Real Estate Online Adspend to Reach $1.8B: Google's Gunning for It MarketingVox reports on findings that online real estate advertising will reach $1.8 billion this year.
TW points to a Poynter article that says, "Google has begun pursuing the real estate category directly, now employing three regional sales teams in the U.S. that are focused on the real estate and other classifieds categories."
MSN's SVP Yusef Mehdi Tells Financial Analysts What's Coming
Not too much surprising here regarding search... "With respect search, which Yusuf acknowledged Microsoft is playing catchup, he pledged the company would "move the customer experience from links to answers." link
MicrosoftWatch reports that: "Microsoft's MSN unit is getting new search, social-networking, Web e-mail and advertising-platform products ready to roll in the coming months, according to company officials." link
MSFT Receives Temporary Restraining Order in Non-Compete Case with Google
Alexandria Sage for Reuters reports that a Washington state judge temporarily blocked Kai-Fu Lee from starting work at Google.
In granting a temporary restraining order requested by Microsoft, Gonzalez forbade Lee from working on Google projects or research relating to search technologies, natural language processing or speech technologies, and business strategies that would be "competitive" with fields he studied while at Microsoft.
IE7 vs. the Google and Yahoo Toolbars
I'm a Firefox guy (tabbed browsing: woo ha!) and MSFT didn't pick me for beta testing anyways so I don't have first hand experience on the IE 7 Google and Yahoo-gate thing, in which the Register's Andrew Orlowski claimed "users with search toolbars from Yahoo! and arch-rival Google have discovered that these vanish. Other third-party toolbars designed to block pop-ups or aid with form filling appear to be working normally, according to reports from Reg readers."
An update on the article says, "We've received multiple corroborations of the problem. For others, everything is fine."
Scoble went right to the source: "I just talked with Dean Hachamovitch, the guy who runs the IE team, and he says that they tested with the Google and Yahoo toolbar and it was running on their machines (he just sent me screen captures of his personal machine running IE 7 with both the Google and Yahoo toolbar installed) and they in no way are trying to block the Google toolbar from working."
And then Rubel chimes in with a post about how well Scoble handled MSFT's PR: "What's interesting here is that Scoble is the only one who's speaking for Microsoft on a media issue in order to prompt a retraction."
Though at the time of this post the Register hadn't really retracted anything: "One user who saw their toolbar vanish in IE7 was none other than Microsoft PR punchbag Robert Scoble. But he later denied having seen any problems, in a fascinating comment thread you can peruse here." Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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July 28, 2005
Search News Remainders 07-28-05
I didn't get a chance to write about these today but think they deserve your search-hungry attention. Enjoy.
Danny Sullivan's first Daily SearchCast is now available. He discusses "developments in paid search, employee relations, feed news, partnerships & deals and gadgets & tips." Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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Canadian Uses Google Ads in Fight With Danes over Hans Island Reuters reports that a dispute between Canada and Denmark over a tiny arctic island called Hans Island has moved onto Google.
Toronto author Rick Broadhead said he bought an advertisement on Internet search engine Google after spotting a Danish ad that said "Does Hans sound Canadian? Danish name, Danish island."
My Hans Island search showed no ads - perhaps Broadhead couldn't keep his quality score up.
Google Search Now on Univision, "Most Visited" Spanish-language Site
Huge search and hispanic marketing development:
"Google's agreement with the largest Spanish-language media company in the United States provides Univision's users with relevant information from search results and ads and gives our advertisers a new and targeted way to reach the Hispanic audience," said Google.
Univision's Javier Saralegui suggests that this is an opportune time for consumer companies not yet targeting Hispanics online to "provide additional impetus... ...to develop websites in Spanish."
GOOG: MSFT Lawsuit Scare Tactic for Employee Retention Dow Jones reports on Google's claims that MS filed suit "to scare other Microsoft (MSFT) employees into remaining at the company."
Kai-Fu Lee, recently hired by Google, claims that Gates told him "Kai-Fu, (CEO) Steve (Ballmer) is definitely going to sue you and Google over this. He has been looking for something like this, someone at a VP level to go to Google. We need to do this to stop Google."
