Below, a recap of stories posted today to the Search
Engine Watch Blog, along with other items we’ve spotted but not blogged
separately:
From The SEW Blog…
Search Influenced $15.2 Billion In Consumer Electronics Spending Through First Half
As the latest in an ongoing series of studies that capture the evolving and complex nature of consumer behavior today, Yahoo yesterday released findings from a joint study conducted with the Consumer Electronics Association. The study was fielded in June of this year and surveyed more than 2,000 U.S. adults who were pre-qualified as intending to make consumer electronics (CE) purchases. The study looked at five CE categories: cell phones, computers, digital cameras, MP3 players and televisions. Below are the top-level findings….
Google Removes Dynamic Parameter Clause From Webmaster Guidelines
The Google Blog notes that they have updated their webmaster guidelines to be more up to date with their crawling and indexing technology. Since Google now is able to crawl and index URLs with parameters, i.e. dynamic URLs – they have removed the line that reads “Don’t use “&id=” as a parameter in your URLs, as we don’t include these pages in our index.” Google still recommends keeping those parameters down to a minimum and calls rewriting dynamic URLs into user-friendly versions, “a good practice.”…
Customized Search From Optevi And Microsoft
In writing about the launch of Google Custom Search Engine, I neglected to mention a couple of other companies doing similar things. The first one omitted from my post was consumer-focused customized search engine Optevi. Optevi allows users to choose from or create “bundles” of sites that influence search results….
Face Found On Google Maps
Philipp Lenssen spotted on Digg a link to Google Maps that shows a face outline in the earth. The coordinated for the Google Maps face is at 50° 0’38.20″N 110° 6’48.32″W. Pretty convincing, eh? It just amazes me how people find these things. This location is in Canada, near Calgary and Montana – so if you are not too far, drive up there, right off highway 1 (it appears) and let us know….
Google Maps Adds “More Info” Link & Expand/Collapse Result
Philipp Lenssen reports that Google Maps has added a “more info” link on the Google Maps results. If you do a search for my company, on the left hand side you will see a “more info” link. If you click that link, a window is overlaid over the map with more details on that business including address, phone, directions, overview, details and web pages related to the company. You can also then click on the windows-like collapse icon on the top right, near the close icon of that window to collapse the details and see more of the map….
Microsoft Removes Belgian Content Without Court Order
The Register writes Microsoft dodges court in Belgian copyright battle where they say Microsoft decided not to go to court over Belgian newspapers request for them to remove their content from their index. Google was ordered to remove the content by a Belgian court and then later lost an appeal on the same case. Microsoft simply did not want to fight them and decided to just grant the wishes of the cease and desist letter sent to them….
Next Up For Sale, Digg.com
Techcrunch reports that Digg.com is looking to sell the property for $150 million. Digg’s recent discussions to sell included negotiations with News Corp, and some other non-disclosed bidders. The word is that Digg wants “at least $150 million” but no one is willing to pay that much to them….
Yahoo Adds NOODP Support & Weather Report Update
The Yahoo Search Blog announced that Yahoo has finally added support for the NOODP META tag. You can deploy this two ways; META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOODP” (stops MSN, Google and Yahoo from using ODP directory) or META NAME=”Slurp” CONTENT=”NOODP (stops just Yahoo from using ODP directory) I reported back on October 11th that this was coming and Danny explains why NOODP tag support is not enough, we need it to support a method to tell Yahoo not to use the Yahoo Directory title and description as well….
Amazon Turns Down Google’s Request For Information On Book Search
Business Week reports that Amazon has turned down Google’s request for information to help in it book scanning lawsuit. Amazon responded to Google’s subpoena saying, that it would make Amazon’s trade secrets public and it was “overly broad and unduly burdensome” on Amazon. In short, it is Amazon’s way of telling Google to stop looking over their shoulder and work it out yourself….
New Toolbar and Bookmarks from Yahoo
Yahoo has applied a major facelift to its toolbar and bookmarking feature, creating a slick new visual interface and tightly integrating your own bookmarks into search. More on the new service in today’s SearchDay article, Yahoo Updates Toolbar and Bookmarks….
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