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Thursday, June 30, 2005

UK SEM, Ian Turner Missing After WebMasterWorld Conference

Written by Jim Hedger and published at 9:07 AM

A moderator at WebMasterWorld, Ian Turner, has been missing since the end of the WebMasterWorld Conference held last week in New Orleans. He was reported missing over 48-hours after failing to meet a flight to the UK in Atalanta.

Anyone with information on Ian Turner or who spoke with him on Saturday or Sunday are asked to contact WebMasterWorld founder Brett Tabke (contact info below)

Brett Tabke
btabke(at)webmasterworld.com
512-231-8107 (9a-3p cst mon-fri gmt-6)
Fax 512-231-1653

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This SEO News was posted by Jim Hedger @ 9:07 AM.

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Wednesday, June 29, 2005

Christmas Time for Search Marketing

Written by Jim Hedger and published at 1:56 PM

(co-written by Bill Stroll, Sales and Marketing Manager)

Christmas is coming. Six months from today, retailers and E-Tailers relying on a strong holiday season will be assessing the bounties of the season. The winter holiday season is the most important segment of the year for North American retail businesses, often accounting for more than half of annual revenues. For many businesses, the period between October and mid-January makes or breaks the bottom line. For online businesses, the early months of summer are the right time to be thinking about the end of the year. Conventional wisdom states it takes about three to four months to achieve Top10 placements with an already established website. It can take even longer with new sites.

Seasonal advertising is almost always based on what are called saturation campaigns. For instance, North American consumers will be swamped with images of Santa and sugar plums. Songs by Bing Crosby and David Bowie will ring nostalgically through our minds. Streets, shopping malls and schools will be festooned with tinsel, holiday decorations and ornamentation designed to get one and all into the season of getting and giving. Increasingly the Internet has taken the holiday spirit, or at least the shopping part of it, away from the mall and onto the monitor.

Savvy retailers are taking advantage of the ever expanding online audience afforded via search marketing and Internet advertising. Retailers who once had a localized marketplace are now competing with retailers from around the world for customers. Regardless of the fact that nobody's real-world store is starting to look a lot like Christmas yet, the race for strong search engine placements for Christmas related items begins this month. Is your website positioned to achieve the visibility it needs to give you the Christmas season you want for your business?

Time is of the essence. While it might be the most wonderful time of the year, Christmas, from a search marketing perspective, is just around the corner. This is an opportune time to begin the process of planning for success.

Choosing strong keyword phrases to market towards is extremely important. Lycos has studied keywords used by search users for years, compiling the weekly list, the Lycos 50. Appearing for the first time this week as the eighteenth most searched word is, "Christmas".

That conforms to StepForth's weekly tracking of holiday related keyword terms which shows a steady rise in the use of Christmas related keyword phrases starting right about now. In May 2004, 73,276 people entered the word "Christmas" at Overture (now Yahoo Search Marketing). In July 2004, that number jumped to 90,215. In August 2004, there were 111,261 Overture searches for Christmas. By October 2004 there were nearly 415,000 searchers for the word Christmas. In November, the floodgates open with 2,426,425 searches, a number that more than doubled in December with 5,383,254 searches conducted for Christmas. A common thread in the study shared by all holiday related phrases shows interest starts to increase radically 90 - 120 days before the calendar date of the holiday.

You might first want to figure out exactly how you wish to be visible on the major search engines as we move towards the holiday buying season. There are two basic types of search engine advertising characterized as Organic or Paid. Organic ads are the general free listings that come up in orders of 1 - 10 under related keywords or keyword phrases. Paid ads tend to be found above or to the right hand side of organic search results and are also distributed across networks of millions of other websites. Knowing the most advantageous ways of using both common forms of search advertising builds a strong foundation and forms a good starting point.

Both types of ad drive traffic though recent studies have shown that traffic driven by organic listings outpaces traffic driven by paid-advertising by a margin of almost 80%.

When most search engine users think about search, they visualize the free, organic listings. Achieving a Top10 organic placement is essential for online retailers who want to be noticed against the millions of other Christmas or holiday related listings that will begin to appear in the coming months. A recent Eye-tracking study of search engine users by Kelowna based SEM Gord Hotchkiss reveals, "There seems to be a "F" shaped scan pattern, where the eye tends to travel vertically along the far left side of the results looking for visual cues (relevant words, brands, etc) and then scanning to the right if something caught the participant's attention." In other words, because they occupy the best real estate on the screen, organic placements are seen by a greater number of eyeballs than their paid-advertising counterparts over to the right.

That's not to say that paid search advertising is a waste of money. It most certainly is not. It pays to pay for paid-search advertising for a number of reasons. Paid search advertising offers distribution opportunities that organic listings do not. Through their networks of partnered websites and publications, ads placed with both Google and Yahoo, (along with second and third tier competitors) tend to appear on literally hundreds of millions of other web properties, based on similarities between text on those properties and text appearing in the ad-copy. Known as contextual distribution, the networks of websites displaying paid advertising from one of the major search engines continues to grow as more independent webmasters sign up as distribution partners.

Another good reason to plan for a paid search advertising campaign is the instant gratification of instantly appearing on the first page of search results under the keyword phrases you have chosen to bid on. Seconds after entering your ad-copy and placing your click-through bids, your advertisement will start to appear on search results. PPC is often used as a temporary measure by search engine optimizers until organic listings begin to appear in order to ensure their client's service or product receives attention as quickly as possible.

Most search marketers agree that a coordinated search engine marketing strategy is important for advertisers in competitive categories and during highly competitive seasons such as Christmas. Understanding the common behaviours of search engine users helps to define the parameters of a smart search marketing campaign. A groundbreaking study by iProspect CEO Fredrick Marckini shows that 92% of all sales generated by search engine marketing actually occur offline. In other words, search engine users tend to research products before purchasing them from a local source or ordering them via traditional mail. This makes search marketing, both in paid and organic forms, an important branding tool. High placement in organic listings, accompanied by a paid-ad which is distributed on other sites relating to the product advertised, brings credibility, customer awareness, and ultimately, converted sales.

Christmas sales have increased every year for the past five years as have searches for holiday related keywords. Just as the seasons follow predictable patterns, search engine users tend to choose seasonally predictable phrases. Given the fact major interest in Christmas related words begins to climb in October, July is the right time to start your organic search engine optimization work. It is also a smart time to begin planning your paid-search advertising campaign and discussing strategy with your search engine marketers. Knowing the trends and how to harness the power of search engine marketing is only part of the battle. Making effective use of that knowledge is the other.

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This SEO News was posted by Jim Hedger @ 1:56 PM.

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Trademarked Target

Written by Jim Hedger and published at 12:47 PM

Over at the Search Engine Watch forums, a search engine marketer who goes by the nickname "Nuthin" put up a post about a problem he is having with Google AdWords.

Nuthin is working for a new but unnamed web directory. He used the word TARGET in the copy of a purchased ad, part of which read, "Reach your target audience today". This all makes sense so far right?

He was sort of stunned to receive an email from Google stating, "Due to trademark reasons, we do not allow advertisers to use 'target' in their Google AdWords ads. This term may be trademarked either for a certain product or service category and may apply only in certain countries."

It appears the major US department store chain Target, owner of the domain target.com, has a trademark registered against the word and claims right over commercial use of the word Target, at least in relation to Google AdWords.

Helpful moderators Ian McAnerin and Danny Sullivan both suggested Nuthin appeal the decision, citing the likelihood of automated electronic monitors making a decision that would almost certainly be reversed when viewed with human eyes.

The most creative response came from UK marketer ProjectPHP who immediately tried to phone former members of UK 80's pop band "The The" to see if they cared about the rampant commercial use of a word that constitutes their basic brand name. Both founders of the band, Matt Johnson and Keith Laws, were unavailable for comment.

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This SEO News was posted by Jim Hedger @ 12:47 PM.

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Tuesday, June 28, 2005

Identity Theft on the Rise - Scarier than Click Fraud

Written by Jim Hedger and published at 3:12 PM

Many search industry observers see click fraud as the number one threat to the growth of the Internet economy. An even greater threat has emerged one that not only places the entire infrastructure of the Internet at risk, it also threatens non-Net users.