MS's beef includes Lee's recent attendence of a "confidential, executive-only briefing in March, dubbed 'The Google Challenge.'"
Ask Jeeves Advertisers Confirm "Premier Listings" Replacement
Advertisers, briefed on the coming changes, told Dow Jones (WSJ?) yesterday that Ask Jeeves will launch a replacement for their Premier Listings offering on Monday.
According to two advertisers who have been briefed on the initiative, Ask Jeeves, which was recently acquired by IAC/InteractiveCorp (IACI). (IACI), plans to sell advertisers the top three sponsored-link positions on its search-results pages using an automated auction system.
So much for NDAs... Or did they ask them to talk a little to build some pre-launch blog buzz?
Dow Jones reminded everyone that: Ask Jeeves gets about 70% of its revenue from Google, under a contract that runs through 2007.
MSN Search Screen Saver Pandia reports that you must have the search tool bar with desktop search installed in order to use their new Hotmail, MSN Messenger and search-enabled screen saver.
No thanks.
Anybody fooled with it yet? Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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Zawodny Confirms Yahoo Blog Search Rumors
At the OpenTech conference, says blogger Ian Forrester, Jeremy Zawodny confirmed that Yahoo's working on a "Technorati killer."
What's taken them so long?
Sifry, Technorati's founder and CEO, is non-plussed about blog-search competition from Google, Yahoo or MSN in a recent BusinessWeek interview:
BusinessWeek: You say you welcome competition from Google, Yahoo, and MSN, should they decide to offer blog search. Why would you welcome such Net heavyweights as rivals?
David Sifry: The larger question is, is it really competition? I look at what Google and Yahoo and other companies in this space are doing, and they're really fantastic at helping you pick out what's the best reference site for something. You go to Google and type in wine, and it will tell you the best places to buy wine. But if you really want to find out what the world's leading wine experts are talking about, Google isn't really built to do that. (thx SEW)
Um, Sifry, you compared Technorati to the search engines as they currently rather than a hypothetical blog-only search. So I think you actually ARE a little worried. I know I'd be hustling to release new advances to stay well ahead of any beta products from Yahoo.
AOL Launches Mobile Search
AOL debuted their mobile search product today (test it here on your browser) that has a sleeker, phone-friendly index and InfoGin, which "converts HTML sites into pages more easily read by mobile devices by stripping out Javascript, resizing graphics, and re-rendering the page."
How they're making money: "The local search service will be monetized by pay-per-call links sold by Ingenio; the paid listings will appear highlighted in yellow with phone numbers that users can call simply by clicking on them, while organic results will have phone numbers that users must manually dial."
In other phone/search news Yahoo's partnering with Motorola to "sync the mobile maker's Linux-based and broadband-enabled devices with Yahoo!'s core Web products and services, including search, instant messaging, e-mail and news."
Ask Jeeves Rolling Out New Paid Search Product?
The new Ask Jeeves product is nothing but a rumor now, though MediaPost has some "reported" specifics:
It primarily will be based on keyword bidding, but with some measure of relevance, such as click-through rates, factored into the advertiser's ultimate cost. The minimum bid will reportedly start at 5 cents.
They also put together a case for the coming product: the Associated Press reported that InterActiveCorp's Barry Diller was considering developing his own paid search system.
Though they remind everyone that:
Google's contract to power sponsored listings on Ask Jeeves doesn't expire until 2007.
Yahoo! is Boeing's In-Flight Wi-Fi Connexion Search Partner
SEWblog has word that Yahoo! is the official search engine for the Connexion by Boeing wi-fi service.
Sullivan points out: The exclusivity probably won't extend beyond the portal page. In other words, if you've paid to have Wi-Fi access, you're almost certainly going to be able to connect to Google or any Yahoo-rival search engine that you want, despite the partnership.
Pretzels, Connexion Not Included in Price of Ticket: Expect to shell out $30 on most international travels, $20 for trips that last less than 6 hours, or $10 for the first 60 minutes of access, then just pay 25 cents for up each minute thereafter.
