Yahoo Site Explorer Delivers Mad SEM Love for WebMasters
Yahoo's really hooking up the webmasters. The new Site Explorer shows:

a) all subpages within a URL or under a path
b) inlinks to a URL or for an entire site

In addition webmasters can submit missing URLs. WOW.

I watched the whole Site Match debacle go down at SES in early '04. Yahoo's PR seemed at an all time low with small web business owners.

Also there's been a sort of persistant "don't game us" -- "we don't want to game you but we want mad traffic" tension between search engines and webmasters.

This offering illustrates a more olive-branch approach to webmaster relationships that will give Yahoo a key marketing touchpoint for thousands of potential advertisers. SMART.

Here's Yahoo's blog post on Site Explorer.

via SEW.
Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive | permalink | +marktd |

 
Rollyo Stalking: Who's Rolling What
Rollyo went beta recently, enabling subscribers to create mini-indices of 25 sites. Gary Price has an excellent write up.

Here are a few high rollers for you to check out, listed in order of their user id numbers in their profile urls. I suspect that's the order in which they accepted invitations.

Evan Williams (60)
John Battelle (134)
Jason Kottke (142)
Seth Godin (169)
Jeff Jarvis (175)
Gary Price (511)
Steve Rubel (738)

Checking out their "indices" is almost as much fun as blog stalking in Bloglines (Some Blogline users make their subscriptions public, allowing me to snoop on what they read).

Here's Rollyo's high roller page. The site is smart and has kept me clicking through it kinda the way MySpace does, just to see who's there and what sites they select for searching.

Rollyo is kinda what I was wishing for here except I can't put it on my site yet and you don't actually control a bot.

A searchbox is coming though, according to the coming soon section:

"We are constantly adding new tools to make Rollyo more useful. A few of these include a Firefox Plugin, a custom searchbox for your site, desktop widgets, a bookmarklet and a simple way to import your bookmarks so you can use them to quickly create a variety of searchrolls."

Update: Forgot to thank Roberto for the link.
Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive | permalink | +marktd |

 
Yahoo Japan Alters Maps Based On User Input
Japan Today reports that Yahoo Japan just launched "a pilot service that asks users to submit information on their neighborhoods to update an Internet map service they operate."

It's not a free-for-all though, as "Alps [Nagoya-based Alps Mapping KK] employees will visit the area to verify information before they update the map, which will be done once a month."

Neato!

I've not heard of this for any US mapping service.

A cursory glance through MapQuest's FAQ didn't turn up any mention that they're open to user input regarding geographic developments (they do have an info@ email address for you to register comments or suggest enhancements to MapQuest products and services). Google Maps doesn't appear to offer any means of contact at all.

Does anyone know of any maps out there that are more wiki than static?

via SEW
Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive | permalink | +marktd |

 
Google Muscling in on Classifieds
Classified Intelligence reports (in a press release??) that "Google is aggressively moving to include classifieds listings in its organic search results, making the rounds of classified advertising Web sites, requesting a direct feed of listings."

WOW.

Greg Sterling asks:

# What form will this ultimately take?
# How will it affect newspapers (competition, distribution or both)?
# What about direct advertiser relationships?

Right - will these classifieds be in AdWords-like positions or in the results (prolly in the results). Will they have their own Froogle-like interface? Will they be in Froogle? How long before Google establishes a direct relationship with all the folks currently selling on craigslist, Oodle etc...

In other local/classified news Monster's aiming for local classifieds too (Monster API in Google?). And online newspaper readers are loyal to their city's newspaper website.
Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive | permalink | +marktd |

 
Yahoo Search Marketing's New Branding Metrics
According to a story in ClickZ today Yahoo's testing branding measurement with a handfull of clients and two new metrics:

Buzz Index "a keyword discovery tool with attached demographic data"
Search Share of Voice "measures the share of overall searches on a keyword or topic a particular brand has results for. Marketers can use the metric to determine how their brand ranks among competitors."

