Guide to the Blogosphere for Marketers & Company Stakeholders

Nice reading (Pdf 22 pages) offer to us by Intelliseek, owner of BlogPulse. Here a few points who define the blogger profile :

• 57% of bloggers are male, 43% are female
• 48% of bloggers are age 30 or under, but 52% are over 30
• 70% of bloggers have broadband/high-speed Internet access at home
• 82% of bloggers have been Internet users for six or more years
• 42% of bloggers live in households earning more than $50,000 a year
• 39% of bloggers have college or graduate degrees
• 12% of Internet users have posted comments or other material on blogs—representing 14 million people and a three-fold increase since April 2004
• 5% of Internet users use RSS aggregators or XML readers to get news and other information from blogs and content-rich Web sites as soon as it’s posted online
• Blog readership is growing among all demographics

Here is the TOC of that very good paper :

1. The blogging boom: what blogs are…and how they’ve grown
2. The impact of blogs: challenges, opportunities and changes
3. What others said about blogs: praise...and drawbacks
4. Blogs that work...and blogs gone wrong
5. Blog segmentation: the edelman & intelliseek trust media blog directory
6. How to contact bloggers: new rules of engagement for the blogosphere
7. To blog or not to blog: key questions for marketers and communications professionals
8. The do’s and don’ts of blogging in general
9. Blogging terms you absolutely need to know

Google Video : Upload Program is there

You'll want to share video with everybody ? You want to start VideoBlogging ? Here is the place to put your movies of any lenght, for free or by charging, and show them to the rest of the world for free. But it's seem VideoCasting will not work because it's gonna be a streming media. If you want Google to charge to see your video, they will keep 30% of the gross recipe, but in special case it can be more.
More details on SEW.

May be it is a historic date to another step in the World Wild Web?
Update 8pm EST : Two first views by Loren Baker

The last point of Raymond M. Kristiansen of Ourmedia.org bring out is the first step in my mind :

I am personally very interested to see where Google will take Blogger with this. Maybe in the future Blogger will be ‘made for videoblogging’. If so, this will make it Very easy for videobloggers to choose Blogger as their favourite blogging tool.

I use Hello and Blogger for a "unlimited free storage pictures server" for one my blog and I loved it. It will rock acquisition of new peoples and give them a huge collection of data and information.

The first comment from Steve Garfield in this same interview :

We already go to Google to find everything else. Why not video too? For viewers, it’ll give the average internet user who is familiar with searching using the Google interface, a comfortable way to explore finding video on the web. For producers, it gives them a huge audience that could possible find their videos more easily.

Update 12pm EST :
The Google site experiment this feature since a few month but undercover. If you search for olympic stadium you will see normal results but if you add olympic stadium pictures or images (with a s give you sometimes picture you can't see without) you'll see picture of the stadium before the normal results. This can be done for videos to easily.

Update thurday 00:45 pm EST :
Other points in Inside Google

I'd love to have a cristal ball to see where it will be... in december !

Google new cellphone services for US & Canada

XHTML-enabled browsers on their phones and PDA can search for a local business, figure out how to get there and provide a zoomable map of the area.

Mamma.com in hot water

The SEC probe become formal. Preceding coverages of that story.

Highest price keywords list of AdSense

Seem peoples of Washington will be hairless this summer ;-)

Hot spot of the world

Interesting to see where are the hot spots of the day in the world. And very nice to got all the archive day by day of the news from 2004.

Finding Information by Phil Bradley

Nice little page to find the good search engine depending on your needs. It's like a Finding the good search engine for dummies. He should add Gigablast in certains categories.

The next step of Web is here

A amazing recipe :

1. 1- You take the most popular local communities classifieds ad directory with an ugly old layout
2. 2- You take the new amazing maps system with a convivial GUI (graphic user interface)
3. 3- You choose a niche market and show them nicely with six easy sorting elements on category of the data with geolocation of the city and the two main market of your field
   
4. 4- You merge the three first steps
5. 5- You got a site to upset all the real estate agencies

I think will see more and more real estate agent on Craiglist ;-)

It have also a great chance to grab a huge part of the search engine market in US (not just local), even more than the old Google search !

Why is it important to keep outdated information in archive

I was try to know when Google Maps Satellite photos was taken in Montreal. I knew it was somewhere in 2003 by spotting some new construction nearby my home but was not sure when in the spring it was taken. I spot the old port of Montreal and we clearly saw the Cirque du Soleil big top on the picture. Where do you think I can find information on that ? On the Cirque du Soleil web site you'll think. Nah.