Identity theft has always been an issue in our economy, at least as long as there have been schemers and confidence scams. Before the advent of the commercial Internet, it would take a great deal of knowledge and skill to assume another's identity. It still does however; a decade into the age of the commercial Internet, accessing and making use of personal information has never been easier for cyber-criminals. Nearly everyone who uses the Internet has experienced an attempt by somebody somewhere to obtain personal identifying information. From phishing expeditions like the phony eBay and PayPay account update emails everyone receives to more complex methods such as the subtle installation of spyware, viruses and worms, criminals have found a nearly open range where they can exploit the carelessness or weakness of others with virtually no one to stop them.

In 2003, the US Federal Trade Commission noted that 1 out of every 25 adults in the United States was a victim of identity theft. That figure is two years old. Since then, we have seen stories about electronic break-ins and the theft of hundreds of thousands of pieces of personal information leak out from data storage and mining firms such as ChoicePoint and Lexis-Nexus. In comparison, the FTC estimated the number of Americans who were victims of credit-card fraud at about 1 out of every 20 in 2001.

ID theft is, according to FTC figures, the most popular and fastest growing form of consumer fraud. Over 2004, the FTC reported ID thieves took over $100 million from financial institutions, or an average of $6,767 per incident. For individual consumers, the numbers are even more staggering. As reported by Janet Wu of by Boston television station WCVB-TV, money stolen through identity theft amounted to over $50 billion in the United States last year. In other words, nearly $200 per US citizen was somehow stolen due to identity theft.

That was last year. This year the numbers are expected to rise dramatically. On June 20, CNN reported that a breach of security at a third-party processing firm exposed nearly 40 million credit card accounts to potential fraud. 22 million Visa card holders and a further 14 million MasterCard were accessed over time when hackers busted into Tucson based CardSystems Solutions and installed a script that searched out specific types of card transaction data. The intrusion was discovered and stopped on June 20 but not before the hackers managed to export information on over 130,000 unique card holders. Information gained included names, credit card numbers and personal security codes.

This is not only a concern for individual consumers and financial institutions. The massive increase in identity theft also presents significant national security issues. The criminals who steal and use other's identities tend to be highly organized and work in teams. For them, this is a business, not an avocation. When criminals can compile enough identifying information about individual citizens to ring up thousands of dollars against their credit or bank cards, what stops them from selling that information to terrorists, foreign intelligence services or other organized criminals? Virtually nothing, as a recent report from Great Britain demonstrates.

Americans are not the only people in the world who are affected. On June 23, an undercover reporter from UK newspaper The Sun, Oliver Harvey, wrote about how he purchased information on over one thousand British citizens, from a company in India. For less than five dollars per person, Harvey was able to obtain bank and credit card digits and pass-codes, addresses, driver's license info, and even passport registration numbers. Harvey's contact in India, a Kkaran Bahree claimed to be able to access and pass details from over 2000 accounts per month through a network of call center workers in Delhi.

It is astonishingly easy to steal personal information. What is even more astonishing is the apparent caviler attitude shown until now by the major data storage and credit corporations who have all moved to close the barn door long after the horses have escaped. Recent laws passed in California and Illinois now put the onus on data storage firms to immediately inform consumers when a breach of personal data occurs. Before such laws, denial was often the first line of defense for many large data storage corporations.

Unfortunately, there is simply no way to secure electronic data from prying eyes. As any junior hacker will tell you, breaches in security are found as quickly as that security is established. The onus therefore remains on the consumer to take action to protect themselves and their personal information. A few years ago, consumers were told to shred all mail from financial institutions before disposing of it or recycling it. Shredding worked for paper documents but is somewhat more difficult for electronic ones. Today there are small steps consumers can take to protect themselves and knowledge is by far the best defense for individuals.

The first and most important thing for consumers to learn is their legal rights. For instance, many Americans don't realize that section 609(e) of the Fair Credit Reporting Act gives them the right to examine the signature on a contract to prove it is not their own. As long as you can provide legal proof of identity and a police report or affidavit, creditors have an obligation to provide copies of transaction records for your inspection.

A second thing consumers should do is monitor their credit reports. Credit reporting firms such as Equifax, TransUnion and Experian allow consumers to view their personal credit reports for accuracy and report inconsistencies. For US residents, the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act requires each of the major nationwide consumer reporting companies to provide consumers with a free copy of their credit reports, at their request, once every 12 months. This is as important as reviewing your monthly bank statement as criminals often wait months or even years to make use of personal identifying information.

Thirdly, it is important to compile as much documentation as possible to prove your case. Collection letters, previous credit reports, a legally notarized affidavit, and whatever other evidence you can gather will help when you make complaints to authorities. Since electronic identity theft is a relatively new twist on an old game, you might have to provide local police or other authorities with information about ID theft. You might need to remind them that a police report is necessary for the credit reporting agencies to take action. In some jurisdictions, state or provincial law does not yet cover identity theft. If that is the case, ask to file a miscellaneous incident report. If local authorities are unable or unwilling to help, you might need to take your case to state or provincial police forces or even federal policing agencies such as the RCMP or FBI.

Consumers should understand that creditors are becoming more knowledgeable about identity theft. While they might resist an easy settlement, it is in their best interest to communicate with and cooperate with the consumer. It is up to the consumer to provide as much information and proof of their innocence as possible. It is also up to the consumer to take measures to actively protect their personal data. Banks recommend changing your personal ID number (PIN) every three months. They also recommend that consumers become a bit more creative when choosing their PINs. When doing so, avoid using information that is easy to figure out, such as phone numbers, birthdates, or a series of consecutive numbers.

Most importantly, never stop learning about identity theft, how it can affect you and what you can do to protect yourself. If you don't already know the managers of your bank branch, this might be a good time to meet them, if only to put a face to your name in their minds. When your credit history is under attack, you have only your personal credibility to fall back on. Even in an increasingly electronically driven society, personal credibility relies on the strength of your relationships. This might be a good time to start building them or shoring them up.

Identity theft is a problem that is not going to go away soon. Even with the development of "smart-id" cards such as biometric identity cards, the most vulnerable financial transactions take place electronically where even the most stringent biometric information is absolutely useless. Consumers need to be aware that personal information is being collected by lots of entities; a lot more personally identifying information is being collected than we are aware of. As too many stories remind us, security is not always foolproof. It is up to you to protect yourself.

Here are some useful links designed to help victims of identity theft. They might help you avoid becoming one as well.

United States:

Federal Trade Commission - Identity Theft
Privacy Rights Clearing House
US Department of Justice

Canada:
Office of the Privacy Commissioner
Canadian Credit Report
Canadian Privacy Law Blog

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Thursday, June 23, 2005

Jack Kilby, Inventor of the Microchip, Dies at Age 81

Written by Jim Hedger and published at 9:26 AM

Jack Kilby, the man whose invention of the integrated circuit in 1958 led to the power of today's microchip, died Monday at age 81. Shortly after being hired at Texas Instruments, Kilby designed a wafer thin crystal platform (the chip), which served to connect components such as transistors, capacitors, and resistors that were previously connected by wire into a single processing unit. This allowed for greater processing speeds and, most importantly, mass production of microchips.

While Kilby claimed over 60 patents in his 25-year career with Texas Instruments, his first, the invention of the microchip, has by far had the greatest impact on human evolution. Kilby also invented the hand held calculator and was one of the inventors of thermal printing, which was used by millions of office workers in early fax machines.

Kirby was not alone in his micro-electronic fascination. Within a year, another innovator, Robert Noyce co-founder of Intel had also created a microchip. Noyce's innovation was to use silicone as the basis of the chip along with pioneering the planar chip printing process still used to connect components today. Seven years later in 1965, Noyce's business partner, Gordon Moore noted that engineers at both Texas Instruments and Intel were able to double the number of transistors on a circuit (microchip) approximately every 24-months. This observation continues to hold true and has come to be known as Moore's Law.

The invention of the integrated circuit was the foundation of the information age. Practically everything we make and consume, from cell-phone to agri-business, has been affected by the microchip. Over the past 50-years, science and technology have served to exponentially improve our knowledge of the universe and of ourselves. The biggest barrier had always been the processing time related to information. Kilby broke that barrier and for the accomplishment was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2000.

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Google Wallet to Fatten Google's Wallet

Written by Jim Hedger and published at 9:25 AM

This week, Google leaked information about another very smart thing they've done. Google is about to introduce an online payment system to help facilitate e-commerce. While search engine observers speculated that Google was going head to head with Pay Pal, CEO Eric Schmitt was quick to dispel rumours that they were gunning for Pay Pal. In an interview with Reuters, Schmitt said that Google was not going to offer a "person-to-person stored-value payments system" like PayPal's, where money is briefly stored in trust during the transfer.