Yahoo's also working to push search marketers to innovate a little:

One of [Jason Lehmbeck's] team's primary messages to advertisers is to think of ways of using search beyond simple direct response.

"People tend to get boxed in with search, because they think of it as just a title and description," he said. "They should be thinking of it more as a teaser to draw their audience into their marketing process. Search can be used to extend the value and reach of ideas, content, and sponsorships."

Lehmbeck says search can be used to move metrics like number of e-mail addresses captured, time spent on site, number of pages viewed, and offline conversions.

MSN's new AdCenter reportedly will have similar levels of demographic data.

Update: check Search Views coverage of the OMMA session Maximizing Brand Advertising Via Search.
Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive | permalink | +marktd |

 
Study Finds Strong Bias Towards Selecting Top Search Link
A recent Cornell study sought to explain why users click on the top hit in a search engine results page. They secretly switched the first and second place results and found little difference in how many people clicked the first position.

Jacob Nielsen suggests that either users think that:

* Search engines are so good at judging relevancy that they almost always place the best hit on top.

or that

* Users click the top hit not because it's any better, but simply because it's first. This might be due to sheer laziness (after all, you start from the top) or because users assume the search engine places the best hit on top, whether that's actually true or not.

It's nice to have some actual data on this, though it's pretty, uh, common sensical.

I'll quote Gary Price's reaction to the data, "I've said time after time here on the blog that the search engines should do more to help teach people (especially certain user groups) to be better searchers, go beyond the defaults, and formulate better queries from the outset."
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Hatchets Buried in the Search Industry
So I had an awesome day off yesterday and worked on internal KWR stuff Friday. Upon my return I noticed a little peace making/resolution trend in the search media.

Google's burying the size war hatchet. Here's Battelle on the situation: "The company has decided to take the McDonalds like number off its website - "8 billion pages served...", and instead simply claim to be more comprehensive. 'Google is the most comprehensive search engine by far,' Mayer told me. Can she prove that? Not easily. But there you have it."

Google's burying the no-CNET interviews hatchet. Nice! Schmidt gave an interview for an index size announcement piece.

Sullivan buries his Berlind hatchet. "My sincere apologies for that to David, plus for any suggestion that I somehow was implying that he couldn't write a fair piece about Google because of Google's policy of not speaking to CNET publications."
Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive | permalink | +marktd |

 
Goodbye Jeeves, Hello China
Diller's axing the butler. Soon we'll be searching Ask.

At an investment conference Diller called his search engine "potentially the glue for almost all of our services."

I noticed an Ask search box as I logged out of Match the other night. It said something like "now that you're done searching for love, search the web!"

Putting search boxes on your properties is more like thumb tacks than glue, but I guess you have to start somewhere.

At the same meeting Diller announced that Ask will begin operating in China next year, and assured the shareholders that, "our job is to increase Ask's market share."

link
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MSFT Reorganization + Talks with AOL = Searchquake
Microsoft's reorganizing to "move toward more Internet-based service offerings."

Steve Ballmer said the changes "are designed to align our business groups in a way that will enhance decision-making and speed of execution..."

Battelle finds the Platform Products and Services division, which combines Windows and MSN, the most interesting. Here comes Web 2.0.

This news comes amidst widespread rumors that MSN's in merger/acquisition talks with AOL that may kick Google to the curb.

What's Google doing to protect its $382 million? I see some interesting stories breaking soon ;)
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Former Search Marketing VP Now Working for Yahoo
Yahoo hired Carat's former VP of search marketing to be the "Senior Director of Global Advertiser Strategy and Development at YSM."

"In his new role, Ron will be an ambassador to clients and agencies, serving as an expert resource in helping them effectively incorporate search marketing into their overall marketing mix."

