Google lost VP Marketing

Post-IPO effect ? The viral marketing approach of that person was genial ! Dommage.

Google Complete ?

A new entry in the Robots.txt of Google is disallowing the Complete directory. At first I was thinking it was there for the Library project, but this is located under the Print subdomain. After I thought is was for Google Suggest (http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en) but I'm don't think the Suggest function need a directory for that because it is mainly a javascript program on the client side.

Anybody have a idea what the Complete Project stand for ?

Google Suggest Reversed Engineered

Nice work by Cris Justus to decode the javascript process of Google Suggest !

Yahoo Maps Real-Time Traffic Report

We can't stop progress !



For trafic in Montreal this morning you can look here ;-)

Yahoo Promote Media RSS with his (new) Yahoo Video Search

Nice thing, but should be embed in file by hardware/software as well, like the meta information embed in jpg with the digital camera. Here are the draft specification. And there is the Yahoo Video Search.

Huge victory for Google on trademark ads

Here is the Reuter short story. This will rise the buying of your own trademark in Google Adwords !

Promise of publication : Yes Sylvain is the number one

Little inside : Yes, my friend Sylvain is still number one on is first name on Google. The proof right here on his Treo 600 :

The most important university libraries will be Googlize

Google gonna digitize millions of books available at Stanford, the University of Michigan, Harvard, Oxford and the New York Public Library to make them available in its index.

Google News add new languages

Argentina, Chile, Canada Français (yé), México, Österreich, Schweiz or Suisse.

Google add real-time suggestions to is form

Google suggest is out for english queries :



The number of results is a really smart idea, because if you see huge number, you will refine your search before having results page. à

Update : Also work in french.

IBM PC unit going to China

A $1,25 billion deal have been made with Lenovo of China. Big Blue turning red !

Copernic Desktop Search v 1.2 now fully support Mozilla Firefox

Here is the press release :

December 7, 2004, Boston, MA – Copernic today announced the availability of a new and improved version (1.2) of its award-winning Copernic Desktop Search (CDS) product that fully supports the Mozilla Firefox Web browser. CDS 1.2 also features up to 200 percent faster indexing of PC hard drive content, reduced memory usage, and better compliance with French, German, Spanish and Italian content.

“CDS continues to get rave reviews from press, analysts, consultants, and bloggers, and has won multiple awards, including the CNET Editors' Choice award,” said David M. Burns, CEO of Copernic. “And now CDS is the only production desktop search product with full Mozilla Firefox support.”

CDS 1.2 features lightning-fast indexing of PC hard drive content and improved PC memory usage. The new CDS version also indexes browsing history and bookmarked sites from Mozilla browsers. According to Web analytics company OneStat.com, Web browser products from the Mozilla Foundation continue to gain on Microsoft’s market leading Internet Explorer (IE). Although IE still owns 88.9 percent of the market, Mozilla-based products jumped to 7.4 percent in October. The Mozilla Foundation reports that more than 5.6 million copies of Firefox 1.0 have been downloaded in the two weeks following the product launch.

“We are happy to see that Copernic is providing support for Firefox,” said Chris Hofmann, Director of Engineering at the Mozilla Foundation. “We are close to 10 million downloads in almost a month since the release in November, and developers are taking notice.”

“CDS 1.2 is our third significant product update within three months, while competing products are still in the early development stage,” said Eric Bouchard, EVP of Products for Copernic. “CDS is available in five languages and is simply ahead of the pack in every aspect: features, usability, speed, quality, manageability, user privacy, localization, and now full support for Mozilla’s Firefox browser.”

Improvements in CDS 1.2 include:

* Mozilla Firefox history and bookmarks indexing
* Up to 200 % faster indexing of hard drive content
* Support for the latest PDF file format (v1.5)
* Optimized PC memory usage
* Improved handling of French, German, Spanish and Italian content
* Redesigned user interface for Web searching
* Miscellaneous performance and compatibility improvements

About Copernic Desktop Search

CDS brings the power of a sophisticated, yet easy-to-use search engine right to your PC and allows you to instantly search files, e-mails, and e-mail attachments stored anywhere on your PC hard drive. Using a streamlined, intuitive user interface, CDS performs sub-second searching of Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files, Acrobat PDF's, all popular music, picture and video formats, contacts, browser history, and favorites. With seven separate technology patents pending, CDS represents the state of the art in desktop search design.

CDS works with Windows 98/Me/NT/2000/XP and Internet Explorer 5.0 or later. It can be downloaded for free from http://www.copernic.com/en/products/desktop-search/. More information about what's new in version 1.2 is available on the product Web site.

Canadians : Chilly online buyers but broadband lovers

Here is the Emarketer latest study : Canada: The Online Enigma

Google WayBack URL

Can anyone explain why this link http://www.google.com////// give us that ?
Via Zorglob

WebSphere will be more SE friendly

Finally somebody wake up at IBM to improve the resulting URL of Websphere !

Hera a example of the resulting URL of WebSphere fo now:

http://www.entreprises.gouv.qc.ca/wps/portal/!ut/p/_s.7_0_A/
7_0_CQ/.cmd/adj/.c/6_1_M1/.ce/7_1_1NG/.p/5_1_130/.d/0/_rp.7_1_1NG/
LnJlcW1ldGgtR0VULnJlcXVybC04OTM4MTM3QTI3MzUwMkU1NTFDMDAwNThBREM5NE
U0NzExOTg0MjI0QTY5RDZGREUzRTVCMDU4MDk3OEM3OEY4MjYxMkJGQTBDM0Y3QjRB
QkYyODUyRTkyNjQwMTJFN0U3NTBCMDBDNzlFODk4MEVDQzlFNTRBRkYzOTEwNzQ0Rk
MwQTNDQkVEQkUwQzRFNDZGQzcxQzA1MUE1Nzk3OUY3MDA2MDYzOUQ3NzI3MTBBODU0
RUMxNDYyQzhFMjRFQzc2RDJBQTFGNzBCMjEzNEQ4MTQ3RUQ0NEI2NTI0MTY5N0VFNj
lENzY1QjMyM0YxRjU5MTE0RkI2MUM5RkQ1QUU3

Incredible no ? They should keep that version for encryption purpose ;-)

Microsoft launched MSN Spaces Blog service

Here it is with the possibilities of photos, lists, music and categories. But like the lauched of MSN Beta Search few weeks ago, it seem suffer from heavy traffic at the moment and you get a lot of errors like ".NET Passport Unavailable at This Site" ;-).

Interactive Printed Edition

Finally a good use of web stats!

Blog is THE word of the year !

A bit late for my point of view but a good news to spread ! Will RSS will be the 2009 word ?

Google handle around 30 petabytes of data

In this interview of Zdnet, Urs Holzle, VP Engineering, give some metrics on Google GFS.

1 petabyte = 1024 terabytes
1 terabyte = 1024 gigabytes

FYI : The Internet Archive Wayback Machine deal with only 1 petabyte!

Google versus Microsoft : Who gonna win the battle of lucrative movie market ?

Seem Microsoft and Google will try to Amazoned the new (after the buble crash) virgin market of digital video & movie ads !

Pros

• A movie ad is fare more lucrative than any other ads. You can also provide links to dvd sellers, cinemas, products placement and even movies database!
• Highband connections is coming the standard in north america

Cons

• Copyright and agreement nightmares to offer a wide sets of clips, trailers and movies
• Inserting commercials in the clips/movie to bypass some adblock system
• Huge bandwith and storage capacity

Will see next year...

Products Placement in Blog

It's there and it's already have a huge covering !

Mamma plans to acquire Copernic

Big move in the Quebec province today. Mamma media solutions (mamma.com), from Montreal is going to acquire Copernic technologies from Quebec city.

Update: This deal seem to not include the newly create Enterprise Search company Coveo.

