Barack Obama is filing his campaign papers and beginning his exploratory committee which basically means that leading up to the 2008 Presidential Election, Obama, John Edwards and Hillary Clinton are the expected top front runners (that is, if Hillary runs). A search for “Barack Obama” leads to his Senatorial web page listed #1 on Google. [...]

Google is not offering feeds to their search results (besides Google Custom Search) and new API keys are no longer available, what’s a web publisher to do? Ionut Alex looks at SOAP API (Not from Google) which scrapes Google SERPs in order to produce Google API like results: Until Google decides it’s a good idea [...]

comScore is putting out two reports on cell phone usage and attitudes in the US. Here’s the press release. I’ve written up the top-level findings at SEL. I focus more here on the local aspects/implications of the data. Only 17% of US mobile users currently subscribe to wireless Internet access (in contrast to SMS). Here [...]

JPMorgan as put together an overview of a study they recently undertook where they surveyed over 1,000 consumers to gauge their online spending behavior, adoption rates of Google Checkout, and the associated implications for PayPal. Here are the key findings: * Google Checkout Adoption hits 6% in first year. Our survey suggests that in less [...]

Yesterday Greg Sterling reminded us all of Google’s search engine dominance and the growth (or decline) of the market share of Yahoo!, Ask.com, Live (MSN) Search and AOL Search. In the comment field one reader, Dan of NewBabySmell.com (which appears to be an arbitrage site), asked… I have adjusted my paid search spend using this [...]

So-called vertical search is all the rage. Why? Partly because “horizontal” (general) search has limitations and partly because it’s almost impossible to get VCs to fund a general search engine. Given how entrenched the market is it’s also crazy to try and break into general search without a 5 to 7 year time horizon. This [...]

Here’s Compete’s relative ranking of the top search engines for December 2006: And here’s comScore’s December 2006 US market share data (6.7 billion total searches): The two sites disagree on Yahoo! and AOL directionally. For Yahoo! comScore shows a gain; Compete shows a loss of share. Regarding AOL, Compete shows a bit of a recovery [...]

In a “why didn’t they do that earlier?” news story of the day we read that Google has taken out the links to Yahoo Maps & MapQuest in their special local section in the Google web search results pages. Google used to suggest these alternatives, along with Google Maps, so readers could make a choice [...]

Great post from Lee Odden today on how blogs and blogging helps the SEO of a site with a blog, or a business using a blog as its main site. SEO Benefits from Blogs Here are a few of the ways Lee says blogs benefit SEO: Crawlable URLs – Most blog software offers uncomplicated URL [...]