Yahoo's Engineered Media vs. Google's Media Engineers
SiliconValleyWatcher's Tom Foremski makes an interesting observation after a visit to Yahoo's campus: Yahoo has many media professionals in its upper ranks while Google is "run by engineers from head to toe..." My question about Google has been: can engineers build a media company?
Well, so far, they have proved that they can, because they have focused on engineering a rock solid computing platform.
And Yahoo has proved over the past few years that it can build a big business with smart engineers and media professionals. The winner is not yet evident.
WebSourced and the Future of Interactive
Hi Mates. I'm Keith Sturges, WebSourced's Interim Vice President of Marketing. I came on board because of WebSourced's reputation as a foremost provider of interactive marketing services.
I'm excited not only about our being positioned for explosive company growth, but for the interactive marketing industry as a whole.
You've probably heard: we now have traditional media under seige. Broadband access will be instrumental in driving entertainment and media industries to US $1.8 trillion world wide by 2009. The web's overall population is set to reach 1.35 billion by 2007, up 67% from today.
These high-growth times are intoxicating, but I want to emphasize the two principles of marketing that helped me to grow the Misys homecare division into an industry powerhouse and that we will use to guide you into the interactive marketing age:
1) Drive Leads 2) Grow the Brand
Yeah, I'm a pretty simple guy.
If you're ever in North Carolina come and see me. We'll talk about the other two principles that help me increase sales and exceed business goals:
1) Boddingtons 2) Sausage and Mash
Cheers mates.
Keith Sturges Interim VP of Marketing WebSourced Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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Mike Grehan: "Seriously, Page Rank is Crap"
Mike Grehan revisited Page Rank in his Monday column at ClickZ. If you're a search marketer and buy links based strictly on Page Rank you really should give the article a read.
Here's Mike's advice on buying links in his non-PR view of the web:
If I'm paying for links, I want a lot more tangible evidence from the site owner. I want stats that tell me how visible the links are across all major search engines, how much traffic they send, and how much traffic they attract overall. I want to see the site owner is a savvy online marketer and is an authority in his community or is developing a presence as such. I need to know he understands and uses analytics to provide tactical data. This is sound, useful marketing intelligence. It's a lot more important to me than a meaningless 4 or 5 in a little sprinkling of green fairy dust above the pages.
Update: Aaron Wall thinks Mike's ideal link buying scenario would force him to pay full value: I would prefer to buy links from people who may not necissarily understand the market value of their links. I don't want the average link selling webmaster to be marketing savvy. Think how bad it would suck if you had to pay full market value for every link you bought. It would end up becoming a zero sum market like AdWords.
He's not completely refuting the whole Page Rank is crap idea, although: A few times I did [buy links] based primarily on PageRank because I knew to have PR8 internal pages the site had to have solid connectivity data, but most of those type of link buys were over a year ago and when I did it the linking page were typically virgin and this site was a bit (maybe a lot) more obscure than it is today.
Update: From Mike Grehan: I never said PageRank was crap. I said it doesn't work. And if it doesn't work (in the practical sense) it has no value. Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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GOOG: Is the Run Over?
Bambi Francisco reports on Google's climb and the $100 billion valuation which puts shares at $400.
...there may be no catalyst to drive Google higher, and no reason to own shares. Indeed, S&P Internet analyst Scott Kessler weighed in Friday, saying the stock is "reasonably valued" at $327. He would not buy more shares because the online giant "might be stalled." He advised investors to consider Yahoo.
Then again, the risk of not owning Google as a fund manager is high since Google is expected to be entered into the S&P 500 Index.
MSN's Maps Left Apple HQ Out of the Picture
The Register's astute readers noticed that Apple's headquarters are missing from Microsoft's Virtual Earth
Here's the view in MSN, and the same view in Google.
How this terrible error came about is not yet clear. Nor can we be certain who else has been removed from Bill's upgraded planet.
Scoble discusses the ruckus, and here an MSN engineer defends the image quality in general (which I did find to be better on the few searches I did, but apparently not everyone was convinced).
