Is It Really A Victory? Danny Sullivan either a) provides an incisive review of the Nigritude Ultramarine SEO competition or b) cunningly tries to win himself an iPod :) Hey Danny - if you win, I want a cut!
Browser (in)compatibility: Interesting thread at WMW on quirks and standards.
I'm off on holiday: To the remote pacific island of Rarotonga. Back sometime. Maybe :)
Puffin: More discussion on Google's plans to deliver local search on your PC. Hurrah! My tax spreadsheet is receiving a PR0 for starters.
Meanwhile, on the other side of Gotham city...Chris Sherman takes an Insider's View of Microsoft's Longhorn Search.
Oh no darling, that simply won't do: Design eye for the usability guy. Jakob Nielsen receives a few style pointers - "Okay, I'm looking at the head, and I'm thinking...hair might be good?"
No way AdWare: Perhaps sensing that the online ad market needs to be tidied up if it's going to go truly mainstream, Google provide guidelines for AdWare/Spyware. Nice move.
Not thinking small: Google goes after Microsoft on the desktop.
Big offering: I, and others, note that their gmail is now offering 1000GB of storage. That's a lot of mail, to be sure. Appears to be glitch, however.
Is AdWords also having growing pains?: Some posters at WMW experiencing difficulties with the channel.
Who is top? What is the most popular search engine? The answer may surprise you. Nah - it's Google, as usual, although Yahoo are making new headway.
Erased: Google Erased .. all 980 Drillion Teraflops of Data. Perhaps.
Marketing 101: A new guest article from Ammon Johns - Marketing 101: The Essentials of Marketing.
More moves on the middleman: Google test AdWords Automator, a program which creates AdWords campaigns based on site content.
Making moves on the middle man: Google introduce JumpStart, an inhouse SEM service. What next, WMW wonders...
Multi-channel spam nabber: Benjamin Edelman, an anti-spam/spyware advocate reported WhenU to Google for cloaking. The fallout continues...
Googleswami: Guess the Google share price on opening day. Win stuff.
Page Removal Bug: Google patch a bug that allowed people to remove sites from the index.
"Only" a search engine: Danny Sullivan wonders if the major SE's are taking their eye off the ball once again. Time for a new player, perhaps.
Black hat/white hat/grey hat/greeneggs and ham: Once again, there's a lot of talk in the forums about methodology, perhaps in reaction to Florida having reshaped the landscape. In reality, all SEO methodology has an element of risk, and morality is a poor framework for categorising technical method. Brad Fallon puts it well.
Feeling Blue: The observant amongst you will have noticed a change in design. "Why blue?", I hear absolutely no one ask. "Why not", I answer. "I felt like a change".
What do you think?
Also, there's a new search marketing directory feature for those of you who run search marketing businesses and/or provide search marketing products. First come, best dressed. Yes, it costs - this helps keep out the riff-raff. Well, the broke riff-raff anyway ;)
If you want to get a listing in our sparkling new directory, get in touch.
AdPictures: It's not April 1st - Google are planning to distribute picture banners via AdWords. HatTip Shak.
Behind the Google curtain: Interview with Craig Silverstein who talks about the history of search and why PageRank is far from dead.
Overture Downunder: Overture are making moves with more search services downunder. Overture will now show results on the ninemsn network. Who will be next, we wonder.
PubCon 6.5 (London) announced: Brett realised that European beer is better.
Google speaks: Or "blogs", as it's known in geek circles. Apparently some new fangled publishing craze.
New look: Google relauch Blogger. Very nice. SearchEngineBlog will be having a (long-overdue) relaunch shortly. Watch this space.
Marketing 101: Ammon Johns (and others) discuss the basics of marketing in this excellent thread at crea8asiteforums. Over at HighRankings, an interesting debate on Rankings Vs Conversions. WMW (Members Section) has a discussion about beer, although I suspect that Brett is speaking in code. Expect announcements shortly.
Split personality: Opinion is strongly divided on Google's IPO strategy. On the one hand, Wall Street finds it all most odd. On the other, there is praise for taking it to "the man". Then there is a another man with a few axes to grind, although he is amusing. Some don't think any of it is worth the bother.
Whatever way you look at it, Google's backers stand to make bank. And the publicity won't hurt a bit.
Ahh, statistics: Results from a recent Search Engine User Attitudes Survey indicate that: "
60.5 percent of Google, Yahoo!, MSN and AOL users selected a natural search result over paid search advertisements as the most relevant on a sample query, 60.8 percent of Yahoo! and 72.3 percent of Google search engine users chose a natural search result as the most relevant, 71.2 percent of MSN users clicked on a paid search advertisement as the most relevant to their search and AOL users identified both natural search results and paid search advertisements equally as often as the most relevant".
I'd like to add my own survey results that indicate 89% of internet surfers wouldn't know a paid listing from a natural one, 69% of MSN users refer to the MSN search engine as "the internet", 42.6% of internet users don't know how to change their default home page and 92% of internet surfers see yellow lines under words all the time because they have inadvertantly installed adware. I may have made that up, but when it comes to statistics, who really cares?