Smart move there - help your clients make more money with your products!

pMac of Marketer Today has the goods on Jupiter's most recent paid search projections.

via Price
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Authors Guild vs. Google Print Finally Hits Fan
The Authors Guild's going to court to stop the Google Print initiative. Susan Wojcicki, Google's VP of Product Management, wrote about the lawsuit on the Google blog yesterday making clear Google's position:

"Google doesn’t show even a single page to users who find copyrighted books through this program (unless the copyright holder gives us permission to show more). At most we show only a brief snippet of text where their search term appears, along with basic bibliographic information and several links to online booksellers and libraries."

A potentially massive increase in sales didn't convince the Authors Guild though.

Guild president Nick Taylor wrote in a press release “it's not up to Google or anyone other than the authors, the rightful owners of these copyrights, to decide whether and how their works will be copied.”

Which I can kind of understand... it's like Google barging into paid content sites, copying everything into their index and then only showing small portions of that content for searches? Though most paid content sites would welcome the extra traffic that such a service would provide.

I think Google may lose this one: though what they display in results is within fair use they have to copy the entire book into their index to do it. That's copying without permission and is what will sink Google Print as it currently stands.

Danny wrote however that "InternetWeek has legal experts saying that copyright law over indexing books appears to be on Google's side."

Here's his most recent and excellent coverage on the suit.
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Watching Google's Adventures in China from the Inside
Shak's in China right now. He chose to set out for China instead of India - even though he already knows the Indian language and culture - because he "felt that if I WAS going to make the move, then might aswell go for the deep end."

I'm glad he's in the deep end cause he's hearing some interesting stuff about Google's doings in China:

1) According to a Hong Kong paper, "Google has identified improvement of its Chinese-language search results, MP3 search and mobility as key areas of development needed to close the gap with mainland rivals such as Baidu.com."

2) Google hired Johnny Chou, former COO of UTstarcom to be Google China's COO. His telecom background does indicate a strong push towards Google China wireless.

3) His "reliable sources" confirmed that "Google's recruiters have been directed to hire every attractive single woman they can."

4) From Shak's perspective Baidu's running the search show: "Google on the other hand are a kick axx company with some very very smart people and an amazing brand, however China is 1 place where all this can mean very little or very much dependant on the mood of the people, and at the moment it's all about Baidu."

Will Google buy Baidu? Shak thinks, "an outright buy or a much bigger partnership would make total sense, as ultimately it's about the advertising $, and this Google has lots of when you look at their advertiser base, Baidu has the user base but very little of the foreign $$$s are coming through, although their marketing activity is being ramped up since the IPO."
Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive | permalink | +marktd |

 
Ask Jeeves Ads on the Radio
Tara from ResearchBuzz disses the Ask Jeeves radio ads. I wasn't too impressed either.

Granted, the ads aren't targeted towards me. Also I've only heard it once. I remember the thrust of the ad being: "we don't just answer questions anymore."

I'm sure they've done tons of research and found that the whole "ask a question" thing is a big hurdle to jump when it comes to changing user perception. I still had the sense of: "no one knew who they were in the first place so why are they talking like they did?"

It was certainly a colorful ad, as Tara indicates:

"The music is WQDR, which is country. I was kinda tuning it out until the commercials came on and I heard something like, "Hi, I'm Adam, Junior Marketing Executive for Ask Jeeves."

"I dropped my hushpuppy and said to my husband, "Ask Jeeves is doing radio commercials."

"Adam continued with a brief lament that nobody appreciated how Ask Jeeves was the best search engine and offered thus-and-such feature, so to get the point across he was going to CARVE IT INTO HIS CHEST."

So I'm mostly curious about how Ask is measuring success with this ad, and what other traditional media they're advertising in right now. Any other Ask ad spottings in other media?

via SEW
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Google Offers WiFi Security in Exchange for Your Usage Data
Great coverage from Nathan Weinberg on the new secure WiFi offering from Google: "Your internet traffic becomes encrypted when you send it out, decrypted by Google, the requested data downloaded by Google, encrypted and sent to you, and decrypted on your machine."