Interview with Gerry Campbell, VP of AOLSearch (Coming Soon)
AOL's growth outpaced Google according to recent report from Nielsen//NetRatings (WPN has the key metrics).
I spoke with Gerry Campbell, AOL's VP and General Manager of Search today, and will be working on the post during the week. Stay tuned!
They currently have no plans for creating their own index: "We have assets that would allow us to make a run at that but we choose not to."
More later this week!
If you're in the search industry and interested in being interviewed in Search Engine Lowdown plese contact me at SELowdown@gmail.com. Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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Yahoo's Index Update Makes CNET News
The relatively mainstream CNET covered Yahoo's recent index update complete with quotes from WebMasterWorld and Yahoo's blog itself, where Tim Mayer announced the update. There are 63 comments on the blog right now.
People with increased rankings praise the change while those who dropped complain. Go figure.
There's already a developer site for those who'd like to build on top of the Virtual Earth platform.
At first glance I'm digging MSN Virtual Earth better than Google Maps: the close up view is closer. The houses are bigger and the pictures are clearer.
For me this is a huge reason to use MSN.
Google Maps released a "hybrid view" which overlays street names on top of the satellite view. Now they have Map view, which is just like a standard road map, the satellite view, which is just an ariel photo, and the hybrid view.
MSN has two views: satellite and map, but their satellite view comes with the street names written already, which makes much more sense to me.
The straight up images are cool, but harder to navigate visually. It was smart for MSN to cut out the less usable satellite-only view.
Also interesting that MSN released Virtual Earth in beta... is this normal for them?
GOOG Says MSFT Suit "Overreaching and Unlawful"
Microsoft sued Google and Dr. Kai-Fu Lee recently for monetary damages, a noncompete clause and something about damage that could result from Lee's knowledge of Microsoft's plans for the Chinese market.
Google asked a California judge to throw out Dr. Lee's noncompete agreement Thursday, and in a filing to the California Superior Court Google called the provision "overreaching and unlawful."
Google Quadruples Net, Schmidt Calls Google Earth Q2's Key Development
Despite revenues of $890 million, Google's stock fell almost "4% in early trading Friday," according to MarketWatch.
Key Numbers:
Total Revenue: $1.384 billion Google-owned sites: $737 million - up 115% over Q2 '04 AdSense Network: $630 million - up 82% over Q2 '04 RevShare: Google paid parnters $494 million
In an interview Schmidt said "the most significant development in the quarter was Google Earth."
"When your name keeps being mentioned at cocktail parties and you are not going to jail, it's good," Mr. Schmidt said.
Yahoo spends 28 percent of its net revenue on sales and marketing, Google spent 11 percent.
10 Brazilians Arrested for Selling Drugs on Orkut
Brazilian police arrested 10 people accused of selling ecstacy and marijuana through Google's social networking site Orkut. "We discovered the drug ring first via authorized phone tapping, and later the investigation included monitoring of their activities on the Internet," said a duty officer at the Drugs Enforcement Service in the city of Niteroi, just across the bay from Rio de Janeiro.
Brazilians make up more than half of Orkut's 7 million members.
VeriSign: PPC Ad Publishers Driving Domain Name Purchases
VeriSign told of an explosion in domain name purchases that they link to publishers of PPC ads. The company reported a 74% increase in revenue for Q2, with net income doubling to $41 million.
VeriSign's Stratton Sclavos tells the Computer Business Review that "names are being bought and then tested against traffic analyzers. The ones that can generate more than the $6 or $7 [registration] fee per year are kept, the other ones are returned within the five day grace period."
VeriSign reports that ad publishers return almost 250K domain names a week.
Ask Jeeves' Inscrutible (and Hilarious) Interview
A reporter at SatireWire interviewed AskJeeves by asking questions directly in the search box and screen-capturing the responses.
Jeeves of AskJeeves.com granted SatireWire Editor Treat Warland the opportunity to actually interview a search engine. There were many important questions to ask. Unfortunately, he never got to most of them.
Eeep! old old old story... Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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Number of Searches Growing, Experts Disagree on Why
Danny Sullivan breaks down the new Nielsen//NetRatings study in which their analysists speculate that vertical search is driving the growth in overall number of searches.
