Category: Of Note in Search Biz

Relatively deep in John Markoff’s piece “Plaintiffs Say Microsoft Still Behaves Badly” these charges are related: In a separate report, filed with the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, Massachusetts, which is the lone holdout from the antitrust settlement, stated that its investigations “portend badly for the efficacy of the Nov. 1, 2002, judgment.”

“We have continued to receive and review indications that Microsoft is engaged in troubling business behavior,” wrote Assistant Attorney General Glenn S. Kaplan.

The Massachusetts report said that the state was reviewing allegations that Microsoft is “engaged in a campaign against various Internet search engines similar to the campaign it previously waged against Netscape’s Navigator browser.”

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Dex, the newly named Yellow Pages unit (formerly of Qwest/US West), announced Friday they have made all 240,000 of their listings – covering a major swath of the midwestern and western US – searchable online. Said Dex President and Chief Executive Officer George Burnett, rather defensively, “We think our product is better than any portal.”

MediaPost has a story on it here.

This piece (via Forbes.com) explores the idea, which Google does not deny or confirm. Says Google may do its own branded email service.

From the piece: Google last year purchased an e-mail management software maker and in 2001 registered the domain name googlemail.com.
Some in Silicon Valley also believe Google could be preparing to launch free e-mail to compete with offerings from Yahoo and MSN’s Hotmail.
“If they were to go the e-mail route they’d have to provide an offering that competes with free (e-mail). Anti-spam is one form of strong differentiation,” said Jim Pitkow, chief executive of Moreover Technologies, whose personalized search company Outride was acquired by Google in 2001.

“SEO” stands for “search engine optimizers,” an oft-maligned class of businesses who specialize in helping companies rank better in organic – aka “pure” – listings. In other words, these are the folks who will help your site get in the first page of results in Google, as Google is (for now) the only game in town when it comes to pure results. And as we all know, getting on the first page of Google results can mean a massive amount of traffic and business to your site. Plus, you can avoid having to spring for paid listings.

Now, SEOs have a long and rather mottled history, and it’s not my goal in this post to revisit it. Suffice to say that many SEOs use tactics which fail the integrity sniff test, and most observers of this space would agree that the overzealous use of search-engine optimization has created a massive spam problem for Google – crap results which clog up otherwise relevant SERPs (search engine results pages). In fact, it’s not at all uncommon to call the dance between SEOs and Google’s programmers an “arms race” – wherein Google will shift its algorithms to thwart obvious SEO deviousness, and the SEO community will respond with new and ever more crafty techniques to foil Google’s algorithms.

But many SEOs perform a honest and valuable service – they play by the rules, and they help sites organize themselves so they rank just about where they reasonably ought to. Optimizing for Google is not a new idea – nearly every good site does it, from CNet to Amazon. The SEO industry recently took a major step toward becoming an industry with standards and practices when it self-organized SEMPO, the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (though I can’t yet find the equivalent of SEMPO Member Guidelines, which I imagine is still a pretty hot potato within that nascent community).

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Chris Sherman over at SearchDay (SEW) gives Metrobot, a new kind of local search engine, a rave review today. From his piece: “Metrobot is one of the most useful specialized search services I’ve seen in a long while. It also shows how thinking outside of the (search) box can lead to a creative yet incredibly useful solution to the local search problem all of the major search engines are throwing a lot of resources at. Here’s hoping they all take a close look at what Metrobot has to offer.”

I tried the San Francisco search, and was not impressed – I searched by “type of business” and could not find a bike shop or a dry cleaner. New York was better populated. The service is very new and the CEO promises to add listings as fast as they can. I’m inclined to listen when Chris or others at SEW say nice things about a new approach to search, and the map feature is really cool (here’s an example here). It’s surprising, in a good way, to see local businesses in context of what else is on the street nearby.

Wired News rounds up the usual suspects (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft) today, going so far as to quote Danny saying “this is not news.” More proof that anything related to Google gives editors the urge to assign a story. However, one can always find something of note buried in me-too news – for example:

According to Kelsey Group program director Gerg Sterling, ‘2004 is going to be the Year of the Search’…”

2004?!! I better get my book done and quick….

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Cnet’s Stephanie Olsen notes that several portals are considering following Google into the taskbar world…effectively increasing pressure on MSFT to get its Longhorn act together. This is a significant threat to the mindspace that Windows occupies: If Windows becomes a layer that is built upon by others…where is the margin for Gates & Co? Hence their massive efforts to get into search…

While I was down in the Valley Weds. I heard word that Yahoo’s aggregator was up and running. But then I couldn’t find it when I got home. Seems they put up a brief beta in MyYahoo, then brought it back down again. Internet.com has a story on it…”Insiders at Yahoo confirmed the plan to add an aggregator as a module within the ‘My Yahoo’ section but described the public appearance of the beta Wednesday as an accident.”

Also of note, NewsGator has a new service to push RSS onto mobile devices.

Comes, as usual, from Search Engine Watch. My posts will be brief for the next day, as I am taking Friday off, but this is worth a read if you care about why local search seems to be a big deal…

Via Reuters, Forbes reports on another Chinese search company planning to go public, this one called Baidu – the name “comes from a Song dynasty poem about a man searching for his lover.” The company claims to be profitable, and to serve 30 million searches a day (“one seventh that of Google”) – the largest in China.