Yahoo! Beta Testing Anti-Spyware Tool

Everybody who's anybody in search (and some who are nobody) offers some kind of search toolbar browser plugin. I use several myself and find them pretty handy. Most search toolbars are now fully equipped with popup blocking capabilities along with all their searching functionality. On Thursday, Yahoo released a beta version of a spyware detector to help track down and remove unwanted programs that sneak onto your computer piggybacked with other programs you download. Yahoo's web search toolbar still comes loaded with all the standard features of their toolbar such as pop-up blocker, personal bookmarks, search tools, etc.

Yahoo also launced an anti spyware discussion forum as a venue to discuss the Anti-spy beta program and the various spyware found by users.

The Anti-spy program is provided/supported by PestPatrol.

For more information about Yahoo's new anti-spyware toolbar:

Yahoo's Press Release

InternetNews.com

Ecommerce Times

WebProNews

CNN.com

The Nigritude Ultramarine Search Engine Optimization Contest

That little contest is turning into the real deal. Now even Danny Sullivan is talking about it. I predict more of these contests will start to surface based on how popular this one has become. It will be interesting to see how many more people jump on board once people start raising the stakes of the prizes.

Another interesting observation by Danny, many people are ignoring the rules of the contest such as including the logo and joining searchguild. It will be funny if someone gets the top spot, but doesn't "win" because they didn't follow the instructions. Although, as of right now, all the top sites have the logo, so it probably won't be an issue.

A9 Blends the Best of Google and Amazon

Chris Sherman reviews Amazon's new A9 search engine, which hasn't gotten much attention since it was released. I'm surprised more people haven't been talking about A9 with all the attention search has been getting lately. Maybe nobody cares because it's just another Google-powered search engine. Here are 7 reasons to use A9 (taken from their site):

1. Search Inside the Book™: In addition to web search results we present book results from Amazon.com that include Search Inside the Book. When you see an excerpt on any of the book results, click on the page number to see the actual page from that book. (You will need to be registered at Amazon.com.)
   
   
2. Adjustable Columns: Simply drag the boundaries between the columns either to the left or the right to change the width of the different result sets (web, books, history). You can also close any column at any time. The next search will remember these new settings (if you allow cookies). This feature does not currently work on all browsers (but we're working on it!).
   
   
3. URL Short Cuts: At A9.com you can search directly from the browser URL box by typing:
   
   a9.com/query
   
   
4. Search History: All your searches at A9.com are stored on our servers and shown to you at any time from any computer you use. Clicking on a link performs the search again. You can hide the window at any time. You can edit your history, for example, to clear an entry.
   
   
5. Click History: If any of the web search results include a site that you have seen before, it's marked on the result. We even tell you the last time you visited that site.
   
   
6. Site Info: Place the cursor on one of the Site Info buttons to see a lot more information about that site without leaving the search result page.
   
   
7. Web Search: Web search results are provided by Google.
   

Is the is the "Google of the future"? Try out A9 for yourself and see what you think.

Overture Changes Name of Pay-for-Performance Search to Precision Match

In Overture's current Advertiser Newsletter they announced the name change of their "flagship" product. With all the merging and buying of companies, they have been doing a lot of rebranding and name changes lately, this one will hopefully stick for a little while--at least long enough for us poor advertisers to figure out what the difference is between Precision Match, Content Match, Site Match and their new local product (Local Match?).

Looks like they haven't had a chance to update their site content to reflect the new product name, but you can find more information in Overture's Advertiser Information Center.

Google Wins Users' Hearts, but Not Their Ad Clicks

Vividence released their findings from a search engine usage study that revealed some interesting information about search:

Confirming popular beliefs, Google is the run-away leader in terms of customer loyalty and satisfaction, with a vast majority of study participants indicating that Google is their primary search engine and 89% indicating they had a strongly positive experience with the site. Yahoo! was the clear number-two search site with 68% of users indicating a strongly positive experience. Google and Yahoo! held a significant lead over the other leading search engines: Ask Jeeves (50%), Lycos (48%) and MSN (41%).