Google will seek SE spammer

A new posting on the Google Jobs section have the title of Quality Rater. They are looking for part-time remote workers from US and Canada to help with search quality evaluation on a project basis.

Lycos going in the SEO business

Lycos is going in the Search Engine Optimization business with his Insite Site Side Optimization solution. A bit weird for a SE to offer optimization service. Will they boost rankink for their clients in Lycos ? Did they will loose some ad revenue by Google ?

But at $200 by page with extra monthly fee to monitor the result, it is not frightening for us.

Google Serp's Estimate : As low as 0,000075

Sometime Google tell us a really huge number like this query! Results 801 - 817 of about 10,900,000. Ouch ! Should make a contest to find the lowest one. The Google Goof is born ;-)

In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 817 already displayed.

Best Search Engine : Huge difference by country

Here a table who show the search engine statistics by country :



US stats from ComScore published in SEW
France stats from Baromètre/Xiti.
Canadian stats from 5 Canadian sites generating more than 800k/unique visitors by month

Hypothetic Future Convergence of the Web

After a summarization about the biggest innovations since 15 years (they forget ICQ for the IM venue), this movie of Robin Sloan predict the next convergences of the IT industry for the next 10 years. The Google Grid is one of the most credible and I love to see also the TiVo move by Google.

Rich Media Is Rising Star of Online Ad ? Not so sure !

Here a Emarketing prediction were I really don't agree with. Specially for thoses and particulary for this marvelous tool.

Google Scholar : Another nice move over Yahoo

Google Scholar have been launched yesterday !
This is one of the good Google move, without the dollar sign place at first objective, for now. It also offer some new informations to us with the crawl in the invisible Web. The citations ranking results are also a very good choice over the PageRank.

This project have probably germinated at Google with the Open WorldCat program in january 2004.
It is weird that nobody at Yahoo wake up and make something like that after their index got more than 2 time the size of the Google index of Open WorldCat ?

Here two good reviews of the Google Scholar : The librarians view and the search engine specialist view.

Special version for MSN Beta Search in Quebec

In France they got MSN Search.
In Quebec we got MSN Recherche. But they forgot to traduce the title of the page and make a little mistake in the traduction of the option box (pages en Canada).
Here the explanation why Québec is so distinctive.

Internet Ad Spending Skyrocket

Here a little snippet from a CNET article written 16 month ago:

According to the trade group Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers, commercial search in 2002 accounted for nearly $1 billion in total sales, an increase of 210 percent over 2001. Researchers expect the paid search market to reach as much as $4 billion by 2005.

From the same source (PwC) a new article written by Clickz 2 day ago:

Revenue for the first nine months of 2004 totaled slightly over $7.0 billion, compared with the $7.3 billion in revenue reported for all 2003. Based on these numbers, 2004 could be a record year, beating the previous $8.0 billion revenue record reported in 2000, according to Pete Petrusky, director of advisory services at PwC.

That will normaly almost reach the $10 billion with this christmas quarter! Doh!

The new standard word for guessing the Google index size

With the new increase of the Google database, the guys at Google have manually fixed the number of results for the two most used words of the english langage. They both show us a 8 billion flat results.
Now we will have to use the third most popular word to follow the size of the Google index. (7,840,000,000 results today)

Torino 2006 adopt Exalead solution for his search engine

The official site of the XX Winter Olympic games have choose the Exalead solution to search all the Olympic sites involved in thoses winter games (CONI, IOC and Torino 2006 Merchandising and Educational websites as well).

One of the features is the results can be group by; the 4 langages, the 4 sites involved in the WG, the type of documents (kind) or by refining by keywords.

Google2 Browser ?

Funny to see on my Sitemeter statistics on browsers share, a new one with the name of Google 2 after all the meme with that recently !?!



By the way, I really proud to see I got a majority of readers who use someting else than IE. Thanks everyone !

MSN Beta Third Impression : Cheating with numbers

MSN Beta Search will only show you the first 500 results for a query. If you got less than 500 results you will see normally the double of the real number. Just add "count=100" at the end of URL and you will see the number slice by 50% or more.
First search : 61 results
Same search with 100 results : 26 results !!!
Same search at Google : 201 results (but 196 real pages)

MSN Beta Second impression : Wrong target

The integration of Encarta in the search engine is a good idea but the implementation is a bit weard. Why you can have the answer of the birth of Matisse but not the same for Dali ?
You can have the date of death of Beethoven but not the one of John F. Kennedy ?

Here is the help page for Facts search.

My second impression about MSN Beta Search is it will hurt more AskJeeves at the place of targeting Google or Yahoo!

MSN Search Beta First impression

I always test a new search engine with a word who is not popular on the web and who I know the better source pages for that word because I made a site 8 year ago who have a few pages dedicated on it.
Here is the query for that word who mean "blueberries plants" in english.

First : The results are the same as the MSN Tech Preview of this summer.

1-9 of 214 containing bleuetiers

• Why 9 results shown on first page ?
• Number 1 and 2 are only there because the word "bleuetiers" is the street name of that company !
• The first page of results is very bad except result 6,7 and 8
• The 214 results is not true, if you go to page six, the results stop at 52 while Google have 218 real results !

The 2-3 dozens other queries I made this morning are betters but my first impression is MSN is as good as Altavista !

With a delay of 10 months Brin get it

In early january 2003 Sergey Brin of Google give that interview where in hope to see Google get the cap of 10 billion pages. We get it today :



Are the Google peoples afraid of the launch of the new (sic) MSN beta search ?

Google add POP3 feature to Gmail

Gmail have now the possibilities to forward your Gmail message to your other mail account or to configure it directly on the Gmail Pop3 server. You can also create a filter to forward certain type of message.

How much you bet Yahoo will stop charging for that service in the next days ?

Research on B2B buyers by Marketing Sherpa & Enquiro

Here is the 17 pages research (pdf) fill with a lot of easy reading tables. Here some interesting snippets :

• Place users go is search (64%), followed by going directly to a well known manufacturer (19%) and going to a portal on the industry (6.6%)
• 82.9% of the searchers chose Google as their engine of choice
• With users with a Masters degree, Google was the favorite of 86.6%
• 36.8% of buyers researched and purchased online while 27.3% researched online but purchased offline
• 69.6% use traditional organic listings (76.7% for Google users) versus 24.6% use sponsored listings
• The organic ranking click rate is 27.4% for the first position, 19.5% for second and 12.8 for third rank
  

Google index increase to 9,58 billion

Wow a 33% increase since this post 10 days ago !!!



Update : 11h24 EDT
On a medium site (10,000 pages) the number of pages indexed have a 25% increase.
On a big site like CBC.ca / Radio-Canada.ca the number of pages indexed increase from more than 15,000 pages since yesterday just for the section (yesterday 14,900) of the Archive (yesterday 16,700) !

Google add a Firefox page to celebrate the launch of Firefox 1

Here is the Firefox page at Google displaying a new tip at each page load.

PPC keywords rise 14 percent in the last month

Good news for the SEO who make organic optimization.

RSS news parsing + Flash = 10x10

Interesting Flash application who use three main RSS sources (Reuters World News, BBC World Edition and New York Times International News) to give you the 10x10 grid who show you the hundred most popular news of the hour.

Hard end of week for Goog

May be that is the answer for the bad performance of the last days. Or may be also this !

GDS Plus v1: Third Party Add-on for Google Desktop

The add-on tool made by Larry Gadea allow to crawl more types of text files by the Google Desktop. It also can be used to tell Google Desktop wich type of files you do not want to be indexed.
The PDF is still not working with that add-on.

Google : The new locomotive of IPO

From the Globe and Mail article here a promising snippet for the future of the techno industry :

In fact, October turned out to be an especially strong month for new stock issuance. The 33 companies to come to market for the first time represent the most IPOs in a single month since 60 came in August 2000, according to data from Thomson Financial in New York.

