From: feedburner.com

Todays headline suggests that Yahoo Wins Gold Medal for Online Olympic Traffic.

As U.S. workers continue to check out the Olympics online during the work week, Yahoo is beating the competition in drawing eyes to its Olympic content. But if you are in management, dont freak out. Peak time for your employees daily Olympic fix is lunch time.

That can hardly be regarded as a complete answer to the question that David Doc Searls posed, Is Yahoo a better search engine than Google?

One of the commenters pointed out that Jeff Jonas had already suggested How to Beat Google! (At Search). Another contender was said to be Clusty.

Clusty got its start in Pittsburgh, PA in 2004 when the search software company Vivsimo decided to take its award-winning search technology to the web.

Vivsimo was founded in 2000 by three Carnegie Mellon University scientists who decided to tackle the problem of information overload in web search. Rather than focusing just on search engine result ranking, we realized that grouping results into topics, or clustering, made for better search and discovery. As search became a necessity for web users, Vivsimo developed a service robust enough to handle the variety of information the everyday web user was after. The result was Clusty: an innovative way to get more out of every search.

Doc Searls had checked a few searches for old blog items in affirming the superiority of Yahoo. It is an intriguing question. Clearly a well-founded answer would require much testing. However a quick check might confirm whether he was on to something. I therefore checked out the performance of the three, Yahoo, Google and Clusty, on some of my old blog posts. The blog posts were all present in the databases for Yahoo and Google, so this was a measure of how well they could deliver results from their databases.

To provide a topical summary measure, I decided to award gold, silver and bronze medals in each event. The gold medal was worth three points, the silver medal two points and the bronze one point. Here are the detailed results for searches for these phrases. They were done without quotes. The phrases were chosen at random so although the sample is small, it should be representative. NF indicates that the blog post was not found in the first 100 results

Performance has a whole host of associations that work well, particularly considering the sports analogy.

#1 Yahoo #1 Clusty #4 Google (61,000 entries)

Does UPS own Brown as part of its brand?

NF Yahoo #6 Clusty #3 Google (365,000 entries)

This is because the use of Frames in web design causes all sorts of problems so that most savvy web designers do not use them.

NF Yahoo #1 Clusty #3 Google (314,000 entries)

Theyre even talking about a place for bludgers.

#7 Yahoo #1 Clusty NF Google (65,500 entries)

Its intriguing to think of the Internet as an Open Space as in Open Space Technology.

NF Yahoo NF Clusty #8 Google (87,100 entries)

ReCellular has more than half the U.S. phone recycling business.

#23 Yahoo #23 Clusty NF Google (714 entries)

Which search engine had the best medal standing? As mentioned, Medal Scores were assigned as follows:
3 for Gold, 2 for Silver, 1 for Bronze.
This gave the following results.
        Yahoo 10.5 | Clusty 14.5 | Google 11
The minimum medal score would be 6 and the maximum 18.

and the winner is Clusty. If these results were substantiated in more extensive testing, then the major search engines might have to take Clusty seriously. Google of course has a huge advance on the rest of the field. However if Yahoos possible superiority opens up the question, then questioners may possibly become aware of the little search engine that could.

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From: feedburner.com

Earlier this week, the Google Adwords and Google Website Optimizer blogs reported some new updates to Google Website Optimizer.

• Experiment Pruning: This new feature allows you to disable one or more combinations from taking part in your Website Optimizer experiments. Pruning can help you achieve faster, more meaningful results by allowing you to remove poorly performing or illogical combinations. This is especially helpful in cases where your experiment may have too many combinations relative to the amount of traffic it receives.

In the past, there wasn’t an easy way for you to disable low performing or
illogical combinations. You’d have to stop a test, make a copy, lose all your test data, and then launch a new test. That’s all changing starting today. Now, you can simply select any number of page variations from your experiment report, click our new “Disable” button, and you’re done. Easy as that. All your future traffic will be sent to your remaining page variations, and you’ll be on the path to quicker, more actionable test results

• A/B Offline Validation: If your test or goal pages aren’t accessible to Website Optimizer then no worries. You’ll now be able to just upload a copy of your tagged page and Website Optimizer will make sure that everything is tagged properly.
• More Intuitive Reporting: We’ve enhanced our reports to more clearly show how your combinations are performing, and to better indicate when we’ve found one or more high-confidence winning combinations. This will help prevent you from drawing false conclusions from results or from ending experiments prematurely.
  
