Posted in • Search Engines News • Google

So Google is buying YouTube for 1.65 billion in stock. Is paying that much for a company that hasn’t made a dime another example of the Web 2.0 bubble buzz? Does this mean Eric Schmidt, Sergey Brin and Larry Page are all ”moronic” as Mark Cuban suggests?

Or is Mark Cuban nuts for not seeing the potential and that YouTube will be smooth enough of a salesman to settle the nerves of media giants, encouraging them to make deals instead of lawsuits? Partnerships with CBS, Sony BMG, and Universal music groups may just be the beginning of a lucrative long term opportunity.

Is Om Malik going to lose 40 pounds? Jenny Craig awaits.

Is Yahoo going to be left in the dust of the video sharing/social networking space?

Whether it is a good deal or not, we’ll find out in a year or two but one thing is for sure, Sequoia Capital are the ones who made out like bandits on this one. Half a billion for an 11.5 million investment. Booyah!

Submitted by RL
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Posted in • Search Engines News

I discovered a choice quote right at the end of this New York Times article on the latest search engine innovations and directions.

“What is remarkable in the data is that two-thirds of Internet users are quite naïve and clueless about what they’re doing with search engines,” Dr. Fallows said. “While so many people use the Internet, only a third are really working with it and using it much more in their daily lives.”

I don’t have an answer to this. Are search engines still too confusing to use? Are users simply lazy and don’t want to bother learning simple things like using quotes in searches? Should they have to? Are there too many media and content specific search sites? Google video search, A9 yellow pages, Google Suggest, local searches for Google and Yahoo need to be prefixed by “local”.

The choices and options are overwhelming.

Submitted by RL
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Posted in • Search Engines News • Google

One Google tool comes out of beta (Google Desktop) while another goes into beta. Google Suggest.

When a user types in a term Google comes up with a list of 10 possible terms and the number of total results pool per term in real time. It seems to grab your first word to start.

Refining the options by factoring the other words as you type may be more useful. For instance, typing in cheesecake will give cheesecake recipes but not strawberry cheesecake recipes. Maybe I’m not using a good example but you know what I mean.

Submitted by RL
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Posted in • Search Engines News • Yahoo • Search Engine Rumors

What do Yahoo’s text ads that’s rumored to be coming soon look like?

I followed the link from Cnet’s article about Yahoo text ads to an alleged Yahoo employee’s site and grabbed this.

Submitted by RL
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Posted in • Search Engines News • Yahoo • Search Engine Rumors

{embed="search-engine/ads"}An interesting item on Cnet about Yahoo to be entering the lucrative text ad serving business for small publishers.

Well it’s only a matter of time before Yahoo launches their own Adsense like text ad serving program for small publishers. Search engines and advertisers all seem to be jumping on the long tail these days.

Google has had the field to themselves for almost two years now. Now that Yahoo/Overture has the advantage of reviewing Adsense over that time let’s hope they can improve on some of Adsense’s shortcomings.

Some things that immediately come to mind.

Smarter Ad Matching

Google is mostly effective for tightly focused sites and pages but seems hopelessly retarded when it comes to long pages that cover a range of topics, like blog home pages. Adsense often places public service announcements in ad spots when it’s confused about the content which means no payout for the publisher. Or in other cases wholly innappropriate ads get tossed onto the page. Yahoo/Overture’s track record when reviewing their ads on larger publishers’ sites has been spotty.

Transparency

Publishers are totally left in the dark when it comes to percentage of revenue payout. How much money from each click is the publisher getting paid? How much did the advertiser pay per click? Google is mum on this. Publishers are dependent on Google’s good graces on paying out a fair percentage. They have the ability to lower the percentage and site owners will have no hard data to call them on. I have inexplicably noticed large dips in payouts on one of my sites recently. Traffic remains consistent, I still show up on main key words but the payout has dropped to about half. Is this what “do no evil” means?

Allowing Competing Ad Networks on Same Page

This is going to be a sticky one. Google currently won’t allow another competing ad network’s text ads on the same page. This from Google’s Adsense eligibility faq.

However, we do not permit Google ads to be published on web pages that also contain what could be considered competing ads. This would include all content-targeted ads as well as text-based ads. Text-based ads, for this situation, can be loosely defined as ads that mimic Google texts ads or appear to be associated with Google text ads on your site. We do allow affiliate or limited-text links.

Will Yahoo be more open?

Click Fraud

This is an issue that affects the whole industry and everyone involved from the engines, advertisers and publishers. How about this proposal? All the search engines should form a consortium to develope tools and methods for detecting click fraud and share the results among themselves. Otherwise if this issue gets overly problematic advertisers will simply go elsewhere, knocking out a major revenue generator for both the SE’s and publishers alike.

