New Search Services Overview

From a PC World Article about new online search services.

Do you spend too much time searching the Web? If you always consult the same search site, the answer is yes. Sometimes you need a specialist that will find only what you want, fast. A slew of new services, from search engine veterans and newcomers alike, are making specialization the hottest trend in Web search.

Not a lot of new info in this one for anyone who's been keeping up with current trends in search engine offerings, but it's a good overview of some of the recently released features from several players in the search engine space.

The Long Tail of Search

I just discovered a local blogger named Eric Hamilton. He recently wrote an article about The Long Tail of Search. Danny Sullivan has written about it before, and I've had account reps at Overture talk about it from time to time when they were trying to sell me on their paid inclusion service. (I believe they're calling it Search Submit now, but that could change next week).

Anyway, Eric's article takes the discussion of the search tail to a practical level and talks about how we can take advantage of the way people search by implementing a few basic principles that will help optimize our sites to show up better for a broader set of keywords.

Here's an excerpt from his article that summarizes what it takes to capture the long tail keywords:

Build more keyword-rich content, and get it indexed. In terms of over all search engine visibility, you want to concentrate on keyword placement, saturation, PageRank, and inbound links, in that order. Experienced SEOs might pitch a fit about that advice, because traditional SEO holds that linktext on inbound links is a key factor in ranking, and they would be right, but for tail terms, good keyword placement and over-all site-strength are generally enough to jump you to the top.

I have to agree with Eric on that, especially because when you're dealing with the tail keywords, you're usually not competing against other sites that have incoming links for the exact keyword that's being searched on. Those searches typically yield results that are "the closest thing the search engine can come up with", meaning there's not a lot of competition for the keywords in terms of pages with exact link text. The results tend to be more like the "old" search results (like way back in 1999 or 2000), which rely more on the on-page factors like content. So your best chance to show up for those keywords lies in acutally having the keywords on your site. A solid internal linking stucture within your site is also important so the search engines can find and index all the pages of your site.

It's a very insightful article, give it a read.

MSN Eyes Local Search

MSN has always been a little slow on the uptake when it comes to keeping up with their search competition, but they decided to get serious about local search with a new MSN Virtual Earth feature - offering satellite pictures of the earth tied in with local search.

Star Wars is hot with searchers

I haven't seen Star Wars Episode 3 yet, but I've heard it's a good one. It will certainly be the blockbuster movie of the year, so I'm not surprised that Star Wars and Revenge of the Sith - related searches have shot sky high of late.
Here's the top 10 Star Wark keywords on AOL:

1) Star Wars/Revenge of the Sith
2) Natalie Portman
3) Hayden Christensen
4) Darth Vader
5) Yoda
6) Ewan McGregor
7) Star Wars Pictures
8) Star Wars Games
9) Star Wars Trailer
10) Star Wars Quizzes

Source: Search Engine Guide

Other resources:
Google Zeitgeist
Yahoo Buzz Index
Lycos Top 50

Google Announces "My Google"

The search engine copycat games continue as Google announced the release of "My Google" for registered Google users.

Google will get even more like Yahoo with today's launch of My Google, available for registered users. As reported by SearchEngineWatch, the service will let users consolidate features of their choice into one home page.

From InternetNews.com

and

SEW Blog

It's available to try out as long as you're a registered Googler.

Search's Love Affair with Wikipedia

It's no secret that the search engines love to display Wikipedia pages in their results. It's a non-profit knowledgebase that usually answers your questions about just about anything. This article from MediaPost talks about the natural synergy between search and wikipedia and the author says we (search marketers) should pay attention to it. It will be interesting to see how spammers try to mimmick the results with fake wikis, etc. just like they've done with fake blogs. It's annoying to run across spammy sites like that, and I'm sure it will be impossible to duplicate Wikipedia's search engine success, but that won't stop search engine spammers from trying just like they've tried to copy every other form of legitimate communication on the web. It's kind of funny how the sites that do the best in the search engines are usually the ones that aren't even trying--like non-profits, .edus, and so forth.

Google Offers Adsense for Datafeeds

Google announced yesterday that they will be offering Adsense for feeds, currently in beta, of course. I'll probably hold off on applying for the program for now, since only two people read my feed. Yeah, I guess if you don't count my mom, it's only one person :)

Google Backlink Update

Looks like Google is updating backlinks again, check out the datacenters to see how it's affecting your sites.

What is Search Engine Marketing?

This article from DM News talks a little bit about the evolution of search marketing and how search marketing is expanding beyond the search engines and simple keyword searches.

