Featured posts from the Search Engine Watch blog, as well as our customary headlines from around the web. If you’re not familiar with our blog, click on any of the links below, or visit the blog’s home page at http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/.
From The SEW Blog…
- Yotophoto For Finding Free Photos Fast
Yotophoto is a fast and easy to use image search engine. There are plenty of image search engines available of course, but that’s no reason why there shouldn’t be one more. The focus of Yotophoto however is on making ‘open and copyleft’ images available to educators, bloggers and digital artists. Consequently Yotophoto acts as a multi/meta search engine, scouring resources such as Flickr, Wikipedia, Stock.Xchng, Morguefile, Pixelperfect Digital and OpenPhoto for images in the public domain, or made available under CC, GNU FDL or similar licenses…. - Yahoo China Sues Hongyi’s Qihoo For Unfair Competition
Reuters reports that Yahoo China is suing Qihoo, claiming that 360safe spyware software is prompting users to uninstall the Yahoo Toolbar. The spyware software claims that Yahoo’s Toolbar is “malware” and is a risk to their computers. Joseph Tsai, Alibaba’s chief financial officer, said that this is unfair competition, alluding to a former Yahoo employee named Zhou Hongyi who know heads up Qihoo. It is important to note that Zhou Hongyi sued Yahoo last month for defamation…. - Google Reader & Ask’s Bloglines Undergo Updates
Both Google Reader and Ask.com’s Bloglines have gone under some interface and usability updates, with some added features included…. - Ask.com Upgrades Weather Results & Adds Earthquake Data Gary Price reports that Ask.com has launched an enhanced version of the weather results and has added earthquake data to Smart Answers. For an example of the enhanced weather results, do a search on weather in 10010 and then click on the top link and you will get a lot more detail, check it out. Also, if you want earthquake information, just search on earthquakes and you will get the most recent earthquake activity, of course you can also search by location….
- comScore: Local Search Gains Momentum SES Local starts today in Denver, so it’s timely that comScore released new local search data, which they’ll be presenting at the show. Here are the top-level findings: “According to the study, 63 percent of U.S. Internet users (or approximately 109 million people) performed a local search online in July, a 43-percent increase versus July of 2005. Google Sites (30 percent) and Yahoo! Sites (29 percent) garnered the largest share of local searches in July. Microsoft Sites captured 12 percent of local searches, followed by the Time Warner Network with 7 percent.” The release has the full market-share breakdown….
- Evil Matt Cutts: Matt’s Evil Twin Brother Spotted via SEO Home, it appears someone launched an alter ego to Matt Cutts’s blog at evilmattcutts.com. You got to admit, this is funny. The picture, the reworded blog posts, and the concept. One example blog post is named How to Verify Google Bot, then Kill and cook him. Who owns the site? Well, I know who owns the domain, http://whois.domaintools.com/evilmattcutts.com. Matt, what happened to your front tooth?…
- 2006 Online Ad Spend: 37% Increase in ’06 & Search Remains Hot The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) in conjunction with PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) released online ad revenue figures for the first two quarters of 2006, showing a 37% increase year-over-year for the same period. The first half of 2006, revenues from online ads were $7.9 billion. Search counted for approximately 40 percent of those figures, at $3,164 million. Like in the past, they do not break out contextual ads from search ads….
- Google Talks On Its Approach To Content & Copyright Our approach to content at the Official Google Blog has Google explaining to the world how it works with content owners and its desire to respect their rights. In terms of copyright, Google stresses that it generally sticks to what’s known as fair use, though the post doesn’t use those words. The idea is that it shows very short summaries of stories, pages, thumbnails of images but doesn’t reprint this material, requiring people to clickthrough to the actual material from places like Google News….
- The Internet, ‘Family 2.0’ And The 43-Hour Day Yahoo and OMD issued the findings from the latest round of their ongoing global research project in 16 contries that involves online surveys and in-person interviews. What they found is that through technology and multitasking families are cramming the equivalent of 43 hours of activity into a 24 hour day. They also found that the Internet (and mobile phones) are a significant part of the fabric of daily family life. There’s a lot of interesting material in the findings. The top level data can be found in this release….
- Google’s Index Bench: Build Your Own Google Search Engine? Gary Price reported that Google registered a few new interesting domain names including bench-index.com, benchindex.com, index-bench.com and indexbench.com. Since then Garett Rogers speculated that this may mean Google is building a product to allow users to build their own flavor of the Google search engine, much like how Rollyo does. Philipp Lenssen guesses that Google may be releasing some sort of Alexa engine. Some folks at Philipp’s forum suggest that “IndexBench could be tools that measure the quality of an index.” Loren Baker leans to siding with Garett Rogers’s guess. Me? I have no better guess at this time….
- Class Action Lawsuit Filed Against AOL Over Search Data Release TechCrunch reports in Suit filed against AOL; seeks to block search history storage that a class action lawsuit has been filed against AOL seeking $1,000 in damages for each person whose search records were released last month. The release involved 658,000 individuals, so that’s potentially a $658 million bill, if the case succeeds. It’s even more if some of those people are California-based, since the case seeks $4,000 per California individual, according to TechCrunch….
- Google Leads In Dead & Old Pages In Google Has the Largest Number of Dead and Old Pages, the Google Operating System Blog points to a video and some research from Google’s Ziv Bar-Yossef that discusses how to grab a random sample of pages from major search engines and extrapolate from those pages information about the search engines. This can be used in a number of ways….
- Organic & Paid Search Conversion Metrics Similar ClickZ reports on a WebSideStory study that shows that organic search traffic realized a conversion rate of 3.13 percent while paid search traffic realized a conversion rate of 3.4 percent. The study covered 57 million search engine visits from “20 business-to-consumer e-commerce sites during the first eight months of 2006.” ClickZ notes that organic search traffic does tend to have a higher click rate (1.5 times higher than paid search volume)….
- Fortune Looks At Chaotic Google & Whether It Can Have A “Second Act” Chaos by design is a Fortune cover story on Google, covering the company’s fast-paced, seemingly disorganized approach to products and exploring if it can come up with a “second act” to please investors:…
- Goodbye Froogle; Hello Google Product Results In Web Search Froogle, Google’s shopping search engine that launched with big hopes back in 2002, is to be deemphasized in place of product listings integrated into regular Google search results….