"The payment services we are working on are a natural evolution of Google's existing online products and advertising programs, which today connect millions of consumers and advertisers," Reuters reported Schmitt saying during a brief interview.

Google has been experimenting with a payment system since March of this year when it began testing a third-party system to send payments to webmasters running AdSense advertising.

The move is good for Google, which draws over 95% of current revenues from paid-advertising. Google wallet might put them in the position of facilitating the entire online product purchase experience.

Diversifying services that can be easily monetized is also important for investors who have rewarded the Google with a reversal of a small slump in share prices earlier this week. The reversal might come at the cost of Pay Pal owner eBay whose shares have lost 2% since rumours began circulating two days ago.

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Summer 2005, Must be the Season of the Niche

Written by Jim Hedger and published at 9:19 AM

The summer of 2005 is going to be an interesting one. The world of search will be fundamentally different by Labour Day. From the recent changes at Google (the effects of which will be shown over time in the core algorithm), to the introduction of several unique types of search engines, dozens of fresh ideas and innovations are finding their way onto our monitors each day. The landscape of the search environment is going to alter its appearance before the leaves change colour in mid-autumn. These changes should serve to solidify the market for a number of new niches in the search-marketing sector.

The environment has already shifted in substantial ways. For the most part, these shifts seem natural and in most ways will be enormously beneficial for search engine users, advertisers and marketers. It is a bit overwhelming though. The introduction of so many new features, tools and types of search in such a short time makes it difficult to phrase thoughts about the future of search, even three months down the road.

In the last year we have seen the introduction of new types of search tools such as local search, vertically themed engines, video search, and desktop search appliances. The four major search engines and about a dozen well placed competitors have spent the year collectively inventing, innovating, acquiring, and coping from each other. Not only are these new tools very different from the general search engines of previous years, the quantity and number of sources these tools draw references from has grown. As Andrew Goodman points out at Traffick, the number of places a search-generated reference might appear has also grown with Google, Yahoo, Ask and MSN furiously creating new real estate to display them on.

For search engine users, the environment is evolving in what appears to be a beneficial way. Information continues to become more accessible as the mainstream search engines learn to better sort results with stricter relevancy standards. Local search offers users an experience combining the Yellow Pages, comparison-shopping and instant mapping. Vertical search engines cut a lot of static out from results by honing in on industry and interest specific search results. Personalization features like desktop search applications, toolbars and mega-storage search-friendly Email accounts can save hours of looking for information a user has already seen each month.

Search engine users appear to endorse the new tools and features by adopting their usage. A recent Harris Interactive survey commissioned by iCrossing shows that consumers are rapidly adapting to make use of the various new types of search.

According to the survey of 2139 US adults between April 19 - 21, 51% of US adults use the Internet for shopping with 80% of them using the 'net to compare prices. Local search is gaining a presence with nearly 50% of users looking for a local shop to purchase goods researched over the Internet. 54% of searchers use the Internet to find people and businesses instead of the phone book with most looking for personal contact information. By the end of the summer, it is reasonable to expect this trend to have a major effect on the services offered by search marketers and the expectations of their clients.

The search marketing industry is already a highly stratified environment with paid search marketing and organic search optimization defining the two basic search-systems influencing the environment.

Those focusing on paid search marketing have spent the last year learning to take full advantage of new places for ad placement created by the Big4 and their competitors. They are also learning how to best use the application programming interfaces offered by the major search engines to target their clients' advertising based on geography, time and season. There has been a rationalization in keyword prices over the past six months with a general lowering of keyword click-bids but concerns over click-fraud continue to grow.

Click-fraud in the pay-per-click market is said to be on the rise but a highly professional niche is growing to address the problem. Since last year, several firms have established PPC Fraud analytics and detection services . Anyone with a high ad-spend should consider the advice offered by these firms.

Another interesting paid-search niche is the growing Pay-per-call billing model in which advertisers pay a flat-fee per call as opposed to a bid-fee per click. Currently offered by AOL and MIVA (formerly FindWhat), Greg Stirling from the Kelsey Group predicts the pay-per-call model could grow from its infancy today to a $4billion industry by 2009. According to Stirling's study of the industry, major online publishers MediaTracks and ZiffLeads are changing their business models to promote pay-per-call. Kelsey says the pay per call model will help drive live-leads to businesses that tend to be more valuable than electronic leads as there is immediate personal interaction between the potential buyer and the vendor. As it is easier to track telephone connections than it is to trace an individual over the Internet, pay-per-call is also promoted as a solution to click-fraud.

Serving the most obvious paid-search niche is the legion of smaller firms existing in, or jumping into, the search-advertising arena. From the major traditional media publishers such as the New York Times or TimeWarner through the AOL network to long-term players such as Kanoodle and FindWhat (MIVA), a significant number of Internet users are being delivered paid-advertising that matches the topic or context of the document the ad appears on, for fractions of the costs of Google and Yahoo Search Marketing advertising.

Over on the organic Search Engine Optimization side of the industry, several major changes that happened in the past twelve months are showing their effects today.

The first has been the introduction of new forms of search such as local search and vertical search tools. In both cases, unique databases are used to extract search results, even when the service is offered by one of the major search engines. Google local for instance draws its original results from the Yellow Pages based on zip codes instead of drawing results from its general database. The vertical search engine Become.com has its own spidered database and its own propitiatory ranking algorithm known as Affinity Index Ranking. By expanding the number of databases search results are drawn from, the search firms inadvertently create new niches and services for SEOs to specialize in.

A second trend over the past year is the flattening out of Google traffic numbers and the subsequent increases MSN and Yahoo have enjoyed. Today, the combined traffic driven by MSN and Yahoo exceeds that from Google. That might not sound like a huge shift. Two years ago however, Google drove almost 85% of organic search traffic by feeding results to practically everyone. For the past year, MSN and Yahoo have created their own spidered results. This has led to a relevancy challenge between the major search engines.

New and unique algorithms are starting to take hold across the search landscape with MSN, Google, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, Become, and others using engine specific algos instead of drawing results from a competitor. This trend leads to specialization within SEO shops with different staff becoming expert in different engines. For example, Google just updated its core algorithm and is examining documents within websites with an ever-expanding view of a website's historic existence. This shift has led to a major shift in link-building strategies and has pushed many SEOs to review their techniques. Thing is, what works at Google won't necessarily work with MSN, Yahoo, or Ask Jeeves.

As search engine users become more adept at finding the best search service for their specific need, the range of options for search advertisers in both paid and organic search marketing systems is increasing. Users are starting to adopt more sophisticated means of search and in turn search engines and ad firms are becoming more sophisticated. As the knowledge necessary to conduct a full fledge search engine marketing campaign has increased exponentially, specialization of services is taking shape both in SEM shops and in the world of freelance tech-workers. Established SEO and SEM shops are hurrying to catch-up. Those entering the field might want to think about niche-market SEO and SEM services. The environment is ready to support them and for those with well-developed expertise, that environment is only getting more resource-full.

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Monday, June 20, 2005

Mamma's Health - Mamma.com Releases Vertical Health Search Engine

Written by Jim Hedger and published at 4:49 PM

Earlier today, Montreal based meta-search engine Mamma.Com announced the beta release of Mamma Health Services, the first of a line of "deep web" vertical search tools planned to be introduced over the next twelve months.

A vertical search engine is one that focuses on unique range of subjects, such as health, travel, or shopping in the quest to present users with topic-specific search results. For a meta-search company like Mamma.Com, establishing a series of vertical search tools might be a wise move given the numerous sources available for them to call information from. The term "deep web" is used to define areas of the web not commonly indexed by search engines such as information found in password protected areas, content accessed by subscription, or documents extracted from protected databases. MammaHealth.com cites references from 7 or 8 highly reputable sources including WebMD.com, Medicine Net, Health Day, and the UK National Health Service.

In an interview, Mamma.com CEO Guy Faure, Mamma has "...identified specialized sources in healthcare marketplace, offering single door entry to the best sites with up to date data going beyond conventional search... to actually retrieve and present content right away to the user instead of just presenting search results leading to an index page."

