Month: August 2006

Flickr images enter Yahoo

Yahoo begins to integrate Flickr images into search results. A corresponding new tool in Flickr allows users to remove their pictures from search listings. Everyone is asking: how are the images in results ranked? and how is Yahoo determining which keywords to use? Instead of all tags, only queries like “interesting photos” will return Flickr thumbnails. link

Checkout Affliates

Google Checkout launches an affiliate program with integration incentives for “e-commerce providers.” Checkout is also running back-to-school promotional, accompanied by themed reasons to shop, like: “Jockey.com: Extra Underwear, Starbucks Store: All-Nighters.”

Ask’s new hire

Ask announces their new VP of Technology and Engineering, Chuch Geiger, former CTO at PayPal.

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Another social site with web 2.0 goodness? Yes. Fanpop may standout, however, by picking the best qualities from a number of leading social sites and bringing them together in a neat integration. As they say, “We’re a little bit of Digg, MySpace, Yahoo! Groups, del.icio.us and Yelp all mixed into one.”

Users can create topical federations on just about anything, giving it a resemblance to Tribe’s flexibility. With 24 broad ‘channels’, Fanpop leaves room for communities to cluster around a long tail of interests. In the Fanpop spots, users can add links to relevant websites or news links, like Delicious. But in addition, submitted websites gain momentum from user voting— giving Fanpop the interactive push of Digg and Reddit.

For search fans, there’s the built-in “more on the web” option of out-bound searches keyword tied to the Fanpop title page you’re on, to Google, Delicious, Wikipedia, eBay, Amazon, Flickr, YouTube—probably a list that will grow.

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Compete says up, alongside conflicting data from Hitwise (reporting a fractionally smaller boost) and NetRatings, recording a slight slip down. By Hitwise’s measure, Google search share grew .4%, to 60.2%, in June. Neilsen-NetRatings shows a tiny dip of .2% in July. Tracking different metric sources, Compete reports that Google’s market share actually increased by .5% in July.

As mentioned earlier, Danny Sullivan is sharing some thoughts as he carefully picks through the details in a skeptical survey of all this. In response, ComScore wrote: “We agree with your assessment that a single-month decline does not constitute a trend. In fact, comScore also observed a similar seasonal decline for Google during the same period last year,” before ascribing it to seasonal fluctuation.

SalesForce for AdWords

Today Salesforce launched AdWords campaign management technology. The new service allows users to directly buy keywords, place ads, and create performance reports in realtime. link

Spreadsheets makes the cut

In the wake of Video’s upgraded status on Google’s search page, Spreadsheets beta becomes an option for services in Google Mail.

Music Trends in GTalk

Google is releasing new data on Talk users’ music listening tastes in the Labs. Within the Google Talk client, users can activate Google to mine and categorize their music habits. Other Talk upgrades, here.

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