Microsoft Fremont to Rival Google Base
Rumors of Fremont, Microsoft's Base rival, were confirmed recently. From what I gather Fremont focuses more on classifieds, while Base is open to more (almost any) types of data.
Glimpses of Fremont are available by pointing a Web browser to fremont.live.com. However, Microsoft said Tuesday the service itself is for now only open to some Microsoft employees.
Microsoft plans the first public test sometime later this month, according to a Microsoft spokeswoman.
Microsoft employees have long used an internal listing service to sell and exchange items with other workers, friends and family. The company's Windows Live team is trying a similar approach with its listing service. Users will be able to offer their items online either within a closed circle or to the broader public.
The site sweeps pretty broadly and has traditional classifieds categories, as well as services. It also seeks to leverage community features so that it’s not just a listings database but much more dynamic.
GoshMe: New Vertical Meta Search Engine
Today I got an email from GoshMe, a Brazilian search company that searches/scrapes across vertical search engines, directories, news sites, and more.
Before searching you indicate in one of 17 check boxes the types of information you're searching for. Clicking boxes is too much to ask of the mainstream searcher, but I think hardcore searchers will find this is a great place to scour for information that MSSE (main stream search engines) aren't delivering.
What I like especially about GoshMe is that they display individual search engines as results, rather than trying to organize ALL the results from ALL the sources they scrape.
I plan to include GoshMe in my "search engine stable" because:
1) I can find vertical search sites I've never heard of 2) it searches the verticals I have heard of but forget about 3) I like the sense that I'm digging into hidden corners/verticals that I'm not certain that MSSEs get to.
I'm emailing them to learn a little more about the number of sources they have and see if they've had licensing issues and whatnot. Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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Updates include: Both the keyword density and search inside features can now be applied to each word in a user's search query as well as to the entire query. Proximity search allows people to specify the number of words apart each word in their search query must be.
If you like tweaking out your searches FyberSearch is the engine to watch.
Shopping Comparison Sites See Search Increase + More Search News
Your daily link dose. Yummy yummy!
I'll be eating turkey tomorrow and sleeping all day Friday. See you Monday, and have a great holiday, if you celebrate pilgrims discovering America and all that stuff.
Pre-Holiday Online Sales Surge 39 Percent "online sales for the week ended October 30 increased 39 percent from the $1.27 billion in the corresponding week a year ago, reaching $1.77 billion"
Yahoo! Poll Shows 80% of Holiday Shoppers Will Buy Online "More than eight out of ten holiday shoppers (83 percent) said they would shop for holiday gifts online, and a similar number, 80 percent, said they are likely to purchase gifts online from small businesses." via MP.
Taking Small Biz Online "Affinity Internet surveyed 2,725 of its small business customers in September 2005 (organizations polled had 1 to 25 employees). The respondents varied in the degree to which they used online marketing. While many businesses conduct 75% to 100% of their marketing online, almost an equal number conduct less than 10%."
First Porn Flicks "Discovered" on Google Base
This via Philipp: "The day had to come (NSFW): Google is now hosting porn movies, as searches for porn or xxx reveal (merchants uploaded them to Google Base in abundance)."
Yes, my post is a cheap attempt at traffic generation and link building with little of value for the search community. Mwahahahahahahahaha! Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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Reports of Google Vulnerabilities Increasing
I read this morning that there were reports of Gmail sanecurity vulnerabilities.
Via Philipp: "A lengthy and detailed report at Elhacker.net says hackers were able to kidnap and get access to any Gmail account. According to the report, the security hole (discovered on October 14) was fixed on October 18."
Not-My-Number Should Make Not-My-Blog
I got an email from a reader who I suspected at first was doing a viral marketing campaign for Not-My-Number. I get lots of emails suggesting stories and when someone seems overly excited and doesn't identify themselves as PR I get suspicious.
When you are out and someone tries to hit on you. You give him/her the local Not-My-Number Dismissal Phone Number if you are not interested in him/her. It is free to use and call.
(And I wondered why I was getting so many numbers lately... I thought it was the dance moves.)