Sullivan largely disagrees, as he found that only 17% of Google's new searches and 23% of Yahoo's new searches came from their image search verticals.
He did note that, "in MSN's case, having the vertical does seem to have been important, though not for growth but rather stemming losses." MSN saw an overall 4% drop in total searches, though their image search vertical saw a growth of 90% total searches.
His takeaway from the study? Advice for up and coming search engines: "It's always been hard to go after the established players on plain old search. But roll out an important vertical, and you might attract people who wouldn't have thought of you the first time."
A Map is Worth 1000 Words? Gary Price found a cool Stanford Info Lab article that investigates the translation of a "set of geographic coordinates into a textual name."
"One possible application of NameSet is to concisely present the geographical scope of a set of geo-referenced observations to a human user."
Cuban's BlogScour to Reveal "Blogger's Consciousness"
The IceRocket search engine is getting a face and index lift (Nick has word that BlogScour will be a whole new entity rather than an IceRocket rebrand) to become BlogScour, Mark Cuban announced recently at the AlwaysOn conference.
Judging from Cuban's marketing/promotion heroes, Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Dennis Rodman and Paris Hilton, we're in for a little flash and bang.
Yahoo: "We Changed the Index"
Yahoo's Tim Mayer announced in the Yahoo Blog yesterday that, "we made changes to the index last night so you should be seeing more of your pages in the index as well as some fluctuations in the rankings of results from previous searches."
Index changes will continue over the next week or so, he said.
Brazilian Acquisition to Be Google's R&D Center for Latin America
According to a press release on the Google Brazil site, Google bought search tech firm Akwan Information Technologies.
Gary translated the release which states in machinese, "Akwan Information Technologies will become the Center of Research and Desenvolvimento (P&D) of the Google in Latin America."
Yahoo Below Wall Street Expectations
Yahoo's Q2 sales were up 51% over Q2 last year and revenues were up 44%, but they still came $6 million short of Wall Street's expectations.
Yahoo predicts as much as $930 million in sales for the third quarter, while analysts put them at $922.4 million.
Google Moons Earth
"In honor of the first manned Moon landing, which took place on July 20, 1969, we’ve added some NASA imagery to the Google Maps interface to help you pay your own visit to our celestial neighbor."
There are little markers that show each of our landings.
Baidu Purging Index of Pirated Music Files
A week after announcing their IPO, Baidu began purging their index of pirated music files in an effort to clean up their act for trading in the US.
Baidu told Reuters that they're "looking into links to more than 50,000 files."
Microsoft Sues Google and Dr. Kai-Fu Lee
Microsoft lost their corporate vice president of Interactive Services to Google and now they're seeking "monetary damages as well as an injunction upholding the noncompete clause and other provisions of Lee's contract..." according to a ZDNet article.
Google announced Dr. Lee's move with a press release, which ZDNet called remarkable as, "the company rarely announces new hires, with CEO Eric Schmidt's hiring being a notable exception."
That same press release also announced a new "product research and development center in China."
Snap to Promote Cost-Per-Action with $10M in VC
Snap plans to use part of their $10 million in venture funding to promote their new cost-per-action model. Maybe they should use some of that money to help people improve conversions on their sites.
They've had 16.4 million searches in the last 9 months, compared to Google's 1.8 billion in the last month.
(Allen) Morgan, who is joining Snap's board of directors, is betting Snap can become a more refined search engine alternative -- a sort of Target to Google's Wal-Mart.
European SEM Industry to See 65% Growth in 2005
In news (old news!! see below) that must (still) have Mike Grehan giddy, Forrester Research estimated that search marketing in Europe will generate €1.4 billion in 2005, a 65% growth over 2004.
Forrester puts the European SEM market at €3 billion by 2010.
Forrester says: “Growing numbers of online shoppers, online advertising budgets, and pay-for-performance search marketing models will attract both large and small firms. But while search spending will more than triple, its share in online advertising will decline by 2007, as consumer mistrust of paid listings takes effect, rich media ads gain prominence, and as prices of keywords rise.”