He pulled this quote from the FAQ page:

"One of our engineers recognized that secure WiFi was virtually non-existent at most locations. As a result, he used his 20% project time to begin an initiative to offer users more secure WiFi access. Google Secure Access is the result of this endeavor."

Zawodny links to Om Malik's news of Google seeking bids for "a nationwide optical network" to push massive amounts of voice, video and data close to the end user."

/. got a whif. (tx roberto)
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Jeeves Talks, Dresses Like Pirate
It's international talk like a pirate day. Jeeves celebrates with new clothes and by pushing their smart result.

Zawodny celebrated a little early by firing one across Google's blog search bow last week.
Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive | permalink | +marktd |

 
Link Bombing Blowing Up Again in Media
Danny explains Google bombing's return to media attention in a comment on Marissa Mayer's post over on the Google blog.
Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive | permalink | +marktd |

 
Yahoo Instant Search
I think the idea is solid enough: it's sort of Google's "Feeling Lucky" delivered as you type (though I do remember reading once that the "Feeling Lucky" function gets front page real estate because users like the button, not because they use it).

There's currently no monitization. The whole instant answers thing could be a decent money maker for yellow pages type business searches like local pizza places or specific product searches.

So I'm most curious about the instant answers usage data Yahoo gathers - I'm sure they have a pretty strong user-driven development strategy. I don't think this function's strong enough in itself (even to warrant a beta page...) but may offer a valuable cross over for some other search product such as maps.

I wonder though how they're getting word out to a wider audience... cause right now my guess is they're getting lots of searcherati ego searches which won't really help indicate how the general public would use the function.

Here's Yahoo's blog mention, and Charlene Li poking a stick at it.
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Nielsen and Hitwise: Why Are Their Search Engine Ratings Different?
Several of the search engine watchers try to estimate the distributions of the visitors to the major search engines monthly and, ultimately, to monitor how the “popularity” of these search engines changes over time. Two of the watchers are the Nielsen NetRating and Hitwise.

A close look at these graphs reveals “significant” difference between the “popularity” of the major search engines. Why are the results so different?

Danny Sullivan posted two articles on August 23, 2005, showing the distributions based on the July 2005 data collected by three two organizations. The following figures are taken from his articles:

Fig 1 - Search engine rating according to Nielsen NetRating.


Fig 2 - Search engine rating according to Hitwise.


Nielsen NetRating shows that 46.2% of the Internet surfers performed the search using Google, and at the same time Hitwise shows that 43.4% of the surfers performed the search using the same Google search engine. The difference is almost 3%!

At the first glance, the difference may look insignificant, but if your web site has the traffic of, say, 100,000 visitors per day, then 3% percent difference means 3,000 visitors. Assuming your estimate of the PPC conversion rate is 10% with the average conversion of $100, then the prediction of the daily revenue will differ by $3,000 per day depending on which search engine rating is used.

The questions is: Why are these results so different?

Let’s take a look at the sampling theory and the basis for the argument. When taking a sample from a population a sampling error is induced, which results in the uncertainty of the estimated parameter due to the fact that only a portion of the population is examined. This uncertainty is measured by the so called Margin of Error (MOR). In the case of the proportion (e.g., percent of searches performed using Google), the estimate of 46.2% has the Margin of Error of approximately 0.1% at the confidence level of 95% (my assumption) and the assumed sample size of 1,000,000 surfers.

Therefore, the estimated percent of Google surfers for July of 2005 is

46.2% ± 0.1%

In other words, if all assumptions hold, the “true” percent of the surfers who used Google search engine in July of 2005 lies in the range from 46.1% and 46.3%!
But, the Hitwise data shows that only 43.4% of the Internet surfers use Google search engine. If the Nielsen NetRating and Hitwise have taken their samples from the same population (population of the Internet surfers), the estimated percentages should not be so different.

Where does the difference come from?

