Forget Competition, the Search Wars are Over - Search Engine Watch

Forget Competition, the Search Wars are Over - Search Engine Watch

The other search engines should just give up and declare Google the winner. Yahoo, Microsoft, Ask, and the thousands of search utilities on the Internet should direct traffic to Google because it's clearly the best search engine.

Yahoo should proceed with outsourcing search advertising to Google. Since Google will be the only search engine for nearly all searchers, Microsoft can dissolve its search efforts and the other search sites should just follow suit.

Or not.

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Advertisers Cloaking AdWords URLs To Get Around Display URL Policy

Advertisers Cloaking AdWords URLs To Get Around Display URL Policy

Remember Google announced that they will be strictly enforcing the AdWords display URL policy a few months back? Well, they actually started enforcing the policy at the beginning of this month. Some advertisers who had display URLs that did not match their destination URLs were impacted. It appears that some of those advertisers are now cloaking their URLs in order to get around that AdWords policy.

Internet Marketing

Search Engine Watch Blog: Search Marketing News

Search Engine Watch Blog: Search Marketing News

Viacom President and CEO Philippe Daumann joined Kevin Johnson, President of Microsoft, onstage last Wednesday at the Microsoft advance '08 client sumnmit to discuss the Future of Search. They didn't discuss copyright infringement or Viacom's $1 billion lawsuit against YouTube. Perhaps they should have.

Google, YouTube's owner, claims the $1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit questioning YouTube's ability to keep copyrighted material off YouTube.com threatens the free exchange of information on the Internet.

Google's lawyers filed papers on Friday in U.S. District Court in Manhattan in response to Viacom's lawsuit alleging that the Internet has led to "an explosion of copyright infringement" by YouTube and others.

Inside AdWords: More partner site examples from the Google content network

Inside AdWords: More partner site examples from the Google content network

YouTube Tops UK Social Media Sites for April 2008 [SearchEngineWatch]

YouTube Tops UK Social Media Sites for April 2008 [SearchEngineWatch]

Google Earth Gets Layer for News [SearchEngineWatch]

Google Earth Gets Layer for News [SearchEngineWatch]

Google Earth has a new layer: Google News. Writing on the Google LatLong blog, Brandon Badger, Product Manager said, "By spatially locating the Google News' constantly updating index of stories from more than 4,500 news sources, Google Earth now shows an ever-changing world of human activity as chronicled by reporters worldwide."

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Nielsen: Google Hits New Search Share High

Nielsen: Google Hits New Search Share High

Here are the percentage shares for the top five search engines shown in the pie chart above:

* Google: 62.0%
* Yahoo: 17.5%
* Microsoft: 9.7%
* AOL: 4.3%
* Ask: 2.1%

Note that in the chart above, traffic from Ask.com-owned My Web Search is not combined by Nielsen with the Ask figure. If it were, the Ask figure would rise to 2.8 percent.

Where does Google go next? - May. 12, 2008

Where does Google go next? - May. 12, 2008

No matter what your attitude towards the Google-Yahoo-Microsoft triangle may be, such a title definitely makes you ask yourself a few questions. “The Real Google Killer”, no question mark? Nope, not this time. Yes, the real Google killer is out there and it’s only a matter of time until the inevitable occurs.

Am I referring to Microsoft? Even if they’d be willing to invest a pretty penny in order to make that happen, they don’t have what it takes at this point. What about Yahoo!? Given the way things stand financially as far as this company is concerned, they are hardly in such a position. Maybe Ask.com? You’ve got to be kidding me!

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Inside AdWords: Improvements to AdWords Conversion Tracking

Inside AdWords: Improvements to AdWords Conversion Tracking

According to the Google AdWords Blog, Google has implemented some improvements to the AdWords Conversion Tracking. You will now be able to define actions that are most beneficial to your business and can perform individual conversion tracking on these actions.

Importance of Conversion Tracking:

Different keywords lead to conversions of varied frequencies, hence it is vital to know about the performance of a particular keyword as it affects your bid. In short, Conversion Tracking helps you improve your ROI (return on investment).

Methodology:

Usually, a small snippet of a code is embedded into specific pages on your websites, that denotes the occurrence of any important event. For example, when a user reaches the order confirmation page after a purchase, AdWords registers it as a Conversion. This data is then sent to your account and you can view it as account statistics and reports.

Improvements:

You can now define and track multiple conversions, which empowers you with more specific details about how conversions occur on your website. Use of AdWords Conversion Tracking brings you one step closer to Conversion Optimizer.

MySpace to allow users to share data with Yahoo, others - Yahoo! News

MySpace to allow users to share data with Yahoo, others - Yahoo! News

Social networking site MySpace said Thursday it will soon enable users to quickly share profile data with Web sites operated by Yahoo Inc., eBay Inc. and others.
MySpace aims to save its users keystrokes and allow them to export their photos, videos and lists of friends.