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Read Original: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/searchnewzlatestnews/~3/371081950/sn-4-20080821NewUpdatestoGoogleWebsiteOptimizer.html

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From: feedburner.com

The Wall Street Journal writes:

Google Inc. will help set up a two-story, 8,000 square-foot headquarters for hundreds of bloggers descending on the Democratic convention in Denver next week, and it will offer similar services at the Republican convention in September, as new media gain influence in politics. (...)

Not only will bloggers have Internet access, workspaces and couches for napping in the Big Tent headquarters, they will be provided food and beverages, Google-sponsored massages, smoothies and a candy buffet. On the final night of the convention, Google is co-sponsoring a bash with Vanity Fair magazine for convention-goers and journalists that has become one of the hottest party invites.

More on the Democratic and Republican National Convention can be found at Wikipedia. I get the feeling everything to do with political personalities and minutiae of the race is already over-covered in much of media, pushing aside the political issues.

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Tag: Google, Political, Blog



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From: feedburner.com

Ever wondered if AOL is turning its back on search for social networking? Well, you might not be too far of the mark.

AOL has just confirmed that it has acquired Socialthing!, a lifestreaming service that competes with FriendFeed.

Socialthing! joins the social platforms stable in the AOL People Networks division, which already includes social network Bebo, chat service AIM, ICQ, Goowy and Yedda.

This purchase could be seen as a little risky for AOL, as Socialthing has only existed for 5 months and is still in private beta. However, AOL must have seen something in the company in order to go ahead with the acquisition.

It seems that AOL has come to the realization that they are never going to be able to compete with Google in search, so they have changed tactics. It would appear that they are going to try to become a key player in the social networking space and attempt to capitalize on some of the current online social trends.

So is this a good strategy for AOL? Well, considering that AOL registers less than 5% share of the total searches in the US , you would think that they really need to go down another online path. Let us know your thoughts by leaving a comment below.

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Read Original: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/searchnewzlatestnews/~3/369036555/sn-4-20080819AOLGivesUponSearchforSocialNetworking.html

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Posted by willcritchlow

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It’s early on a rainy Tuesday morning here in London as I settle down to write the post I should have written yesterday…

What with it being Labor day in the US yesterday, it should have fallen on the trusty global associates to put together something for the SEOmoz blog. Unfortunately we were working instead. I was hoping to hold the fort while the Americans slept before returning to work after the long weekend, but it turns out Rand never sleeps.

Waiting for the bus in the rain this morning was a fairly miserable start to the day, but what if it had started worse? What if I had woken up this morning to find bad things written about me or my company on the internet?

Years ago, we only really had to worry about what was printed in the newspaper and what people said to each other (you know, person to person – in real life – which doesn’t scale all that far). These days, the power of the great world wide web means that people whining to one another can become a search result for your name for ever more. At the expert seminar a couple of weeks ago, Duncan and I talked about two things that have been taking up a lot of our time here at Distilled HQ – international SEO and online reputation management.

This morning, I wanted to talk about a particularly pernicious reputational challenge that we have seen recently and which is very very hard to combat. It is something we talked about at the expert seminar – where we called it ‘wiki-circularity’ – while it isn’t necessarily limited to wikipedia, it’s one of the easiest examples. Here’s the scenario:

You keep your nose clean, behave well, have a wiki page ranking for your name with nothing untoward on it (we’d generally class this as a ‘neutral’ result in a reputation audit)

• Someone (malicious or misguided) writes something untrue (or even libellous) on the wikipedia page
• Mainstream media pick up the story (“checking their facts” on the internet)
• Fictitious story appears on powerful newspaper website (of course, they don’t reference wikipedia –they want to look like they researched the story)

So far, so reputation 2.0. The kicker comes in the final step:

• Wikipedia gets updated to reference the mainstream media story

• Your SERPS now contain a negative result (the wiki page – even if the news story doesn’t rank) and unlike in many situations you have done nothing to deserve it

It is now almost impossible to convince a wiki editor to remove the reference as they tend to assume the sanctity of “real” media – an assumption that breaks spectacularly when “real” media is getting their stories from wikipedia.

What can you do about it?

Unfortunately, as outlined above, once the circle is complete, it’s hard to do very much about it (try some high-powered legal advice – you probably want the page removed from the newspaper website rather than just a retraction elsewhere on their site). This makes it all a powerful argument for monitoring your reputation and that of your business online so that you get a chance to do something about it early. If you don’t have the information, you are dead in the water. For most people and businesses it takes hardly any time to skim everything written about you every day – and for higher profile brands it is definitely worth investing in.

Of course, I would say that, since we have an online reputation monitoring tool but I’m also going to give a shout out to other ways of doing your monitoring such as Andy Beal’s Trackur or if you want to put more work in but do it for free, you can follow Andy’s advice and monitor it all yourself.