So I think somebody should make this for bloggers, when we get PR emails that aren't relevant to the space we cover we can post them over on not-my-blog. Mwah ahahahahahahahaaaaaaaaa. Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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Google Base Flaws, Reciprocal Linking Truth, More Search News
Lotsa lotsa links today - lotsa news.
Rumor: Google in the RTP?
In a neat bit of ear-to-the-ground and reasoned speculation Andy Beal points to a potentially enormous story opening up right here in the heart of RTP.
He quotes RTP VC Jason Caplain:
"Rumor is that Google could be announcing that they are opening up an office in Research Triangle Park, NC.
If it is true, this would allow Google to tap into RTP's high concentration of engineering talent. My guess is that they will probably announce an acquisition here rather than start building their team from scratch."
And then works his Beal magic, wondering if perhaps ChannelAdvisor could be a Google Acquisition target:
"Jason's VC company is nicely invested in ChannelAdvisor a local company that specializes in helping business sell end of line inventory on eBay and Amazon (and the shopping engines). ChannelAdvisor's CEO Scot Wingo is known to the Google-guys and even had had a brief stint with Overture (his previous company, AuctionRover, being acquired by them). ChannelAdvisor also recently acquired SearchMarketing.com in an effort to break into the SEM space."
Search Overtakes Email, Google Acquistion Rumors + More Search News
Drove to Louisville 560 miles yesterday through the hills of West Virginia aided only by Google Maps and my trusty Saturn wagon. It was my first time driving that far by myself. I liked it way better than flying because on the planes people usually stare at me when I talk to myself.
So I got my BlogLines on this morning. Normally I'd try and write a little about each post I found, maybe cluster them a little around a common theme/company. Not today. I'm just linking the post titles. When the post titles aren't descriptive enough I'll throw a little text from the posts in there for ya.
VCs vs. The Platforms (Battelle) Simon, who is MD here for Yahoo in Business Development, mentioned something that struck me as both obvious yet somehow not stated very clearly. Addressing the audience of mostly VCs, he said:
"Folks like Yahoo will be competing with you for deals."
Watch Jack Ma (Battelle) Ma isn't content to dominate China's auctions and e-mail. He wants the third point of the Internet triumvirate, too: search.
Inxight on Federated Search and Intelligent Clustering
I got a note today from Catherine H. van Zuylen, the Director of Product Management for Inxight Software, Inc.
She wanted to join the enterprise search conversation developing here on SEL since Grokker's Kevin Puelo dropped me a note about the new Grokker offering.
I'm posting her email verbatim, in the interest of rounding out your (my readers') understanding of the current enterprise search industry and in drawing Vivisimo into the conversation. They sent me an email recently asking for a platform to address an issue they had with how Puelo characterized their product. I sent back some questions but haven't heard anything yet. I hope to, and will post when I hear from them. So here's Catherine H. van Zuylen:
No discussion of federated search and intelligent clustering would be complete without an evaluation of Inxight’s Awareness Server offering (then again, as you can tell from the email address, I’m a bit biased).
Our most recent offering, introduced at KMWorld this week, offers federated search of the open web, deep web, subscription sites, internal sources, etc.
Although we also allow users to cluster results by source or by pre-defined taxonomies, the coolest feature (according to our prospects) is our “key mentions” filtering, which automatically clusters and allows users to filter by people, companies, organizations, places, concepts, etc. mentioned in results sets.
Basically, what Vivisimo gives you is an undifferentiated list of concepts.
We’re able to “read” text and tell you, for example, that “Bill Smith” is a person, that “Microsoft” is a company, that “California” is a place, and so forth (without a reliance on customer-supplied lists).
Customers can also supply their own lists or patterns of things to cluster by, such as product names, competitor names, gene sequences, terrorist names, etc.
To get a better idea of what this means to the user, compare the two attached screenshots from clusty.com vs. our Awareness Server.
(we actually have 27 different entity “types”, including dates, currencies, weapons, vehicles, etc., but I’ve kept the list down a tad here to show what typical “enterprise” users want)
Users can also set automated alerts with the same criteria.
I of course asked if she had a blog: Nope, I don’t; we have an internal wiki to which we log our pontifications, but nothing for the outside world. As far as I know, most enterprise search folks are pretty closed-lipped to the outside.
