Below, a recap of stories posted today to the Search
Engine Watch Blog, along with other items we’ve spotted but not blogged
separately:
From The SEW Blog…
Yahoo Slurp Adds Wildcard Support For Robots.txt
The Yahoo Search Blog announced that Yahoo’s web crawler, aka Yahoo Slurp, now supports wildcards in the robots.txt file. The two parameters that Yahoo now supports include the “*” and the “&.” The * will tell Yahoo to do a “wildcard match a sequence of characters in your URL.” The & will tell Yahoo to do a “anchor the match to the end of the URL string.” Many more details at the Yahoo Search Blog….
GPS, Geotagging, Images and Maps
The NY Times has a long and relatively interesting article on geotagging images and mapping. It primarily discusses Flickr and, to a lesser degree, Google Earth and Picasa and other services such as TripTracker. The article also goes into the geocoding/tagging technology itself. Not discussed in the article is Microsoft’s “Photosynth,” which is an interesting hypothetical application and extension of all this technology. Mapping, images (including video) and local/travel are rapidly coming together in very rich applications, as alternatives to pure text-based online navigation….
Gmail Mobile Client Released
Google just announced the release of a mobile client to manage your gmail account on your mobile device. The new benefits include; 5X faster, reduced clicks and scrolling required, plus attachments are “viewable and automatically resized to fit the user’s phone.” You can download the client on your mobile devise by visiting http://gmail.com/app on your mobile browser. For detailed help, visit here – I personally had trouble installing it on my Treo 700P. There is also a great review at MobileCrunch….
ClickRiver New Pay Per Click Program from Amazon
Ever wanted to put your ads right on the product page of your competitor’s product at Amazon.com, or wanted your product advertised with something related to it? Now with Amazon’s new pay per click program ClickRiver, now you can. The program is in beta at the moment and through Amazon’s A9 department. You can find out more about the program here and apply to participate in the beta at ClickRiver.com…
Google Effect Of Domain Name Change Of Ownership
This morning I wrote Does Change of Domain Name Ownership Hurt Rankings? a question that has been bugging Danny and myself since I wrote Google Effect Of Domain Name Expiration & Change Of Ownership. Well, I now have some webmaster feedback on this that claims that domain name change of ownership, by itself, appears to not have an affect on your rankings….
In UK, Google To Surpass Channel 4’s Ad Dollars
The Independent reports that Google UK is expected to earn “£900m from the UK ad market in 2006.” When compared to Channel 4’s “£800m at the TV group” this year, Google is expected to beat this TV player in ad dollars. Channel 4’s Andy Duncan said, “Some broadcasters have been very slow to realise this. The industry as a whole is frankly rather backward-looking and is perhaps underestimating the scale of change that is going on and the pace of change.”…
Google To Partner With Clear Channel Communications?
Business Week’s Steve Rosenbush thinks it is a good idea for Google to partner with Clear Channel Communications. The article explains that Google has been “adding “high profile” radio sales people in New York, Washington, Baltimore, Atlanta, and Chicago.” And Google is known to be working towards embedding ads into radio with recent rumors that Google AdSense For Audio Coming Soon….
Ask.com Launches Elections Smart Answers
Ask.com launched some new smart answers for the upcoming elections. You can do a search on elections 2006 to see “General Elections are Tuesday, November 7, 2006.” The smart answer also gives you links to the Republican Party and the Democrats web sites. Additional quick links they give within the smart answers include; Analysis by Poll Reports, Race Profiles, Key Races, Key Issues, Races by Issue, and Congressional Districts Map. The additional resources include Candidate Reports, Ballot Items, Campaign Fact Checking, Campaign Funding, and Evaluating Initiatives. Finally, you can also break down by state by searching for New York state…
Yahoo Launches Yahoo Food
What is for breakfast this morning? Well, you can now go to Yahoo Food and find out. Yahoo launched food.yahoo.com that contains “recipes, advice from regional celebrity chefs, video cooking guides and easy-to-use Web tools.” Reuters reports that in early 2007, Yahoo Food will expand to Australia, Britain and Canada, then expand into other global markets later….
Google Says Belgium Did Not Send $43.2M Fine
Elinor Mills reports that Google has claimed that Belgium fined Google $43.2 million the other week for not removing all Belgian publishers’ content from the engine’s index and cache. Google spokesman Ricardo Reyes, told Elinor Mills at News.com in an email, “Google has complied with the Copiepresse judgment and we are not aware of any fine. We believe this story to be completely untrue.”…
The Interestingness of Social Networks
Interestingness is a great name for a ranking algorithm. It’s what Yahoo’s photo-based social network Flickr uses to show which images the community finds the most “interesting.” Techdirt considers the impact that a couple of recent Yahoo patent applications filed for in February, and published last week (which I wrote about at SEO by the Sea), might have upon the growth of social networks. They reference the thoughts of Thomas Hawk, CEO of Zooomr, who weighs in on the topic in Should Yahoo Own Social Search and Rank in a Web 2.0 World? We’ve seen the major search engines compete…
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