Like all the big events on the major entertainment shows or festivals in Quebec (Jazz Festival, Francofolie, Just for Laughs -the only one to got a tiny history-, World Film Festival) all those sites have no archive of the marvelous shows they made and the majors artists they bring here.

Theses sites have spend a lot of money (with our taxes and/or contributions)to make the bio of artists and calendar of their shows, and many many more information, to the Web and they flushed all that goodies for ? Because the majority of thoses sites are made by Ad or Web agencies who don't know nothing about search engine and archive history.

That's really stupid. If the Jazz Festival have keep up his archive online, on a BB King, Ella, Urban Sax, Eric Clapton (and hundreds of other big's name who goes there often) query, they are a lot of chance to find it in thoses archives of thoses big events name. That's a huge trafic they miss.

BTW: Where to you think I found the date (between may 15 and june 15) of the Google satellite picture ? In a small Auberge of Old Montreal where the data is no longer available in their new site but still on their server ! Funny no ?

Viral & Buzz Marketing Campaign : Going a bit to far ?

I was a bit shocked when I start to read this New York Times Magazine article (PDF) about viral and buzz marketing campaign. Here are some part of the document who afraid me a bit :

Tremor, a word-of-mouth operation that is a division of Procter & Gamble (maker of Crest, Tide and Pampers) has an astonishing 240,000 volunteer teenagers spreading the word about everything from toothbrushes to TV shows. A spinoff, Tremor Moms, is in the works. Other marketers, particularly youth-oriented firms, have put up Web sites recruiting teenagers to serve as ''secret agents.''

Knox said that Tremor's approach to finding the Magic People is intensively researched. The company tries to isolate the psychological characteristics of the subset of influential teenagers, and has developed a screening process to identify them. The details of this are a secret, but as an example, Knox noted that most teenagers have 25 or 30 names on their instant-messaging ''buddy list,'' whereas a Tremor member might have 150. Tremor recruits volunteers mostly through online advertisements and accepts only 10 or 15 percent of those who apply. The important thing, Knox said, is they are the right kind of kids -- the connected, influential trend-spreading kind. Knox mentioned a focus group of Tremor kids in Los Angeles, where several teenagers showed up with business cards. Magic.

Ouf. I hope this bill will be adopted!

Google Maps Sightseeing Blog

Nice idea

Google Q&A à la Encarta style

Google start to respond to query like canada prime minister (probably not for long) directly at top of the results.
It's not working on all queries like vicente fox age, but George Bush age work fine. Try it, sometime it's useful like to remember who directed the movie shining shining director or what's the moon size! Thoses last two exemple come from Jean Veronis

He really have a lot of good answer!

But others time, really, really bad one even if you take the French version of it.

Pertinence Summarizer for Google

Here a nice tool who embed the Google Serps and add a Summary link after the "Cached - Similar pages".
After clicking on the link, the first time you'll be there, they will ask for ID and password. Use the search engine name for both. It's really fast.
After that you can choose the amount of automatic text summarization you want. Enjoy !

ICC Guidelines on Marketing and Advertising using Electronic Media

International Chamber of Commerce have provide principles on marketing including advertising, which use the Internet, online and interactive services, and electronic communication networks including the telephone.

A few point of that guidelines still have to be implement in the Web marketing industry.

Search Engines Market Share Tendency

I monitored the metrics of search engine referals since 97. I collect data of a hundred sites since 2000 from small sites who got only 1,000 unique visitors a month to mid-big's one who are in the range of 600,000/month.

Since that, I choose to follow up closely one e-commerce who get a audience wide open of about 50% north american and the rest from european ans asian countries who get a average of 135,000/month and representing the middle range of all sites I monitored.

Whow are GYM (Google/Yahoo/Msn) and others doing since the last 27 months ?

• Google seem to finally have stabilized in the last months after huge growing in 2003 but a big drop after the Florida update in late 2003 and first months of 2004 top of his market and take around 67.5% of the market.
• Yahoo get a very short momentum after the Google Florida Update, but since that, he is loosing part of the market month after month.
• MSN also got gains after the FU, but loosing it on 2004, but in the last month marketing campaign in America seem to give him a boost in 2005.
• Aol, AltaVista and Lycos are dying, but a old player Excite seem to revive from limb.

Since the apparition of a lot of vertical engines, I think it will stay about the same market share of GYM on 2005. Google with the recent addition of satellite on Google Maps and with the video coming, will still keep it's market over Yahoo. MSN may be gain a extra few % with it's AdCenter and upcoming new developments.

