Rumor mill on Google OS

Last year it was Jason, wednesday is was Dave reblog today by Nick. But may be it's for is API programming ? Will see !

Traditionnal media loosing a lot over Internet ads

For Viacom only, a $18 billion goodwill charge. The radio and outdoor advertising unit been delested of 10.9 and 7.1 billion bucks. But what not clear about this article is why and where the money goes ?

In this translate article you'll have more details like :

According to figures' published this week by the cabinet Interactive Advertising Office (IAB), the advertisers spent nearly 9,6 billion dollars on line in 2004, against 7,3 billion in 2003.

This heavy tendency obliges the traditional media, in particular the great groups of press, to develop in the Internet with the risk to see melting their principal source of income.

Good news for us.

Yahoo Gift

Youpi for me!



I have always dream, since I'm very young, to get a ice cream on a second day of march, and only for the second of march, and to go lick-it outside at 4 degree Farenheight (with the wind factor). It's a chance I'm at the south part of this country !

Where I can find it? Oups not at Baskin-Robbins site. Oups not at Yahoo-Local. Ok a find the good engine to locate-it :

Yahoo Contextual Ads is the gift ?

Yahoo annonce in her birthday page they will have a special treat for us tomorrow. I bet on those little green boxes wich mean Google AdSense will have competition. Via Waxy.

Also note Yahoo will replace the Overture brand by Yahoo! Search Marketing Solutions wich imho is a good thing to consolidate the Yahoo! brand. Seem also Yahoo will be more permissive than Google with some niche market like tobacco.

Happy birthday Yahoo

They will turn 1o tomorrow. But today it's the developer who get the gift with a API service.
Update : I predict a lot more of applications for Yahoo over Google because the developer api use the simpler REST interface at the place of SOAP use by Google.

Google SERPs result: Put it on quote before your EGO blown ;-)

Observing (again) my log today I saw a Google referer on "Web Marketing News" ???
Make a query and second position on 28 million pages ? I really don't deserve that second rank even if thoses words are in the title of my blog!



But don't worry it will not last for long and if you put thoses words between quotes it's only on less than 5,700 pages.
Morale : Never take the first nice digit for real.

New Advertising Model : Cost Per Action

After the recently Pay Per Call for small business who don't have web presence, a new innovative ad scheme appear today with Snap CPA or Cost Per Action decline (badly) in two differents options whitout giving a lot of details before filling a form.

At first view the Fixed-Cost-Per-Action have not so much difference with the Variable-Cost-Per-Action for products sale. They should separate the first one for service and download and give more information and keep the second one for e-commerce in my mind.

But it's seem a very good alternative for affiliate in e-commerce, specifically since the new rules on affiliate programs in SE, who are one of the cause of cheatings like PPC Frauds and the new nasties Page Impression Scam.

MindRaider : Semantize your files and resources

MindRaider seem to be a semantic application who scan your hard drive and add, with your help, to organizing your resources with metadata.
As I saw inside a comment of a blog, the next release will use SE like Google to explore the FOAF link friends and relative to build a semantic map of your interests. Mix with Deliocius and other tagging project this can be a serious turn in the semantic Web.

Hey Googlers, here is a nice project for your 20% time on new project !

The Google Story

How those two little mens pass trough all the difficulties of making a multi-billion dollars search company in only 6 years. A must read article.

Google at a theater near you

Google introduce the movie: operator to find movie critics where you can sort your results by relevance, date or rating. Also in United State you can ask Google for showtime or location by city or zip.
The showtimes and location is quite useful, but for movie review/critics the Movie Review Query Engine is *the* place to go.

Yahoo on a Hollywoodize mood

Nice article from the Christian Science Monitor about the turn Yahoo seem to take in the entertainment business.

Yahoo New Operators

Seem Yahoo will add some new operator soon ! Or may be they are use internally use to help detect some page/bug/spammer ?

Here the new operator :

• TITLEWORDS (term1 term2)

This have to be uppercase. The main difference from intitle: is the number of words use. With the intitle: you'll have a lot of time only one or two words to be really in the intitle: searches. But when you're using TITLEWORDS all the words are include in the title.

Tiscali and the Black Hat technics

Here some facts in Italian telecommunications Tiscali's page from his division in South Africa. I'm not sure they will stand there for long :

We submit your website to key South African and International search engines and re-submit monthly to keep its rankings as high as possible. The search engines include: Gauteng.com, Ananzi, Northern Lights, Aardvark, Hotbot, Webcrawler, Altavista, Google, Excite, Go, Lycos and Ask Jeeves.

