Markoff has the scoop: Yahoo platforms Groxis. Posting will be light as I am traveling today. My prior coverage of Groxis here….
For a company in the midst of a lawsuit with Yahoo over PPC models and sucking wind after its auditor quit under a cloud, this news – a class action claiming the company overpromoted itself and its stock – is just more bad news….
One: Fred is at it again, sharing his AdSense data. This time I think he did in fact violate AdSense TOS. Not in saying AdSense Image ads suck, but in providing click through rates. Hawk comments here. Two: Google's Web Accelerator is turning into something of a PR nightmare….
One: Fred is at it again, sharing his AdSense data. This time I think he did in fact violate AdSense TOS. Not in saying AdSense Image ads suck, but in providing click through rates. Hawk comments here.
Two: Google’s Web Accelerator is turning into something of a PR nightmare. Some coverage:
Spoke with a Google spokesperson just now, who clarified the multiple reports, including mine, about Google's plans in China. Google is opening an office on the mainland, but the office is not an indication of a new operation, she told me. Rather, the company has obtained a license to…
The office is in a shared office space set up, the kind of place many businesses lease when they are starting out in a new country (I’ve done it before in London with The Standard). Apparently the local Hong Kong and Chinese press have had a field day with this story, going so far as to interview a woman who runs the leased office space and claim she was an employee of the company. “Google is committed to learning as much as it can about the local market,” the real Google spokesperson told me. But she added that Google has not hired anyone in China. As to reports that Google had retained Victor Koo, she claimed to have no knowledge of that one way or another.
Yippee! Newsflash from Reuters: A federal appeals court on Friday vacated a Federal Communications Commission a rule designed to limit people from sending copies of digital television programs over the Internet. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia said the FCC had "exceeded the scope of…
I just learned that Wayne Rosing has left his role as SVP, Engineering at Google, and plans to focus on a passion of his, astronomy. He's been named senior fellow in mathematical and physical sciences at the University of California, Davis. I've pinged Wayne to see if he'd be…
I just learned that Wayne Rosing has left his role as SVP, Engineering at Google, and plans to focus on a passion of his, astronomy. He’s been named senior fellow in mathematical and physical sciences at the University of California, Davis. I’ve pinged Wayne to see if he’d be game to talk with Searchblog. Wayne will remain as an advisor to Google.
Rosing is going to be working on the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). From the story:
The LSST is intended to look for light from distant galaxies that has been bent by gravity to detect the mysterious dark matter and dark energy thought to make up most of the universe. When completed, possibly by 2012, it will be able to survey the entire visible sky every three nights, taking exposures every 10 seconds. Its three billion-pixel digital camera will generate 30 terabytes of data per night. Plans for the telescope call for all that data to be immediately available to the public.
Read MoreAs many of you no doubt recall, Searchblog is the target of some pretty determined comment spammers. To defeat them, I reluctantly implemented TypeKey, a comment registration system. But I really prefer allowing folks to comment as they wish to, without registration, and when Scot Hacker, my zen webmaster,…
Scot explains what we have implemented:
“Our concern is keeping spam out of my inbox and off this blog. The web host’s requirement is that the server not be strained by comment spam attacks. We’ve enabled Brad Choate’s excellent SpamLookup [http://bradchoate.com/projects/spamlookup/], a Swiss Army toolbelt of comment and trackback spam tools. We’ve just enabled SpamLookup’s passphrase option. TypeKey logins are no longer required, but you will have to answer a simple question with each comment submission.”
Read MoreThis says it all: " GOOGLE APPARENTLY HOSTS TERROR BLOG THREATENING BUSH AND BLAIR". As Colin Powell has said: Free speech is intended to protect the controversial and even outrageous word; and not just comforting platitudes too mundane to need protection….
As Colin Powell has said: Free speech is intended to protect the controversial and even outrageous word; and not just comforting platitudes too mundane to need protection.
Over at Google Blogoscoped, one of my favorite sites on search, blogger Philipp Lenssen reports that he has been threatened by SEO Inc., a SEO company, for posting widely known facts about the company. He does not have the money to pay for his defense, so he has taken…
Over at Google Blogoscoped, one of my favorite sites on search, blogger Philipp Lenssen reports that he has been threatened by SEO Inc., a SEO company, for posting widely known facts about the company. He does not have the money to pay for his defense, so he has taken down his original post, which noted that SEO Inc. has apparently been blacklisted from Google’s index, at least as it relates to particular terms like “search engine optimization.” (In fact, a search in Google for “SEO Inc.” does not yield the company’s URL in the first set of results, which is certainly odd.)
If Lenssen, who is based in Germany, had the money to fight these bigfoot tactics, he’d certainly win. Instead of fight, he decided to report what has happened, in the hope others will pick up the flag for him. I found his original post, titled “Fall of SEOInc” in Google’s Cache. I have a PDF of it as well, should the cache get rinsed in time. From the piece, which, in case the SEOInc. lawyers are reading, I quote under principles of fair use, newsworthiness, and commentary:
It’s kind of ironic that SEOInc.com, a search engine optimization company which for a while was on the Google number 1 spot for the highly competitive query “search engine optimization”, is now nowhere to be found in the Google results. This is likely due to the recent PageRank update and even more algorithm tweaks implemented by Google. Enter “SEOinc” into Google.com, and SEOInc.com is nowhere in the top 10; and the SEOInc.com PageRank has dropped to “none”. Only by entering “site:seoinc.com” into Google will you see the site is still indexed in some way.
Mo media, mo content. From the WSJ (sub): Yahoo hired Patrick Houston, 51 years old, away from Cnet Networks Inc., where he was editor-in-chief of Cnet.com, a site that publishes reviews of computers, cellphones and videogames. Mr. Houston will lead Yahoo's initiative to expand its technology content as part…
Yahoo hired Patrick Houston, 51 years old, away from Cnet Networks Inc., where he was editor-in-chief of Cnet.com, a site that publishes reviews of computers, cellphones and videogames.
Mr. Houston will lead Yahoo’s initiative to expand its technology content as part of a newly created position, said a spokesman for the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company. The expansion could include introducing original Yahoo content on the technology site, he said. Yahoo’s tech site currently aggregates news and product reviews from other sources.