I enjoy facilitating this conversation here on SEL, but if you guys had blogs you could duke it out there instead. But hey, keep it coming. It's nice to hear what's going on in the enterprise search world. Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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Google Sitemaps Security Flaw
Danny gots the haps: David Naylor points out, as does this WebmasterWorld thread spotted via Threadwatch, a pretty surprising security oversight with Google's new Sitemaps stats system that can allow anyone access to stats of other web sites, if those web sites don't report 404/File Not Found errors correctly. Right now, I'm looking at stats for eBay and AOL, as well as Google's own Orkut!
First Annual Ima B. Inken Con: 21st - 29th
Ima B InKentucky from the 21st through the 29th for mom's pecan pie and to hear grammy complain about Bush. I'll still be posting stuff cause I'm addicted to search and I can't bear the thought of being out of the loop for that freaking long.
If you're a WebSourced person reading this and you have news or anything please send it to selowdown@gmail.com. You know I'll give you mad props.
If you're a search geek in the gorgeous bluegrass state and more specifically LOUISVILLE, the hometown of my heart, send me an email at, you guessed it, selowdown@gmail.com. We'll set a place for you at chez francais for TG. Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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November 17, 2005
WebSourced SEM Expert Joins Kowabunga! Expert Panel
WebSourced sister company Kowabunga! has long conversed with their merchants and affiliates in the Kowabunga! blog. They recently began offering their blog readers the opportunity to have their sites critiqued from a marketing perspective, as well as the council of Kowabunga's affiliate experts. They've turned this advice into many info-rich blog posts.
Their blog is a fantastic study in how blogs can engage an audience in a way that helps drive branding, customer retention, and thought leadership. (Scott Vogelsberg, a content specialist here at WebSourced, interviewed Kowabunga's Jim Kukral, who leads their blogging efforts, to learn more about how they're actually measuring the value of the Kowabunga! blog.)
So, congratulations to Jenny, and if you have any SEM questions for her (or questions on affiliate marketing...) head on over to the Kowabunga! blog. Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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Grokker ESM: New Enterprise Search Management Application
I got an email from Kevin Puelo over at Grokker to let me know about the new Grokker enterprise offering.
I had a few questions, which he answered well and promptly. Thanks Kevin!
1) Who are your competitors in the space? Our key competitor is Vivisimo. They also provide information clustering, but not federated content access to the extent we do.
2) What is content federation? Content federation is bringing together disparate data sources into a single user interface. With Grokker, a user can simultaneously query multiple databases and explore the topically organized results. It differs from A9 in that the results are all displayed together by category, and not segregated by source.
3) What does "visual" mean in your search application? Visual refers to the way in which results are presented to the user. In addition to topic clustering, we provide visual cues to guide the user navigation.
In the outline view, it's all about color. If you look at the hierarchy, you'll see that top-level categories are dark green; as you delve deeper into the list, the categories become lighter green. The final links and documents are displayed in blue.
In the zoomable map view, it's a more 3-d representation of results, with circles representing categories and squares representing links. The bigger the circle, the more results it contains.
4) How is this product different from what you previously offered the enterprise market? This is a hosted solution. Previously, we've offered downloadable software and enterprise-hosted web-based solutions. The advantage to this solution is that it is very economical and can be deployed quite quickly. We see more and more enterprise applications moving toward this model.
5) How did you determine that there was a need in the enterprise market for this product? First, we were fortunate that we had Sun and Stanford as early partners.
While their end users and their goals were somewhat different, both of those organizations gave us valuable proof of concept information. We also did extensive market research. IDC has covered a lot of the gaps in the enterprise search space in the past couple of years.
Lastly, I'd say that we're fortunate to be funded by Draper Fisher Jurvetson. They provide a tremendous amount of advice and market knowledge. Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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Google Bundle: New Ad Placement, Analytics Review, Google Print Name Change
Aaron Wall reports, but did not screen capture, AdWords at the bottom of the SERPs.
Philipp Lenssen seems pleased with Google Analytics: "So far it has all I’m looking for, and things I didn’t even know exist. It’s not super-fast (the individual Flash files always take a second or more to load) but it’s not slow either anymore."