OOPS! - this is old news! Sorry 'bout that :0 Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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New Movers Using Local Search to "Reduce Stress"
ClickZ reported on a Harris Interactive study of 2,604 US adults who relocated in the last year (and bought lots of stuff as they settled in) found that 91% said local search was "helpful in reducing their stress." The top four stress-reducing features of using the Internet for local search cited by new movers was comprehensiveness (58 percent), speed and convenience (51 percent), accuracy (41 percent) and dependability (28 percent), according to the study. Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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Baidu Going Public in the US? Baidu filed on the Nasdaq, is looking for $80 million. Matt at SiliconBeat has the Baidu beef plus links. Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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Blog Search Burblings
PaidContent has a link-filled post on the rising Blog Search Mania. Price likes Clusty for his blog searching. Who do you use? Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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Schmidt Talks Google's Corporate Infrastructure
Caught this from Lensen, who caught it from Gary Price is right: Schmidt talks to University of Washington students about scaling an infrastructure for rapid growth, high innovation, and diminished development cycles. And I think he mentions something about meta tags ;)
Become Getting More Useful
Chris Sherman has the goods on Become's new integrated comparison shopping feature. Users can choose to search the research or shopping index. Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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July 15, 2005
Back for an encore...
Wow, how about that blog post that "was" then "wasn't"? Even with my uncanny knack for controversy, I never expected the kind of reaction that has been evident over the past few days. I thought I would come back for yet another blog post at SEL to try and clear-up a few things (yes, this is yours truly).
Many thanks to each of you, for your kind words and emails of support. I am extremely flattered and sincerely appreciate each of you who have contacted me. Many of you jumped to my defense, thinking that perhaps I was involved in some huge conspiracy theory. I wanted to come back, of my own free will (truly) and answer a few questions that were raised by my brief resignation letter. So here goes...
First, I have nothing but respect for Think Partnership and its board of directors. Gerry Jacobs and the board are building a fantastic group of companies and, as a significant shareholder, I am excited about the group's future potential. It is unfortunate that some have linked my resignation of WebSourced, with my thoughts on THK. I believe THK will be strong for many years to come.
Second, while I still have a difference of opinion, when it comes to the direction of WebSourced, some of you have drawn your own conclusions about what that means. To clarify, I simply believe that the time is right for me to move on and look for an opportunity that is better aligned with my future goals and aspirations. I could have stayed at WebSourced and taken advantage of opportunities within the company, but after 5 years of non-stop working, it was a good time to take a break and clear my head (which as you know, is full of shi...stuff).
I still don't have a clear idea what is going to happen with this blog. There are some issues to resolve, but I am confident of an outcome that suits both WebSourced and me. I will not likely continue posting here, at least for a few weeks, in the meantime, please be nice to Garrett. ;-)
I hope that helps clarify a little better. I do plan to take a few weeks off and figure out my next plans. I'll certainly be in touch with each of you who have contacted me and who knows, I may even get to SES San Jose (although maybe as an attendee, not a speaker...which will be weird - just don't know yet). Just as soon as I've gotten bored of not having my voice heard, I will be back, looking for the limelight again. In the meantime, expect a quieter, more subdued Andy Beal.
Thanks again to each of you for your emails, keep them coming to andy.beal@gmail.com.
Cheers,
Andy
PS. Happy 2nd Birthday to Search Engine Lowdown ;-) Andy Beal
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July 13, 2005
Match Address Book to Google Maps
If you're a Mac user, you'll like this free tool that allows users to get Google directions and/or a Google map to any entry in their Address Book instantly.
Thinking of Buying PageRank?
Mike Grehan, CEO of our UK division, Smart Interactive, has some advice for those of you thinking of buying links to improve PageRank.
I get asked often how to improve PR. It happened many times last week. My stock answer, "PageRank isn't so important, so just forget about it," draws some very confused looks from people who somehow are convinced it's vital for ranking.
What's more, one question I was asked last week had me slightly dumbfounded for a moment: "If you're saying I can't value links that I buy based on PageRank, how do I value how much I'd be prepared to pay for them?"