Resubmitting a website each month give you nothing more and it is not helping your site to keep its rankings as high as possible. Also they should revise their list of SE because Northern Light is out since a few years and HotBot no more using Inktomi, so it's not a search engine anymore.

But this other paragraph is going against a lot of search engines guideline :

We rewrite your home page in meta tags and hidden words and create doorway pages that target specific search engines in order to increase your website ranking. We also do on-going re-phrasing of power scripting and optimise each individual page for different engines.

Did some SEO company from France have make a deal with Tiscali ?

Semantic Browsing Project : Itunes Interface + Google = mSpace

A new project from the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton with interaction model to help explore relationships in information call mSpace.

A combination of a ITunes like interface combine with mSpace Framework software to organize the information to suit your interests, while concurrently having available to your multiple other complementary paths through that information.

Nice integration. A project to follow !

Why I prefer Google over Yahoo

A few minutes ago I checked my log file and see that line in it :

17 February

10:30

Fidelity Investments, United States

A bit surprise by this new visitor, I check why he landed on my blog. When I saw he was coming from Yahoo, I look what was his query.

Ha ah ! This guy was auditing the Web to find people talking badly about his company. But when I saw my blog was in 11th position for that expression I was really surprise ! I even not remember the post on the big success that company got with the Google stock. But why Yahoo give me the eleven rank for that expression where in that post I don't use the word "sucks" ? In the archive of the month, this bad word appear only once and 1,992 words after the sequence "Fidelity Investments" !

That not really a good proximity ratio on 1,430 results ? Yahoo should lower this ratio because it make this guy landed here for nothing !

North Countries and Aussie are the most connected

Nice stats compilation by ClickZ about Internet penetration by country. Here the top 5 :

1. Sweden : 68,9%
2. Norway : 66,7%
3. Australia : 65,9%
4. United State : 63,9%
5. Canada : 63,5%

Google Maps : GPS and Movin Gmap make it find your way

Only seven day after his launch, Google Maps have already a little application, Movin Gmap, to makes the map recenter on you as you walk/drive around with a GPS and a laptop.

Exalead will be in the desktop search soon

Exalead the relatively new clustering search engine from France which I give my first impression last fall, was not supposed to be online at this time.

I received a email from the CEO Mr. Bourdoncle (a old AltaVista member) just after my post and I don't have anytime to release and test back the real thing about this since today. The launch was a leak and they got to let in online even after a they goofed on the parameters at midnight before indexing. That's why the number of pages indexed was at 300k at the place of the 500k promised.

But now the index is now at 1 billion page and the overall results in clustering and in SERP's are by far better. I got time today to compare Exalead with Clusty and I was amazingly surprise! It is the better clustering engine I seen from far. Also in the SERPS I discover a half a dozen results on me I never saw anywhere else (normally if I can saw 2 or 3 is very good on new engine). For a newbie like that it's promise well.

They will be some new things coming out soon with the Exalead Desktop (here some beta screen shots) in March and the Blog and RSS indexing. Also the meta-data of most multimedia files, archive and zip files may be come out soon with a index of 2 billion pages!

BTW: Don't forget to explore all the functionnalities of this search engine. Watch out GYM.

Google Maps Revisited : Don't follow the help instruction !

On my precedent post on Google Maps I find the rendering of the map spectacular, but the data associate with a query quite bad.

When you follow the help page to find a products/services in your city with the word "in" or "near" you usually get some results far away form the area where you live. Even zooming in you're area and remake the same search bring you back to the first area you've get in the first search prior zooming with some store/office far away where you are. But that's not the way to use it. The guys at Google who wrote the help page and the Map Tour have not talk to the programmers of the application !!!

Don't use "in" or "near" and even your city in your query !

Go to Google Maps

1. Double click on your search area on the map (this will center the map on your search location)
2. Type in the search box the product or service you want
3. Zoom in to a level you want to travel to, for the business/service
4. Drag the card to locate your area where you live
5. Go back to the search box again without erase the item you search and press Enter again

Tadam ! Finally the business around your area will appear !

My Google Analyst Day Interpretation Slide Show

• The Google Framework Strategy of 70-20-10


• Focus on localization with partners networks huge growing and bringing almost half revenue

• Focus on big corporation and for small/medium localize clientele

• A propective focus on Asian and Western Europe market because of the international revenue growing rate of more than 5% in the past 2 years


• And future services and products will go with ads.

