Category: Of Note in Search Biz

Topix Pushes MicroPublishing Forward

This just in from Topix founder Rich Skrenta; Topix.net has added news channels to track any stories for 2,500 privately-held startups, scanned from the 10,000 sources Topix.net is crawling. The tracking channel was designed in association with Bob Karr's LinkSV.com, which maintains the database of private company profiles which…

This just in from Topix founder Rich Skrenta;

Topix.net has added news channels to track any stories for 2,500 privately-held startups, scanned from the 10,000 sources Topix.net is crawling. The tracking channel was designed in association with Bob Karr’s LinkSV.com, which maintains the database of private company profiles which we’re using for the automated news scan. There is also a related channel which tracks press releases from any of the same 2,500 startups. In addition we’ve got a general Venture Capital industry news channel.

topix.net/startups

topix.net/startups/pr

topix.net/vc

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A Happy New Year For Net Stocks

Analysts are jumping onboard – online advertising is poised for a huge year, they say, and YHOO and GOOG are responding in kind. From a Reuters story: Google gained as much as 5.15 percent and Yahoo rose as high as 3.3 percent in Nasdaq trading after Goldman Sachs increased…

HappyanalyAnalysts are jumping onboard – online advertising is poised for a huge year, they say, and YHOO and GOOG are responding in kind.

From a Reuters story:

Google gained as much as 5.15 percent and Yahoo rose as high as 3.3 percent in Nasdaq trading after Goldman Sachs increased its forecasts, citing strong Internet advertising trends. In a report, Goldman Sachs analyst Anthony Noto said that his firm’s recent talks with media buyers demonstrated that “the strength in online advertising demand did not appear to abate” in the quarter.

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Uber Tag Search?

Brian Dear imagines a search engine where all user-generated tag information is searchable – an engine that confederates the various nations of Flickr, iTunes, etc. Neat idea, and certainly another step toward the semantic web vision. . . . if more and more services in 2005 add user-generated tagging,…

TaggleBrian Dear imagines a search engine where all user-generated tag information is searchable – an engine that confederates the various nations of Flickr, iTunes, etc. Neat idea, and certainly another step toward the semantic web vision.

. . . if more and more services in 2005 add user-generated tagging, will “federated tagging” be far behind? And if someone were to index all the tags from these various sites…. would the result be Taggle? Imagine: a service where you type in a keyword, and you get back all the hits that have that word as a tag. If Flickr, del.icio.us, and umpteen other sites cooperated, then an uber-tag-search service might just work . . .

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Pew On Blogs

I'm late on this, but in case you did not see it last week, Pew released a study on blogs. Gary has the highlights. Net net: It's happening, folks. Highlights: • 7% of the 120 million U.S. adults who use the internet say they have created a blog or…

PewI’m late on this, but in case you did not see it last week, Pew released a study on blogs. Gary has the highlights. Net net: It’s happening, folks.

Highlights:

• 7% of the 120 million U.S. adults who use the internet say they have created a blog or web-based diary. That represents more than 8 million people. • 27% of internet users say they read blogs, a 58% jump from the 17% who told us they were blog readers in February. This means that by the end of 2004 32 million Americans were blog readers.

• 5% of internet users say they use RSS aggregators or XML readers to get the news and other information delivered from blogs and content-rich Web sites as it is posted online. This is a first-time measurement from our surveys and is an indicator that this application is gaining an impressive foothold.

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Sixty on Google

60 Minutes aired a long piece on Google last night, and instead of summarizing, I'll just link to the transcript. For avid watchers of all things Google, the piece did not go very deep, but then again, as Leslie Stahl told me during our interview, they have to make…

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60 Minutes aired a long piece on Google last night, and instead of summarizing, I’ll just link to the transcript. For avid watchers of all things Google, the piece did not go very deep, but then again, as Leslie Stahl told me during our interview, they have to make this stuff make sense to people who have never given Google a second thought.

I’m tempted to Monday morning quarterback my participation in the piece, but I’ll simply state this: I’ve never been entirely happy with the quotes someone has chosen when it comes to a piece of journalism that includes me, and I imagine that will also be true of the sources in my book. Journalists do their best to be true to a source’s intent, but it’s an imperfect craft. Of course I thought I said all sort of interesting things that didn’t make it into the piece (we spoke for nearly an hour), but on the other hand, many friends have assured me I didn’t make an ass of myself, so I’m happy with that result. I was surprised that I was the only “outside voice,” but given that Google cooperated with the program and gave them lots of access, I guess it makes sense that they gave as much airtime as they could to the actual subjects. They did show actual paper copies of the GLAT (Google Labs Aptitude Test) and Slashdot is tearing through the piece here.