Gary Price reports on Google Print's name change: "In a post on the Official Google Blog, Jen Grant, a Product Marketing Manager at Google says that Google Print has a new name. The service is now called Google Book Search. Makes sense to me." Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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Matt Cutts on the Google Sitemaps Changes
"You can now see crawl errors, timeouts on pages, robots.txt errors, unreachable urls, etc. Just really useful hard data that tells you if you have crawl problems and what they are. And you do not need a sitemap to use this functionality. You just create an empty file to verify that you own the domain. Check it out."
I was going to do a separate post for this item, but I think Matt only gets one SEL post today and besides we already mentioned him in the Pubcon post below.
Pubcon X Overview
Ken Chen, an SEO Technician here at WebSourced, patched this overview together from Gary Price's coverage of Barry Schwartz and Lee Odden.
DIY Search for Your Blog Project: Gigablast, RollYo, and Now Eurekster
In August I asked Google/Yahoo/MSN to create a build-your-own-search-engine web app that's gui enough for anyone to use (blogger.com-style simplicity). And free. I imagined this app would be especially useful to bloggers, who often cover very niche areas, and might want to provide highly targeted search engines to their readers.
So the big 3 ain't done crap.
There have, however, been some very exciting developments in the area of hyper-easy DIY indexes/search engines from some of search's smaller, fiestier players. And interestingly, 2 of the 3 I know of involve community-based index building (Gigablast has a bad-ass tool available that "allows you to create a list of up to 500 web sites (or subsites) and a search box that searches just those sites").
And now Eurekster has launched their "swicki" concept, which enables you to essentially build a search index that's highly targeted to your readership/niche and post a search box directly on your site.
I'm still not sure where the wicki part of "swicki" enters into the equation, other than the fact that wickis are conversation-capturing information-sharing applications and this product apparently captures "the power of your community."
As far as new terms go, well, ouch. Swicki. It just sounds gross. Ok. As far as pushing targeted-information building resources to bloggers and other information-sharing types: A+.
Here's more Swicki coverage:
Foremost check out Susan Mernit's Eurekster post. It's short and seems to link to about every other post there is on Eurekster. She also consulted with them on building it.
And Greg Sterling, who had the link to Susan Mernit's post.
Info I'm seeking: solid comparisons between RollYo and Swicki. Contact me (selowdown@gmail.com 919-433-3139) or post below if you know of any. And any more news on folks implementing either service on their sites. Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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We Have New Bosses It's official now, and I've never been more excited about working at WebSourced. From our press release: "WebSourced, Inc., the world's leading search engine optimization firm, today announced the promotion of three key executives at its Morrisville, N.C. headquarters."
Thomas M. Dwyer has been appointed vice president, interactive advertising. Kya D. Sainsbury-Carter has been appointed vice president of client services. William J. "Bill" Howard has been promoted to vice president of client operations.
So, my congratulations to these talented folks, each of whom I consider a business mentor and drivers of our climate of innovation, creativity and superior client service.
You're press/blogger and wanna know more? Talk to this dude: Xavier Hermosillo, 310-832-2999 Xavier@thinkpartnership.com Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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THK Signs Letter of Intent for Crystal Reference Systems and Their "Contextual Search" Technology
WebSourced's holding company, THK, signed a letter of intent for Crystal Reference Systems, "Based in Holyhead, North Wales, U.K., Crystal Reference Systems is an Internet content and search technology company that was founded in 2001 by managing director Ian Saunders and Dr. David Crystal, a world authority in linguistics and one of the world's foremost authorities on language."
And, wow: "Textonomy uses techniques from linguistic science to determine the semantic relationships between words and the contexts in which they occur. The Textonomy suite of products includes solutions for search and navigation, e-commerce and contextual advertising."
You're press/blogging and wanna know more? Talk to this dude: Think Partnership Inc. Xavier Hermosillo, 310-832-2999 Xavier@thinkpartnership.com
TrueLocal Looking for Kelsey's 1.4B in Local Search Spend TrueLocal jumped into the slowly warming local search arena, about which Kelsey Group's Neal Polachek, senior vice president, research and consulting, laments “Paid search advertising may well reach $7 billion in 2005. Based on today’s traffic volume, local search should be a $1.4 billion marketplace, yet it is less than $500 million. The question is: When will local get its share of search dollars?”