Some possibilities are:

1. To be representative of the population from which it is taken, a sample must be taken in some random fashion, which implies that every member of the population (a surfer, in this case) should have approximately equal chance to be selected in the sample. If that is not the case, the result, the engine “popularity” percent will be biased and probably far from the true value. How do these two organizations select a sample of surfers from the overall population?

2. Is a different sample (1,000,000 people!) taken every month? I would assume not, but I may be wrong. If not, the bias of the estimate is introduced again because the surfing pattern in the current month is influenced by the surfing pattern applied in the previous month; i.e., “my experience from the previous month influences my behavior in this month!”

3. Do these two organizations use the same search criteria for counting the number of searches? If not, the difference in the count could be significant.

For similar discussions and insights into the various search engines statistics, statistical market analysis and application of the Six Sigma methodology and tools, read my next posting.

Dr. Vladimir Crk is WebSourced's Director of Six Sigma Quality Assurance and Marketing Statistical Analysis.
Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive | permalink | +marktd |

 
Google Blog Search Reactions Round Up
Here are some initial Google blog search thoughts from some of my favorite bloggers. There will certainly be more to come - this is all circa 10:22am EST.

Scoble's been writing his ass off. Off. Off. Off.

Dave Sifry welcomes the competition, is sure they'll "continue to improve" over the coming months by adding all the tools that Technorati has.

Charlene Li (welcome back!) hears Technorati's/Feedster's/et. al's death knell. "This relevancy ranking is what I think will be the secret sauce to Google’s blog search success – that it can bring to bear its deep experience on extracting relevance to blog posts."

Chris Sherman spoke with Jason Goldman, Google product manager for blog search. Nice general specs article.

Greg Sterling gets spazzy on the increasingly competitive blog search landscape.

Anil Dash offers his blogging business perspective.

Duncan Riley gives Google a B, A, C-, and D. In what? Check his post.
Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive | permalink | +marktd |

 
Google Blog Search Launched
Google blog search went live today, with a host of new operators (yay!) and a coming soon blog index submission service.

I haven't done any spam/relevance testing besides my search for [search engine news].

I'll round up the reactions in a later post.

BoingBoing broke the exciting news to me. Battelle told them. I mentioned its imminent introduction over a year ago.

link
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Kai-Fu Lee Can Begin Recruiting for Google China Rules Judge
A state judge ruled that Kai-Fu Lee can begin, "recruiting and staffing a Google center in China," reports the AP.

However, "Kai-Fu Lee remains barred from working on products, services or projects he worked on at Microsoft, including computer search technology."

link
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eBay to Provide PPCall Services?
Greg Sterling at the Kelsy Group pointed out a potential move by eBay into pay per call. From the press release announcing the purchase: "The acquisition also enables eBay and Skype to pursue entirely new lines of business. For example, in addition to eBay’s current transaction-based fees, ecommerce communications could be monetized on a pay-per-call basis through Skype."

Gary Stein caught a similar "small type" PPCall possibility in MSN's recent acquisition of Teleo.

link
ClickZ
AuctionBytes coverage (excellent)
Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive | permalink | +marktd |

 
MSN API to Launch This Week
Though they apparently didn't want it discussed last week (according to the MSN Blog), news leaked and the search world now knows of the coming MSN API. I'm psyched.

One blog I check regularly is the Google Maps Mania, the gMaps API blog - I expect to see a 3rd party blog for MSN once their APIs launch and developers start crafting some gooey API goodness.

"By opening up our platform to the developer community we hope to extend the opportunity to innovate and create new services and applications thereby providing an even more useful experience for our customers."

APIs Available:

MSN Search
MSN Virtual Earth
MSN Messenger Activity API
MapPoint Web Service 4.0

link
SEJ coverage
Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive | permalink | +marktd |

 
"Revolutionary" Search Engine Sounds Pretty Much Like Ask Jeeves
VNU has a little story on Orion, a "revolutionary" search engine out of Wales New South Wales that "is designed to find pages where the content is about a topic strongly related to the keyword."
It sounds suspciously like Ask to me:

Allon cited a search on the topic of the American Revolution as an example of how the system works.