Google reach the 6 billion

After almost reach $200 in trade today, the other index of Google the "the" search pass the cap of 6 billion:

MSN future look ?

From the Serch Engine Watch Blog here some screen shots of the next MSN look ?



In this one you can see a PC tab and the Search Builder Box (a advanced search) open! The MSN Desktop out soon ?



In this one with a click on Result Ranking you will see appear three sliders like some used at Yahoo shopping.

Google for president

Too funny paper by the Standford Daily Online Edition!

MapReduce : The programming model who give us the Florida update ?

A new report (pdf) on MapReduce, the new programming model use by Google to processing and generating large data sets, his now at Google Labs, I found thoses :

We wrote the first version of the MapReduce library in February of 2003, and made significant enhancements to it in August of 2003, including the locality optimization, dynamic load balancing of task execution across worker machines, etc.

The update of the Google index following thoses was in mid-november and was the most talk about update. Coincidence ?

Fidelity : A $325,2 millions in less than 2 month with Google stock?

Remember this post (but with a broken link inside now) the 10th of september ?

Here a new link with the same story here:

Google Stock Gobbled by Fidelity Investments

Fidelity Investments, the world’s largest mutual fund manager, bought $549 million of stock in search engine Google’s IPO, about 23 percent of the shares offered during the initial public offering. Fidelity reported in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that it now holds 5.21 million Google Class A shares. That’s about 16 percent of Class A stock and 1.9 percent of Google’s total shares outstanding.

The Boston Herald reports

“We don’t comment on buying or selling of individual securities, nor on SEC filings,'’ said a Fidelity spokesman yesterday. Fidelity’s fund managers tend to be shrewd, but on balance conservative, stock pickers. “Fidelity has a very good research department, and a particularly good group of technology analysts,'’ adds John Bonannzio, commentator at Wellesley-based research firm Fidelity Insight.”

The Herald adds that Fidelity could be sitting on a $100 million dollar profit in a month - wow.

This last line is the best! Not $100 but normally at least 325,2 million dollar profit in around 40 days if you look at thoses:

5.21 million actions (buy in august and september) x $110* = $573,1 million
5.21 million x $172.43** = $898,3 millions

* Higher price reach since the IPO at the moment of the news release of the buy)
** Price at closing today
Difference : $325,2 million at least in less than 2 month!!!

Google : Since 1999 a 437,115 percent increase

From the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 (pdf) :

Is it enough to measure success by revenues alone? How about when your company name actually becomes a hip verb, when your site is used for everything from getting the lowdown on possible love interests to finding critical medical information? Or when your IPO becomes the cause célèbre of the business world?

Google is an Internet phenom if ever there was one. But unlike so many earlier phenoms that tanked, Google has revenues. Indeed, they posted $220,000 in revenues in 1999 and $961,874,000 in 2003, an increase over five years of 437,115 percent.
A play on the word googol, which refers to the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros, Google is now an unlikely household name. The search engine company first opened its doors in 1998, and while in beta mode, answered 10,000 search queries a day. Word got out and in one year, the service was answering more than half a million queries daily and had Red Hat as its first commercial search customer. Oh, and they tossed the beta label, as well.

Yahoo slowly put its tentacles in China

A few others parternships with China for Yahoo! When you look how internet connections already reach 6 millions users in the only town of Beijing, you see the huge market there !!!

Gates: PC will replace TV, TV will become a giant Google

A not so bad article, and at first thought make me laugh at the first paragraph :

Microsoft founder and chairman Bill Gates must see Google everywhere he looks these days. He must even see Google when he closes his eyes, and enters that lucid dreaming state from which all of Microsoft's great strategies eventually emerge. What he sees at that moment, we imagine, is a Tellytubby landscape that looks a lot like the Windows XP default wallpaper - perhaps with Chairman Bill himself as the sun. But bouncing across this happy vista are the red, green and blue colored balls that have rolled out of the Google playpen.

But after reading the others one, for one of the first time I agree with the comment of a writer of the Reg.

Meanwhile, and this is even more astonishing, digital TV has become an object of widespread derision in the UK. For the first time in its history, the word "digital" has negative brand connotations. Such is the pushback against glitchy digital TV streams, full of drop outs and hiccups, and hard-to-use controls, that people are beginning to clamor for the analog signal to remain on. "Digital" now means "crap", which should give lazy marketeers some pause for thought. TV is becoming associated with the kinds of problems people associated with PCs. It's true a few programme formats lend themselves naturally to some form of interactivity: particularly live TV which invites vox pop polls or comments. But these gimmicks actually get in the way of programming with a conventional narrative pull: such as a movie, a drama or a footie match.

That one make me remember the party I got with friends, not seen for a while, a few day ago. They were around 28 to 45 years olds, and the majority are just new (around 1 to 3 years) with "new" technology. I was shock to see that party focusing on a joystick :

They were completly addick to a Xbox boost with a 200 gig drive and full of MP3, video clips and TV shows record on it with a easy to use GUI program to handle it. Almost 75% of the peoples who was there already have DVD and use and computers at work, but were totally obsessed by the Xbox hack to TV where you can have the total control with a Joystick, and make me a bit sick while the TV and Xbox take the control of the party ;-)

Warning for French trademark keywords use in Overture

The french keywords suggestion's page of Overture now show this warning about registered trademark :

Remarque 2: Vous pouvez vérifier si un mot clé correspond à une marque déposée en vous rendant sur le site de l'INPI* (http://www.icimarques.com)

Translation : You can verify if your keyword match a registered trademark by going to INPI* site.

*National Institute of Intellectual Properties

Hope they will make some distinction between other country using french language and France ! Will Google Adwords will make the same warning after their French trials ?

Microsoft Catalog Index

A unknown Microsoft (2000 and up) service is the Indexing Catalog. Not very easy to setup, it build a index like GDS and CDS before you can use it. After that it will show you that form to perform your query :



Well, its fast, and that's it. In a test query I made on MCI versus a normal (slow) search with the research tool provide by Microsoft it found only 8 of the 19 files I got. The MCI missed 7 Word documents and 4 Word backup documents. But it is the only tools I saw for now, who perform also searches in CSS.

The lack of a nice GUI interface, the number of clicks to reach it and a glitch in the Help screen Advanced Query Syntax give me a very bad first impression.

Thanks to Dodgers Webstractions.

I will comeback on this in a Desktop Search tools comparaison soon !

Power searchers equal power buyers

Good news for SEO and SEM industry. In the Web 2 Conference the presentation (powerpoint) made by Gian M. Fulgoni of ComScore reveal that power users of search engines are clearly better clients than light or non-searchers.

Here two of the slides of that presentation:



Also notice the huge increases in some categories of goods :

Google IM protocol already embed in GDS

It seem that some new protocol "google_im://" are already inside the code of GDS. I was not so far !
Also the lack of finding other file may be explained by the use of Microsoft "index.dat" file by GDS.

GDS + Firefox + Slogger even index what Google can't see

I just test the Slogger Firefox extension who save in Html every kind (php, Websphere, asp, etc) files in a folder of your choice to let be crawl by Google Desktop. It work amazingly good. Even that page, made by Websphere, who will never appear in the Google index due to is uncrawlable url and construction, now appear in my Google Desktop query!

With that extension Google Desktop can now see ALL the pages your surfing and you could get back the textual information on a GDS search. Yes!

Here a Google query looking for a few words on the page link before. No URLs pointing to www.entreprises.gouv.qc.ca, because Google cannot crawl that page. But with GDS team up with Firefox and the Slogger extension here I can saw it in my "Results Store on your Computer".

Google Desktop : Security Warning

If you install by defaut the Google Desktop and you go check your bank account via the Web, you will have good chances to see all your account informations indexed by the Desktop application.