Searchers are presented with an easy to read page providing quick reference answers which are arranged in a fashion designed to educate as much as inform with the first results leading searchers through four early sections labeled "about", "causes", "symptoms", and "treatment". After the "treatment" section, there is a news section constantly updating information from the pages of the trusted sources referenced. Lastly, there is a section labeled "metasearch" providing all results found in the databases of the trusted sources. One thing searchers won't see at the beta version of MammaHealth is paid advertising. Faure noted Mamma.com wanted to avoid paid advertising on the Health-vertical but would not rule it out for future vertical search engines.

An interesting feature to MammaHealth.com is that the limited number of sources allows for instantly updated information delivery. "Our deep web Health Search offers a search experience unlike any other," said Faure. "It's the fastest, easiest way for Internet users to find in-depth, non-biased information on any health-related topic. We don't just deliver 'close' results, but results that are dead-on accurate - and hand-picked from multiple, credible medical sources from across the Web. Our technology does more than aggregate results from various content providers for medical information; we crawl deep into the websites of certain handpicked, trusted, medical websites to extract and format results in a easy to understand, and comprehensive manner."

Another appealing feature is the "second opinion" option which provides users a greater number of choices drawn from the trusted Health sources.

Vertical search might be the answer Mamma.com is looking for as they struggle against the tide of popularity enjoyed by Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask Jeeves. Over the next twelve months, Momma expects to develop and release other vertical search engines though Faure was tightlipped on exactly how many, the subject matter (he did hint at travel), and the timing of their release. Building vertical search tools is likely a good step for the firm that labels itself the Mother of All Search Engines. By building vertical search tools, Mamma can avoid competing against the Big4 in the field of general search while offering their users tightly focused information.

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Wednesday, June 15, 2005

Google Bundles Toolbar and Desktop Search

Written by Jim Hedger and published at 4:04 PM

Why do our friends change so much when they grow up? Remember when we were kids and didn't have to think about dealing with utility bills, mortgage instalments, taxes, rent, student loans, groceries and car payments? After passing through the awkward stage of adolescence, most of us find ourselves resigned to compromising our values in one way or another in order to get a bigger piece of whatever pie we are chasing. It happens so subtly that most of us don't even notice that we have made such compromises or that they have changed our lives. It just happens that way. Through talent, dedication, luck, and the fortunate conflux of all three at the same time, some find great wealth, influence and power when they grow up. Google officially became an adult late last summer after surviving the techno coming of age ritual known as the IPO. Now that they are all grown up, Google appears to be willing to make compromises on their beloved core mission: to make money without being evil.

Late last month, WinZip Computing Inc , the makers of one of the most popular file compression tools made an agreement with Google to bundle two well known Google applications in with downloadable versions of their WinZip software. As of last week, people downloading WinZip will also download copies of the Google Toolbar and Google's desktop search application. While users are given an opt-out option, the WinZip executable file will, by default, install and activate the toolbar and desktop search application. The odd thing is, neither application has anything to do with compressing files except perhaps to help a user find such files on the net or on their hard drives.

To be fair, Google's toolbar and desktop search applications are both very useful applications but Google's use of this method of distribution is starting to disturb many in the web community. By bundling their software in with unrelated applications, it appears Google is muscling its way onto unwitting users' hard drives, a practice that leaves long time Google watchers questioning their motivation and marketing savvy. To remain fair, Yahoo does it as well but Yahoo has no pretensions around their relationship with stuff that might be considered "evil".

The toolbar provides users instant access to a wide array of Google applications with a search query box, a pagerank meter, a pop-up blocker, an auto fill feature for online forms and a bunch of other user-defined features. It also includes the infamous Autolinks button that alters websites by adding links from Google Local, Google Maps, FedEx, UPI, Carfax or Amazon (depending on the content) when activated. The toolbar provides Google with a great deal of information about its users.

Google Desktop keeps a highly useful record of files stored on a user's computer by spidering the contents of that user's hard drive. While the spider and all results are kept on the user's computer, non-identifying information such a page visits, document views, searches and usage, are shared with Google.

Both applications are used to provide Google with deep mines of demographic data to support the development of direct contextual ad distribution, and of course, a better search experience for its loyal users.

Bundling one piece of software in with another application is not a new thing and might not be considered "evil". As a matter of fact, this is hardly the first time Google has used bundling in their marketing efforts. In exchange for Google inspiring and fostering their growth, several basic versions of the Firefox browser default to a Firefox flavoured Google homepage. As noted in Search Engine Watch , Google also bundles the toolbar and desktop with DVD creation software from InterVideo and with downloads of RealPlayer .

Bundling can also provide an avenue of distribution for smaller software developers who have created complimentary applications for the products they tag along on. Small but useful pieces of software are often distributed by attaching their executable files to the EXE's of software packages they were designed to compliment. Multiplayer online games often come with a copy of the GameSpy search application which helps gamers locate nearby or favoured servers to play on. Users of accounting programs like QuickBooks or Quicken might find third party software designed to help file taxes online or calculate local income tax rates included in the initial install. These additional applications are useful to the end-user and their inclusion is a form of business partnership that provides a valuable customer service.

Sometimes bundling is used to pay the bills. That's when bundled software can bring big time badness. A few years ago online file traders faced all sorts of problems after they installed versions of Kazaa and Bearshare infected with Gator user-tracking and marketing software. Not only did it watch and record what users did, in some cases it took over other applications. Websites wouldn't load properly, URLs would be redirected and unrelated apps would mysteriously stop working properly.

When I was in Toronto recently, while visiting my parents, I was forced to install Firefox and then cleanse my father's computer of mal-ware to access my Gmail account. An IE toolbar offered by a local Toronto radio station had malicious software bundled into it. Software designed by a company whose penchant for lawsuits is legendary prevented me from accessing Google and my Gmail account by redirecting anything with the Google URL to a spam-site search tool.

Sometimes bundling is used to control or dominate a market. Windows operating systems are the ultimate example of how bundling can be used to deliver extremely complementary applications as an all-in-one package with the goal of outright OS domination. The kneecapping of Netscape in the short browser wars of the mid-90's was accomplished by bundling Internet Explorer in with versions of Windows95. Previously, Internet Explorer was sold as stand-alone software.

Acquiring new users and maintaining user loyalty is a major piece of the overall marketing pie for every major search engine and Google is increasingly including pieces of itself with the install of other pieces of software. While working to increase Google account holders by any means possible, the practice of pushing products on users who wanted to use an unrelated product is producing PR problems. Not only does Google need to avoid being evil, it needs to avoid appearing to be evil.

These are problems that don't really need to happen. Google already allows application developers to work Google search technology into their creations through their Application Programming Interface (API) program. Yahoo also offers a similar Developer Network API . Allowing developers access to branded search technology helps build a better web and, in the context of power-giants like Google and Yahoo, is a much cleaner method of brand distribution than the piggyback method of bundling.

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This SEO News was posted by Jim Hedger @ 4:04 PM.

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Monday, June 13, 2005

The Business of Search: Racing Beyond the Bottom Line

Written by Jim Hedger and published at 12:07 PM

The Rubicon has been crossed. Even for traditionalists, there is no going back. The Internet has finally become the world's primary marketing tool, fundamentally altering corporate ad planning and spending. Momentum had been building around the online marketing sector for over three years but 2005 appears to be the year that mainstream marketers notice their universe has changed.

Over the previous three years, a very public race between Yahoo, Microsoft and Google caught the attention and imaginations of most people in the search marketing industry. Known as the Search Engine Wars, this competition has propelled innovation and invention in all aspects of search, especially in the realm of paid-search advertising. As in all races, there are going to be winners and, of course, there are going to be losers. Unlike most races however, this one does not have a fixed finish line and anyone can enter the race at any point, provided they can keep pace with the leaders. Recently, Ask Jeeves worked its way into the race and, as absurd as this might read, may actually be in a better position today than its far larger rival, Google. The same can be said of Yahoo and MSN. The race might be influenced by size and speed but in the long run, everyone knows that this is an endurance race.

Technically, the search engine landscape is sound and growing. Both Google and Yahoo recently updated their organic algorithms in the past month. Microsoft continues to tweak and improve MSN, which is expected to enter the lucrative paid-search advertising market before the end of this year. Rounding out the Big4, Ask Jeeves VP for European Products, Tony Macklin, weighed in at vnunet.com last week saying Ask's newly developed search technology will outperform Google, luring previously loyal users away.