Search is the area of services that knows the specific thing you want to do, learn or see, with a great amount of precision. It brings you the best possible resource or resources you need to accomplish that goal, out of an otherwise unmanageable bevy of choices. And it does it very, very quickly.

NextSearchSurvey Results

NextSearchSurvey was a survey built and designed to find out what people thought about search engines, what kind of search engines they use, what features in those search engines they use, and what they think about the future of search.

See the results of the survey

New Anti-Terrorism Search Engine

As part of an effort to anticipate -- and thwart -- the plans of potential terrorists, the Federal Aviation Administration is supporting the development of a new search engine by University at Buffalo researchers that is designed to detect "hidden" information that can be gleaned from public Web sites.

I'm not entirely clear on how it will work, but it's a new kind of search technology that may help piece together "hidden" information that could help protect us from terrorists. I expect it could also improve our overall search experience as well.

More from Science Blog

Friday The 13th

I'm not superstitious and I think people make their own "luck" by how they live their lives and the choices they make, however, it is Friday the 13th today, so I'll share a couple of my favorite quotes regarding luck from the quote of the day email I get.

We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don't like?
- Jean Cocteau, 1889 - 1963

I think we consider too much the good luck of the early bird, and not enough the bad luck of the early worm.
- Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1882 - 1945

The Results are in...we're lazy

I just got an email from the Center for Media Research that caught my eye. I personally don't have much time for TV, although I usually catch SportsCenter and or the Trifecta about every night. I always find it interesting to see how much people are watching TV.

According to the American Time Use Survey, average Americans spend 11% of their life in front of a TV screen, 35% sleeping and 33% at work.

Hightlights from the study:

• Working mothers with young children have only about three hours of leisure time a day.
  
• Teens age 15 to 19 sleep an average 9.4 hours a day, beating the 75+ segment by more than 20 minutes a day.
  
• Teenagers spend only seven minutes a day reading paper-based personal interest materials
  
• The 75+ group has the most hours of leisure time at eight, and read for 72 minutes a day for personal interest
  
• College educated workers spend 6% of their hours a day watching TV, while consumers with a high-school diploma but no job spend 17%
  
• Teens are active 40 minutes a day on physical activity, people from age 35 on spend 15 minutes or less, consumers with bachelor's degrees or higher tend to do more.

Is Google a Leader?

John Battelle addresses the issue.

Small Business Seminar

I went to a Small Business Seminar in Salt Lake yesterday. It was put on by Zions Bank, so it was no surprise that a lot of the speakers were bankers who talked about understanding your balance sheet and improving your ratios, etc. There was also a local ad agency, Richter7, which had a few guys giving a seminar called "Impact Marketing on a Shoestring Budget." They gave some good insight and even talked about a few aspects of online marketing, including paid search, but there certainly wasn't enough time to get too deep into any serious discussion about search marketing. Search isn't really one of their strengths anyway. They seem to focus more on traditional advertising and PR. Richter7 is one of the biggest ad agencies in town and from what I've seen they do some great work. I really liked the first guy's presentation who talked about the importance of branding for small businesses.

The lunch was great--turkey, mashed potatos and gravy, with apple pie for dessert, yum!. The keynote speaker was also very good. It was Jim Blasingame author of "Small Business is Like a Bunch of Bananas" and small business advocate.

He spoke about how the printing press was the greatest invention by mankind. He highlighted the progress we've made intellectually since Gutenberg's invention of the press. He also spoke of what he called "Our Journey of Intellectual Property". He emphasized that small businesses need to embrace technology. He talked about how 20 years ago, most companies' balance sheets had about 80% fixed assets and 20% intellectual property. Over the past 20 years, those percentages have flipflopped, with most companies now owning about 80% intellectual property and only 20% fixed assets. Small business owners need to leverage intellectual property more and hard assets less.

Jim gave an interesting viewpoint on outsourcing and Wal-mart. He said small business owners should embrace outsourcing because it enables us to reduce our costs and improve our level of service. Also, outsourcing can provide us with an opportunity to be the outsourced partner for our customers. We should always ask ourselves, "must this be done in-house?" If not, we should outsource to someone who can do it better and cheaper. We should ask our customers the same question, but then ask, "If not, can we do it for you?"

