Gator, the controversial AdWare company that earlier in the month sued to have the label of *spyware* detached from their ad serving technology, today announced a corporate name change to Claria Corporation, www.claria.com. The company’s eWallet technology will continue to bear the Gator name. Claria/Gator is a content and behavior targeting ad serving device, associated [...]

The Federal Trade Commission remains concerned that consumers may not be able to tell when search results are advertiser-sponsored, thanks to sometimes-unclear disclosure on the part of search companies. Last year, the FTC notified Web operators–including Yahoo-owned AltaVista and America Online–that they must clearly mark advertisements that appear within their search results. Though some reform [...]

Yahoo gets DotMusic Not really search engine marketing news, but relevant to the Search Engine Wars, Internet portal Yahoo may be stepping into the online music-selling business following the acquisition of the BT-owned music Web site Dotmusic. After launching a broadband venture with BT earlier this year, Yahoo acquired Dotmusic and Games Domain from BT [...]

I work for a decent-sized international charity as the Director of IS / IT. One of our bigger projects this year has been redoing our website. For some companies this is a small endeavour, but considering we do nearly 20M$/year in business online it’s a fairly important part of who we are. One of the [...]

Amazon’s Search Inside the Book Amazon.com today announced the launch of its latest innovation, Search Inside the Book. This is a new search service which lets customers find books by searching the full text inside them, not just matches to author or title keywords. In collaboration with publishers, Amazon.com is enabling customers to find books [...]

Why should I invest time into this huge 128 page 39.2 MB eBook? If you have not read much on the issue of usability, then it is hard to imaging you have a user centric web site design. If you do not make it easy for people to do what you want, they probably won’t. [...]

Ok, I checked out the info on Mooter, a new Australian search engine and can say this… the logo is interesting. If anything, I find it an interesting way to search, by cluster, but not much different than the old blue folder Northern Lights, UCmore Search, or Vissimo. Clustering is a great way to search, [...]

Navel gazing. A fabulous habit. With the amount that happens in North America it’s a wonder it isn’t a full-contact Olympic sport. Navel gazing is especially interesting in the SEO environments as everyone becomes focussed on getting others to notice them. For instance, I used to run a reasonably succesful humour site (did it in [...]

When the internet was swelling with paper millionaires Disney tried to cash in. With poorly guided inefficient systems Disney began to hemorrhage cash. Instead of relying on any other product they wanted to do everything themselves. Their solution to the Open Directory Project was the directory created by the Go Guides. Once Disney realized they [...]