IndustryHighlights from the SEW Blog: Sept. 11, 2006

Highlights from the SEW Blog: Sept. 11, 2006

Featured posts from the Search Engine Watch blog, as well as our customary headlines from around the web.

Featured posts from the Search Engine Watch blog, as well as our customary headlines from around the web. If you’re not familiar with our blog, click on any of the links below, or visit the blog’s home page at http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/.

  • Where Are The Mobile Search Marketers?
    I’m generally swamped when I do a call for speakers for any SES event. There’s no end of people who want to talk about paid listings, conversion tracking and so on. But man — no one is biting for my Mobile SEO panel as SES Multimedia & Mobile this October. I’ve seen this occasionally before — a panel simply might be too ahead of the market. Maybe everyone’s talking the mobile search talk but no one’s doing the walk. If you are, prove me wrong and make a pitch. Details here, and I’m taking them through next Wednesday….
  • More On Google & Blocking Privacy Proxies
    Yesterday I wrote about how several proxy servers used by those wishing to search and surf anonymously had apparently been blocked by Google, including the popular Tor service. Google’s since explained why these were blocked and how human users can get around the barrier….
  • Google Sitelinks: New Name For Those Links Under The Top Listings
    Last year, people started to notice that Google began showing “subtopic” or “subcategory” links below their listing, if they were the first in a Google search. Now, Google’s finally confirmed the change as a permanent feature and given it a name: sitelinks. Here’s an example of sitelinks in action, which I tapped into doing a search for HP: Notice how under the first result, there are a number of sub-listings, such as:…
  • August 2006 Search News Recap Posted
    The latest edition of my monthly Search Engine Report newsletter is now online, recapping top stories in search from the past month. You can read it online or receive it via email for free by signing up here. If you’re a Search Engine Watch member, the latest edition of Search Engine Update newsletter has also been posted. That newsletter carries more items than the Search Engine Report newsletter and goes out twice per month….
  • Microsoft Adds Behavioral Targeting Features To adCenter
    MediaPost reports that Microsoft has added behavioral targeting features to the adCenter product. Microsoft has broken down Internet surfers into 18 audience segments including; mobile users, Internet power users, gamers, movie watchers, new/expecting moms, parents, and several categories encompassing travel searchers, and auto buyers and researchers. This now helps Microsoft stand apart from Google’s AdWords product and Yahoo’s Search Marketing product, PPC engines that currently do not have integrated behavioral targeting capabilities….
  • Google Updates Terminology Of Last Visit Date In Cache Results
    Vanessa Fox posted an update at the Google Webmaster Central Blog on what the date and time displayed on the Google Cache page really means. The date displayed technically shows the last time Google “retrieved” data off the page, meaning if you have a page that hasn’t been updated, and Google visits the page and sees that it was not updated, then Google will not retrieve any new information from that page and it won’t update the date displayed on the cache page. Here is an example of the cache page of Search Engine Watch, carefully look at the date…
  • Google Opens Tesseract OCR Software
    The Google Code Blog announced that Google has “re-released” the Tesseract OCR software to the open source community. OCR, optical character recognition, is the technology for converting text on a physical paper into computer based text. So if you have a ton of papers you typed up in your college days and you want them stored in digital format, you can use OCR to translate those documents for you….
  • New Engine ‘ChaCha’ Offers Real-Time Answers From Live ‘Guides’
    Part Wikipedia, part Yahoo Answers and part About.com, ChaCha is a new search engine with a compelling hook – real-time results from human beings. The site launches (in “Alpha”) today and offers users two ways to search: traditional algorithmic results or help from live “guides.” Users interact with guides via an embedded instant messaging window in the search results page….
  • Borrell Bullish On Local Search Revenue Outlook
    According to an article in today’s MediaPost, Borrell Associates’ newest local forecast is quite upbeat about geotargeted ad growth across categories, but especially in paid search….
  • Google Adjusts Minimum CPC Rates
    I reported at the Search Engine Roundtable this morning that Google has made some “minor” adjustments to their minimum CPC prices. In a WebmasterWorld thread, AdWordsAdvisor explained that Google has “rounded many of the minimum CPC amounts so that they’ll no longer appear as rather odd amounts.” AdWordsAdvisor continues to explain that this has an impact mostly ‘lower quality ads,’ ads with low CPC rates. Many AdWords customers have noticed that many of their keywords have dropped into the ‘inactive keywords’ bucket, resulting in lost traffic. I have more details at the Search Engine Roundtable….
  • ‘Local Shopping’ Competition Intensifying
    Several years ago I was in a room with Chuck Davis, then CEO of BizRate (Shopzilla), and pitched him the idea of including local, offline store information in the company’s database. He cited the complexity of getting the local information and the absence of a competitive need for it at the time. Times have changed and local (together with “social shopping”) is the next frontier for comparison engines….

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