TrueLocal has a bidding system in place: Any business with a physical location can appear at the top of the results for as little a $1 bid per category and zip code (e.g. hotels in 60603).
And a local index comprising: over 13 million local businesses and 50 million local web pages. (Though I didn't see anything on how they built the index.)
Google SMS Translates Language, Currency Gary Price points us to neato advances with Google SMS, which I have yet to use because SMS takes me forever and my phone hates talking to the internet.
Now nimble-fingered SMS users can translate French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish from or to English or convert a currency to another currency.
Small news in light of Base and Analytics, but significant in how Google's translating the Google brand for the SMS channel. Here's Google's SMS page. Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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Google Base Launches Gary Price pokes at Google Base and delivers this bottom line, with his characteristic backwards smilies:
Those with lots of content now have a way to add it to the Google database. It will likely be a new responsibility for the SEM when he or she is not working on their Google Sitemaps or feed to Froogle (-: It could also give library catalogers moonlighting opportunities. (-:
Danny's comprehensive Base write up should pretty much answer all your Base questions. Ultimately he thinks it's a see-what-happens offering: "Google Base is a way for Google to let anyone upload information to Google about anything. That's the master plan. Exactly how that master plan will unfold isn't clear. Maybe there won't be any particular date types that are uploaded. Maybe it really will turn into a great place for those with classified listings that will lead to a dedicated spin-off service. The overall goal seems to be put this tool out there and see what people make of it."
Internet Retailer caught up with Safa Raschty, who's a bit more bullish about Base: "'Google will be a Craigslist on steroids—a very potent and dangerous challenge to where eBay wants to go,' Rashtchy says."
Bindu Reddy, a Base product manager, posted about Base in the Google blog and has testimonials from several organizations already submitting content.
Battelle waxes Basey: "Behold, the physical world rendered as information. One of the main arguments in my book is that if it's not in the index, it's not considered valuable in a search-driven world. This, of course, is a new way to Get Into The Index. We've only just begun..."
I'll update as I find more reviews/analysis. And after I get my Base on. Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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November 15, 2005
Scoble Linked to Brandt in Yanked Anti-Google Post
Scoble wrote and yanked a post recently, in which he gets pissed at Google employee Jason Shellen:
Ahh, let me get this right. Google is pushing a single-browser solution. And their employees are advocating putting code on your site that’ll turn off Internet Explorer.
I wonder what the reaction from the blogosphere would be if Microsoft tried such a strategy against Firefox?
And later he links to Daniel Brandt.
I used to call Brandt every couple months when I worked for WebProNews (Google Filter/Scroogle Blocked/Google Datacenters/Brandy Update). I remember him as soft spoken, very intelligent, and I always appreciated his then-unique anti-Google stance.
It was just one of those funny, full circle moments for me to see Brandt linked to by Scoble. I wasn't as interested in the politics/ethics of the Google bashing IE issue. Luckily Nathan was.
Nathan Weinberg posted the deleted post, and notes that "Scoble raises some good points of the conflict of interest of a Google employee advocating anti-IE trickery, even if Google doesn’t technically own Firefox, and the employee isn’t involved in FF development." via tw. Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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Yahoo Search Ads in RSS Feeds for Yahoo Publisher Network
Just got this in an email from Yahoo:
"Beginning today, Yahoo! is offering search advertising in RSS feeds from publishers participating in the Yahoo! Publisher Network beta product. As Yahoo continues to expand the number of publishers within the network, RSS ads will be offered as another opportunity for small- and medium-sized publishers to earn revenue from their Web sites (the new feature is available to all beta participants)."
Google began putting AdWords into RSS in April, as Andrew noted.
Also, Pheedo launched an RSS analytics tool today, according to mVox. Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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Aaron Wall Distills Best Practices from Yahoo/Stanford Linking Paper
Thanks Aaron! He read and translated the Link Spam Detection Based on Mass Estimation PDF I mentioned last week.