The ideal purpose of search may be to assist Internet users in finding specific information in a chaotic ocean of documents but the business of search is entirely about paid advertising and product delivery. User loyalty is the foundation of success for the major search engines, each of which has developed, acquired or partnered with massive networks of digital advertising media. Aside from their associations with the Internet's basic navigation tools, paid search programs offer marketers a bonus their elders could only dream of; direct ad placement by user-interest or contextual delivery. Membership in these networks is not particularly exclusive with websites made by small business webmasters displaying the same paid-ads as huge corporate sites. In other words, an ad for a unique auto part supplier could be delivered to viewers who were specifically interested in that unique type of vehicle. Ads for Boston Red Sox memorabilia could be served to Beantown sports fans, without wasting valuable impressions on unimpressed Yankee fans from the New York region.

Once the feasibility of that concept became clear, advertising and investment dollars started pouring into the sector. Paid advertising produces the record-breaking revenues shown nearly every quarter by most firms in the search sector. The growth of various paid search ad delivery models gives financial analysts like Safa Rashtchy of Piper Jaffray the confidence to predict search engine revenues will surpass $23 billion a year in the next five years.

In a huge bid of confidence, AOL has transferred much of its massive advertising budget to paid search advertising through Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing. After preparing a $50 million television campaign, AOL execs noticed the majority of traffic to their travel, music and other services came from organic and paid listings on other search engines.

Along with AOL's latest $50 million, literally hundreds of billions of dollars has gone into developing and sustaining the search engine landscape. As we know it today, that landscape is huge and the horizons seem limitless but in the distance, dark clouds of market realities are starting to form. Three reports were issued last week detailing three different difficulties the paid search sector will face in near future.

Searchers prefer organic
The first was a research study from Penn State University presented at the ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce in Vancouver, "Examining Searcher Perceptions of and Interactions with Sponsored Results". (summary) (full report) The study followed the search experiences of 56 subjects aged 18 - 29. The subjects followed instructions leading them to perform hundreds of common queries across the major search engines.

While searching, the subjects communicated their impressions of their search experiences to the researchers. One test had subjects pretend they were going on vacation and needed to find a low-cost tennis racquet they could take with them. Another had them look for a dirt bike for sale in Pittsburgh.

After analysing their verbal impressions and click patterns, the researchers concluded that search engine users tend to trust and consequently click on organic results before paid ads more than 80% of the time. "Consumers have a bias against the links that businesses pay search engines to provide," said Jim Jansen, assistant professor in the Penn State School of Information Sciences and Technology (IST).

In sharp contrast, the study showed only 6% of searchers clicked on the paid or sponsored results first. "What our study shows is that even when the returned results are exactly the same, people still view what they thought of as the organic results as better. The quality of the sponsored links isn't the issue; it's the placement of the results", Jansen added.

Keyword bid-prices dropping
The second report came from Fathom Online's Keyword Price Index (KPI) showing the first decline in keyword bid prices since August 2004. The KPI tracks the bid costs of 500 generic keywords across the major paid search engines. In April, bid prices declined 31 cents on average, leading to a short sell frenzy of search stocks on Wall St. Google, which looked like it would peak $300 a share has fallen to $282 today. Yahoo took a minor hit of 88 cents per share but gained most of it back by today.

Declining keyword bid prices are likely natural phenomena as the market matures to correct itself after months of inflated bids. It might also have something to do with a slowing housing market as the biggest decline was seen in the mortgage and home finance sector.

Even with rational reasons behind the falling click costs, there is worry that investors will see this as a long-term trend that could threaten the values of their shares. Google investors seem particularly worried, especially when analysts and observers start speculating on the burst of a bubble.

Do all bubbles burst?
It has only been nine months since Google released its IPO at $85/share. Two days ago the stock price peaked at just under $300/share and is trading around $282/share today. Its rivals, Yahoo, MSN and Ask are all trading in the $25 - 36 range. With a decline in bid prices on paid-ads that are being ignored by search engine users, Google's financial stability appears based on a shifting foundation.

In a rather biting piece in last Friday's Guardian Unlimited, UK tech writer Nils Pratley asks, "Who in their right mind would buy shares in a company at a price equivalent to 25 times its annual sales?" Google, which is operating in an increasingly competitive environment, might have a very difficult time sustaining shareholder expectations while continuing to expand operations. Pratley looks at the value shareholders have vested in Google and wonders exactly where the floor will be found. He concludes his piece with a lecture Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy gave investors two years after the dot-com crash.

"Anybody thinking of buying Google at 25 times should listen to Sun chief executive Scott McNealy's post-crash analysis of the stupidity of his own shareholders. In 2002, he said at an investor conference: "At 10 times revenues, to give you a 10-year payback, I have to pay you 100% of revenues for 10 straight years in dividends. That assumes I can get that by my shareholders. That assumes I have zero cost of goods sold, which is very hard for a computer company.

"That assumes zero expenses, which is really hard with 39,000 employees. That assumes I pay no taxes, which is very hard. And that assumes you pay no taxes on your dividends, which is kind of illegal. And that assumes with zero R&D for the next 10 years, I can maintain the current revenue run rate.

"Now, having done that, would any of you like to buy my stock at $64? Do you realise how ridiculous those basic assumptions are? You don't need any transparency. You don't need any footnotes. What were you thinking?"

Indeed. Five years is an awfully long time on the Internet. It has been five long and very successful years since the dot-com crash of 2000 and the enthusiasm shown for Google stock is reminiscent of the bitter sweet love affair investors had with tech stocks in the late 1990s. The value of other tech stocks seems to conform to the perceived value of their respective firms. What are investors thinking when they are willing to place their educated bets at prices equivalent to 25X the value of the entire firm? Some believe they are simply seeing gold in Google while others think investors are concentrating on one mighty tree in a huge and growing forest.

Google has a terrible problem faced by many businesses. Even though they are the most popular search engine and have the largest paid advertising distribution network, approximately 95% of their revenues come from paid-search advertising. In contrast, paid-search accounted for less than half of Yahoo's annual income until revenues from its acquisition of Overture increased 235% in 2004. MSN is subsidized by Microsoft and is just entering the paid advertising field and newcomer, Ask Jeeves is hardly reliant on paid search advertising and just starting to roll out its own contextual distribution network based on its association with Barry Diller's Interactive Corporation and its recent absorption of the Excite network.

Finding other forms of income will be essential for Google if it hopes to continue moving forward and supporting such a high share value. Realizing that income might be more difficult for Google than for its rivals as they have much wider foundations to build on. The business of search is a battleground with multiple fronts. While Google is the current leader on the most profitable front, paid-search, it might not be able to retain that position indefinitely. Hopefully both Google and its investors are thinking eight quarters ahead instead of only focusing on tomorrow's bottom line.

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This SEO News was posted by Jim Hedger @ 12:07 PM.

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Friday, June 10, 2005

Google Patent Study - The fine taste of Bourbon?

Written by Jim Hedger and published at 9:12 AM

Two months ago, Google released a 63-point patent document outlining how it examines historical data associated with websites and documents in its index. Since that time, we have witnessed changes in the algorithm which have become known as the Bourbon Update. StepForth has written a short whitepaper which studies that document and gives a short overview of the patent and how its contents may affect the Google organic search engine. It is important to note, this document does not cover subsequent announcements from Google such as Google Sitemaps. The following are a few paragraphs from the whitepaper, "Historic Data and Google Ranking: An analysis of the March 30th, 2005 Patent"

Google's Growth and Reasons for Change
Google is no longer a search engine in the finest sense of the word. As a search tool, Google is a multi-media information retrieval machine that is capable of assumption and suggestion. Growing misuse of simple optimization and linking techniques combined with advances in both user and Internet based technologies are forcing change at Google. StepForth's most recent whitepaper examines the general search engine rankings generated by Google with a particular emphasis on ideas, concepts and sorting techniques noted in the March 31st 2005 patent application "Information retrieval based on historical data" filed by Google engineers, Anurag Acharya, Matt Cutts, Dean Jeffrey, Paul Haahr, Monika Henzinger, Urs Hoelzle, Steve Lawrence, Karl Pfleger, Olcan Sercinoglu, and Simon Tong.

Google is now seven years old. Each year, Google grows a bit bigger. Big, in the context of Google, is bigger than any other public search resource in the world. Google's stated mission is "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." To do that, it not only needs to gather the world's information, it needs to sort it and return relevant results to its users based on words or phrases entered. Therein lies the key to understanding Google's greatest challenges, its search features and how they work together.

Google is in the midst of sweeping changes to the way it operates as a search entity. It isn't a pure search engine. It isn't really a portal either. Google has become more of an institution, the ultimate private-public partnership. Referring to itself a media-company, Google is now a multi-faceted information, advertising and active media delivery system that is accessed primarily through its simple, well-known interface found at www.google.com.