The 27 months data

Keyhole now integrated in Google maps

Cool, even part of some (click on satellite on the upper-right orange bar) big cities in Canada are integrated in a zoom level not so bad in Google maps has I posted earlier today. The photos was taken at least one year ago :

Olympic Stadium of Montreal


Lafontaine Park nearby


My panorama of the pond in the south part of the picture.

MSN Search Marketing Campaign : A Flop (in France) !

Xiti a leader of the Web monitoring market release some metrics on the MSN campaign to promote his new search engine. Here's the automatic translation of it.
Also note the big lost peeks of the week-end in the graphic who confirm the fact of many users use it at work.

Keyhole will be in Google Local & Maps soon

In next week issue of NewsWeek Business, already online here, you see that in the third page :

While the discrete new products outside the core get attention, Mayer says that the bulk of Google's work is quietly improving the bread-and-butter of search. "We don't put out a press release saying that we got rid of 5 percent of search spam, but that stuff happens all the time. We definitely have a grand plan," she says. Indeed, just this week Google is integrating the Keyhole service into its local search product.

Wow! that's gonna be a real plus in the Local market, Yahoo have already their traffic information, I'd love to see the real picture of it.

Browser Share : A new metric to consider

The rise of Firefox in the browser share give a good clue to marketers and webmasters. It's a fact the people using Firefox have a better chance to be a bit more techies than people who use Internet Explorer, specially if you tracking your data by geolocation and time of the day. Here the browser share of this blog :



Last november data

Mamma.com delayed its financial results and still hope for the Copernic acquisition

Here are the automatic translation of the Journal Les Affaires story. I'm not sure the Copernic deal will conclude !

Gmail increasing the 1Gb limit

Looking at my mail today I saw :

You are currently using 119 MB (9%) of your 1346, 1386, 1393 MB.

I was thinking a bug, but no it's seem to be the first step to this.
It fun, but it bring me a question.

Why Google want to be the mail wharehouse of the planet ?

Update 2 april :

You are currently using 119 MB (6%) of your 2050 MB.

WordPress hiding links to get money on AdSense

A hidden link is never hidden for long !

Goowiki

Interesting presentation on communication tools used by Google and other organization. We learn that Google is also using Wiki at the Plex.

Also look at that slide, the huge number of space they got internally :

You are currently using 364 MB (0%) of your 1000000 MB.

Weird also to see the number of Spam messages ?

Yahoo! transgressing their own rules

Funny coincidence. I just receive a email from the Yahoo! team :

The URL you suggested

< url:http://www.the-site-I-submitted.com: >

was not added to Yahoo! Canada because the site
appears to be under construction. Here are some of
the most common factors that make a site incomplete:

- broken images or links
- text links that have no information yet
- an "under construction" announcement on the site
- a site that does not work in all major browsers

When your site is fully functioning, please resuggest
your listing through our online process.

Ok, the site I submit have two section "coming soon" on it. But all the products are there, only the testimonial and an other section missing.

But when you are searching for the new Yahoo! beta 360 °, surprise you'll see it with the directory listing :
"Category: Cyberculture > Virtual Communities"
But if you click on it you get a 404 page ! Even on the Jeremy page, all the horizontal menu give you 404 !

They should follow their own rules, no ?

Who are your neighbors who backlink you ?

A new tool have be released by WeBuildPages to show you who are backlink you and if thoses backlinks are in the same class C of IP addresses.
When a search engine see links coming from the same class C address (200.152.163.110 the first 3 octets of a IP address) to your site, it assume that class are owned by the same person or company and decreased the importance of thoses links.
A really great tool who will figure in my search engine marketing toolbox.

Yahoo! 360 : Nice Integration and GUI

Here a screen shot of the Yahoo! 360 to be launch next week on invitation :



More info in Forrester at Charlene Li's blog
.

Google Results : Sometime I don't understand

Which site you'll think you will see in first position when you enter "google definition" in Google ?
Look ahead.
Note Ask also place my blog in the top ten. Seem thoses are crazy ?

Here my speculation :

• "Google" and "Definition" are in the url without any word between
• "Google" and "Definition" are in the title of the post without any word between
• "Google" got three occurence in the short text of the post
• Google love blogger
  

But even with thoses it should not bring me there. Why ? Ah ha :

• "Google" is in the anchor text of 7 of my 10 previous post !

AFP shoot up his own customers

Suing Google is not always a good idea :

No matter how you look at it, AFP will lose this battle. It is inherently just an attempt to extort money out of Google. What AFP does not realize is how badly they have damaged their clients. Political Gateway is one of their clients and we have been devastated.