He details the takeaways for search marketers:
Don't be scared of getting a few spammy links (everyone has some).
Only a few quality links are needed to rank in Google in many fields.
If you can get the right resources to be interested in linking your way (directly or indirectly) a quality on topic high PageRank .edu link can be worth some serious cash.
Sometimes the cheapest way to get those kinds of links will be creating causes or linkbait, which may be external to your main site.
(there are more in his review)
And then he overviews the methodologies for the study, which you can check out for yourself, as I'm not sure which excerpts are most important.
via SEW, where Danny gives his thoughts on the evolution of link valuation. Good stuff too. Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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Yahoo Bundle: Yahoo Update 2, Shoposphere, Podcast Creation + Hosting, More Tim Mayer posted Sunday that "You should see some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages that are included in the index. This update will be complete by tomorrow (Monday) morning."
There are some wrenching comments from folks who lost all their Yahoo rankings overnight that's reminiscent of the Florida update uproar from '03.
"Yahoo Shopping's shoposphere is a new form of social commerce where the Yahoo user community can get involved in commerce without having to worry about any infrastructure."
From Netcraft's Rich Miller: At a podcasting trade show Friday, Yahoo confirmed that it is developing a service to publish and host podcasts. The show was also awash with rumors that a similar project is in development at Google, and it seems logical that Microsoft's new push into web-based services will eventually include a podcasting component.
Battelle found this Business 2.0 article on how Yahoo's acquisition of Flikr has affected their business strategy, including this telling quote: "Indeed, the Flickr purchase helped ignite a larger strategy. Thanks to a new generation of managers like Butterfield and Fake, Yahoo is starting to see how user-generated content, or “social media,” is a key weapon in its war against Google (GOOG)."
Google Analytics is Here
Ever since Google bought Urchin, the web stats company, people have wondered what they were planning to do with it. Well it looks like their plan is to put all of the little stats companies out of business by offering a comprehensive web stats program for free. Basically, Google bought Urchin, gave it a facelift (added their Logo) and opened it to the public.
Does anyone know if there's a minimum montly AdWords spend for Urchin access? Evan informs me it's free for all. Evan
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November 12, 2005
Google Blogger Ads in MySpace
Blogger crapped out on image uploads for me (most likely an ID-10-t error) but I swear to you I have a screen capture of a Blogger ad in MySpace (pic at the link below).
This ad is interesting to me from many angles...
(I found this ad on Saturday when we were having SEL posting issues so I posted over at our side project). Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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November 11, 2005
Picsearch Adds Seekport to List Including MSN and AskJeeves Picsearch, which powers image search for MSN, AskJeeves, and Lycos, added European search company Seekport, which operates search engines in Germany, France, the UK, Spain and Italy, to their roster.
Seekport, from the press release, "offers European users country- and language-specific indexing that enables users to find results of the highest relevance and to escape much of the unhelpful 'info-junk' which they often encounter on other search sites. This new approach has been made possible by Seekport's creation of country-specific indexing teams that tailor search results for each market. Combined with vertical search capabilities, this makes Seekport an exciting alternative to the US-based search giants for European net users."
According to Net Imperitive, Seekport just relaunched: "Users in the UK, Germany, France, Spain and Italy can now focus search on news, blogs and reference material, or to search for pictures and products."
Update: Oop - just remembered that MSN's patented an image relevance method for search... Interesting, though not surprising that they would seek to replace any and all search results providers. Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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78 SEL RSS Subscribers Use Blogarithm
78 of you Search Engine Lowdown readers get links to these posts emailed to you through a service called Blogarithm. As a baseline we have 985 Bloglines subscribers.
I asked Alec Campbell of Blogarithm, who emailed to tell me about the 78 of you, "who are your users? Do they fear/not understand/not trust RSS readers for some reason?"
He responded:
Our users are extremely diverse, including the tech-savvy and those who are not as comfortable with tech.
I would assume that a number of our users do indeed fear RSS readers or at least, don’t have the time to set them up, learn how to use them, and then routinely visit the site.
