached copy of how Feedster used to look. Scott Johnson points out that a great deal of the development was done by FaganFinder's, Michael Fagan (he's interning at the Feedster hq for the next few months). Thanks to SC for the news tip.

Big Company SEO Can Take Time

Corporate SEO Implementation: From the Inside Out from ClickZ looks at how SEO can be a complicated process when trying to push across search engine friendliness changes through a bureaucratic structure.

IBM's WebFountain Takes A Blow

IBM's WebFountain search engine has gotten some attention in the past as a potential Google killer, though it was never released to the public in that way. Instead, the company positioned it as a high-level tool for web data mining. That use just took a blow, given that Factiva has dropped its partnership to use WebFountain for reputation monitoring. Indexing refresh was said to be too slow.

More here from Information World Review: Factiva to drop IBM's WebFountain. Also see IBM and Search for some links to more information on WebFountain, Monitoring Super Bowl Ad "Buzz" for mentions of some competing reputation tracking tools and IBM's WebFountain Launched–The Next Big Thing? for a past write-up on the IBM-Factiva partnership.

Search Executives Talk Local

Local search initiatives continue to build momentum, and no wonder: By most accounts, between 20 and 40 percent of all search engine queries have some sort of local intent. In today's SearchDay article, Meet the Local Search Engines, Shari Thurow covers a recent Search Engine Strategies conference where executives from Overture, Ask Jeeves and AOL discussed their local search programs and the opportunities they provide for search marketers.

Google Upping 101K Page Index Limit?

Tara over at ResearchBuzz notes that Google seems to have lifted the 101K limit on indexing HTML files that it has long had: Has Google Dropped Their 101K Cache Limit? Gary and I played some more yesterday to test this and found an example briefly that showed its true -- sort of.

I'd love to put up a live link showing this, but it disappeared almost as soon as we found it. Tara updated her blog to note the same strange disappearing act happened to her. But she also noted that what Google says it reports for a page in its search results listings may differ from what it shows actually cached.

Here's an example to explain more. This search at Google brings up a page I know is larger than 101K, the archive of all blog postings we've done in December:

Search Engine Watch Blog: December 2004 Archives
... I've compiled these lists of search patents and ... My first compilation on the SEW site
was posted on ... Applications Systems and methods for searching using queries ...
blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/0412 - 101k - 1 Feb 2005 - Cached - Similar pages

Look in the last line of the page's listing, and you'll see that Google says it is 101K long. In reality, it's 633K. That's how big it is if you were to save the file without images to your hard drive. For example, right-click on the link, save the file to your hard drive, and that's how much information is in there. The 101K figure is simply how much of the page Google has actually recorded.

Now let's go to Google's text-only cache of the page. If Google has only indexed 101K of the page, then it should end abruptly about one-sixth of the way down. In this case, it does.

Now here's another example where things get weird:

ResourceShelf
ResourceShelf, ... ResourceShelf is Compiled & Edited By Gary Price, MLIS Gary Price Library & Internet Research Consulting gary@ resourceshelf.com Gary's Bio ...
tinyurl.com/jnpm - 101k - Cached - Similar pages

That's 226K. And when Gary checked this page yesterday, briefly Google reported it nearly the same (actually slightly larger), as the screenshot below shows:

Now back to the cached-text version Google has of the page. If only 101K is actually indexed, then only about half of the page's content should only show in the cache. Instead, the content of the actual page looks to be the same as the cached page.

One more test. I looked for a string of text that only appears on this page and also near the bottom of the page. If Google is indexing all the text, it should have brought the page up for the query. That didn't happen. It found a page from Gary's research news site, but not the same one.

So...something's going on, but what exactly isn't clear. I did ask Google about it but haven't gotten back a formal answer yet. Instead, I got an informal "isn't interesting what you can spot" type of thing that typically means Google is doing something but isn't sure if they want to come right out and say it, because it might not last.

Examples? Barry notes that some are seeing the return of a Google "Search Harder" button that the company has never announced, or the Google Frequent Searcher counter feature that rolled out quietly in limited form, then disappeared.

For a rundown on how much of a web page each major search engine officially says it indexes, see