In addition, Google topped the Vividence Customer Experience Rankings Index, which weighed more than 250 metrics and assessed key areas of each search engine, including brand impact, future usage, customer satisfaction and sponsored link/ad activity.

Google users reported a higher perceived rate of success when using Google. However, Vividence uncovered that actual search results returned by the leading five search engines do not differ substantially. In fact, when search success was objectively measured, Google did not help users achieve search success any more than the other major search engines. Rather, the perceived quality of the search results, including result presentation, was the primary driver of customer satisfaction and future usage of a search engine.

I'm not sure how they determined that the search results are not significantly different at each search engine, but I have to agree. When Google was born, it was a lot better than the other search engines, but now Yahoo has copied everything that made Google successful, and almost all the other search sites are using Yahoo's technology (except AskJeeves), so the search results are all usually pretty comparable. People still have a strong perception, though, that Google's results are better than anyone else's. That's the brand that they've built up. They have also shown that they are willing to sacrifice the easy buck by clearly separating the paid and natural search results. As evidenced by this Vividence study, Google's ads aren't clicked on as much as other search sites. Google seems to be betting on the fact that users will keep coming back and they'll make up for the lower ad click rates with their volume of users (and syndicated ads to other search engines). So far they seem to be winning that bet.

Read the press release from Vividence

With all the current attention on search, it's not surprising that companies are starting to realize how little research has actually been done on the subject. Another study was recently done by iProspect.

A few findings I found interesting:

• 56.7% of respondents said they usually use the same search engine.
  
• 81.7% of respondents begin a new search if they don't find what they're looking for in the first 3 pages of search results.
  
• 64.8% of respondents who were college graduates found natural search results more relvant, while just 56.2% of those who were not college graduates found the natural results more relevant.
  
• 64.5% of respondents who are employed found natural search results more relevant, with just 55.1% of unemployed respondents finding the natural search results more relevant.
  

You can download the white paper in PDF format. 28 pages of info to read through, but well worth the time if you're interested in search engine usage.

'Tremendous name recognition' for Google

I don't know if this is really news to anyone, but in case you didn't already know it, a Chicago market research firm confirmed that Google has a very recognized brand. The interesting thing to me is that Google already has a brand as recognized as Microsoft or Amazon...but not quite as much as companies like McDonald's, Coca-Cola, Pepsi and Wal-Mart which all have 90 percent plus recognition (Google only had 76%).

Another interesting finding from the survey (and good news for Google) is that a large majority of the respondents of this survey think Google is a good investment opportunity. These Google-loving investors are even willing to pay an average of $849/share for Google stock!

Read the entire article from the Sun Times

Gmail: Online's Hottest Ticket

I read several articles today like this one that talk about how everyone wants in to Gmail, and they're offering about everything (including money, body parts, and more) to get access to an account. I have to admit I was curious to try it out, too. I was glad when I found out they were offering a beta account to Blogger users. I haven't really used it much yet, I was just curious to test it out and what it's all about. I've got a few of my spammier email addresses forwarded to my gmail account to test out the spam filter. So far, I'm not very impressed with the spam filter. The user interface is awesome, though. Simple and clean. No blinking ads, not a lot of links to confuse me. It's great. And who doesn't love the thought of having 1 GB of storage space! I haven't heard when gmail will be available to the general public, but I'm sure it won't be too long now. Once they open it up, I guess sites like GmailSwap.com will be obsolete, and the auctions for gmail accounts on eBay will dry up. In the meantime, it's interesting to watch people going nuts about web based email again.

Future of Search Will Make you Dizzy

This according to the chief of Amazon's new A9 search engine. He's probably right, we could get dizzy thinking about the future of search, but hopefully when it becomes a reality, it's easy to use and actually makes us less dizzy in our web searching than we are now.

