A picture worth a thousand words

Now, imagine the cost per lead with a site optimization !
Source

Yahoo & Google News sites: 27 millions/month

Who in 1999 will thought the two promising main search engines will beat veteran players like MSNBC and almost surpassing CNN in the news industry? Google with is 6.3 million reach is quite surprising for a news service compiled solely by computer algorithms without human intervention.

Google News: A reversed RSS system.

They grab the news feeds from differents sources and build a news site with it!!!

MSN Beta Preview is over

The MSN beta preview Search Engine is now over. I give him a few tests, and laugh a bit, and my impression was the actual MSN search site have better results. The worstest thing about that beta was the no-duplicate domain filter. For a query you can have to 7 results pointing to the same domain ;-(

Note that Microsoft give you a link on Sandbox now, where you still have a link on the beta preview ;-)

Google logo also on serps

The Google special logo appearing today, for the first time, also on the search engine results pages. It seem it will change each day of the olympic.

Google IPO : Where are the buyers ?

Company will have to count on last-minute rush
From CBS MarketWatch by Bambi :

From the It's not even that investors aren't bidding the proposed price of between $108 and $135, but that Google isn't getting enough bids at all, according to the banker, who asked not to be identified.

Jux2 : A really smart idea

A new kind of meta search engine who give you the overlapping results on 2 of the 3 search engines they use: Google, Yahoo and AskJeeves. You will see the overlapping results are a lot less than you thought before!

Search Numbers about Search Engines

Here is a research (pdf) made by Pew Internet & American Life Project (PIP) and comScore Networks on the top 25 search engines with 1,399 Internet users between May 14 and June 17 :

• Americans conducted 3.9 billion total searches in June
• 44% of those searches were done from home computers, 49% were done from work computers, and 7% were done at university-based computers.
• The average Internet user performed 33 searches in June.
• The average visit to a search engine resulted in 4.4 searches.
• The average visitor scrolled through 1.8 result pages during a typical search.

That last quote surprising me a bit. The last digit I have give less than 1.8 page. But it's possible because the change of algo in Google where you got more different kinds of results in the first page. Here is other facts by that study :

• In June, the average user spent 41 minutes at search engine sites.
• comScore estimates that 40-45 percent of searches include sponsored results.
• Approximately 7 percent of searches in March included a local modifier, such as city and state names, phone numbers or the words “map” or “directions.”
• The percentage of searches that occurred through browser toolbars in June was 7%.

Multimap : A new Geo-location promising tool

While Yahoo Local and the Google Local are limited to US (but Yahoo! Maps also work for Canada), a new tool have appear in UK. Multimap have beatiful maps, and some nice features.

You can see in UK, for now, all the ; Car rental, Education, Entertainment, Event Tickets, Flights, Florists, Health, Hotels, Hotels - Late Deals, Insurance, Jobs, Leisure, Local websites, Mortgages, Motoring, Properties for sale, Rental Properties, Restaurants, Services, Weblogs and Wifi Hotspots.

For the moment only the WiFi spots are working worldwide, but some Weblogs also come in. Here the procedure to ad your blog.

With the dead of the GeoURL, this tool is very good replacement. If they can add all the features for the country they deserve, this site will get a lot of attention from the majors players.

Google News : Where are the 4,400 other sources ?

Interesting analyse of the place allocated to the majors players, and governement owned, in the Google News pages.

Google IPO backlash is over: The SEC will not delay it

Finally someones will think two times before writing some ineptitudes :
From Tom Taulli of CNET :

The IPO lexicon has a myriad of colorful words, such as "green shoe," "blue sky," "flipping" and "red herring." There is a new word we can add: GOOG-plosion. Definition: IPO disaster.

A bit of exaggeration here ?

First of all, it is absolutely insane to conduct a mega IPO after mid-August. Would it be smart to sell ice cream in January? Not if you are in Massachusetts.

Google have (almost) always launch new; products, services and update in the weekends or holiday. The better one was Gmail the first of April. It was finally a genius move!