Google Maps Reverse Engineered

Here how it's work.

Google find the WMD

Too funny !

RSS-SMS can safe your life

A new function on PubSub, the Earthquake Monitor let you choose a region of the world, indicate a magnitude degree and give your a RSS or email warning when a earthquake append. A SMS option will soon be on to warn you on the beach for the tsunami.

The Google Language Detection is Bad

When you're using rare words you can see the Google estimate going completely nuts. Here a few queries of the word "Gourganes", a french word for a kind of big pea :
Google Web : 698 results
Google Pages of Canada : 751 results ?
Google French pages : 1,190 results ???

Google Maps

The Google Labs release Google Maps Beta today. The draggable feature is one of the best I have seen but the overall is not at the height of Yahoo Maps with the exception of including us here in Canada. But the data provide in the maps in Canada are sometimes false, like the Autoroute des Laurentides as been replace by the Autoroute TransCanadienne in this case.

Update: The canadian data is sometimes really funny for the directions !!!

Google putting images in SERPs: To counter MSN-Encarta ?

As you can see here, Google start to put images in the Search Engine Results Pages. Why now, Google Image is there since a long time ? I suspect that new move from Google is to counter the new release of MSN Search who include Encarta database now in the results of its index.
PS: To see image in the Google results, you must use a proxy like Anonymizer, because it is sporadic on the regular result.

Will 2005 break the $10 billion mark in the paid search market ?

In a conference I gave in the fall of 2003 for the fed gov in Ottawa, I was citing this part of a study of PricewaterhouseCoopers made in the summer of 2003.

Researchers expect the paid search market to reach as much as $4 billion by 2005

Wednesday we read the numbers of the Q4 2004 for Google.

...the company's fourth-quarter profit beat analysts' estimates and sales topped $1 billion for the first time.

This mean we can expect Google reaching alone the $4 billion mark for 2005. If we add Yahoo, Msn, Aol and all the other players in the paid search market, we probably gonna reach the $10 billions mark in 11 month !

Google Registrar : Ten speculations

I vote for #6 for now, and #10 in the next month.
BTW : The third one is impossible because each registrar have access only to their clients information, not the database of all the regitrars.

A funny traditional marketing technique

Just use your creativity ;-)

Google referal program form not secure ?

Google launch today a referal program for his AdSense and Adwords ad. But the form to apply to it where is asked all your information like phone, address and bank account are not under a secure protocol ???

Huge after hour trading quote on Goog after releasing Q4

Shares hit all-time high $210 in after-hours trading !
Press coverage

Google and the 101k limit

Tara of Research Buzz ask a question about Google and the 101k limit. For my side, I found Google caching more than the 101k limit like this page with 535k when you save it to your hard drive or 549k in File info of Firefox, where Google show the 101k in the SERP (First result).

If you go see the non-cached version you will see the cached version is about the third of the original. But if you make searches with a bunch of words located at the end of the cache page, or even in the middle of the file, you will never see that page in the SERPs. I don't know why Google cache more than it really index, may be he will increase the 101k limit in the future to match the Yahoo limit ?

Firefox blow the 20 million mark

Good news. I'm also happy this blog have a majority of none-IE visitors !

Google will flirt with a open source project ?

Here the job post for that position. For a new VoIP project ?

Google Definition now link with Answer

Nice move. The Answers site is by far more complete than the Dictionary site. I just love to see more languages to come at Google. In other country, Google is by far more popular than Yahoo and MSN and it is time to Google to think about that.

Google Video will allow preview

Seem the new Google Video Beta, who should be call Google VideoTranscript for now, will add preview of video soon if I understand the three last lines of the Robots.txt file at Google :

• Disallow: /videosearch?
• Disallow: /videopreview?
• Disallow: /videoprograminfo?

A new Googler been censored ?

Here is the story of Mark Jen. Here is the Yahoo Cache of his blog. Here is old blog at Microsoft.

Google Video

The Google Video Beta is now live. It's not, for the moment, to find a movie to see it on your computer like the also new Yahoo Video, but more a way to search the transcript of the programs on air recently (about 2 weeks as I can saw). It's also a way to see when your favorite program will be on air.

It can be also a good way to see the hot news of the past days and where it was been on air ;-)

Here the About page of Google Video.

Google increase the words limitation in searches

Really nice move, but it's work not well all the time !