However, I would also assume that your readership is fairly comfortable with RSS and yet 78 of them have subscribed to your blog through blogarithm.
This would lead me to believe that even those in the business prefer the simplicity of blogarithm.
Give the people what they want, in the channel they prefer, I say.
You can also subscribe to feeds from gMail I believe. And Thunderbird has a built in RSS reader. I'm not sure what Hotmail and Yahoo mail provide in terms of RSS readers but I think they have them??
But hey, if you want RSS feeds directly in your email, check out Blogarithm (and keep reading SEL however you want ;). Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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IBM Tool Tracks Blogs, "Captures Buzz"
So it sounds like a blog index plus analytics:
"The solution also leverages multi-lingual text analytics from Nstein Technologies which enables the extraction of advanced metadata, allowing organizations to identify "hot topics" as well as analyze tone, facts, opinions, events, locations, and indirect alliances to detect early trends and emerging problems."
I'd be curious to see what kinds of case studies they have. Some pundits have questioned the value of reporting vs. offering solid strategies for managing/joining the conversations.
The influxinsights blog stated "IBM doesn't yet have a tool that develops strategies to enable responses to changes in reputation, but that is surely just a matter of time." It also states that tool starts at $100k. Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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"Gary Price -- awesome sleuth that is he -- was doing some searching of the US Patent Office & Trademark Office database yesterday and noticed that Ask Jeeves filed for a trademark, a service mark to be accurate, for the term "ExpertRank" about a week ago. Perhaps the sign of a new branding campaign to come?"
Interesting from the perspective of how exactly one brands the innerworkings of a search engine... Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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Google Bundle: Cache Problems, Personalized, More on Google in Newspapers Danny Sullivan reports he's having problems accessing cached versions of pages in Google. I'm hearing reports that the cache issue's not consistant.
MediaPost reports on Google's testing of newspaper ads, but downgrades from an "is" testing to, "is considering" testing.
Cutts posted a recruitment email, intended for a different Matt, he received from Yahoo. He also bashes some Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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November 10, 2005
Zawodny Reads Google's Tea Leaves, Predicts Yahoo 2.0
Tristan Louis (former NC resident, now Application Development Manager for HSBC) posted recently his observations regarding Google's product developments in relation to Yahoo, MSN and AOL in Reading the Google Tea Leaves. There are fantastic graphs with links and some interesting speculations regarding upcoming products, such as Google calendar.
Jeremy Zawodny linked to him in his post entitled Google is Building Yahoo 2.0 and also dropped news of Google Finance, which, if there is ever to be such a thing, probably is something like Yahoo Finance. Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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Search-Related Patent Apps from Yahoo, MSN, IBM
Gary Price researched some of the non-Google US patent applications. "By NO means should this be considered a complete list. It's far from it. I just did some quick research and came up with the following list of patent applications (most published within the few weeks) from a few of the major search players and a couple of other companies."
Google News Bundled: Jagger, Automat, Maps Risk, Local on Mobile Review, more
Here's a Google news bundle for you, to keep you up on all the Google haps from the last few days/hours.
Cutts says "as Jagger1 and Jagger2 wind down and Jagger3 is visible at 66.102.9.104, I wanted to recap where things stand."
Charlene Li invited her colleague, Charlie Golvin, to write a review of Google Local for Mobile. "By far the best features were the automatic click-to-dial associated with any search result, and the driving directions."
Google Confirms Print Ad Test in Chicago Newspapers
Danny Sullivan shook confirmation out of Google regarding a report of Google placing ads in a Chicago newspaper.
Search Conference Stuff: SEW Forum Conference Coverage, Interview With Tabke
Danny Sullivan recaps the coverage of the SEW Forum conference held recently at the Disneyland Hotel.
We had about 130 people come to the low-cost, low-key session on search. I joined a panel with a number of our SEW Forums moderators, with the entire event put together by SEW Forums editor Elisabeth Osmeloski.
Brett on reliability of forums for SEM information:
A lot of veteran search marketers advise against solely relying on forums for SEO/SEM information, do you agree with that advice and what recommendations would you make to webmasters for staying on top of SEO/SEM?