I you make a search after with your Bank name, you will have a good chance to see in the cached results with all your credit or debit balance at the top your screen. Frightening!!!

You should uncheck this box fast or at least, the Google Desktop should make appear a warning treath each time you enter in a secure zone with https. Specially because because it's not so easy to retreive thoses informations to delete it in your hard disk.



Can anybody tell me why the peoples at Google let this line check in your preferences ?

Update: I know if anyone a bit tech saavy can see all thoses information using my computer, it is just it make it so easy and fast to do it, even without searching specifically for thoses private informations!!!

Google Desktop second impression : Too soon

Here some test done this morning about the files it see on the Web and on your hard drive (hd) :

• .htm (web yes / hd no)
• .html?parameter (web no)
• .html# (web yes)
• .shtml (web yes/ hd yes)
• .net files without filename (web no / not test)
• .php (web no / hd no)
• .asp (web sometimes* / hd no)

*If your URL is simple like filename.asp or with clear parameters (&src=web or even .asp?cid=11623) but not working if it's like (.asp?uniqueid=21633)

Here some wrong statements I read here and there on forums :

• It can crawl other than only your C: drive if it's partionned (mine go to G:) and even find other USB drive (not verified by me)
• It can show you more than 10 results for all your files. Just add &num=100 at the end of URL

Google Desktop first impression: Frustration

Why ?

Give a bit more transparencies when you invade private life

When a program scan my hard disk I like to know at wich stage he is now, and at least see the name of files he is parsing in a status bar. That should be a minimum of good manners !

Opt-out at the place of Opt-in

Help us improve Google Desktop Search by sending non-personal usage data and crash reports.

Here again Google remain vague and don't have a minimum of clarification !

Time to crawl

Twice as much as Copernic to crawl less file!

Partial file crawling

Seem to have the 101k limit like in Web. That's make me really mad.

Html crawling

Yes, but only if your file have a .html extension, if it's .htm you can not see it! That really sucks!

IE only for Web browsing history

Even if its take Firefox and Opera as your defaut Web browser it is not taking the major hot thing in this program : The Web history!

Meta Indexing of your HTML files

No

Date of file indexed

Web History file's date is ok. Every computer files I don't open since the indexing process today have the same date of the 5 august ??? Even when I transfer few months ago 30k files from NT 4 english version with international date setting (dd/mm/yy) to my new computer with a french version of XP with date as (yy/mm/dd) don't make any problem !!!

I think I will stop were, take a cold shower, and try a bit more tomorrow before unistalled it!

Election 2004 and PPC campaing

On the third week of august I was wondering why nobody in the political field in US was not using PPC campaign ? I definitly found the answer reading this article today who was concern by the same mather :

Google apparently has a policy that bans ads that include "language that advocates against an individual, group or organization"—so attack ads won't fly.

As I seen and get echo of the campaign in US, now I understand why we not see any ads;-)

First impression on Exalead

Seem a smaller database than they talk about, but very good to manage about over optimize and SE spammer sites and very nice results with clean little sites and fair to good results for small-middle (200 - 1k pages) but poorer to big one, and also to governement web sites. The clustering is far from Clusty and the Web site location is just average like all other services (and very hard with the technology to be better for now).

But it is still in beta and really giving very good effective results within the really small delay they got to put that up (and differents from all the other "new" sources) and very good new tools and options to dig deeper with a not so bad user interface (should take a bit more minimalist view here). And with all the good and many advanced search features not seen anywhere else, you should keep a eye on it.

Hope for Google, Exalead will not merge, fusion or make a deal with Vivisimo, because if they can handle a better clustering, fusion databases or crawl them deeper with a little tweak in algo for the biggest sites, the Goog will fall under the hundred soon ;-)

Google Related Searches coming back soon ?

I notice this new line in the Robots.txt of Google a few months ago :

Disallow: /relpage/

My first thought was Google will comeback with related searches or a clustering engine, but I was not sure enough, because Relpage is also used in some database query languages.
But now, with the screen shot taken two days ago and post today on the Marc Duval blog, we got the proof Google will comeback with it soon.

New Exalead in Beta

Tons of options for this new version of the french search engine who now got a billion pages index. Here a list of the functionalities :

• Related Terms
• Related Categories
• Web Site Location
• Document Type
• Bookmark Site
• View Site in a Frame
• One or Three Columns Thumbnail Views
• Restrict Query to 11 langages
• Restrict Query to Country
• Restrict Query to four Types of Office Document or Rtf and Txt
• Site: Search
• Stemming Search
• Phonetic Search
• Approximate Spelling Search
• Sorting by Date or Relevance
• Prefix search
• Pattern Search

Exalead supports regular expression patterns. Patterns are introduced by a slash ('/') character. Within a regular expression, '.' is a special character that can represent any character, '*' stands for character repetition, '|' stands for 'or', and parenthesis are used to group characters. '?' is placed the end of a character group to make it optional.

Example:
/s.ren..pi.y/
Searches for documents with words that match the pattern S . R EN .. PI . Y -- this can be very useful to finish your crossword puzzles!
/mpg(1|2|3)?/
Searches for documents containing any of the following: mpg, mpg1, mpg2, or mpg3.

Time and Search Engine: Short term memory

A really good study on Google and Altavista and theirs problem with long term memory due to time stamp of Web documents in their databases.

Google client's parameter giving lot less results

When you use the Firefox search box Google will add the client parameter to the URL and sometimes another one name rls. when the &client= parameter is there, you will have a lot less results. Here a query for the word "the" (2,5 billions results) and without the parameter &client= you get a 5,9 billions results !!!

The beginning of the end of RSS ?

If Yahoo really start this project, I think it will be harmful to them, or to RSS if other SE also go in that direction. Hope they will find other way to make money and not corrupting the first easy way to make the web more semantic!

Google goes SMS

But for US only!

Launch of Snap

The Snap search engine is launch today by Idealab, the guys behind Overture. Here is my first experience :

Like

• Transparency for the stats they give you
• Clustering
• Refine the results
• Sort on multiple criteria

Disliked

• Frame results page
• The small database
• Pertinance of results caused by Web Popularity
• Speed

For now, it will be for me a good metric tool, but if the database going bigger and if they fix relevancy and framed results, it will be a very good competitor.

Finally a reverse phone and address lookup for Canada in french

Really nice tools for us up north and also en français pour la première fois!

Michael Moritz : I'm Feeling Lucky

The little history of the Sequoia Capital venture capitalist Michael Moritz who put $12.5 million in Google in 99.

Moritz is too modest to say how much he has made personally from the sale - he is reported to have received up to $280 million in cash, plus stock worth more than a $1 billion - although he dismisses reports he is now a billionaire as "wickedly overstated".

Google best secret : We're a dog company

Google put up a new investor section on his site. And yes they are a dog company (e.) ;-)

We have nothing against cats, per se, but we're a dog company, so as a general rule we feel cats visiting our campus would be fairly stressed out.

Web Mining, XML and SE integration of thoses ?

Nice interview with Mr. Laurie Lock Lee, principal knowledge management consultant with Computer Sciences Corporation in Australia. The last paragraphs are the better's one:

If you could command sites like Google to make one or two big changes, what might you require?

Clearly textual clustering or summarization, which is what we are seeing from companies like Vivisimo, Autonomy, Semio, and Verity. This technology on top of a Google-type search engine, which reaches even further into the rich data sources available over the internet, will make the web even more useful than it is today.

Are there major trends in WM standardization that you think people should be watching more closely?

XML is already the de-facto standard for improving the ability for machines to interpret textual repositories. I would anticipate that XML will become as pervasive as HTML. We in fact may still see a de facto standard emerge.

Hope so, because since 99, Xml seem to me is only use to produce sites from database, but not really to structure the web for a easier comprehension for machine interpretation of the pages produced.

Why Google don't encourage the users of RSS ?

