IndustryHighlights from the SEW Blog: Sept. 18, 2006

Highlights from the SEW Blog: Sept. 18, 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/.

From The SEW Blog…

  • Google Adds Tabs To Personalized Home Page
    Last night Google has added the ability to add and manage tabs on your personalized home page. At the top of the page, you should see a “Add a tab” link. Clicking on that will enable you to add a tab to your home page, helping you keep your Google home page more organized. Both Garrett Rogers and I took screen captures of our personalized home pages. Garrett added a “work” tab, I decided to add a “feeds” tab, that contains all my feeds. This can be very handy for those who are big into Google Personalized home page….
  • Google.org Creating For Profit Hybrid Cars
    In a New York Times article named Philanthropy Google’s Way: Not the Usual, describes how Google.org is actually a for-profit company, unlike the “Google Foundation” which is part of Google.org. Google.org is actually “consulting with hybrid-engine scientists and automakers” to design a new “an ultra-fuel-efficient plug-in hybrid car engine that runs on ethanol, electricity and gasoline.” I guess we can call it the Google Car? The goal of this Google car is to have these cars exceeds 100 miles per gallon. I wonder what colors these cars will come in?…
  • Yahoo Adds More Social Features To Local
    Yahoo has been rolling out its “FUSE” (find, use, share, extend) strategy across its many properties and has just made its popular Yahoo Local site more personal and simultaneously more “social.” A number of new features have been integrated into the site that allow people to create customized profiles and lists of local favorites but also to tag and share those favorites for discovery by the larger user community….
  • Business Searching Beats Sex Queries & Who’s Handing Out The Query Data?
    There’s a new paper out saying that business topics have ousted sex topics as top searches. Forget the findings, however. In the wake of the AOL search data uproar, I wanted to know where the 20 to 30 million search sessions studied came from….
  • Google: Expanding One Start-Up At A Time
    The Washington Post has an interesting article looking at Google’s acquisition strategy, in Google Goes to Market. The article shows how Google has spent a lot less than it’s competitors. In fact, it appears Google’s goals behind their acquisitions differ greatly from Yahoo and eBay. The article describes that Google tends to buy companies that are early in the stages of development, and then when they acquire them, Google “has done little to highlight them.” It is rare for Google to tell the public why they bought a certain company. It is also not like Google wants to buy software,…
  • Intuit & Google Announce Major Local Search Marketing Partnership
    In a development with potentially sweeping implications for local search and small business online marketing, Intuit has announced a partnership with Google that integrates AdWords campaign management and other Google-related features directly into the workflow of QuickBooks, the company’s bestselling software package for small business. QuickBooks has 3.7 million active small business customers. A similar set of capabilities is contemplated for a future release of Intuit’s other bestselling software program Quicken….
  • Hitwise Data Center Offers Search Terms & Top Search Engines For Various Countries
    New from Hitwise is the Hitwise Data Center, sharing details on web surfing behavior. There are different data centers for various countries, and for search marketers, two key reports tell you top terms and top search engines….
  • Site Search Volume More Than Web Search Volume
    There were two interesting articles on site search, searches done directly on a web site versus a web search engine, recently. The first was from Shaun Ryan where he estimated the search volume of site search compared to web search. He shows that web searches are performed about 200 million times per day. But based on his best guesstimation, there are more than 2 billion site search done per day. If that is the case, a new study from Lou Rosenfeld on how site owners view site search might be interesting to read. The study asked four questions and received…
  • Shakespeare Searched By Clusty
    If it’s September it must be Shakespeare. Clusty has released Shakespeare Searched which is designed to provide quick access to the works of the Bard. It’s not designed as a replacement for, or access to the full text of his work, but as a quick reference resource. The concept is that it can be used to identify who made a specific speech, which work contains which quotes or even individual words, and also helps draw out specific themes in individual works or across the entire corpus. It doesn’t provide analysis or commentary, just direct access to the text via Vivisimo….
  • The Ten Linking Commandments By LinkMoses
    Eric Ward posted a fun but true list of what he calls LinkMoses Linking Commandments. But honestly, number five makes me wonder about practicing what you preach. 🙂 Come on LinkMoses, “Thou shall not refereth to content as link bait, any more than you shall refereth to your users as carp.” Nice list!…
  • Big Brands: Do You Know What Wikipedia Saying About You Via Google?
    Steve Rubel produced a small study on the top 100 advertisers, according to AdAge, to see where in the Google rankings, does the brand’s Wikipedia entry fall. For example, a search on the well-known automobile brand Chevrolet shows a Wikipedia entry for them at the number four result. What that Wikipedia entry says about your company, can have a huge impact on your brand. The study showed that the Wikipedia entry listed in the Google results for the top 100 brands, on average was at position 11. But Steve Rubel explains that many of those brands have listings within the…
  • Windows Live Local Better, But Still Not There
    Windows Live Local (WLL) came out of beta today along with Live.com and Live Search. Chris Sherman covered the full upgrade and release in his Search Day article. This post will focus on WLL specifically. Derrick Connell, Microsoft’s search business general manager, is quoted as saying that 15% to 20% of search queries are local. (While this estimate may be slighly low, it would mean somewhere between 975 million and 1.3 billion U.S. search queries per month (across all engines) had a local intent. This shows what’s at stake in having a good user experience and being able to monetize…
  • Track Federal Spending With Government Search Engine
    Andy Beal spotted an AP article named Senate backs online search of spending. Yes, the Senate wants to make it easier for normal users to track what the US Government is spending taxpayers money on. The example search given is that, “one could type in “Boeing” to find contracts awarded to the aerospace company or “breast cancer research” to see efforts to battle one of the leading killers of women.” Andy asks, why not just have Google do it for the government, since they already know a lot more than the government does anyway? :)…
  • Google Interesting Items Module: Recommend Searches, Pages & Gadgets
    Google has added an Interesting items for you module to the personalized home page interface as noted in the Google Operating System blog. Google works with your own searches and attempts to find other things that will be of interest to you. The module provides users with three tabbed options – searches, pages and gadgets. I found that the searches Google suggested to be something of a mixed bag; some of them were actually quite sensible, although they were limited to a maximum of three individual search terms (not a phrase search in sight) – out of the 10 recommendations…

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The 2023 B2B Superpowers Index
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