That's what I thought...

Bug in Google's Gmail Temporarily Boosts Storage

Google Reportedly Working on Desktop Search

An interesting article from the NY times and ClickZ about Google reportedly building out a desktop search utility to rival the search functionality of Microsoft's upcoming "Longhorn" OS. With all the new offerings from google, it seems like Google is trying to be all things to all people. (sound familiar?) I think they will give MS a real run for their money on several fronts. They already kick MS's butt in web search, so why not try to take a bigger piece of the pie. The main difference is that Google is the darling of the 'Net. Everyone loves Google. Nobody seems to like Microsoft, but everyone uses their stuff anyway. Will Google we able to maintain this love-affair with users once they are no longer the underdog? Will people begin to resent Google's omnipresence like they do Microsoft's? Has it already started to happen?

Google offers Terabyte e-mail limit?

According to this article on CNET and a bunch of blogs all over the net, Google quietly increased several Gmail users' storage limit to 1 terabyte. I just checked my Gmail account and it's still showing 1 GB. Google didn't comment or make any announcements, but my guess is that it was just a glitch in their system that they have fixed (or will fix). I also wonder if it was a sneaky way to garner some additional publicity in what has become a bit of a competition among email providers, with Yahoo announcing increased storage space as well as Lycos Europe unveiling 1 GB of email storage.

Googol may sue Google

The family of the man who coined the term googol, the word upon which Google's name was based, is now threatening legal action against the reigning king of search. I don't blame them for wanting a piece of the Google action, but seriously folks, I'm no lawyer, but you don't appear to have any legal basis to make these claims. I don't think the term googol was ever used commercially or trademarked or anything. Personally I think it's a dumb name for a search engine anyway. The reason they've been so successful is because of their relevant, quality search engine, not the name. I guess it is catchy, but they could have called it LarryandSergeysearch.com and just as many people would be using it because it does a very good job of what it's supposed to do.

Googol may sue Google
Feelin' Googly - Boston Globe
Have your Google people talk to my 'googol' people
Kasner's neice talks to Neal Conan on NPR

Man faces jail over Google shares scam

An article from the Guardian about the guy who scammed would-be investors into thinking they were investing in pre-IPO shares of Google. He made off with 1/2 a million bucks of their money and spent over 350,000 of it before they realized what was happening. Moral of the story: be very carefuly who you give your money to.

nigritude ultramarine

This is kind of old news now, but since I just started this blog, I thought I'd mention the DarkBlue SEO CHALLENGE. It's a contest to see who can get the top spot (and hold onto it) for a search term that they made up (nigritude ultramarine). I like the idea of an SEO competition. I've seen several merchants offer contests like this for their affiliates, but this is the first time I've seen a competition for a made up phrase. The first time I checked Google back on May 7 for nigritude ultramarine it showed zero results, so it really was starting from scratch. How hard could it be to get the top spot, then? Well, when you consider you're going up against some of the best SEOs on the planet, it is a lot harder than you think. I personally haven't had time to even build a page to promote for nigritude ultramarine, but I just checked Google again, and there are 97,400 results for nigritude ultramarine - that's a pretty big jump from zero just 10 days ago! Yeah, it's competitive all right, and it's interesting to see what all these SEOs are doing to promote the finer details of nigritude ultramarine.

If nothing else, this SEO competition was an ingenious way for Dark Blue to promote their affiliate network.

Online buyers shift to aggregator sites, BizRate reports

I found this article interesting. It talks about a change in the percentage of online buyers who start their shopping trips at aggregator sites. It includes search engines in the list of aggregator sites, but I wonder if more and more people are bypassing search engines to go to shopping sites. It can be a daunting task to sort through all the search results to find what you're looking for. Many times there is so much information to sort through, it can be overwhelming to use a search engine to shop--especially for users with less online search experience. I think it depends what they're shopping for, but if someone knows what they want, it makes sense for them to go where they can find the widest selection and/or sort by price. That's why Yahoo Shopping, Froogle, BizRate and all the others will continue to grow as more people realize just how useful they can be. I also think these sites will continue to work together WITH regular search engines to provide users with convenient access to whatever they're searching for.