Whatever happens with Yahoo’s entry into text ad serving for small publishers, the initial offshoot will most likely be a boost to it’s stock price and put pressure on Google’s.

Submitted by RL
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Posted in • Search Engines News • Google Google, trading on their reputation in web search released their desktop search beta last year. Now the official version one Google Desktop release is out and available for download. That swishy logo seems rather fancy for Google doesn't it? Maybe all that IPO money is making them go all crazy and wild! Submitted by RL
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Posted in • Search Engines News Ebay launched Kijiji an international Craiglist like classified ads site. What took you so long Ebay? Craiglist didn't want to sell you the whole thing? So far it looks like Kijiji is outside of the US and no speaka English. Countries covered so far:

• Germany
• France
• Italy
• Japan
• Taiwan
• China
• Canada

Submitted by RL
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Posted in • Search Engines News

Part two of E Commerce Times article on the future of search starts with many blind folded dart tosses. Google to launch voip in the UK, Google to buy an RSS aggregator, Yahoo to make a big blog play. Hoo boy, playing what if is fun isn’t it?

Some market share numbers.
“Why so much focus on Google? Because it’s the 800-pound gorilla, serving 47 percent of the search market, according to Nielson//NetRatings. Yahoo serves 21 percent and Microsoft’s (Nasdaq: MSFT) Latest News about Microsoft MSN handles 13 percent. However, that market share is not exclusive. Nielson says there is crossover. Fifty-eight percent of searchers also say they use Yahoo and MSN.”

The article then goes on to say sponsored links on blogs will be the “next probable venue”. Uh… people, that’s already happening. Look at all the blogs running Adsense ads, look at blogads, Adbrite, whole blog sponsoring like Sony with Lifehacker, and numerous other options for bloggers to run ads. This is older than the aged cheddar sitting in my fridge.

Coverage then talks about Google and lawsuits against trademark violation on ads. Again, this is so last year.

Google will be a portal! This has been mentioned how many other sources before? Google really doesn’t need to be a “portal” in the traditional sense of tying everything together on a single site. It’s a platform that only needs a browser. Gmail, news, maps, Blogger, Adsense, movie search, local search sites in multiple languages. Picassa doesn’t even need web access. I would say they already have the features of a portal and more without actually being called one.

Besides, a portal is just icing when they own your desktop?

Submitted by RL
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Posted in • Search Engines News

The soothsayer warned Julius Caesar to “beware the ides of March”. March 15th is almost upon us but perhaps we should beware of soothsayers instead?

There is a three part article predicting the future of search on E Commerce Times.

Part one covers search extending beyond the web or “webifying” everything. Pundits just love coming up with their own vocabulary.

Here are a few more predictions.

Clustering will take off, whereby a search term will produce results in potentially related groups.

Value added search. Value added is so over used these days it can mean whatever the speaker wants it to be. In this case, value added means more customized and specialized results. The ability to search library books, desktop search and visual search.

Differentiating search results by giving away prizes for using a search engine is another idea mentioned. Of course the proponent of that idea is the company, Blingo’s co founder. Well, doesn’t iwon.com already do something similar?

Last time I checked they were not one of the top 5 engines. Buying users with cheap prizes like movie tickets won’t get you to the top. Good results and features will. However, there may be enough cheap people and bottom feeders out there to sustain you. And then there’s the fine print “...you’re limited to 10 qualifying searches per day.” Thanks Blingo but no thanks.

Submitted by RL
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Posted in • Search Engines News • Google

Isn’t three years a long time for a product to be in beta? Perhaps the reason is they haven’t figured a way to monetize it yet. No matter, Google News has introduced the ability to customize the news page to fit your preference. Choose sections based on your country that you wish displayed.

You can rearrange the sections and delete them. Sadly there are only 7 main sections. It would be useful if Google News allowed subsections and let you fine tune them.

You can even customize a section which only displays stories that meet your keywords.

This is all nice and good but Excite and other portals have been doing this since the dot boom. Google does add it’s own spin by allowing country and keyword based stories from a much wider breath of sources but I’m sticking with Excite for now because of all the extras. Stock listings, directory links, personal reminders and phone numbers, customized weather, movies, portfolio, word of the day etc. but most useful for me is the bookmarks on the customizable main page.

Google sticks with the KISS principle for news only which some will find useful but others may want a news page with extras.

Submitted by RL
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Posted in • Search Engines News • Google Here's the summary of the article

Here’s the body of the article and a bunch of gibberish.  Note- google ads will be set to ‘Left Justified’

Fandom: Smallville
Song: Perfect World
Artist: Liz Phair
Available in wmv format

Oh boy, it’s a pretty life you have
And I would need a map
Just so I could navigate the back yard

Right Click to save as:

end of the seo-body stuff.

Submitted by media
Here's the extended text stuff. //// (0) Comments | (0) Trackbacks | Permalink | Email Article