Highlights from the SEW Blog: May 1, 2006
Featured posts from the Search Engine Watch blog, as well as our customary search headlines from around the web.
Featured posts from the Search Engine Watch blog, as well as our customary search headlines from around the web.
Featured posts from the Search Engine Watch blog, as well as our customary search 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/.
Microsoft’s IE 7 Serve Unfair Advantage Over Google & Yahoo?
Everyone is pointing to a NY Times article that claims Google is complaining to the Justice Department and the European Commission about Microsoft’s new Internet Explorer 7. IE7 has set the default browser search engine to MSN Search, Google feels this puts Microsoft at an unfair advantage. Marissa Mayer is quoted as saying; “The market favors open choice for search, and companies should compete for users based on the quality of their search services.” She adds, “We don’t think it’s right for Microsoft to just set the default to MSN. We believe users should choose.” Microsoft replied to this saying that Google is correct, IE7 sets MSN Search as the default, but changing that setting is incredibly easy and can be done at any time.
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Yahoo Tests Yahoo Buzz Box Within Search Results Page
I reported this morning that Yahoo has been testing adding the Yahoo Buzz box within the search result pages. Conduct a search at Yahoo Search on any term, and you may notice this big bright yellow box on the right hand side (above or possibly below the ads) with other popular searches from the Buzz index. To see image of this in action visit my site. This just seems way off target to me, how does this enhance the user experience for the searcher’s query? The buzz index does not seem to be matched on the query, it just seems to be based on today’s most popular searches.
AdSense Launches Text Ad Referrals, Site-Flavored Search and New Image Ad Sizes
The Google AdSense team has made some new additions to the program over the past few days. The first is a new text link referral program to go along with their image referral ad program. This is a surprising addition because many thought AdSense would never allow text link referrals, but it is worth noting that publishers cannot customize the text in the links, and it is generated by an AdSense script, not a simple html link as with most referral programs.
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Google Suggest For Google News
Google announced that they have added the Google Suggest feature to Google News. To try Google Suggest for Google News out, visit http://news.google.com/news?complete=1. This is a nice feature to help people narrow down the news searches they perform.
Former Yahoo Exec Toni Schneider On Life At Automattic
Yahoo’s had a number of executives depart to start-ups and smaller companies recently. Toni Schneider was one of them, leaving last January. Swapping job security for a startup at Business 2.0 has John Battelle talking with him about making the move to Automattic.
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Google AdWords Broad Match To Act Differently For Commercial, Non-Commercial Terms
Depending on broad match or phrase match to get listed on Google? A new tweak to Google AdWords means that in some cases, that might no longer get your ad listed as in the past.
Ads quality and you from the Inside AdWords blog from Google covers the change. For queries that are less commercial in nature, broad matching is becoming more conservative, less likely to put some advertisers on Google’s search results pages.
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Revisiting Search Engine Ad Breaks
Originally, the news of Google’s broad matching change had me thinking that Google was adding more ad positions to their search results pages. I’ve since talked with Google and understand now this isn’t the case. I’ve broken what is happening into a new story. Meanwhile, I think this story is still a useful reminder on the number of ad positions each search engine offers across the board.
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Washington Post Talks About The SEM Community
Leslie Walker from the Washington Post wrote an article named How to Juice Up a Site’s Rank, which is basically an article about the SEM community. Rand Fishkin says he was interviewed for the article, but like Rand, I don’t think the article 100% accurately described our industry. What is cool, is that the article not only discussed “Google Juice,” a term normally not used in the industry, but also talked about the v7 competition, SEM forums, link building, spam, getting banned. Many of our every day SEOs and SEMs we here from in our community are mentioned in this article.
NOTE: Article links often change. In case of a bad link, use the publication’s search facility, which most have, and search for the headline.