Only 7% of the sources Topix.net crawls have XML feeds. I'd estimate that only a few hundreds of the top 3,000 newspapers we crawl have RSS support.

After reading the post on the Topix Blog, I'm a bit surprise that no engine, except Yahoo, clearly encourage or stimulate the use of RSS in our sites. RSS is not only useful to News site, but in a lot of sections of the site. Every of thoses pages like the; Press Release, Portfolio, Calendar, Career, New products, Investor and a lot more sections, should have a RSS feed.

You save bandwith, and your clients save a lot of time by not visiting a page not changed since his last visit or by time save to manage the spam he receive in his email box because of the subscribtion of your press release.

Why not give bonus points on ranking, or a special category, or a logo on SERPs (like Yahoo), to thoses who take time to give to search engine a more structured feed. If the crawler of Google see that feed, we don't have to run complex algo to calculate the "weight" of words in the page and save computing time ! Why not encourage thoses strutured feed ?

Search engines ads : The new Eldorado for lawyers

The Vioxx is not yet completly retired for the drugstores you can already see lawyers adwords on Google !

Trafic from SE : Yahoo and MSN gooing down while Excite making a comeback !

The new Vivísimo baby named... Clusty

One of the good sources to do searches today have been released with the name of Clusty ?!?
He one of the better SE in clustering today, specially with broad subject or for clustering the live of a friend with the exception of the mode cluster ;-)
The major problem I found is to get fresh results. Clusty is using the SE databases of; GigaBlast, MSN, Lycos, Looksmart, Wisenut, Open Directory and Overture. All of thoses take weeks, if not months, to get new sites in theirs index compare to Yahoo and Google.

Spam is not free for spammer, but it is cheap

Interesting study by the Microsoft Research Team about spam and specially the HIP's solution :

Moni Naor suggested using Human Interactive Proofs (HIPs) to combat spam. A HIP is an image that contains distorted letters and numbers. Humans can read the HIP, but a machine cannot. Since spammers rely on machines to send and receive messages without expensive human intervention, if spammers were challenged to read a HIP their machines would fail the test. The Anti-Spam team thought this was a good idea.

"You take Cynthia's idea of using computational puzzles, and you take the idea of using HIPs and you combine that with the machine learning filter. If something comes in that's suspicious, the computer sends a challenge. The challenge says solve this computational puzzle, or solve this Human Interactive Proof," said Goodman.

By giving the user the option to solve a HIP, the user won't have to download special software to solve the computational puzzle or update their legacy computer so that it can handle the computation. They can just read the HIP and send back the answer. Spammers would have to employ and pay a lot of human workers to read HIPs, which would make spamming unprofitable.

"It costs at least .2 cents to pay someone to solve a HIP, compared to the .01 cents spammers currently pay - that's part of the reason we studied spammer costs. This changes their profit model by a factor of 20.

Also that part about the 3 categories of products been promote and how the laws in each country can moderate the spammers :

When the researchers connect this geographic information with what the spammers are selling, they're able to paint a picture of how laws might be successful in stopping spammers.

They grouped the type of products being sold into three categories. Domestic, semi-domestic, and international. Domestic products require a domestic presence. They include financial services, insurance, and items too expensive to ship internationally.

Semi-domestic products require shipping, but the cost is low. These include products such as Viagra, college diplomas, and magazines.

International products or services include those that don't require physical shipping or a domestic presence. They range from software, to porn, to swindles such as the infamous Nigerian scam.

About one-third of the spam was domestic, about a third semi-domestic, and about a third international. "This kind of analysis is really useful" says Goodman. "Given the large amount of domestic and semi-domestic spam, it shows that good laws and prosecutions in the US and neighboring countries can really help. Also, when you see such a large portion of spam that appears to be coming from overseas, you realize there's a need to globally coordinate efforts to address the problem. It also shows us that while laws can be very useful, they won't solve the problem by themselves. We have to keep working on improving the technology and standards too."

Interesting metrics about searches at Google

David Scacco Director of the Vertical Markets Group at Google share interesting data at the Channel Advisor Strategy Summit:

28% of Google searches are for a "product name", 9% are for a "brand name" and 5% are searches for a "company name". "Brand" keywords also have a 8x higher ROI than generic keywords.

Google admits that it can only reach 5% of web page traffic via Google.com and its search partners. With their contextual ad partners, that jumps to 80%.

Via Andy

Yahoo makeover

Yahoo redesign is homepage. Less place to the directory part, more place to the Yahoo services and more customizable. Here a full screen shots of the old Yahoo page :


And the new one more compact and with lot less scrolling :

Yahoo let you find ; office documents, databases, etc

Like the Google filetype:, Yahoo got his instruction to find differents type of files with originurlextension:
Note that it is not all the results who have a mdb extension who are necessarily database.

Google hacking : Photocopiers ?

This article seem hard to believe. I know and I read some article about networked photocopiers who use hard disk to store the latest copy made, but Google can't understand image. How can those IP adress can have a decent ranking in a Google query ?

Yellow pages Canada make a deal with Google

Yellow Pages Canada make a deal with Google to include the business listing in Google Local Canada. It should also work in Google Local because, when you put a canadian city in http://local.google.com it is working too.

I hope Yellow Page will make a clear link to Google Canada Local, because for now, it is hard to find in... Google ;-)

Ask Jeeves will bring the Web search to his second step with MyJeeves

After A9 who give you a history, AskJeeves go a step further with the possibility to save and organize your materiel in sortable folder. For now it save only the tiitle and description, but it should save the entire page in a near future. Also they release today a Local search.
More info on SEW
PS: It is a really good thing for Google that AskJeeves still display sometimes up to 10 sponsored results before the organics results ;-)

Mooglezilla or Gbrowser ?

You remember the post on the Google browser ? The 26 of april Google have registered the domain Gbrowser.com. More information on Jason blog.

I hope they go to register the trademark and make a agreement with them ?

The number one secret of Google : Viral Communication ?

When you saw the launch of Gmail in April 1, releasing some new features on week-end or in holiday to make the geeks blogger (who are usualy pro-google) spread the news before news agency, or seeing some anodyne news like this article where you see about 4 paragraphs on moving service staff outside the United States but still get a new title like "Google making its mark worldwide Firm will have to play catch-up in some key nations" or excerpt title like Google's Global Growth you can tell they get lucky with the press or they got some really good PR peoples in there ?!?

Google add a few mores filetypes parsing

Google can now parse files from Autocad (.dwg and dxf)

Yahoo going in the dating business

Yahoo launch personal for 10 countries! See the tour!

The number of new services from SE is only a beginning !

Overture expanding

Good news for us here in north, Overture will expand in Brazil, Canada, China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. The french service of Overture was in France and was not really easy to reach for the Quebec customers.

Seem it will be in english and french now for Canada!

Google ban some big SEO company in France

Netbooster, Absolute Référencement, CVFM, Ability Référencement and 1ere Position have see their sites ban from the Google index. Thoses players, like the number one in Europe, Netbooster also been out of Yahoo.
Some of the customers of thoses agencies also get penalized. It will make a huge backlash in the SEO community in Europe.
The reasons I suspect for thoses penalities is huge quantity of doorway keywords overstuff pages generated dynamically by script to reproduce the uncrawlable database of theirs clients and huge cross-linking strategies!

When I discuss of thoses strategies on french forums and with a manager of one those company more than a year ago, they always tell me: It is impossible to do other way, they don't want to change the backend of the site nor to use Url rewriting because "blablabla" and security and "blablabla". My response was always : Tell the customer to call you *before* his next makeover and let them use costly PPC campaign instead!

May be now they will start to educate web agency to stop making uncrawlable site at the place of using bypassing way to get on the SE index.
Via Zdnet France (in french)

Microsoft Research Reorg

With the lead of Eric Brill (I love is funny linking) the new Text Mining Search and Navigation Research is one of the four new research teams with "a new hub for search" focus. Google and Yahoo should keep a eye on thoses guys.