Canadians are More Active Searchers Than US Residents

According to this press release a new study conducted by comScore networks shows that Canadian Internet users are big time searchers -- more than their US counterparts. Google has a lot bigger share of the search market in Canada (62% vs. 36% in the US). Despite those numbers, it's interesting that online advertising accounts for a lot smaller percentage of total advertising dollars spent by Canadian companies. Sounds like a nice opportunity if you're trying to reach a Canadian audience. Sure it's a smaller pie, but 575 million searches a month isn't bad.

WhenU Banished By Google, Yahoo!

Looks like WhenU was caught doing some cloaking to improve their search rankings. You can read the Clickz article here. According to Ben Edelman, a big time anti-spyware guy, he was the one who tipped Google off about it.

You mean to tell me WhenU engaged in unethical behavior? No way! they would never stoop to that level. They're such an upstanding Internet citizen, how you could you even accuse them of such a thing? ;)

The New York Times - Google to Sell Type of Ad It Once Shunned

More on Google's new image ads: The New York Times > Technology > Google to Sell Type of Ad It Once Shunned
Google, the Web search engine which attracted a loyal following in part because its simple Web site is uncluttered by obtrusive graphical banner ads, has now decided to sell the sort of ads it once scorned.

Google Relaunching Groups

An article from Clickz about Google's new image ads with information about the relaunch of Google Groups that will supposedly be announced today. Google Tests Image Ads, Re-launches Groups

Search engines take the stand

An interesting article about the use of Google by judges. I can see the value of Google or other Web search for certain types of cases, but I worry that some of these judges might be putting too much trust in the reliability and accuracy of information they find in Google. Article from CNET News.com

Here's an article from CNet about the new image ad offering from Google: Google to sell banner ads | CNET News.com

Google AdWords / Adsense Image Ads

Banner ads on Google? Not quite, but Google is now offering the option for adwords advertisers to use image ads (banners) in addition to the traditional Google text ads. An interesting move towards becoming more of a full service ad network. They say they still won't show image ads/banners/etc on Google, just on their Adsense publishers and partner sites -- for now anyway...they leave the door open just a bit with the words, "At this time, we won't show image ads on Google." It's in beta testing now, so if you're an advertiser with Adwords or a publisher with Adsense, you might want to give it a shot.

Here's a link to more info from the Adwords FAQ

PageRank is not Dead!

Google's man behind the curtain - Interesting interview with Google's Director of Technology, Craig Silverstein. He says that pagerank will continue to be a factor in Google's algorithm, but that it's a constantly evolving process.

Searching for Balance

An interesting study was recently completed regarding user's preferences for paid and natural (organic, free, unpaid, etc) search results. I found it very interesting, although not surprising, that there were huge differences in user behavior between the different search engines. A lot of that difference is probably due to the way results are presented in the different search engines. The main idea I get out of all this is that it is best to be listed in both the natural and paid search results whenever possible, but be sure to focus on getting good listings in Google's natural search results.

It's not really clear how they conducted this study or how they selected the participants, but it appears to be skewed towards Internet users who spend a lot of time online. There's nothing wrong with that, I just wonder what the results would be like with a broader mix of users. I also think you could get different results by using a broad range of search terms. For example, some keywords yield more relevant results in the paid listings, while other keywords serve up the best results in the natural search results. There are so many factors that could get involved, it would be interesting to see this same type of study conducted on a broader scale.

Anyway, here's a link to the article on Clickz.

Also, as a sidenote, I remember reading about a similar study conducted by the IAB and Comscore last summer that looked at click and conversion rates for paid versus natural search.
Here's the Clickz article
And a good explanation of what's wrong with the Comscore study