Orion is designed to bring up results with extracts containing this phrase, but it would also give results for American History, George Washington, American Revolutionary War, Declaration of Independence, Boston Tea Party and more.

Would that be anything like the Ask Jeeves search for American Revolution that delivers both the zoom function so you can drill down contextually into and out of the war and search through related names?

One difference, which I picked out of the news article, is in how they display their contextually related results.

"The results to the query are displayed immediately in the form of expanded text extracts giving you the relevant information without having to go the website, although you still have that option if you wish," said Allon.

It's interesting to note that Gates um, someone related to Orion even commented on Orion (see comments... thanks for the catch Ken), saying that it would "take search way beyond how people think of it today." Right. All the way to what Ask's doing.

Check out the article and let me know what you think. I'll see if I can contact the inventor to see what's actually different between the engines, as VNU isn't likely to have laid those out too clearly.

via SearchViews

Update:

Just also wanted to let you know that he's from New South Wales (a state in Australia) not Wales (a country in the UK) :)

Cheers,
Laura
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English Online Entrepreneur Invades China
Interested in the China "goldrush" but don't have the gumption to pack up and head over? (Yeah I don't either.)

Check out Chinawhite, a blog by online entrepreneur Shak (couldn't find his last name) who was a long time Web Master World moderator. His blog details both his keen observations on Chinese culture and business as well as the latest ecommerce news from China.

I had the pleasure of meeting Shak at a PubCon a few years back. He gave me an awesome mini mag light. Good luck in China Shak and keep cutting those lines for us - I'm addicted already.

link
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Search Traffic to Auto Sites Increases
Vroom vroom. MediaPost reports on Yahoo's findings that search engines drove 21% of traffic to car-related websites in June. That's up from 17.5% in June of '04.

MVox recaps:

The vast majority - 20.5 million - of the 25 million or so monthly visitors to car sites went to third party sites such as Kelly Blue Book, and 8.9 million visited manufacturers' sites (some visited both types).

via MVox.
Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive | permalink | +marktd |

 
Google and Reuters: Why Buy the Cow?
Ah Jeez. Google buying Reuters?

Gary Stein doesn't think it will happen. Me neither, but I'm going to pick on his post a little bit.

He asks: "do the engines need to diversify their services, specifically away from the content-capture/indexing business?"

Am I missing something Gary? Yahoo and MSN already create/own their own content.

And consider Ask's (don't-call-me-an-answer-engine) Smart Answers: a structured data search pulling from vertical databases like the yellow pages or citysearch. And Yahoo's local UGC. And the Froogle/Map/Desktop/etc results pushed to the top of Google's SERPs.

Across the engines we're seeing add ons to the ten blue links that are moves away from the "content-capture/indexing business."

Could these add ons go prime time though if trade organizations and governments "start looking more closely [at web crawling], and potentially determining whether or not there needs to be limits[?]"

I don't think it will come to that. I think that any potential limits - if somehow US government decided that robots.txt weren't enough - wouldn't take more than a few million pages out of anyones index. And who the hell is it that wants out?

Like Stein I don't believe Google will buy Reuters. Why would it buy the cow when it gets the milk for free?

If Google has word of some coming anti-news indexing legislature that it suspects it can't beat (from some frikin idiot conglomeration of news organizations that don't want traffic - or maybe Rupert Murdoch), then I can see reason for buying Reuters.

Stein thinks they might want Reuters because they could control its structure and package it/parse it out in Smart Answer fashion. I guess I could see that too, but why buy instead of partner?