Goog going good

A really nice week plus a history peek ($115.67) for Google!

SearchStatus : A really nice extension of Firefox

Why I love more and more Firefox ? For little extension like SearchStatus !
It use the free space of the status bar in Firefox to display the Google PageRank and the Alexa traffic ranking, and can give you all the backwards links of the main 3 search engines on a simple click, for the page you're browsing!

Microsoft get caught pants down in search engine spamming

Too funny to saw even Microsoft doing that!

A9 seriously challenge Google to innovation

With the new features like; Reference, Bookmark and Diary, the new A9 (no more beta) is a very useful search engine.

With is focus on history, the Alexa data, the new references from Guru net, the bookmark and diary combine with the really smart idea to drag your all the links and title results, from any box (movie, history, reference, etc) to the search box or in your bookmark is making A9 a very good research tool !!!

PS: If A9 can add "site:" automatically when you drag a link to the search box it will be even more useful.

Izito : A new GUI metasearch

Izito was launch today. He use Google, Yahoo, MSN, Altavista, Teoma, Wisenut, AlltheWeb and Kobala (a Nederlands search engine) and use Flash to display and arrange result. His features are :

• Tiling of result in 1, 2 or 3 columns
• Park results for future use
• Add to favorite feature

Cons:

• Problem with diacritics (é,à, etc)
• Same query with different results
• Problem with Firefox viewing the site

Yahoo : After the blog, the music

Yahoo is in growing mode, after the probable development of a blog community there going to acquire Musicmatch.

AskJeeves : Le maître d'hotel in a makeover quest

AskJeeves butler is out for a week to find a way to improve AskJeeves.
Pssst to Jeeves : Just reduce the place taken (and number of) by your sponsored results !

Yahoo going in the Blog business ?

It's looking like that if you read that job description at Yahoo!

Presentation-Layer Web Developer for Yahoo! Communities (Blogs)

Also under an other production manager description :

...you will be responsible for developing and executing a strategy for
our Message Boards, Polls, Ratings, Reviews, and Blogs platforms.

Seem Google/Blogger will face competition !

Via the UnofficialYahooWeblog

It would be a excellent place to test a YahooSense PPC program !

Google News using blog sources

Google News France started to use Blog sources as you can see here:


Will Google News US will follow ?

PS: Yes I know you can see Slashdot on Google News, but it is not really a blog IMO.

Yahoo seem to going again in the electronic business line

After the big flop of the Yahoo! Digital camera, it seem Yahoo gonna make a new try in DVD, TV LCD screens and Home Theater System!

Surprising news about Google

Fidelity Investments have 15.5% of Google Class A common stock !

Browse by name in Firefox

You're jealous of the new Google Toolbar feature browse by name ? No problemo ! Try it after with : worst president ever ;-)

Another horror story

Why they don't make search on the name of the SEO company before to go with them ?

The decline of ethical SEO and the new lure on profit only business of that market

When I read something like that from Batelle I'm a bit scary of the educational part of what SEO should be:

The point is, whoever joins SEMPO, agrees to act by some basic fair play rules. That's not policing, that's common sense. It'll be good for the industry, good for SEMPO, and good for search.

I saw Sempo last year for the first time and I was really shock when I saw the front page! My first thought was : Is that organisation really want to promote fair value of SEO and SEM with the first right column full of sponsors and the right one with a huge list of SEO companies links where I know a few one over the years using some discusting techniques to get good ranking ? Ok, don't get mad on your first impression and dig a bit more. But after looking; the articles, editorial and case studies I was not very more and more sceptical. Specially with the last one :

Traffic jumped 12,833% in 12 months...
... the site currently handles over 1500 unique visitors per day.

Did I read 12,833% and now 1,500 visitors per day ? If you go see Web Archive it seem impossible that site got only 0,0085 visitor by day before ? That's less than 1 visitor a week ? One of my customer get 3,500 visitors by day since three years selling only men's underwear! Not flowers where we should buying more than twice a year if we won't pay lawyers for divorce ;-)

The final page of Sempo who convinced me to pass by was this one, the Join US page.
First thing you see there : Links from SEMPO Home Page
Second : How many line you got in description and howe many external links and logo
Third : Right to use SEMPO logo
Forth : Advertising opportunities
Fifth : Burk! I'm sick reading that shit who was supposed to promote ethical SEO and rehabilitate the SEM/SEO industry

The good news today is after Mike Grehan publish his story last month, Danny and Chris resign from the board of Sempo.

A good move !

Open WorldCat Pilot Project : Yahoo beat Google by far

Goal of the project : Make libraries more visible to Web users and more accessible from the sites where many people begin to look for information.

WorldCat project from the OCLC(Online Computer Library Center) is to envolve search engines to crawl the database of WorldCat to make it easier to find where, on the 9,000 libraries Worlwide, you can find your book with a simple query in a search engine.

The project start with Google at the beginning of the year and with Yahoo in may.

Google results : Less than 300,000 library records today from near 500,000 in the 8 of july ???

Yahoo results : Yahoo have 4 millions records and give to your book title search a better position in the ranking compare to Google.

A new ResourceShelf source: DocuTicker

Nice new repository source for online; studies, research reports, issue briefs and papers of all sorts like;

• Governement initiatives on open-source software,
• Sierra Club article with How the Bush Administration Is Eroding Coastal Protection and
• from the Government Accountability Office : Data Inconclusive on Effects of Shift to Counterterrorism-Related Priorities.

Nice work from Shirl Kennedy, Steven M. Cohen and Gary Price with a easy to find XML/RSS feed ;-)

MoveOn recap: Google: 1 Yahoo: 0

Two weeks after the first article, Google have remove all the cached pages and exposed URL while Yahoo have done nothing!!!
Update 5 sept. : Almost nothing???

Funny coincidence !?!

Four day ago.... and today !

MIT Technology on MoreGoogle ?

The MIT Technology have put up a story on MoreGoogle! Weird article research from this institution !

What is MoreGoogle ?

This Add-on for Internet Explorer give you Google search results via a API from Google, and with thumbnail view from the site and links to traffic rankings via Alexa. Here all is ok!

The catch

But when you search for a product, it's show you Amazon price information and users rating. Well, that's good you say ! That right! But if you go to Amazon and buy the product, the guy at MoreGoogle receive a commission!!!

From the MoreGoogle site:
How are you affiliated with Amazon.com?

I am an Amazon.com associate. Amazon Associates drive internet traffic to Amazon.com through specially formatted links and earn up to 10% in referral fees on all qualifying revenue made through their links.

When you use MoreGoogle and click on an Amazon.com result, you support me and MoreGoogle if you actually purchase a product.

I think this is a clear violation of the Google API !?!

The Google Web APIs service is made available to you for your personal, non-commercial use only (at home or at work).

But the guy is kind, he is splitting half and half with you, if you are a Amazon associate!

Ultrabar launch Firefox toolbars

The maker of Ultrabar for IE have release a set of toolbars for Firefox. The one with Technocrati can be useful to know if the site you're visiting is well known. You can also get one for; Blogger, Blogline, Typepad and LiveJournal. Where is WordPress?

Flash and SEO : No (more) problemo !?!

I was never a fan of Flash because the resulting SWF files won't get crawled by search engine's robots. But the graphist and artistic director always love Flash. That's why the artistic's guy was not my favorite friends in my work. But this can change soon.

Do you know Shaun Inman ?

Until today, me too! But that guy invented a technique to 'Un-embed' Flash in a Html page. Wow!

He wrote his pages out as standard XHTML and then used javascript and the Document Object Model to replace all designated text with Flash-rendered text a split second after the page had loaded. Known as IFR, or Inman Flash Replacement, this method was rightly praised by the web community for enabling rich typography without affecting any underlying XHTML code. The method had many revolutionary features and only a few shortcomings, the most glaring of which was the lack of support for multiple lines of text.