Out of diverse opinion comes a consensus. That consensus is most often found in forums after long discussion. It is but one venue of many that people should read. The traditional, reliable, main stream, and well known news sources are also a must read.
An excellent read. Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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Link Spam Detection Paper from Yahoo and Stanford
Link spam research from academia and Yahoo. My suspicion(?) is that there's nothing new in the paper to anyone at MSN/Yahoo/Ask/Google, but it's still a fascinating skim that reminds me just how complex the back end of a search engine really is.
Search Drove $6.6 Billion in Online Travel Spending in 8 Week Period
I'm having one of those flu medication/caffeine-fueled holy crap moments. Because, well, holy crap: "In April, 35 million U.S. consumers used a search engine to initiate travel planning, and those who bought travel online ultimately spent an estimated $6.6 billion in the category during the eight week analysis period."
and: "Among the 35 million consumers searching for travel in April 2005, nearly one-third purchased a travel-related service either online or offline within the eight weeks following the initial search. Among these buyers, 80 percent completed travel purchases online. The discovery that 20 percent of these buyers ultimately completed a travel purchase offline underscores the influence of online research across all buying channels."
and: "20 percent of all travel transactions linked to search engine activity occurred directly following the initial search referral, while the remaining 80 percent took place in the days and weeks following the initial search session."
Great study. And a great example of how creating content that's useful to your industry builds links, drives industry perception, builds brands, thought leadership. Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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November 08, 2005
Danny's Jagger Update Roundup
Danny rundowns the latest reports from SEMs and other serps watchers in his Jagger coverage roundup yesterday.
Not only is this an excellent post, digging into the canonical naming mess that the Jagger update supposedly addresses, he also links to WebSourced's own Jenny Halasz's Jagger article.
Congrats to Jenny and thanks to the search marketing engineers here at WebSourced who helped her gather information for her article. Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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November 07, 2005
Google Local Round Up
Philipp tested out Google's new local search on his mobile phone. I'm impatient and the service sounds agonizingly slow, at least from his account. My poor little Sprint phone is such a slow little web weakling that if it could even run Google' local I'd prolly end up chucking it against the wall in a fit of hurry-the-f-up!!!
Still, once phones are a little beefier I think maps + gps are a natural fit. Local search will be big on phones, and when local search, phones and social networks such as MySpace collide finding the hottest party/club/band in town will be as easy as checking your phone.
MVox cites a Reuters story on the mobile advances from both Yahoo and Google, including Yahoo's upcoming cell phone.
Googler Matt Waddell posted to the Google Blog a song he wrote in tribute to Google Local. update: "Get Lost and Found on Your Phone" is so in-freaking-credibly dorky/wrong that I LOVE IT.
Browse Google dot com slash g-l-m on your desktop. Tell us 'bout your phone, and we'll show you a link to the file in a blink and you're ready to start...
Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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Google's Jagger 3 Update Soft Launch Friday
I'm not telling the algoholics anything new, but for those of you not monitoring data centers Google AlgoLord Matt Cutts announced Saturday that, "starting yesterday, Jagger3 was visible at the 66.102.9.104 data center. There’s still some minor flux on that data center, but it includes Jagger1, Jagger2, and Jagger3."
There are 106 comments in Matt's Jagger3 post, including tons of fun speculation and narrow bits and pieces of what the update means to webmasters from around the world. Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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Google's Firefox Push
So now Google's paying a buck to publishers when users download the Google toolbar, bundled up with Firefox, and fire up Firefox for the first time.
Li suspects that it's Google footing the bill for the downloads. I think new Firefox users are worth FAR MORE to Google than one dollar each.
Here's Charlene Li, who also addresses the $100 bounty they're offering publishers for AdSense customers. Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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Scoble sounded the alarm for MSN and Yahoo, saying that they're doomed vs. Google in the map race and what he thinks they both have to do in order to win.
Zawodny responded to Scoble, and is not in agreement with his idea that the key to winning the race is cloning Google's API.
And to get a feel for where maps are taking us you have to check out Google Maps Mania. The array of creative mashups there is astounding. Is there a Yahoo or MSN Maps Mania blog yet?
And finally, because map search is a key piece of local search, take the
