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.