From Dawn Kawamoto of CNET

The SEC could impose a "cooling off" period that would delay the IPO, currently expected to happen next week, or it could impose a much more expensive requirement that Google buy back shares.

Sorry boys !

Update 21h05: The best story (in my mind) by the IHT on this IPO since 3 weeks.

Greece: Congratulation for this wonderful show

The nicest show I ever see in my live!

Microsoft's new research : Block-level link analysis

It's working hard at Microsoft to improve relevancy of their MSN search engine. After the Vision-based Page Segmentation Algorithm who seem to be a brilliant new approach to understand the topic of a page and value them, here is the Block-level Link Analysis who seem to be a evolution of the precedent one. Whatch out other boys.

A SEO optimizer company have to refund clients and pay a fine

Yes !!! Finally one crook is out. Why I suspect they are abusing theirs clients :

1- It is impossible to offer guarantees, except if the client have a very specific niche. And even there, you can not control the change of algo in the SE (Many of the White Hat SEO have been hit hard by the november 2003 update at Google).

You can normally rank in the top ten, but in some sector like traveling, hotel, casino, banking, hosting, real estate, pills, etc, it is almost impossible without making a huge makeover and add a lot of content's pages and some reviews and historical data.

It's like other SEO company slogan I too often saw:

We will promote your site on 20 or 50 keywords !!!

Optimizing a site is not only push 20 or 50 keywords/phrases ! It is educating the ; owners, copywriters, programmers, sysadmin, designers and integrators to focus on "search engine mind" and clients when they do something on the site!!!

Text descriptions and links to our client's optimized page will be placed on all six of our shopping malls at 4GreatBuys.com

2- All thoses pages, where are the links, have PageRank 0 to 3. It would even be list with the link: fonction of Google!

We perform carefully timed submissions to all 15 major search engines (Yahoo, MSN, Google, AOL, Ask Jeeves, Infospace, etc.) plus 8,500 minor search engines, special interest directories, etc., timing these submissions twice per month, while conforming to each search engine's current standards and indexing schedules.

3- You NEVER have to resubmit a site, except if it disappearing from the search engine.
4- The 8,500 minor search engines is a scam. This is done with a program and you never know if the site will be there and if you put your email address you'll be spam with a huge numbers of email. And even that, the major six engines drive more than 95% of your traffic.

Guarantees top-20 ranking on at least 4 major search engines

5- With one top-20 ranking on Google you will also automatically have the top-20 in AOL, Netscape and IWon. The same is true with Yahoo where you're always, (almost), got the same positions appearing in MSN, Altavista and AlltheWeb.

Web = 12% of british media consumption for a tiny 2.5% on ads expense!

If we want more content on the web in the future, the difference with media consomption and ad expenditure have to narrow. From Brand Republic.

Two days left for bid registration in Google IPO ! Friday THE day ?

The story by Reuters. Bloomberg say Google may begin accepting bids for its stock as early as Friday !!!

Google take is time to indexing competition ?

Funny fact, in june I post on a blog a new government site who was online for the first time that day. The day after it was in Google! About five weeks earlier I post another thread, on a forum, a brand new site and it was indexed 3 days after.

Now after 8 days up (sometimes down in saturday), and 50 results in Google News, you can't find IceRocket in Google ???

It is a very good metasearch and surprisingly fast engine, with a good products tab, but the image; news and find a friend, leave me on my appetite. The history is a nice feature, for all the tabs, but the email search is not working since sunday ;-(.

If that engine add a clustering feature like Vivisimo and can give you the choice of the search site it is crawling (MSN & Lycos is redundant), it will be a nice alternative to others meta engines.

Big Brother Going Private's Big Business

From the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) and via Wired Magazine, this report (Pdf 1.5 MB) open a trend of how Bush can bypass legal restrictions on domestic spying! Here some little snips :

Florida’s TIPS.