The Reuters buy just doesn't add up to me... unless there's some legislature coming we haven't heard of.
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Thought Leadership and Search Marketing
I guess this is amen day for me. Kathy Sierra gets another one:

The most important skill you need today is not fund-raising, financial management, or marketing. It's not knowledge management, IT, or human resources. It's not product design, usability, or just-in-time inventory.

The most important skill today is... teaching.

and

teaching is the "killer app" for a newer, more ethical approach to marketing.

So hey, SEMs, work that CONTENT.

link
Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive | permalink | +marktd |

 
Stein on SEM: Clicks Don't Make You Any Money!
Gary Stein of JupiterResearch gets an amen from me:

"Search, despite its popularity, is still a satellite, distinct from the overall business. So it's measured solely on its own merits -- clickthroughs and conversions," Stein said. "Search needs to be considered as a core part of the marketing plan, not as a separate initiative."

"The majority only measure clickthroughs, which is kind of crazy --
clicks don't make you any money!"

link
Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive | permalink | +marktd |

 
Blog Search Based on Tags = Stupid
Technorati recently launched a whole-blog search function so that you can find individual blogs rather than blog posts about a given subject. It's based on "the power of folksonomy."

I also hear they're building their new offices on quicksand and replacing their phones with telegraphs.

Tags? WTF? (Hey Technorati please educate me on your decision here - I'd like to understand your reasoning. Convince me that tags are worthy building blocks.)

What about an Ask-style neighborhood contextual relevance thing? The blogs MUST have a neighborhood structure like the rest of the web, right?

(I guess I should really be asking what are the key problems of blog search. I'm sure the majors would be able to answer me that as we have yet to see a viable blog search from any of them.)

Gary tried several searches on Chicago, his hometown, and hurricanes, a topic that should have at least a few results. Nada. That were relevant anyways. Ok ok I know it's in beta.

I just wanted to pick on the whole tag-based search concept.

I'd rather see an editorial-driven blog directory than tags, cause what we're looking at now is a library organized by -at best- the authors rather than the librarian.

One area where I DO think tags will work well is in narrow verticals without too much online commercial spend. Like, uh, I don't know, dominoes or something. Or nanotechnology. Or sailing. Or ninjas.

So here's what. I know Technorati just got that Washington Post deal. That was cool. And I've not abandoned them like some of the searchorati out there. But I don't have much hope for them if they roll out major products built to search tags alone.

Check out the comments on Dave Sifry's post announcing Blog Finder.

Oh f-it. Here's the comment I want you to read: "I do have one concern that I would like to voice. What if SPAM blogs start tagging thier blogs with keywords like - PR, Marketing, Books, etc - in order to gain readership through this new tool. Does this concern you?"
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MSN's AdCenter Now Live in Singapore, Offers Segmentation?
According to ZDNet MSN's AdCenter's live in Singapore now. It requires advertisers to pay a one-time subscription fee (anyone seen subscription fees required for PPC before?) and a minimum bid of S$.10, which is around US$.06.

Like Google, AdCenter determines ad placement in part based on clickthrough rates. The article also mentions costs based on "types of user profiles captured by the system."

Does this mean AdCenter actually has users segmented? Can you target demographics in AdCenter? Holla in the comments or email me if you know. I'll be investigating too.

Is segmentation how Ballmer's going to f-ing kill Google? Is this why he says Schmidt's a p*ssy? mwahahahahahaha!

via TW

Update:

Um, it appears there was already a bit mentioned about the specifics regarding segmentation with MSN's AdCenter. From the esteemed Mr. Lee:

MSN uses registration data from Hotmail, Messenger, or other personalization to deliver ads targeted by age, gender, and other parameters. Now, marketers can influence whether their ads show up more frequently to a specific age group or gender by increasing bids.