This is the stark reality: People still actually buy and sell links valued against Google's PR score. Which is ridiculous. It's just buying into the myth. Andy Beal
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So What Are Your Searching For?
Chris Sherman has a summary of a new study by icrossing that looks at what people are searching for.
What are people searching for? Most people (88%)said they were researching specific topics—specifically, information about hobbies. And women (61%) were more likely to search for health and medical information than men (35%). Surprisingly few people researching specific topics are looking for job or career information (28%). Andy Beal
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July 12, 2005
Five Ways to Determine Whether You Should Bring Search Marketing In-House
Heather Lloyd-Martin offers practical advice for those of you considering bringing your SEM campaign in-house. Andy Beal
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July 11, 2005
Google Ready to Buy China's Baidu Search
Over at MarketingVOX you'll find rumors that Google may be looking to buy Baidu, China's largest search engine, in which Google has a four percent stake. Andy Beal
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FeedPlex Adds New Search Filters
Tis the season for blog search engine announcements. Nathan Enns has added a bunch of new search filters to FeedPlex.
* The "Keyword Density" feature will require that each web page found in a user's search results contain his/her search query at least X times.
* The "Words Per Page" feature will require that each web page found in a user's search results contain more/less than X total words.
* With the "Category" setting a user can restrict his/her search query to web pages relating to a certain topic. Andy Beal
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Belated Happy Birthday to Google's Marissa Mayer
If I can post a photo of me in a halloween costume, I see no reason why I can't publish this photo of Google's Marissa Mayer, enjoying her 30th birthday. ;-)
Can't Find On Google? New Site Aims to Help Rubel points to a new site that helps those of you who simply cannot find what you need on Google. Simply post the type of information you are looking for and let others come to your rescue.
Here's an example:
Really looking for: An mp3 of Blood for the bloodgod. It was on a flexi-disc free on the cover of White Dwarf in the U.K. years ago. It was by a group called Sabbat i think???? Queries tried: White Dwarf, Blood for the bloodgod mp3, Andy Sneap, flexi-disc, etc
Of course, you could simply try your search on Yahoo, Ask or MSN. ;-) Andy Beal
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Google Wins Domain Squatting Case
According to DM News, Google has won a domain name ruling from the National Arbitration Forum.
The NAF, Minneapolis, said Google has rights to googkle.com, ghoogle.com, gfoogle.com and gooigle.com, even though an individual, Sergey Gridasov, had registered those names. Andy Beal
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July 08, 2005
Yahoo Testing Blog and RSS Search Engine
Rubel has a screenshot of Yahoo's new blog and rss search tool. The site appears to be removed....for now. ;-) Andy Beal
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Keyword Prices Continue Climb
MarketerToday has the latest price trends for keyword prices. Andy Beal
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Google T-Shirt Humor
Keeping it light on Friday, right? (ok, that was bad).
We're not affiliated with t-shirthumor.com, but I love the shirt they have with the following print... Thanks to Robert! Andy Beal
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Can Yahoo, Ask and MSN Ever Topple Google?
BusinessWeek asks whether Google's 52% market share is too much of a lead for the other search engines to catch.
Google's search lead, moreover, looks pretty unassailable, at least for now. Despite many studies indicating the near-parity of rival search technologies, changing searchers' habits is more difficult today than in the Web's early days, when surfers hopped from Yahoo to Excite to AltaVista and back.
I think Google's strong name is the key to their continued success. So long as they don't do anything to tarnish the great brand, it will be difficult for Yahoo, MSN and Ask to increase mind-share.
I've said before that the top four search engines are all close when it comes to relevancy/accuracy, so it will come down to who has the better perceived brand. At this stage, the market share is Google's to lose. Andy Beal
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Should Ask Jeeves Break Ties with Google?
Gary Price has details of an interview with IAC chief, Barry Diller, where he hints at maybe leaving the Google ad network when the contract with Google expires in 2007.
Gary's not too convinced that Ask will actually build its own ad network, but I tend to think otherwise. I've said all along that I believe th