But Mike Davidson improve those innovations and now you can have multiple lines of text. Are we gonna see long movie soon ? Not yet, but thoses techniques improve rapidly !

Domain name protection : A lesson from China

Amusing to see that article. Not the fact that China have always control the net. Just because here, in Canada, only one have is domain name registred by a relation firm, all the other olympic winners domain name are available in .ca or .com!
Here the name I check; lori-ann-muenzer, tonya-verbeek, karen-cockburn, emilie-heymans, adam-van-koeverden, caroline-brunet, marie-helene-premont, tonya-verbeek, kyle-shewfelt, blythe-hartley, mike-wolfs and ross-macdonald

I got Gmail invitations for my readers

I got five, four three invitations for Gmail for you. Just email me.
PP: Absolute secrecy for my side, but with the Web ;-)

Lesbrutes.com : A search engine spammer

Check those two results page :
Yahoo result : 169 pages
Google result : 323 pages (201 for real)

Do you see your company name in thoses results ? No ? You see always the same page when you click a link ? This is the purpose of those spammers!

If your company have a french section and you working in; design, hosting, optimization or indexation... You have a good chance to be there, not necessarily in the snip of the search engine result page, but in the hidden code of thoses pages, reveal here by the cached version cached page.

They grab all the information of thoses legitimate sites and code it a way to have a good ranking in search engine using a huge number of links and H1 tags with your content and trademark name!

Update 6 september : They fix it!

RSS Aggregator : Will someone make it more useful ?

Here some quotes of a nice thread of Ponyboy :

Feed readers have at their disposal near infinite processing power, well-differentiated and -defined data and… do nothing with them. You can sort your feed items by date. Exciting!

Totally agree! My RSS aggregator features only sort on date, headline and topic!?!

Where are the extrapolations, based on the data? Where is Bayesian filtering? Why isn’t there auto-correlation between like items? Why isn’t there sorting by link popularity? Or inter-linking between feeds? Why can’t I rank feeds or categories higher than others? Why can’t I rate items and let the cumulative ratings over time determine feed rankings? Why isn’t there some statistical combination of each of the above to put what I’m actually going to care about at the top of the list and the discussions about which syndication protocol is best at the bottom?

When you read this, the majority of aggregators seem more like FTP programs. RSS and XML are the future of search and the only innovations we see are Web based like the Technorati or other Blogline, Pubsub and MyRSS!

Microsoft will delay his advanced file search capability

Good news for Copernic and bad timing for Microsoft!

Copernic Desktop Search is out

The new Copernic Desktop Search is available for download today!

Wikipedia on Google Data

Wikipedia have made new addition on the Google Data sheet :

According to this estimate, the Google server farm constitutes the most powerful supercomputer in the world, being able to perform at least three times as many calculations per second as the Earth Simulator.

Yahoo News new Election Blog Roundup

Nice Election Blog Section in Yahoo News to have a different view from tradionnal media for the 2004 election.

SEM have now a dedicated radio show

Online live the tuesday morning and with archive section with good interviews with Batelle, Beal and other guys involved in the SEM/SEO business.

Google Index Size : Why after 12 months he don't pass the 2^32 gate ?

Since the month the Google index size has not change! First time, since the launch of Google, the index size is not updating within a year ? Is the 4,294,967,296 pages (2^32) give a problem to engineer ?

In january 2003 Sergey Brin say :

For '03, Brin hopes to expand to catalog the Web's entire 10 billion pages

What's the bug ?

Next generation of search engine : Searching the structured XML feeds

Nice reviews of the major feed search engines.

When we will see the next generation of search engines who gonna make real time aggregation by the pings of structured data ?

Soon if the majors listen to Jeremy Zawodny and if we implements thoses feed in our sites.

Google in acquisition mode ?

The rumors are up and running !
IMHO : I don't think DoubleClick is a very good choice.

Politically correct : Proud of my town...

...And the design firm who operate here! Nice viral and email marketing for the first movie and very good works for the subsequent sites !

How to prepare a relationship with a SEO

Very good points for the first part (point 1 to 4). The three last ones, in my mind, can be a split compromise between the ressource of your company can handle, and the SEO professionnal.

Converting your visitors with website's usability

Nice paper about usability from Mary Elges. Here some keyphrases :

"In short, usability is the ease with which someone can use your website to do a particular task and get the expected results based on what they currently know,"

"In other words, the site has to be intuitive. Still, many companies are not addressing the usability problem at the level they should to avoid website usability pitfalls."

This one may be ring a bell to website managers ?

"When a site is designed with usability in mind, there is a large drop-off in the need for user training, expensive help desks to answer questions from confused web users, and it drastically reduces the need for future rewrites," Elges says. "In addition, usability noticeably increases the lifespan of your website, since most rewrites are due to poor usability issues."

Yahoo - Sina merger ?

Here a snip of ChinaTechNews:

Rumours are arising once more in the Chinese media that Yahoo! has been having secret discussions with Sina about a possible merger, and that their negotiations are finally making some ground.

What the heck is Sina ? Sina is like the CNN of China and the third portal in the world for is traffic, after Yahoo and MSN, and before Google!

THe funny little history of Wired/Web Markerting

Homo Erectus: (1980-90)
modemus 300-1,200 baudus

Content (BBS) : games exchange, messagerie rose (adult-oriented chat originated from Minitel) and forum exchange of all kind used by the wired geeks ("early adopter" what not yet the buzz word ;-) who where using BBS

Marketing techniques : Words of mouth, specialized computer magazine ads

Homo Sapiens: (1990-94)
modemus 2400-9600 baudus

Content : Research and studies, games, some university presence, personal diary, some big corporation and again messagerie rose

Marketing techniques : Words of mouth, campus babillard, computer magazines ads and articles, some media meme and the appering of Excite, Yahoo and WebCrawler

Homo neandertalensis (1995-99)
modemus: 19,200-56,000 baudus

Content : Emerging content from all you can imagine. From casino and porn to guy who put a site on his wall-mart coupon to computer free to navigate the web, with all the stuff we get now. "Free-for-all" period.

Marketing techniques : Altavista, AlltheWeb, Dmoz and Yahoo submissions and good titling, metatag spam, ugly graphics banners and links

Homo sapiens sapiens (2000-2002)
modemus: 56k, 112k hi-band and modem-cable

Content : 404 after the techno-burst-bubble and sites of companies who get realistic business plan. Flash bubble.

Marketing techniques : Titling, contents, links strategy and PPC by Goto and Adwords and the decrease of graphic banner

Homo modernus (2003-2004)
modemus: DSL and Cable (1,5Mb and more)

Content: A lot of good contents and Flash decrease.

Marketing techniques : Contents, contents and content optimization, conversion and usability, heavy PPC campaign, url rewriting, link strategy, blog branding, blog knowledging, semantic and geo-location writing, education, education, education and client formation

Mozilla + Google = Mooglezilla ?

Not a so stupid prediction. First this! Second the Gmail Notifier and Google Deskbar have prove the people at Google can make software with a good integration with Windows OS. Third the Gmail application who use a extensive javascipt library without bugs. Third, the recent acquisiton of; Blogger, Picasa and Hello Instant Messenger picture sharing tool.
Like Jason Kottke also note in his story about it :

A Google Browser would give the Mozilla platform instant credibility and would be a big hit. The peerless Google brand & reputation and their huge reach are the keys here. Mom and Dad know about Google...if Google offered a browser that was as powerful and easy to use as their search engine and didn't scum up their system, they'd download it.

BlogSpot users now open to use AdSense

When I noted the replacement of the AdSense with the NavBar, I got to one of my favorite forum and ask if that move will open up BlogSpot to AdSense! No response in my thread ;-( But this morning Blogger, tadam, open up BlogSpot to Adsense.