In relation to other large Internet businesses, Google has matured at its own speed, often acting as a defining voice of the search-sphere. Google has been the favoured search tool of the current generation of Internet users which has helped sustain and motivate their ability to innovate, and those innovations have pushed other search firms to bolster their search products. Innovation on basic concepts in search has been necessitated by two major factors.

The first is the basic concept of Moore's Law. Advances in technology offer both home and business users more powerful tools to create basic and advanced documents with. The web has moved away from basic HTML based sites to include sites that feature video, audio, shopping carts, massive databases and dynamically generated content. The description of a website as a collection of unique web pages housed under the same URL or domain is somewhat limited in that these "pages" may actually contain video or audio content, or might not even actually exist until complied "on the fly" using information supplied by the site-visitor.

The second major factor is that Google needs to discourage search-marketing consultants (SEO/SEM) from abusing the obvious exploits found in their core-method of sorting and ranking sites, PageRank. While parts of the PageRank formula have changed over the years, the base concept that a link equals a vote has remained the backbone of Google's ranking algorithm since day one. The simple logic behind PageRank produced highly relevant search engine listings, which were fairly easy to manipulate. In order to prevent gross commercial manipulation, Google has had to add several weights and measures to the evaluation of incoming links, a process that is obviously easier said than done. It also has to tie as many of its features and services together in order to present the best search listings it possibly can.

As Google grew over the years, subtle shifts in its algorithm were seen and recorded by the search marketing industry. There have been a few times, most notably in mid-November 2003, when Google made massive changes to its algorithms, thus causing massive changes to the search engine results pages generated when users entered a simple query. These changes precipitated a cat-and-mouse relationship between Google and many search marketers. Every change Google makes is deconstructed and debated across over a dozen search related web-forums. Google is known for its from-the-hip style of innovation. While the face is familiar, the brains behind it are growing and changing rapidly. Four major factors (technology, revenue, user demand and competition) influence and drive these changes. Where Microsoft dithers and .dll's over its software for years before introduction, Google encourages its staff to spend up to 20% of their time tripping their way up the stairs of invention. Sometimes they produce ideas that didn't work out as they expected, as was the case with Orkut, and sometimes they produce spectacular results as with Google News. The sum total of what works and what doesn't work has served to inform Google what its users want in a search engine. After all, where the users go, the advertising dollars must follow. Such is the way of the Internet.

Users continue to flock to Google and Google continues to build itself into an indispensable information resource. Users trust Google as a resource and their underlying faith is the foundation upon which its highly profitable paid-advertising delivery platform is based upon. Google, in turn, needs to provide its users with increasing levels of filtering to prevent its search results from being manipulated and subsequently degraded.

This is what Google has attempted to do in its recent 63-point patent filing. Careful reading leaves an impression that the ideas behind the patent are designed to build a firewall against link spam and other forms of obvious ranking manipulation. It also shows a few new levels of sophistication in Google's recording and ranking algorithms. As the web grows larger and more complicated, Google engineers face problems of judging a wide variety of documents against relevant keyword queries.

The whitepaper details changes to the way Google examines relevancy between linked documents as outlined in a patent filed on December 31, 2003 and published on March 31, 2005. Over the years, Google has modified and improved its ranking algorithm in an attempt to prevent manipulation of its listings; however, every change or innovation has been treated as a challenge by the search-marketing sector. The patent document this whitepaper is based on presents several fundamental changes in the way Google examines and evaluates information contained in documents found in its index and, in documents that are linked together. The most important piece of information stemming from the patent is that Google compiles document profiles on every item in its vast index. These document profiles contain information on the history of a document and the URL or domain it originates from. This historic-profile is used to judge the relevancy and/or validity of information contained in the document being profiled as well as information about documents linking to the document being profiled.

The contents of a document profile can be placed under a few simple headings based on the area or element of a document being examined. These areas or elements are: On-site Elements, On-site Links, Incoming Links, and Elements found on pages or documents linking to the document being evaluated.

The patent document itself is very long and covers 63-points, most of which cross-reference with other points found in the patent. The whitepaper is an attempt to tie these points together into a coherent examination of changes to the algorithm and what webmasters, SEOs and business owners should watch out for.

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This SEO News was posted by Jim Hedger @ 9:12 AM.

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Wednesday, June 08, 2005

Tasting Bourbon - Major Back-link and Index Update Underway

Written by Jim Hedger and published at 4:32 PM

They say that today is the first day of the rest of your life. That makes everyday an important one though as we all know, some days are much more important than others. Today is one of those days.

It has taken over a month for Google engineers to install, tweak and unleash a 3.5 module update to the core Google algorithm known as the Bourbon Update. StepForth's Senior SEO, Scott Van Achte keeps strict tabs on several factors at Google, including the number of back-links directed to sites owned by the firm and our clients as well as the number of pages in Google's index from each site he monitors. Scott noted a major shift in back-links and in pages indexed starting early this morning (Wednesday). A major shift in back-link counts has traditionally signaled a subsequent shift in Google search results. Coupled with increases to the number of pages from our site and client sites found in Google's index, we are predicting a fairly substantial shift in Google's results to be seen early next week, if not sooner.

As with previous updates, Google has been tightlipped regarding the exact nature of the alterations made to the algo. Many long-term industry observers, myself included, believe the details can be found in a devilishly long patent document Google released at the end of March.

While there is no way to know how Bourbon will affect Google's search results or the extent of the changes to the algorithm, we do know by this time next week, Google's search engine results pages will almost certainly look different than they do today.

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Cosmetic Changes at Google Precede Larger Overhaul

Written by Jim Hedger and published at 4:02 PM

Google is undergoing some of the most sweeping changes in its short, seven year history. As of next week, Google will have finished sorting what might be its largest algorithm shift ever as the final points of the 3.5 part Bourbon Update were installed last Monday. This update has been staggered into three and a half sections in order to avoid a massive amount of dislocation in established rankings as was seen in previous major updates. While changes stemming from the Bourbon Update have not actually manifested into a full reordering of Google's search engine results pages (SERPs), many individual webmasters have reported fairly significant losses or gains in ranking over the past few days.

There are dozens of factors behind changes at Google but the greatest is the enormous valuation of the company itself. With share prices nearing the $300 mark and current market capitalization topping $80billion, Google is considered the most valuable media company in the world, surpassing the $78billion value of Time-Warner and rising far above Yahoo's estimated value of $56billion. Most of Google's riches are newly found, having been generated after their August 2004 IPO. In their race to outlast, outperform and outsmart their competitors, Google has changed its PR strategy and its appearance to suit the legions of suits swirling in and out of their Mountain View offices.

While money may move mountains, it takes a community to change an institution. The search environment has changed substantially over the past three years and in that time, every major player in the search sector has changed as well. Today, Google has become a lot more complicated, so much so that it has stopped trying to look simple. This change in corporate attitude is best reflected in two places, the homepage and the About Google section.

Google's homepage used to be quite simple. Recently, Google created a personalized portal interface (google.com/ig) offering users instant access to several of these new features. For folks with Google accounts such as Gmail users, subscribers to Google Groups, Google desktop users and other account holders, personalized versions of the once sparse homepage now present instant entry points to the various applications the individual uses. Many industry observers have suggested Google's adoption of so many new features and an all-in-one interface show they are moving towards presenting themselves as more of a portal like Yahoo or MSN. Google has always been a bit different than its competition. Even when borrowing and innovating on competitors' ideas, Google has, until now at least, managed to keep itself at an arm's length from the mainstream in appearance and operation. The maintenance of that image gave Internet users an alternative view of Google, one that propelled Google to a position of almost total dominance of the search engine sector. While that dominance might have slipped over the past year, Google is still the most popular search appliance in the world.

One of the ways Google has acted differently than others is in the appearance of not taking itself too seriously. Its corporate ethics policy was limited to the three word phrase, "Don't be evil". Its front page interface retains the double-entendre induced "I feel lucky" button, even though the button is rarely used. The prospectus issued during their August 2004 IPO was specifically written to appear idealistically anti-corporate. Since its introduction, Google has practiced projecting a simple, youthful image that required very little in the way of explanation, so long as their search engine lived up to users' expectations.