"There's this concept that social networks are walled gardens," said Amit Kapur, MySpace's chief operating officer. "We're taking those walls down."

Other sites that can receive the MySpace data include Twitter and Photobucket. Like MySpace, the photo-sharing site Photobucket is a unit of News Corp.

Google Friend Connect Launched

Google Friend Connect Launched

Google released Friend Connect, a service for webmasters to add such gadgets as comments, reviews, or contact lists to their site. Furthermore, Friend Connect supports any creation from the Google gadget initiative OpenSocial, and also adds social features to a given site which connect the site to the social network site of a user.

The latter, Google argues, holds the potential to increase your traffic, like when they post the event Pete added a review at I-Love-Movies to Orkut, which may make people visit I-Love-Movies. You may think of Friend Connect as a kind of People Sense, which is a code name Google gave the product; whereas Google AdSense provides an attachable ad layer for your site, this service lets you to attach a social layer.

Internet Marketing articles

Google Introduces "FriendConnect" Social Widgets For Site Owners

Google Introduces "FriendConnect" Social Widgets For Site Owners

Contrary to some earlier reports, Google's new FriendConnect, launching today, is not focused on data portability or a direct answer to MySpace "Data Availability" or the new Facebook Connect. While there's a data portability dimension, it's focused on the flip side of the equation: site owners who want to make their sites more "social." It's more like a Ning competitor accordingly.

Online Annonsering
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iMedia Connection: Is Yahoo sniffing Glue?

iMedia Connection: Is Yahoo sniffing Glue?

AdWords Adds Landing Page Load Time as factor for Quality

AdWords Adds Landing Page Load Time as factor for Quality

Google has announced, that it will now be displaying load time evaluations or Landing Page Load Time on the Keyword Analysis Page.
Depending upon the loading speed of the keywords with landing pages, the Quality Scores will be determined. The slower the landing page, the lower would be the quality score and vice-versa.
As of now the Landing Time will only be displayed in the Keyword Analysis page.

Online Annonsering

Google AdWords Displaying Quality Score Variables

Google AdWords Displaying Quality Score Variables

Reports are surfacing today that some Google AdWords ads, especially on Google.de (their German TLD), are displaying what may be variables used in determining quality scores: Pscore, mCPC and thresh. The numerical values have been spotted in both sidebar and shaded results:

Yahoo Makes the World a Safer Place

Yahoo Makes the World a Safer Place

Yahoo will now display warnings on SERPs to indicate that some of the sites listed in their results may not be entirely safe.

Yahoos new advisories are based on McAfees Site Advisor findings and are used to denote sites that may feature dangerous downloads (including dangerous downloads disguised as or packaged with legitimate downloads) and unsolicited email harvesters.

These are sites that can stealthily harm a users computer or install malware simply by visiting the site. Beginning today, any such sites or pages included in McAfees data will be removed from search results automatically.

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Online Annonsering

Does Google Need An Ethics Policy Like The New York Times

Does Google Need An Ethics Policy Like The New York Times

Google is really a publisher. It publishes its search results. It adds paid advertisements and the more you pay the more visible your Adwords will be. It is trying to maintain that the non-Adwords content is commercial free. However it realizes that big advertisers may well spend money to get higher in the organic results ( the publication side of the business). It needs to be visible in trying to preserve the integrity of that noncommercial content.

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Online Annonsering

Google Makes Reader a Social Tool

Google Makes Reader a Social Tool

Search giant Google (News - Alert) this week has moved to make its Google Reader RSS tool a more social instrument by adding features that allow users to share content anywhere on the Web.
Google Reader will now constantly check favorite news Web sites and blogs for new content, where previously the tool only allowed feeds that users had registered for.

"As it turns out, there's all sorts of information 'out there' just waiting to be streamed, shared and otherwise consumed by you and your friends," wrote Jenna Bilotta, on the official Google Reader blog. "Now you can finally show all of your Reader friends that awesome talking cat video you found, your favorite grilled trout recipe or reviews of the best brunch places in your neighborhood -- all without a subscription."

Inside AdWords: Landing page load time now available on the Keyword Analysis Page

Inside AdWords: Landing page load time now available on the Keyword Analysis Page

Google Reader gets social features News - PC Advisor

Google Reader gets social features News

Google is making the Google Reader RSS tool more social, adding features that let users share content and add notes as to why they're sharing it.

The updates provide users with "bookmarklets" to share content from web pages from any site, even those that don't have a feed, Google said. Users can also select some text from the page before clicking on a bookmarklet to allow the selection to appear as the item's body.

"As it turns out, there's all sorts of information 'out there' just waiting to be streamed, shared and otherwise consumed by you and your friends," noted Google's Jenna Bilotta.

"Now you can finally show all of your Reader friends that awesome talking cat video you found, your favorite grilled trout recipe or reviews of the best brunch places in your neighbourhood - all without a subscription."

The updated Google Reader also provides a place for users to add notes with comments about why they are sharing specific content.

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