Say you put up a campaign and test the traffic. For a specific power keyword, you find you'd bid $0.25 more if searchers were female and $0.11 more if they were 25-35. The ad would rotate more heavily based on a higher AdRank (Google's term, but appropriate here). Additional control through such bid knowledge creates better campaigns.
Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive | permalink | +marktd |

 
Cracking Open the Google Mini
I'm no hardware geek. My eyes glaze when people start talking processors and megahertz and sh*t. It was still cool to see the Google Mini cracked open and documented over on AnandTech, especially knowing that Google uses screws with no screwdriver slots at all to protect their configuration.

Neato!

via TW
Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive | permalink | +marktd |

 
BoingBoing's Katrina Coverage
I don't watch TV, so the majority of what I've learned about Katrina and New Orleans came from the excellent coverage on BoingBoing and links from friends in MySpace (where I just found out Kanye West is a member - he had a blog post decrying the Louisiana situation that made its way through the network).

BoingBoing's been covering where and how people can donate, including donations of time, adspace, materials, wireless development and more. Like the request for 10,000 radios.

I like how they cover the under-covered. And they're leftilicious.

In my opinion BB is undercovered, unlauded in their efforts. So here's a start: thank you BB for giving voice to the unheard and being, to me, a primary source of news.
Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive | permalink | +marktd |

 
Chirac Battles Algorithmic Imperialists
I'm trying to wrap my brain around Chirac's vow to create a Google/Yahoo/MSN/Ask rival to save Europe from the US. So here are his reasons that I pulled from the Telegraph:

1) Anglo-Saxon cultural imperialism
2) omnipresence of US culture in French Society

I have a hard time not thinking about this from a business perspective though, how Chirac's promised "forgivable loans" to the French group Thomson and Deutsche Telekom to create a "multimedia search engine for the internet."

I know f-all about European tech companies (it's my Anglo-Saxon cultural imperialism), and even less about the French (beyond Monty Python sketches) but I'd love to see the behind the scenes relationships between Thomson and Chirac's party.

And how culturally imperialistic can an algorithm be?

My cultural theory teachers in college would tell me that an algo CAN be imperialistic (granted - they were knee deep in French philosophers like Foucault and Barthes).

And algos can obviously be tweaked to favor certain sites over others, but to claim that the G/Y/M/A algos are culturally imperialistic seems absurd.

At their purest, search algorithms are the scientific definition of relevance. (Not that science has never been a cultural battlefield ;)

That said, does anyone know of academic/theoretical studies of cutural bias in search algorithms? How is such a thing demonstrated?
Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive | permalink | +marktd |

 
MSN: PPCall, VoIP, Feed Search, Getting Buzzed
MSN's had a nice little flurry of news lately, and they've been playing some of it Google-style low-key, letting the industry watchers spread the word (or am I just all google-eyed thinking MSN's copying Google here?).

First there's the Teleo acquisition that enables MSN's IM VoIP catch up. While this is a no-brainer move, there was some small print that Jupiter Analyst Gary Stein caught that I didn't see anywhere else: Teleo also does pay per call.

Now that was a smooth little acquisition on MSN's part, and we're sure to see some PPCall products rolling out in conjunction with their new adcenter.

MSN Buzz Building

Then there are the two blog-related MSN developments that, from what I can tell, there was no mainstream media PR campaign behind. There's no buzz builder like saying nothing...

Jeremy Zawodny pointed out the "Blog This" buttons on MSN news stories, which he read on MSN monitor (a Jupiter site... did Meckler sell this one too?).

I like the idea. It makes it as simple to blog about a news story as it would be to "email to a friend." Granted it does go directly to MSN Spaces. (Watch for a Yahoo News "blog this" function soon - Zawodny likes the idea.)

MSN's new feed search also rolled out in media stealth mode (though there was the niche-media talk of MSN hammering feeds).

Danny Sullivan's got a great write up on how to search RSS feeds on MSN.

I didn't find, in my 3-4 test searches, that their index was very up to date from the RSS perspective. Anyone found that the feed search kicks any particular amount of ass? Anyone going to use it rather than/in addition to just monitoring regular subscriptions in BlogLines?
Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive | permalink | +marktd |