Alexa Web Search Platform Wow. I was checking out the Amazon web services homepage for some affiliate stuff and noticed there were some new Alexa related web services. Turns out Alexa is opening up their crawler and index to anyone who wants to use it, for a cost. The new service is called Alexa Web Search Platform. So how much does it cost? $1 per cpu hour ($0.50 for reserved but unused hours) For every hour that...
Personalized Search Engine Optimization I think personalization represents more business for SEMs that understand how people search. [This is a repost from my response over at the SEW forums.] For instance lets say you have a web page about blackberry - the fruit. Right now it would be impossible for you to rank for the term blackberry, even if you have a great on topic page because blackberry (the appliance) is generating so many more...
MSN's Google PageRank of 2 and Canonical URL Problems MSN’s homepage - www.msn.com is now showing a Google toolbar PageRank of 2. This is another example of the canonical problem I covered in an earlier post. Looking up the link information for msn.com and www.msn.com, you can see that Google considers these two different urls. In order to correct this problem, MSN could redirect msn.com to www.msn.com with a 301 redirect, but instead...
Yahoo's Index Claim Suspicious According To Study Matthew Cheney, Mike Perry, and Dr. Orville Vernon Burton of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications have compared the size of Yahoo and Google’s Index. The researchers based their study off of an assumption that the search engine with more documents for obscure search terms would be the engine with a larger index. Since the size of an area crawled can be measured by its perimeter, we feel...
Google Loses Trademark Case Versus Geico A US district court judge has ruled against Google and found that there was infringement where the terms “Geico” and “Geico Direct” were used in the text of sponsored ads. This new ruling emphasizes that the infringement breach refers only to sponsored links that use Geico’s trade marks and does not conflict with the previous ruling in December. The previous ruling stated that there was no trademark...
Google And Apple iTunes Together? Google may soon be offering Apple iTunes through the Google site. Are we seeing the first of many uses of Google’s micropayment system? Combining music search and music downloads would place Google way ahead of Yahoo - its main competitor in the music search arena. I’d imagine Google to incorporate iTunes into any search regarding musical/artist terms. Any search for related to a particular artist, lyrics, or title of a song would...
Yahoo Publisher Network Invite Only Beta Yahoo is finally releasing it’s AdSense competitor - Yahoo Publisher Network. Yahoo has had a while to take a look at Google AdSense and figure out what AdSense lacks so that they can improve on the network. Yahoo plans to address customer service issues and give publishers more control over what ads will be shown on their sites. Our new self-serve platform will offer publishers new sources of revenue, starting with...
Google Improves AdWords System Google recently introduced two new changes to their AdWords system. (via Inside Adwords) Both these changes will help advertisers improve their campaigns - I like the lower minimum ad bid corresponding to higher quality. Simplified Keyword States: Keywords will be placed in to one of two states – active or inactive. People like the idea of something that’s a little more binary - on/off, day/night, hot/cold – you get the picture. Increased...
New Google Groups Alert Google added a new feature to the Google Alerts program - Google Groups Alerts. Now you can monitor the top search results for Google Groups by keywords. Any new articles posted that match your criteria will be emailed to you, just like Google News alerts. The ideal candidates for Groups Alerts are those that might be discussed in multiple discussion groups. Give it a try and see if you don’t save time -...
Inside Google Firefox Extensions With the release of several Firefox extensions by Google - we can take a look at how Google officially implements PageRank queries. Firefox extensions are packaged files. Download the extension file and unzip it, you’ll notice there are several directories. The location of source files will vary from extension to extension, so you’ll have to surf around for a bit. For example, download the Google toolbar file (google-toolbar.xpi). Now unzip it. You’ll see a...
Loren Baker
+Ann Smarty
Alan Bleiweiss
David Harry