This is a very huge new market (more than 1 million blogspot users multiply by the number of pages of each blog = $$$)! Ok let me be conservative. If only 5% is eligible with each one at 10 pages for ads, it still give you half a million pages for ads placement.

Technorati seem to get funding

David Sifry will take that money like a breath of fresh air, if that first round of financing go to the $6.5 millions of new cash like Om Malik told us in his blog! Congrat David!

The Spectre of Dipsie make another comeback

CNN have a paper on The next Google! It is about Eurekster and Dipsie who hope to become the next big thing.

Eurekster is up and running and going better from test to test I performed with the exceptions of is MSN search URL in the results and some feature I don't like (most popular, recent searches).

But Dipsie is a really weird choice to put it in the next big thing ! Here some of a march 2004 interview with Jason Wiener:

You won't be able to search for yourself until May 10, when Dipsie's search engine (www.dipsie.com) will open to the public with 5 billion documents in its index -- about 16.5 percent more than Google's index. (An index is the place where documents are stored so users can retrieve them when they search.)

Oups... Whe are at the end of august now!
Yahoo grab the web and a 2-3 billion documents in a few weeks only after leaving the Google results!

The result is what Wiener describes as Dipsie's "robotic" technology that Wiener said enables Dipsie to locate 99 percent of the documents on the Web -- content that Google and rival search engine Yahoo ignore, Wiener said.

How come nobody have ever see their Dipsie-bot in their log files ? I ask this question in a few forums, I look over a dozen clients log files and we never saw is trace! Also I never see anyone who get any reply of the Dipsie SEO Beta Signup !

I heard you thinking about Vaporware?

Politic and search engines keywords campaign

I was looking if the republicans and democrats have already start their PPC campaign in the two major search engine. I try different keywords like; election, november 2004, war, iraq, economy, jobs, stronger america. Nothing!
But if you search for wmd in Yahoo! you finally got a ad for the John Kerry who lead you to... A page not found error !!!
Ouffff... Nice ROI!
BTW : Failure give Georges W. Bio in first result on Google and second spot on Yahoo!.

Goog IPO recap : A "don't be evil" way who makes its way !

A good article about all the saga around this unusual IPO, and the Wallstreet fear, by
Floyd Norris of the International Herald Tribune

Cnet on MoveOn.org glitch and ONLY Google ?

Here the article.

Here's some quotes:

A Web page misconfiguration left dozens of the liberal political group's subscriber pages easily searchable through simple Google queries. Each page included a subscriber's name, e-mail address and the mailing lists to which he or she is subscribed. CNET News.com confirmed that several related searches turned up more than two dozen individual subscriber pages

The information leak is the latest version of "Google hacking," using the search engine's advanced features to find data leaked by Web sites.

The incidents highlight increasing concern that knowledgeable Web surfers can turn up sensitive information by mining the world's best-known search engine.

The big problem with this story, it is only reffering to Google and it's two dozen results.
I got to Yahoo!, and in a minute, I found more than 300 hundreds of thoses pages with email, name, subscribed lists and sometimes much more:



As this capture screen show, you can get more information than only name and email address in Yahoo pages:



It's not only Yahoo and Google, it's any good search engine with a way to see a store copy of the page. Even Gigablast, with is relatively small database have some results !
Inspired by Gary Price of ResourceShelf

After Yahoo and Google, Amazon step in China

For $75 millions Amazon buy the biggest e-commerce site of China, Joyo.

.. Analysts expect China to boast the largest Web population within five years..

Thoses analysts should check the position; 3, 5, 6, 7 and 8 of Alexa Global Top 500 List! Half of the "Global Top Ten sites" is now chinese. Even Google lost in third position to Sina, the major portal of China.

American sites have 40% of thoses top ten, living one to the Japan. The analysts should lower their metric and prediction to 2-3 years maximum!

Blocking ads will make SEO a must in the next months

Yes this is true, specially if I count the recent number of phones and emails I received for optimization and formation. This quote will reflect the new tendency :

More importantly, said Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Watch, many users - as many as 70% - don't look at paid listings at all, while new software is capable of stripping out paid search ads.

For my part, I saw less than 10 ads since a few weeks! The Block image function in Mozilla/Firefox plus the Adblock are so easy to use, the manager of the big portal will have to incorporate ads from the same server who deserve the picture of the site if they want to sell ads in a near future!!!

The most complete search engines 'partnership' chart

After the "trademark" Bruce Clay relationship chart, here a more complete Search Engine Partnership Chart. Nice work!

Google add a Notifier to Gmail

A good add-on to Gmail, the Gmail Notifier, but only for Windows 200 and XP for now.
It is not really new, but it is more safe in my mind.

Also a excellent ressource about Gmail news and other utilities.

Google starting at $140.929

Huge start!
But will see more the reality at the end of the day.

Update 13h00 EST: That starting price was a glitch! Real highest bid was $103.45! Even in my email, by Alert Yahoo Finance, the price was false!!!

Yahoo get his own !!!

After the official Google Blog, (the non-official first one of Aaron Swartz still in first position ;-) here the Yahoo Blog.

Whoupi doo! If you read it, you will see why I laugh a bit at this first post. A bit too much of self-congratulation. Bad PR from marketers who don't understand really what is a corporate blog ! It's not to proclame we are the best, the finest, blablabla, it's more in my mind to annonce new stuff coming up, get idea and interact with your customers.

Also note in the right column the "Industry Source"*. This is not a very good idea ! It will make jealous and it's not the purpose of a SE !!!

*PS: Note that 95% of thoses links are included in my RSS aggregator.

WSJ: Google stock will begin tomorrow at $85

On the front page (public) of the WSJ tonight will can see, finally, the price of the google a the last low range of $85. He will see how this will go there tomorrow.

Blogger new NavBar

Since a few day Blogger have replace the ad at the top of the Blogspot-hosted blog users with a NavBar. The search feature is using Google and is the same as a query like this one:

site:name-of-the-blog.blogspot.com keywords

This is a bit tricky, if the blogger published a lot of stories, because the recent posts is not always already in the Google index and the look and feal of the search box is give you the idea it perform the search inside you pages.

But I was surprised to see in my log a few visits from other Blogger (italian, singapore, american and canadian) users who seem to use the Next Blog Button to start hitting random blogs.
Note: you can change your Blogger NavBar color in the Template Tab.

Almost 85% for the search engine use

From the same study by PEW I post monday, here some charts and facts you may be missed.

Google go to bargain sale with IPO

The saga continue with the IPO sale price slashes by 25%.

Also the shareholders will lower the number of shares sold by 6.1 millions.

I don't know if Abraham (yesterday night post) will get his 600 shares ;-)

Google IPO delayed and bargain bet's on the way

The SEC will not turn the green light and some investors have also make some bids on the aunction fail :

In his own five-step bidding strategy, Pincus explained, his faith in Google as a wise investment decreases with every US$10 increment. And so, on Saturday morning, Pincus placed five separate bids on Google: US$1.5 million at US$50; US$1 million at US$60; US$500,000 at $70; $400,000 at $80; and "for the fun of it," a US$100,000 allotment at US$90 a share.

As for Abraham, several weeks ago he had planned to bid on 5,000 shares. But as the market for technology stocks plummeted and Google committed a series of public stumbles, he trimmed his appetite to 1,000 shares by the time the auction opened on Friday morning.

On Friday, Abraham placed bids for 200 shares at five different prices: US$110, US$102, US$95, US$88 and US$75.

If the final price is set at US$90, Abraham's first three bids would be accepted. He would end up with 600 shares, at a cost of US$54,000.

Note: The initial price of the aunction have been set between $108 to $135 range.

I'm sure will see soon a movie on this saga of the Google IPO ;-)