Google strives to live up to user expectations and, for the most part, has met and exceeded them time and time again. There is one long-held expectation that Google may not be able to live up to any longer though. Many of us assume Google's relatively informal public attitude will continue to carry over into the later part of the decade. It won't. By comparison, Google will almost certainly continue to be perceived as the search engine driven by youthful energy. Whenever competitors such as MSN or Yahoo try to appear as down-to-Earth as Google does, their efforts seem obvious and forced. Does anyone remember that poor-fellow in the butterfly suit wandering aimlessly around New York last year? Google's communication style is maturing and the best place to view these changes is on the About Google section of their site.

Google has published information about itself on pages found behind the "About Google" link for several years. While documents found in the About section have never been totally static, a facelift over the past few weeks has radically altered the look and feel of the section. Along with the traditional organic search engine results and highly targeted paid-ads, Google is actually a series of 30-someodd search-based applications ranging from alerts and answers to wireless search and weather information. Driven in part by an inventive entrepreneurial spirit and in part by a desire to keep up with products offered by competitors, Google has been rapidly adding new features and tools to their core search service for the past three years.

Google's "About Google" page was once much smaller than it is today. It has grown slightly larger every time Google adds another offering to it. The biggest changes are found behind the increasing number of links on the About page. Today's version of the About page has five boxes added to the left hand side of the page advertising Google Desktop, Blogger, Google Code, Google Mobile, and My Search History. In the center column, Google continues to show four main site sections labeled, Our Search, For Site Owners, Our Company, and More Google. Collectively, those sections contain a larger number of links than they did previously and the number of documents found behind those links has grown as well. Serious Google users should take an hour or two to tour these changes and learn more about the staggering range of features, services and search-enhancements Google now offers.

For webmasters and SEOs, an examination of the new Google Webmaster Guidelines is a definite must. Google has recently changed its webmaster guidelines which are also considered to be a primer on "ethical SEO" practices in relation to Google placements. Google has recently updated its webmaster guidelines to include information on "supplemental listings", crawling frequencies and prefetching. Google has also posted information on its new Google Sitemaps experiment.

Google Sitemaps is perhaps the most important new feature for SEOs offered by Google in a long time. Said to be an experiment in spidering, Google Sitemaps invites webmasters to feed site data directly to Google through an XML sitemap page. Webmasters and SEOs can now tell Google exactly which sections of their sites to crawl, and providing they are keeping their XML sitemap current, when and where to look for changes to their sites. This experimental initiative will especially help webmasters working with database driven sites or large Ecommerce sites where documents are subject to frequent change and are often found behind long-string URLs. Google has been kind enough to provide detailed information on establishing an XML feed and setting priorities for Googlebot.

As it grows, Google appears to be running into the same problem other webmasters with numerous sites or services encounter, the rapid dilution of a domain's unique topic focus. In order to keep themselves accessible, understandable and relevant, Google's teams of engineers, programmers and public relations specialists are involved in what appears to be a massive overhaul of the interface, public documents and the basic sorting algorithm that produces organic results. As in previous years, how this all plays out in the end is entirely up to the searching public. From the SEO/SEM perspective, it is a good thing Google is in the midst of this update. Web workers have been demanding a greater degree of transparency from Google for some time now and perhaps these updates are the beginning of a new commitment to communication from the Googleplex.

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Friday, June 03, 2005

Yang and Yun and Become.Com

Written by Jim Hedger and published at 4:20 PM

Michael Yang and Yeogirl Yun are two of the most interesting entrepreneurial engineers in the business of search. Representing the business brains and intellectual brawn behind the vertical shopping search engine Become.com, both Yang and Yun have storied histories in the industry. In April 1998 the duo conceived and developed the original comparison shopping site, mySimon.com, selling it to CNet two years later for $700M. The results of their unique partnership have shaped the Web as we know it today, effecting popular properties such as WiseNut, LookSmart and a huge chunk of the immense Korean Internet market. Somehow, both found the time to earn multiple university degrees, participate in international economic development efforts and, in the case of Yang, acquire a third-degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do. Yesterday, they graciously found the time to speak with StepForth News.

Earlier this year, Yang and Yun introduced what is arguably the most interesting vertical search engine, Become.com. Merging their experiences of the past with what they both passionately believe to be the future of search, along with $7.2 million in new venture capital funding, Yang and Yun find themselves sitting atop a tool that could conceivably be the most comprehensive shopping mall ever constructed. Become.com is a vertical search engine, which means it focuses on one specific topic area, in this case, shopping.

One of the reasons Become.com is so interesting is that it is one of the few shopping search engines that uses a spider to populate its database and an algorithm to sort it. Active for just over a year, the BecomeBot has found and spidered over 3.2Billion shopping related documents. Once in the database, these documents are run through Yun's Affinity Indexing Ranking algorithm known by its acronym AIR.

While working on the same basic principles shared by most, if not all algorithmic search engines, AIR has been erroneously compared with Google's Hilltop algorithm and other Kleinberg derived algos. Yun, who is generally very informative and friendly said, "AIR is fundamentally different than from Google. AIR is based on principles of engineering and physics and was specifically designed for vertical sorting."

Unfortunately, that's about all he was going to say about the algorithm, partly because he and lead programmer Jon Glick have a few more tricks up their sleeves and partly because Yun and Yang wish to protect their competitive advantage as long as they possibly can. A component of their competitiveness will be the unveiling of a comparison shopping tool in the early summer allowing consumers to examine similar products based on several unique criteria.

Having any competitive advantage in the vertical search shopping market is important not only to growth but to survival. Current market leader, Shopping.Com was purchased by EBay last Wednesday for approximately $620Million. The first shopping assistance tool Yang and Yun built, mySimon.com also enjoys considerable popularity as a CNet property. Being the new kid on the block in a market that is dominated by properties owned and operated by EBay and CNet, Become.Com plans to out-market and, within three years, out-sell its larger rivals.

Other features have recently been added to Become's otherwise sparse homepage interface. The most noticeable is a search-term suggestion tool that appears below the search query box. As a searcher types in keywords, the suggestion tool lists over a dozen possible words describing the product or service the searcher might be looking for. Suggestions change as the searcher enters more letters to complete the word or phrase they are searching for. Another recently added feature is a spell-checking tool that can help users find the correct spelling of a company or product name.

Yang sees the purchase of Shopping.com by EBay as a beneficial development. "The EBay purchase is good for Become because it pushes the idea of shopping search into the mainstream", he said. Yang sees the vertical search sector becoming even more competitive as other firms move into the market however he feels Become's technology will carry it above and beyond its rivals and exceed visitor's expectations.

Over the next few months, users will notice subtle changes to the front page interface as Become starts to look for and include sites from around the world. Yang and Yun hope to provide a full international shopping service by next year; currently it only supports shopping sites in the United States. Users might also notice an increase in personalized services as Become starts to anticipate their shopping or searching needs. One of the nifty personalized tools will be an automatic alerting system that direct users to products or services they are interested in as they are found in Become's database.

Webmasters and SEOs will be interested in learning more about the AIR algorithm and how it works. From our examination and information we were able to glean from our conversation with Yun and Yang, it would appear that like Google, Become is highly influenced by links. A major difference between the two is Become's ability to apply far stricter link-relevancy measures than its more mainstream cousin. Become values links from authority sites above all others. An example Yun offered involved an online camera sales site with a link from a photography magazine. To add another dimension to the way Become judges links is the intent of the site owner in placing links leaving his or her site. Become performs a relevancy test on all links associated with a site, both incoming and outgoing. Another factor in Become listings involves minor human intervention. As the BecomeBot spider pulls listings from around the web based on links it has followed, there are times when a human eye is better at spotting authority sites related to shopping. A small group of human reviewers look at sites as they are brought into the database to help the algorithm determine which could be considered authorities and which shouldn't. Yun suggested clear link paths though a site and obtaining links from relevant sites with very strong reputations, along with product focused content as the easiest way to achieve strong placements in Become's listings.

Yang and Yun are in a great position today. They have just achieved another $7.2 million in venture capital funding and have long-term plans on how to best use it. Their spending plans rest on four main pillars. They are investing in improved technology which will yield new features and applications to make their shopping search stronger. The first of the major new features will be the comparison shopping engine to be released early this summer. Once that component is complete, Become plans an intense branding and marketing campaign. Before they can market their brand however, they need to fill a few key positions.