Microsoft put a online community for the global electronic artist

With all the hype on podcasting theses day, Microsoft haved jump in the train by providing Crossfader beta. Seem to be an online community with blogs, forums, electronic deposit a bit like Ourmedia.org.

Yahoo launch a Creative Commons Search Engine

Here a post on Yahoo Blog where Larry Lessig of CC explained the copyright protections for creative works.
The CC search engine is here.

Gigablast add reference and related pages to his SERPS

It seem Matt Wells made a really nice improvement to his Gigablast Site ! After a few queries I'm amazed with this new feature. Seem by far more effective than the other big players and specially in french queries. Wow!

But it's really late here and I got to test it more in a few hours. Be back.

Google cache reveal messages from the Minnesota killer

I think will see more and more robots.txt to disallow forum crawling after this.

Overture Ads Guideline : Cigarettes seem ok but no Cuban Cigar

Contrary to Google ads guideline Overture have not banned tobacco ads, but Cuban Cigar ads are prohibited. But on a few queries I made today on tobacco related products, I didn't find any ads.

Google News sued by the AFP

Why it's took around 3 years to proceed ? Bizarre !

Ask Jeeves has been sold for 1,85 billion in stock

Here is the communiqué. Seem to me a lot of money for a search engine I saw only once (0.08%) in my monthly log files.

Flickr going to Yahoo

The pro and free account will be enhanced.

Botnets Used to Cheat Ad Programs

Honeynet.org have release a paper on botnets where they list the uses of thoses small programs to cheat ad banners and PPC programs :

Installing Advertisement Addons and Browser Helper Objects (BHOs)

• Botnets can also be used to gain financial advantages. This works by setting up a fake website with some advertisements: The operator of this website negotiates a deal with some hosting companies that pay for clicks on ad. With the help of a botnet, these clicks can be "automated" so that instantly a few thousand bots click on the pop-ups. This process can be further enhanced if the bot hijacks the start-page of a compromised machine so that the "clicks" are executed each time the victim uses the browser.

Google AdSense abuse

• A similar abuse is also possible with Google's AdSense program: AdSense offers companies the possibility to display Google advertisements on their own website and earn money this way. The company earns money due to clicks on theses ad, for example per 10.000 clicks in one month. An attacker can abuse this program by leveraging his botnet to click on these advertisements in an automated fashion and thus artificially increments the click counter. This kind of usage for botnets is relatively uncommon, but not a bad idea from an attacker's perspective.

MSN AdCenter prototype to be launch in ....

Here a few paragraphs of the ClickZ post who seem more to me as a infomercial than a real article.

Following several days of media hype predicting MSN's imminent launch its own pay-per-click ad network, Microsoft today will reveal more modest plans. The company will demonstrate a prototype of a new paid search advertising platform at an event for ad clients in Redmond.

How to deflate a balloon !

At the sixth annual MSN Strategic Account Summit, Microsoft plans to show off to 500 of its top customers the new MSN adCenter, a platform that will eventually be used for ads throughout its network. The first component of adCenter is the paid search piece, which will be piloted within the next six months in Singapore and France to gather customer feedback. Eventually it will be launched worldwide.

NEVER before 2007 in America ? (Yahoo contract expire in june 2006 and normaly it's take 1 or 2 year to release 50% bugs free update to Microsoft)

"We're rolling out the pilots to demonstrate and learn what value software can add to the search platform," said Eric Hadley, senior director of advertising and marketing for MSN. "Right now, everybody thinks search is just about clicks, but it's about more than that. It's about connection with the customer."

Connection yes, but with the good content for users. MSN have always connected with advertisers but not with users outside its commercial entity.

The platform promises in-depth analytics and audience intelligence, including geographic location, gender, age group, lifestyle segment and time of day. Advertisers will be able to access this information before placing their ad, so they will know what to expect before launching their campaign.

Geographic location and time of day OK, but I'd like to see how; audience intelligence, gender, age group and lifestyle can be achieve to mass market without registering user of a search engine. Are we talking of a PPC Platform or a MY MSN + Passport search engine ?

"This will really help drive ROI and the effective results of a search campaign beyond just knowing if somebody clicked on it, but to know if someone is likely to click on it. We think that's a huge step forward in this category," Hadley said.

Like the mouseover tracking at Google SERPS ?

While the full-scale deployment of the platform is not likely to happen before the end of the year, MSN is getting some early praise for providing advertisers with more control over their campaigns.

