Category: Of Note in Search Biz

Interesting:

Local.com Corporation (NASDAQ: LOCM), a leading local search engine, today announced that the company has been awarded patent number 7,231,405 by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for the process of indexing and retrieving web-related information by geographical location.

The patent covers local search technology related to identifying location information from web documents, indexing that information and making it searchable geographically. In Local.com’s commercial implementation of the technology, the search results are ranked by search term, LocalRank score, location prominence, among other factors. The system then extracts, matches and indexes web pages from the Internet and generates web references where applicable on more than 16 million local businesses listed nationwide on Local.com.

Patents are a real hot button issue in our industry. What do you all make of this? I’ve sent emails for response from the majors…

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Mike has the scoop…

Wenda Harris Millard, former head of sales, is leaving for Martha Stewart, and Yahoo is unifying search and CPM sales under David Karnstedt. More from PC.

Matt posts on the role of humans in Google search, prodded by a NYT story on the topic:

If you ask an average techie about Google, you’ll hear that we use lots of computers and algorithms. Indeed, the title of the New York Times article is “The Human Touch That May Loosen Google’s Grip.” But (in my opinion), it would be a mistake to think “Google is nothing but cold algorithms and computers; there’s no room for humans at all.” I’ll give you a few examples of the role of people over the years at Google:

– PageRank is fundamentally about the hyperlinks that people on the web create. All those people creating links help Google formulate an opinion of how important a page is.

– Google News looks at a wide variety of news sources; the decisions of human editors at thousands of news sites help Google estimate whether a particular story is significant.

– Google introduced voting buttons on the toolbar back in 2001. They look like happy/frowny faces and they let regular people send thumbs-up or thumbs-down votes to Google.

– Google has allowed users to remove results that they don’t like from Google.

– For more than five years, we’ve allowed users to report spam to Google. We’ve said for years that we reserve the right to take manual action on spam (e.g. if someone types in their name and gets off-topic porn as a result).

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My my. This from VentureBeat is interesting.

Two more high-level Google engineers have left the Googleplex — this time to join well-known venture capital firm Benchmark Capital.

Bret Taylor (left) and Jim Norris (right), two of the masterminds behind Google Maps and several other Google products, have joined the firm as “Entrepreneurs in Residence.” This gives them paid positions to hang out at Benchmark’s offices on Silicon Valley’s Sand Hill Road and think through starting a business. They have a specific idea in mind, but are secretive about it, telling VentureBeat only that it’s a “consumer Internet” company.

Reprise is a leading SEO/SEM firm, and it was recently purchased by InterPublic Group, a large advertising agency. (My company FM is working with Reprise). One of its founders, Peter Hershberg, recently sent me a report on its early interactions with Panama, and I thought I’d post some of the company’s findings. If you want the full report, I will have uploaded it soon (here is the link to the PDF).

Here’s the nut of the Executive Summary:



In short, while it was found to be a significant upgrade over the previous Yahoo DTC (Direct Traffic Center) system (especially for enterprise-grade clients), there are several challenging aspects of the Panama upgrade that may impede Yahoo’s ability to access the long tail of the market.

Reprise evaluates Panama along many lines of inquiry: Campaign Management (including Perfomance), User Interface, and Technology.

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