Become is going on a hiring spree and is looking to add a few Vice Presidents to its management table. Become is looking for a strong VP of Marketing, a VP of Sales Development, a VP in charge of Syndication, and a VP in charge of Merchant Sales. They have ten other positions open at this time and are hoping to fill them by the end of the summer. By the end of the year, Become.Com hopes to be a household name in the upwardly mobile world of vertical search.

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This SEO News was posted by Jim Hedger @ 4:20 PM.

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Goodbye Corey - Pioneer marketer dead at age 34

Written by Jim Hedger and published at 11:14 AM

Pioneering Internet marketer, Corey Rudl, aged 34, died in an auto racing accident yesterday morning. As the founder and CEO of the Internet Marketing Center, Corey was credited with creating enormous wealth through lengthy action-orientated website marketing pitches. His writing style has been studied, copied and used by literally millions of other webmasters over the years. The Internet Marketing Center generated over $7.5M in revenues last year and Corey often claimed to have made over $40M worth of Internet sales in the course of his decade long career.

Corey was one of the legends of Internet marketing and was considered among the most influential webmasters of all time. His success is often cited as a reason many online marketers entered the field. Corey was the passenger in a 2005 Porsche Carrera GT which veered off the track at the California Speedway and crashed into a safety barrier at over 100 mph. The driver, Miles Keaton was airlifted to Loma Linda University Hospital where he died about an hour after being admitted. Corey died at the scene of the accident.

Goodbye Corey, thanks for all the tips and inspiration.

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This SEO News was posted by Jim Hedger @ 11:14 AM.

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Thursday, June 02, 2005

Google Sitemap Spidering Experiment

Written by Jim Hedger and published at 7:54 PM

Google is trying a little experiment. They already have the largest public database of documents found on the web but there is always more to see than meets their spiders' eyes. Google Sitemaps is a good way to start finding it.

Google appears to be inviting webmasters and SEOs to create detailed sitemaps in XML format to invite, direct and re-invite Google's spiders as the sitemap evolves with the site. Webmasters can set priorities and protocols to tell the spider what should be examined and how it should be seen. Google provides a highly detailed explanation of XML instructions, but only to those who've signed up for a Google account. More on that stuff later.

Get a jump on your weekend and start learning about creating and submitting sitemaps to Google today. In the long run, a lost techno-weekend following a pleasant long-weekend might not be so bad after all, given fun of playing with spiders.

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This SEO News was posted by Jim Hedger @ 7:54 PM.

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Wednesday, June 01, 2005

AOL to broadcast Live 8 concerts online FREE

Written by Jim Hedger and published at 4:31 PM

Twenty years ago, the lead singer of the Irish punk band The Boomtown Rats, Bob Geldof organized two concurrent concerts, one at Wembley Stadium, London, the other at JFK Stadium in Philadelphia, to send money and food to famine stricken Ethiopia. Known as Live Aid, the concerts were a follow-up to a global effort on the part of recording artists through the UK , US and Canadian Band-Aid recordings. On July 2nd of this year, musicians around the world will band together to do it again with five simultaneous concerts planned for London, Berlin, Rome, Paris and Philadelphia. The concerts are timed to coincide with the G8 economic conference in Scotland , under the nickname Live 8. Confirmed acts include UK rockers Coldplay, Sir Paul McCartney, the Spice Girls, Eminem, Madonna, U2, the Rolling Stones, Will Smith, Jamiroquia, Youssou N'Dour, Crosby, Stills and Nash, REM, The Cure, A-Ha, Brian Wilson, Sarah McLachlan, and dozens of others.

"We will not tolerate the further pain of the poor while we have the financial and moral means to prevent it," Geldof said Tuesday. "What we started 20 years ago is coming to a political point in a few weeks. What we do next is seriously, properly, historically and politically important."

The shows will be carried live by AOL on July 2.

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This SEO News was posted by Jim Hedger @ 4:31 PM.

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Search Dominates New Advertising Spending

Written by Jim Hedger and published at 4:17 PM

Google and Yahoo are eating lunch on what used to be the expense accounts of the largest advertising and information venues in the world.

Both Google and Yahoo reported record revenues last quarter, income that is expected to grow rapidly over the coming years. As the leaders of the search advertising pack, Google and Yahoo represent the wide end of an expanding wedge. According to Safa Rashtcy a senior analyst at investment bank Piper Jaffray, search revenues will increase by a staggering $18 billion over the next five years. Projected revenues are expected to surpass $10 billion in 2006, $13 billion in 2007, $16 billion in 2008, and $19 billion in 2009. By the end of the decade, revenues generated by search are projected to be in the $25 billion range.

A report issued yesterday by search industry research and analysis firm Outsell says this growth is coming at the direct expense of the largest traditional media firms. The world's ten largest traditional information distributors are Reed Elsevier, Thomson, Gannett, Pearson, Tribune, Reuters, McGraw-Hill, VNU, Wolters Kluwer, and the Daily Mail and General Trust. In 2003, their collective revenue was approximately $56 billion, growing by about $4 billion to top $60 billion in 2004.

Google and Yahoo combined generated about $6.5 billion in revenues last year. The year before, their combined revenues equaled about $2.5 billion. In other words, the combined growth of the two largest search firms over 2004 surpassed the combined growth of the 10 largest traditional media firms. Last month, Advertising Age predicted that search engine revenues would exceed those of the major TV networks by the end of this year. The Interactive Advertising Bureau said that revenues generated by all forms of Internet advertising in the United States alone grew by about 33% from 2003 to 2004 with overall revenues approaching $10 billion.

Between the two, Google and Yahoo are starting to starve growth for traditional media and advertising firms. Outsell's report "Financial Performance Scorecard, Full Year 2004 ", written by lead analyst Chuck Richard, concludes that Google and Yahoo are, "Clearly diverting advertising revenue from the established information companies, ...literally sucking the financial air out of the room." It also places the world's newspaper of record, the New York Times on a crisis watch list labeled "Sinking Stones", citing low revenue growth and challenges attracting new readers throughout the traditional news publishing industry.

This movement of money away from traditional advertising venues is starting to manifest in serious changes in the traditional media sector, prompting a new round of lay-offs, consolidation and acquisitions. As an example, over the past three months, the New York Times laid-off over 190 workers, most of which worked in advertising and sales for its smaller newspaper holdings in Boston and the US mid-west. At the same time, recognizing that much of the news that is fit to print will never see the stain of ink but will instead be found online, the NYT also purchased the search directory About.com. Around the same time, the publisher of the venerable Wall St. Journal, Dow Jones & Co. purchased leading online financial publication, Marketwatch.com. The Wall St. Journal also announced this week it would soon be producing content for the financial section of the Washington Post.

According to the Outsell report, there is an imbalance in ROI between traditional advertising and paid-search marketing resulting in a situation where traditional ad-purchases cost far more per converted sale than online advertising. Advertisers are paying too much for the returns gained in traditional advertising while paying less for better returns from paid-search advertising. This imbalance is expected to correct itself over time as search advertising matures and the various players work to increase their shares of the wealth.

In a speech to Goldman Sachs' annual Internet conference, Yahoo CEO Terry Semel said that 2005 was all about improving search monetization as measured by the amount of revenue Yahoo can claim from each search. Catching up with Google's AdWords is clearly a priority for Yahoo which spent 2004 constructing their own algorithmic search engine to compete with Google's. While organic listings may be considered a loss leader by search engines like Yahoo or Google in the search marketplace, they provide their owners with an overall view of the Internet, its users, and their own users.

Over the years, Yahoo has compiled a great deal of information about the nature of the Internet and the surfing habits of its individual users. It will be using this data to better personalize the targeting of paid-ads to its individual users. "We think it's a real competitive advantage," Semel said, "because the enormous number of pages that Yahoo users peruse offers an equally enormous inventory for targeted advertising."

Google and Yahoo might be among the biggest players but there are dozens of smaller paid-search players distributing advertising in their massive shadows. Ask.com and FindWhat.com both doubled revenues over the past year while acquiring European search firms Excite and Espotting respectively. MSN is also expected to enter the paid search advertising field before the end of the second quarter of 2006.

Search marketing has long been promoted as the most cost effective means of communicating to a massive audience that continuously pre-qualifies itself. Increasingly, the search engines are using information about specific users to individually target advertising based on the known habits of those users. That's a neat trick traditional marketing venues simply can't perform and perhaps the most compelling reason for a movement of massive amounts of money away from traditional marketing and into the search marketing sector. The future will be uniquely interesting.

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This SEO News was posted by Jim Hedger @ 4:17 PM.