Welcome beta testers who will gave us money to help us correcting multiple bugs !

"Microsoft has laid out a roadmap for a product that looks to be a leap forward," said Fredrick Marckini, CEO of iProspect. "By raising the bar, we're likely to see Google and Yahoo! raising the bar to keep up."

Should starting by giving us good results on organic search and may be users will come.

Google make a wink to Mac OS X users

Here is your new front door.

<inside>Consoles-toi CFD</inside>

Site Metrics Accuracy: Are you sure your data are good ?

You got two main methods to mesure trafic to your Web site; Log File Analyser like Webtrends or Clicktracks with or without javascript to add more information to your log file and cookies based system. For thoses who use the second methods, you should read that article about a research done by Jupiter Research who reveal :

• 12% of Internet users delete cookies on a monthly basis
• 17% do so weekly
• 10% every day
• 52% at least once in the last year

If your site metrics use cookies you should switch to that :

Google Local Business Center have forget Canadian

Google Local provide now a form to add or correct your listing in Google Local. You write your data in the form and Google will ship you a PIN number by snail-mail to the business's bricks-and-mortar address. The only drawback is there are no canadian province in the dropbox :-(

Mark Pilgrim Retaliate at the Google Toolbar

A new plug-in, under the GPL license, for Firefox to alterate Google Results Pages by adding links to it and removing ads. This is a response to the controversy new release of the Google toolbar who can add links to your page.
That's after a lot of patches to disabled the autolink feature.
Wake-up Google and drop that feature who was like Microsoft have done with the Smart Tags.

Searching Google : Position of the words in a query are important

In a Andy Beal post today I was surprise by his conclusion on how search engines would benefit from personalization. Shure it's true on the dream world, but it will take long before we saw that.

Even with a Desktop Search who gonna clusterize my hard drive to see what my point of interest and take it in account when I make a SE queries, it probably been wrong because I done a web site on berries a while ago and thoses words associates with berries in my hard drive would wrongly influence results on the fruits and not on the RIM Blackberry.

His query was using the wrong search engine. On Yahoo the position of the words on your query rarely get attention. This is bad and the terms you use have more than one meaning. On Yahoo the results on "cookies blackberry" and "blackberry cookies" are the same on the first page of two. On Google the first word of a query will have more weight and give a different set of results. For his query Google find the answer in second position, and if he was looking for food and not cookies files he should only inverse the term to find his "blackberry cookies" recipe in first position !
Not a soap and bathing page like Yahoo give on first place for those two queries ;-)

Gigablast to sell a 25% share of the business

Matt Wells and his company Gigablast are in a expansion dead-end. He want to sell a quarter of his business to hardware and personnel investments.
$8.5 million seem a good deal for all the possibilities in that market but with only a quarter of the cie, the investor have not a huge voice over the board.
Hope this will work for Matt and his very good search engine.

Something have changed at Google

I was reading a six weeks old post and try to see if the most used words (and stopwords for search engine to) in english langage have move. Surprise !

14th of january 2005
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

Today
the = 2,880,000,000 / a = 2,570,000,000 / for = 2,520,000,000 /
to = 2,680,000,000 / of = 2,760,000,000 / and = 2,700,000,000 /
in = 3,350,000,000 / is = 1,770,000,000 / that = 1,090,000,000 /
it = 1,170,000,000 / he = 259,000,000 / was = 550,000,000

Google have stop manipulate the number of the six first one and cut by two, at least, the number of results pages on the other six with the exception of the word "was" who is the only one to get is number gaining.

Seem Google have depreciate a lot their digits ! If you go to the post of Jean Veronis made in about the same time of my first one, you'll see a decrease between 20 to 75% in all the terms used by Jean with some little exception like Amazon, who get more than three time the number they've got in the end of january.

Yahoo Publisher Network to be release soon

I was talking about it last week, but it seem they've got to adjust the conceptual algo before to release officially the Yahoo! Publisher Network for small publishers.
Update: A bit weard to saw in the code of the page this :

...form name="ccoptin" action="http://ui.constantcontact.com/d.jsp" target="_blank" method="post">

Your email address will go to a Email Marketing company ? and not to Yahoo! where you can read this in the Privacy Policy :

This policy does not apply to the practices of companies that Yahoo! does not own or control, or to people that Yahoo! does not employ or manage.

A bit scary.

Google Cloaking : Ok for us, but not for you !

Google get caught by TreadWatch.org to bypass their own guidelines.

I also found another page where Google use the same tactic and stuffed another title tag!

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 !