Regarding Wal-mart, he said Wal-mart is great for small buiness because they attract all the price-sensitive customers who are looking simply for commodities, and leave the best customers for small businesses who are best at giving them what they really want--a customized product or service that goes beyond just what they need. Basically, he said small business owners should thank Wal-Mart for getting rid of all those customers who take up all our time as they shop for the lowest price. Along those same lines, he said the price war is over and we lost (small businesses). We should get rid of any part of a business plan that focuses on price and we should instead focus on what differentiates us from our competition.

Jim also talked about how more and more, people are valuing their time more than their money. So if we can offer them something that will save them time, they won't mind paying us for it.

Google Admits Problems with Accelerator

Google's effort to speed the pace of Web browsing quickly aggravated some early users, who say that the software is delivering them Web pages under other users' logins and breaking Web applications.

From Eweek

Visualize Search Results

I just read this post on the SEW blog about Grokker being featured in an article in the NY Times. Grokker has released a new web-based version of their visualization software. It's really cool the way it groups search terms and gives a whole new perspective on search. The current version uses Yahoo search for their results. Go to grokker.com and try it out.

Gates vs. Google

Just read interesting article on Fortune.com that chronicles Microsoft's venture into search over the past few years. The story's not over yet, but they've definitely come a long way in regards to search. That article gives some good insight into how it came about and some of the hurdles they ran into along the way.

Here's an excerpt:

Trying to build a Google killer, however, has turned out to be truly humbling for Microsoft. The effort has taken longer, cost more money, and exposed more big-company problems at Microsoft than anyone imagined.

Google Drops Price on Urchin

I had a feeling Google would drop the price for Urchin. They've reduced the price of their Urchin on demand hosted analytics program from $495/month to $195. Pretty sweet deal, but I was really hoping they'd make it for free. I know I'm a dreamer, but this is the company that offers 2GB of storage space with a free email account, so you never know.

They also offer a 15-day free trial of the service so you can try it out to see how it works.

the article I read about the price change

More info about Urchin on Demand

Forrester Predicting Strong Growth in Search Marketing

Our buddies over at Forrester Research announced their predictions that online advertising will continue to grow in 2005. According to their predictions, online advertising will grow to $26 billion by 2010--11.6 billion of that coming from search.

Here are some key findings from their report:

• Search engine marketing will grow by 33 percent in 2005, reaching $11.6 billion by 2010. Display advertising, which includes traditional banners and sponsorships, will grow at the average rate of 11 percent over the next five years to $8 billion by 2010.
  
• New advertising channels will draw interest and spending from marketers. Sixty-four percent of respondents are interested in advertising on blogs, 57 percent through RSS, and 52 percent on mobile devices, including phones and PDAs.
  
• Marketers are quickly losing confidence in the effectiveness of traditional advertising channels and feel that online channels will become more effective over the next three years. Seventy-eight percent of survey respondents said that they think search engine marketing will be more effective, compared with 53 percent of respondents who said TV advertising would become less effective.
  
• The only nondigital advertising channel to reach the same level of confidence as online channels with marketers is product placement — only 8 percent of respondents believe that product placement will become less effective over the next three years.
  

Access to the full report is for paying customers only. Sorry.

It's Official...but not in Firefox

Another (yawn) new search engine has burst onto the scene. It's called Official Find. I had to try it in IE to see what it's all about. I guess they call it official find because if it finds an "official" site--meaning the primary site owned by the person, company, or whoever you are searching on--it give it the little seal of approval saying it's the official site. For example, I searched on george bush and it shows me a link at the top to www.georgewbush.com with a little image that says it's the official site.

It's an intersting concept because it can be difficult for the average user to discern which site is the official one with all the fan sites, affiliates, and whatever else out there. Also, Official Find takes a cue from Google Suggest, and gives you options to go straight to the suggested sites without even having to perform the search. I'm sure someone may find this useful, but that particular feature doesn't work in Firefox.

No Mules in Mule Canyon

I had a great time on our hike in Mule canyon, in Southern Utah. It was a nice hike and the rain held out so we didn't get totally drenched & muddy. It was fun to see the old indian ruins, which are remarkably well preserved after hundreds of years since being abandoned. It was also nice to get away from all phones and email and just be able to feel the wind and sun (and a little bit of rain). It's refreshing to get out in nature like that and not it was just an overnight trip, but we managed to stretch it to almost a full 48 hours by the time it was all said and done. It was nice to spend time with just the guys. In fact, it was a near-perfect trip for me--I'm sure the two guys who got sick might not feel the same way. The only lingering problem is that am still sore from tying to pull myself up that rope, oh, and I haven't yet had the courage to pull my sweaty clothes out of my pack to wash them.