If you are monitoring then these kinds of untrue stories can often be quashed early on without recourse to legal action before everything explodes. If the situation does get worse and you have the circular issue happening to you, then this real-world example of a similar thing happening to Sacha Baron Cohen (in a relatively harmless way) shows how with a lot of detective work, the circularity can be broken.

The real world

It’s easy to classify this all as a theoretical problem, but we have seen it in real life (those at the expert seminar got the story with names removed) in a situation where the story was completely untrue.

High profile people are gradually becoming aware of these kinds of issue – I found it interesting to read that the new Republican VP candidate had some wiki-cleaning done the day before the announcement. I’d call that reputation 1.5. They have understood the importance but not the social nature of web 2.0 and the likelihood of getting called out. It seems that the edits were approached in a pretty upfront way – with high-quality changes referencing published sources, but simply the volume and proximity to major news were destined to risk red flags. Rand always steers people away from political discussion in the comments, so remember to discuss online tactics not policy…

Breaking celebrity reputation news

On a different note, this morning I read a story about Soulja Boy having his online identity hijacked. I love his response to it. For a (expletive-laden, R-rated) lesson in how to respond to a reputation attack rapper-style, check out this story.

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Read Original: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/seomoz/~3/381302435/a-reputation-20-problem

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From: feedburner.com

Posted by randfish

Sometimes you come across a set of search results that just don’t make any sense. For most ordinary users, I suspect they probably just move on to the next query, but for those of us deeply embedded in the world of search and SEO, these noggin’-scratchers just keep on itchin’.

I’ve collected these ten over the past couple months and figured I’d share them on the blog with the hopes of getting greater group intelligence to participate in the guessing game:

#10 - Google’s Favorite University

Apparently, it’s the U of…

Arizona? I’ve seen some strangely biased sitelinks in the past, but this one is a serious enigma. Whatever the sitelinks algo is that triggers results like this, someone needs to turn down the knob.

#9 - Wikipedia as Safe Search

Try a query for guido, and note the “related searches” returns a single result - guido wikipedia (which I have a tough time imagining is a popular secondary query, but OK). Now perform that search - guido wikipedia - and note that the Wikipedia page describing the slang term has been replaced by two others for less derogatory uses of the word (and less exact matches). Bizarre, indeed…

#8 - Jobing for Unrelated Domains

I’ve purposely moved results 8, 9 and 10 to the top of the screenshot to illustrate result #10 - I’m not sure how Google ascribed that title to a page/domain that has no content, save the word “hello.” Looks like several years ago, it contained some related content, but it’s been a long time and Google’s still giving an empty page front paeg billing.

#7 - YouTube; The 1st and 2nd Most Important Site on the WWW?

A search for inurl:www inurl:com site:com brings up an interesting listing of important domains, nearly all of which are extremely high PageRank with lots of important links except… A weird YouTube result, the kind that normally only shows when there’s a relevant YouTube video in position #2. Looking at the content and the links, I can’t figure out what it’s doing there. A conspiracy theorist might suggest it’s evidence of Google’s favoring of YouTube content, but I’m wondering if the lack of keywords in the query just brings out some odd behavior.

#6 - Sarah Jessica Reminds us that Google Bombing is Still Alive & Well

The next time someone tells you Google-bombing is dead and gone, show them the obligatory click here example, but don’t forget about Sex & the City’s star, who’s apparently “lovely,” no matter what the keywords say:

I was hoping they were reading the text in the Flash file, but as that appears to be purposefully inaccessible, I’m guessing they just paid lots of attention to all that “lovely” anchor text.

#5 - Your Site Isn’t Here

Search for “Your Site Here” in quotes and find another disturbingly brazen example of pages ranking for a phrase that doesn’t appear anywhere in the text. The weird part is.... Not one of the top 10 results contain that keyword phrase:

It isn’t until you get to result #13 that you finally find a URL containing a text match. To be honest, I’m surprise the results don’t look something more like this - it’s as though they automatically append a -allintitle: parameter to your query.

#4 - Gotta Love the Domain Match

I think I must have mistyped quality when I sutmbled across this query for - quali. When I performed the search last month, the #1 result was for www.quali.com, which contains no content, has fewer than 5 followed links pointing to it and last featured content in 2001 (when it was, apparently, for sale).

p.s. Sadly, it’s now slipped to result #13 - poor quali.com.

#3 - Where to Get Properly Hitched

I’m a busy man, and I need to rustle up a wedding pronto, so naturaly I searched for marriage license seattle, wa.