In a direct local imitation of the original TIPS concept, police in Orange County, Florida are planning to train emergency personnel, cable workers and other public and private workers to look for and report evidence of terrorism, drug trafficking, or child pornography in private homes. Overseen by Florida state police officials, the program’s brochure originally included an element of explicit racial profiling. Though that was removed, the program is still underway, leaving homeowners to wonder if anything in their home might draw suspicion whenever a cable or utility worker comes in to do a repair.

Colleges and universities.

A 2001 survey found that 195 colleges and universities had turned over private information on students to the FBI, often in apparent violation of privacy laws; 172 of them did not even wait for a subpoena.

Internet

Internet service providers report that search orders have “gone through the roof.” ISPs maintain records of individuals’ Internet use, including records of IP addresses (a number that is assigned to each computer that connects to the Internet) that can be combined with logs automatically maintained by most Web servers to identify which individuals have visited a Web site, participated in “anonymous” chat or message boards or adopted a particular online pseudonym. In 2002 alone, for example, BellSouth received about 16,000 subpoenas from law enforcement and 636 court orders for customer information.

A system for government “Google searches” through Americans’ private financial records

The Patriot Act mandates that companies transform themselves into surrogate agents for the government.

Background checks: from reporting to enforcement

It turns companies into sheriff’s deputies,responsible not just for feeding information to the government, but for actually enforcing the government’s wishes, for example by effectively blacklisting anyone who has been labeled as a suspect under the government’s less-than-rigorous procedures for identifying risks.

Happy to live up north!!!

Unbelievable bad timing for the Google IPO

After been profitable since the last 12 quarters (july 2001), Google will be in the red zone for this quarter ending in september after they settled the dispute over Yahoo!/Overture bidding ad technology. And this is after the last week story of the 23 million shares not included in the propectus. Really hard summer for Sergey, Larry and Eric !

Firefox and Mozilla Custom Keywords : A real timesaver for search

I was keeping my old Internet Explorer just because of a toolbar who help a lot to pre-program my search and who only work for IE. But that's over now for the Bill's browser.

Tired to go to your favorite search engine and type long sequence of characters in search box like this one ?

Here a query to find all the page at Google on the site www.constellationw3.com

Here is what I do now for exactly the same result :(and for any othe domain name ending by .com)


How I do that on the Address Bar of Firefox (or Mozilla) ?

1- Go to your favorite engine and type your normal query.
2- Take the beginning of the resulting URL (where is the logo) and drop-it in a folder you have made in your personnal toolbar.
Note: The bookmark itself will not be useful. It's his association with a keyword who are important. And to remember easily all your keywords, my personnal trick is to put it in a folder in your personnal toolbar.


3- Go to that folder where is now the bookmark and right click on it and choose Properties

Go to the location box and change the domain name (or the word on your query) by "%s" (whitout the quote)
Before : http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awww.constellationw3.com+-sdfgagw
After : http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awww.%s.com+-sdfgagw

4- Enter the keyword you want in "Keyword Box:" gs
5- Also it is a good idea to put also the keyword you just enter in the "Name Box:" to remember it: (gs)

Result : Now for each site, ending by .com, I want to know how many pages Google have in is index a just type :
"gs name-of-the-site" without any other characters (site:, www, .com) in my address bar of Firefox !!!

6- Repeat step 1 to 5, for each site you visit often (who got a search box) and type the queries you make on them directly in the address bar on Firefox or Mozilla.

Note: You can't pass more than one parameter. .
I try using it for a "link:%s(domain name) -site:%s(domain name)" and the second parameter remain "%s" in the query string.

Here is my favorite searches folder who help me to remember all my keywords :

Enjoy you new fast searches with Firefox

Yahoo! make some fun over the Google Dance party

Google have make their annual party "Google Dance 2004" in the same time was nearby the Search Engine Strategies at San Jose.

For those who read about the Google Dance 2004 you would have noticed they ran out of beer early within the party. That's why when you make a query for "ses party rule #1" on Yahoo! now you will see a funny thing at the beginning of the page!