Google settlement
The judge in the Google click-fraud case approved the $90m settlement—in credits, Google is pleased but 500 drop-out from the class-action. (Battelle talked earlier about this. ) AP: By settling claims made in the plaintiffs’ class-action lawsuit, Google will give advertising credits that are the equivalent of a $4.50 refund on every $1,000 spent in its ad network during the past 4 1/4 years.
AOL Video
Time Warner introduces AOL Video search (with upload and sharing capabilities) that will offer on-demand video and TV shows like South Park, in addition to free content. TechWeb writes that the technology backbone is from Truevo and Singingfish, which AOL purchased last Dec. and in 2003 respectively. Planned to launch Aug. 4.
Hot eye-tracker study
A web navigation study finds the upper left of the search results screen attracts the majority of attention, with about 45% of user clicks within the slightly larger F-shaped area. Research at the University of Hamburg finds: the Web moving from static hypertext information to dynamic interactive services. Clickstream heatmaps and web page statistics show rapid interaction over smaller areas of the screen.
About 33% of searches contain 2 keywords, over 88% contain only 2-3. (from SEW)
False names
A loophole in ICANN’s registration policy is abused in “a growing practice dubbed Domain Name Kiting,” reports Kuro5hin: Of more than 35 million domain names registered in May 2006, less than 3 million were legitimate! The remaining 92% were dropped within five days without incurring registration fees…ICANN regulations permit domain registrars to delete a registration within five days a receive a full refund.
So many Good topics today – had to save time by literally digging – Battellemedia.com – as one topic
But, in reference to the Domain Knitting controversy – Who are they hurting by making a few dollars?
For all anyone knows, these ROI strategies many help keep domain costs low or help in the offering of free services that many Registrars are now offering, or even prevent employees from being laid off in a business that may not be that profitable of a Cost per transaction model.
Of course, no one should be too extreme, because a backlash will sadly ruin it for everyone.
Society expects everyone to be Pure and Flawless in every way – those are just not the realities of business survival.
If there are loopholes that ocassionally allow people to get a little extra in life – so be it – how many times during a lifetime are you shortchanged & screwed?
almost all eye-tracker studies have shown a left-side bias. furthermore, conspicuous images or graphics attracts the eyes to avert from the text to that particular image.
(kindly delete the previous comment, hit the wrong post. :p)
I think this is NOT right place to post but now you can see your orkut birthday scraps on google’s homepage as seen in http://mitanshu.blogspot.com/2006/08/view-orkut-birthdays-in-google.html
I wonder if there’s been a study on vertical search properties and eye tracking behavior? I’d like to think the topical engine we operate is more info dense than a Google or a Yahoo. But, then… human behavior might just be human behavior. Dunno?
The “magic triangle” as it was once called is a hard habit to break I’m sure.
Well, this research may not be complete. It was already discovered long back that when men see pictures of beautiful girls their pupils become big and all attention is diverted there – whetther or not the pics are in the small F shaped area 🙂 I have tested this with one of my websites and it gets lot of traffic and click rate is very high !!
“there’s been a study on vertical search properties and eye tracking behavior?” i am wondering about tihs too