Google phone home ?

May be, may be not !

Really bad year for Yahoo and MSN in France

The difference is search engine statistics from US, Canada and France, as I already post here, are now even bigger as you can see in this year 2004 graph page at Baromètre Weborama. The first graph of each SE represent a general panel and the second one is for the professionnal panel. Thoses data come from 30,000 sites with 2 millions users by day.

Google Boolean operators going nuts

Here a french post (easy to understand) by Jean Véronis about the Google Booleans operators results who are illogical.

MSN use now is own index

The search at Msn.com now use is own index (the MSN Search beta) and not seem to use anymore Inktomi. The results is sometimes very poor. On a search on "bleuetiers" (blueberries plants in french) 4 of the 5 first results are totally irrelevant :

Number 1, 2 and 4 are there only because they have a address of "rue du bleuetiers" (blueberries street) and number 5 is a listing of publications with 3 occurences of the word !

Yahoo got a record year ! But where are the million$ from Google ?

Here the article of ClickZ.

For the full year, it recorded net income of $840 million, or $0.58 per share.

But where in the above article is the money from Google ? :

Google Inc. has one fewer page of negative search results to its credit today after it settled a patent infringement lawsuit brought by rival search firm Yahoo Inc. Victory, however, comes at a price, which in this case will include charges of $260 million to $290 million and a first-quarter loss.

...

Under the terms of the settlement, Google will issue 2.7 million shares of stock to Yahoo. The deal also resolves another dispute with Yahoo over stock issued last year under a 2000 agreement between the two companies. All told, the settlement is worth about $328 million to Yahoo, assuming the Sunnyvale company sells all its shares at $121.50, the midpoint in the per-share range that Google has suggested for its initial public offering, or IPO.

CFD tu peux m'aider à comprendre ?

What's next for Google ?

Funny (sic) speculation theory :

• Google is no more just a search site and spreading on library
• Google is no more a search site and spreading ON the Web
• Google seem to reverse the court on trademark
• Google is one of the biggest Web advertisers with Adwords and Adsense
  
• Google seem to be the major main source of digitalized data
• Google control Blogger, Picasa, Gmail, Orkut, Hello, Keyhole, Froogle, Catalog, Answer, Groups (usenet), AdWords, AdSense and is inside of your computer with the Toolbar and Desktop search
• Google planning to build a global fiber-optic network
• Carnivore failed and seem to be out of the US security eyes

What's next ? Carnivore will be replace by Google and Big B in the near future ?

Goog Record at $204.60

A new height for the Google action at $204.60 !

"In" is the new Google standard word to check the index

Since Google update is number of pages indexed in last november to 8,058,044,651 he also manually tweak the number of results for the 6 most used words to 8 billion. Here are the 12 most used word in english :

the = 8,000,000,000 / a = 8,000,000,000 / for = 8,000,000,000 /
to = 8,000,000,000 / of = 8,000,000,000 / and = 8,000,000,000 /
in = 7,560,000,000 / is = 3,820,000,000 / that = 2,690,000,000 /
it = 2,570,000,000 / he = 687,000,000 / was = 69,100,000

Google Mini and Baby and Yahoo Baby

Google release a mini appliance box good for 50k documents. He gonna love it. But this one may be not ;-)

SEC probes Mamma : Will this affect the Copernic deal ?

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is probing links between Mamma.com Inc. and Irving Kott, a legendary Canadian stock promoter with a long history of run-ins with the law.

Will this affect the Copernic Deal ?

Big Corpo Going into the Blogging World

Really nice move from the marketing department of GM to lauch GM Fastlane Blog now under the name of Par Catalog. As you can see, the comments are open and it's a really nice focus group style. The trackback also give huge visibility to the site.

I'm jalous about the viral spreading of this blog. In less than a week in already have 221 links from 139 sources in Technocrati !

After the IR Report and the Webster Word of the Year, the big company will start to allow some ressources to this (new;-) form of communication really useful to the marketing side of the business.

From my experience, blogging since 2001 in differents forums and collaborative blogs, 90% of my contracts came from my blog posts.

Google Group (Usenet) Timeline

Good move from Google to extract facts from the past 20 years of Usenet archives.

Less than 20% of MSN staff use their own search engine

Really funny data on Yahoo, MSN and Apple staffs search engine habits !

GuruNet launch a free Answers

The Answers super encyclopedia is now free without subscription fee !

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.