Thanks to all of you for bearing with the extended hiatus I took over the past ten or so days, I got a lot of work done on the book, and am closing in – just 2 chapters to go, for the most part. I’m trying to get a full first draft done by the end of this month. My publisher is now weighing whether to push the book out quickly – late spring – or wait until September – which would be a “normal” amount of time given the completion date of the manuscript.

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Yahoo Releases Update to Index

Last year Google released a major update to its index right before Christmas, and all hell broke loose. This year Yahoo did the same, but the reaction has been more muted – even positive, in some cases. It's always hard to draw conclusions from index updates, but this one…

Last year Google released a major update to its index right before Christmas, and all hell broke loose. This year Yahoo did the same, but the reaction has been more muted – even positive, in some cases. It’s always hard to draw conclusions from index updates, but this one seems to be moving a lot of SEO links around the SERPs…

Update: According to SEORountable, an update is happening over at Google as well, though opinions are mixed as to whether it’s major, or simply ongoing maintenance…

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Pell, Geico, and Paid Search

Dave Pell recounts his excursion into buying AdWords based on the Geico keywords, and summarizes some new marketing realties: My experience does clearly point to the fact that we have opened up a whole new marketing frontier that will require ad buyers and small businesses to be a lot…

Dave Pell recounts his excursion into buying AdWords based on the Geico keywords, and summarizes some new marketing realties:

My experience does clearly point to the fact that we have opened up a whole new marketing frontier that will require ad buyers and small businesses to be a lot more creative with their marketing plans. It’s not as simple as coming up with the most obvious search terms. As the market grows, those will become prohibitively expensive for most buyers. Ad buyers will need to predict what their potential buyers might be interested in and then try to get in front of them as they’re on the way to finding it. If you want to get in front of a few thousand potential orthodontics patients, you might have to figure out something more creative than the words teeth and braces. And in many cases, your marketing plan may only last for a few days (or even a few hours) at which time you’ll need to add new search terms to the mix.

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Google Desktop Security: Welcome to the Software Biz

As I noted when GDS first came out, once you start providing serious PC-based software and integrate it with an internet service, you can become a target of hackers. The Times today writes about the security flaw initially discovered by Rice researchers. Google has already posted an updated version…

As I noted when GDS first came out, once you start providing serious PC-based software and integrate it with an internet service, you can become a target of hackers. The Times today writes about the security flaw initially discovered by Rice researchers. Google has already posted an updated version of GDS.

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Comment Spam and Search

Anyone with a blog has come across the bane of comment spam, recently it's gotten to near epidemic proportions for folks who use Moveable Type, as I do (I think this is because MT users tend to have high PageRank sites, but that's just a guess). Why do comment…

Anyone with a blog has come across the bane of comment spam, recently it’s gotten to near epidemic proportions for folks who use Moveable Type, as I do (I think this is because MT users tend to have high PageRank sites, but that’s just a guess).

Why do comment spammers do what they do? Simple: for the ranking juice. A spammer’s link inserted into the comment field confers this site’s authority, such that it is, to the spammer’s target site. Jeremy Zawodny, who is working with the Search team over at Yahoo, posts an interesting commentary on this problem, and suggests a solution.

If you assume the following:

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Froogle’s Product Reviews

As many have noted, Froogle has begun to aggregate snippets of product reviews from the web at large. This marks the Google News-ification of Froogle. When will the service jump the shark and start making money on vigs from sales? Or will it? Will publishers like Cnet revolt? Wait,…

FrooglereviewsAs many have noted, Froogle has begun to aggregate snippets of product reviews from the web at large. This marks the Google News-ification of Froogle. When will the service jump the shark and start making money on vigs from sales? Or will it? Will publishers like Cnet revolt? Wait, here’s Cnet coverage…

The service, which is similar to the company’s aggregated site for news around the Web, highlights Google’s ambition to bring more content to its own site with the use of its “spidering” technology.

Huh. “Bring more content.” That’s an interesting way to put it. Indeed.

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