Having just stopped by the government building recommended by this map, I can say that it is the proper place to acquire a marriage license in Seattle. However, why no address is provided (even clicking the map, you can’t get an address) and why the link points to the wrong page (the correct URL is on Seattle.gov or Metrokc.gov) is something I can’t quite figure out.

#2 - One of these Domain Queries is Not Like the Others

I’m not sure why Google’s giving the query about.com the URL information treatment.

Virtually every other domain query from seomoz.org to cnn.com to porcupineliteraryarts.com gets the standard search results, most of them with sitelink. Since domain queries are also very popular searches, I suspect there’s a lot of confused individuals out there wondering why About gets such odd results.

#1 - Math & the Beatles

Now, I’m well aware that a week technically contains seven days, but sometimes, that’s just not enough time, particularly when you’re in love. Hence, the Beatles gave us Eight Days a Week… But Google’s got something strange to say about that:

I believe that’s 8 divided by 7, but why it’s in the calculator I can’t say. I do know that it works for other numbers of days in a week as well - ten, four, eighty-one. Maybe it’s just their way of being geeky.

Feel free to share your own bizarre search results in the comments, and for our US readers, welcome back from the Labor Day holiday; I hope you all enjoyed the long weekend.

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Read Original: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/seomoz/~3/381168919/the-xfiles-of-google-10-inexplicably-weird-search-results

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From: searchenginewatch.com

Philipp Lenssen over at Blogscoped has a detailed article about Google’s browser project including a link to a great cartoon. Apparently the rumors were true and the former Mozilla employees have been busy.

Read Original: http://feeds.searchenginewatch.com/~r/sewblog/~3/380763509/080901-163034

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From: feedburner.com

Google presents its new Chrome browser in comic book form.

Read Original: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/pandia/vfbc/~3/380771592/709-the-google-chrome-browser.html

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From: searchenginewatch.com

Wordtracker has teamed up Aaron Wall to publish new e-book, “50 Kick-Ass Keyword Strategies” which offers simple, smart and speedy ways to use keywords to attract more customers online.

Or, to keep the alliteration going, “50 Kick-Ass Keyword Strategies"� is packed with pointed, practical tips that focus on what today’(tm)s online marketers care about most: getting real PROFIT from keywords.


We wanted to create a simple, readable book that got people buzzing with fresh keyword ideas, ideas they could start using right away to improve their business profit. And knowing how busy people are, we insisted that Aaron cut out the fluff and get to the meat of what you

really need to know, said Ken McGaffin, the CMO Wordtracker.com, in a press release issued over the weekend.

Online success is not so much about spending tons of money, but more about working hard to come up with unique, creative and useful ideas that attract and engage your audiences, said Aaron Wall in the release.


This practical e-book gives businesses of all sizes lessons and insights that include:

-- Clever, little-known strategies for getting more valuable website visitors.

-- Outwitting competitors, and impressing clients with surefire ways to skyrocket their website traffic.

-- How to reach beyond the obvious keywords to discover terms and phrases with untapped commercial value.

-- How getting rid of words like free and discount can boost your conversion rates and get better customers.

-- How mining analytics data can be the key to uncovering valuable, low-competition keywords that bring in valuable streams of traffic.

-- How a site’s search box is the key to finding profitable new keywords and content ideas as well as ideas for new products to add to a website.

Wall added, (tm)s not just the right keywords that guarantee your online success—but how you use them. Most marketers tend to blindly follow the same, tired research path that everybody else follows. As a result, they miss out on all of the traffic and profits that some clever keyword thinking could bring them.

50 Kick-Ass Keyword Strategies� is available as an e-book at www.wordtracker.com/academy/kick-ass and retails at $39. Check it out.

Or, check out my interview with McGaffin at SES London 2008. It appears that one of the new groups to discover the power of keyword research is ... journalists! There goes the neighborhood.

<iframe class="embeddedvideo" src="http://www.youtube.com/v/rcXpy5JZ8Ng&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="425" height="344"></iframe>

Ken McGaffin, WordTracker, SES London 2008 Keyword Research

Read Original: http://feeds.searchenginewatch.com/~r/sewblog/~3/380516216/080901-100326

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From: feedburner.com

Twenty-five years ago today (boy that was a long time) I finished the internship that changed my life. My bosses at Spinnaker Software gave me a lot of room and I ran with it.

Last March, I posted about an intern program I was starting.

I was overwhelmed by the quality of what I got back. (The quantity was expected… interesting internships are hard to find). I heard from students on most continents, with a huge variety of backgrounds and life experiences. And these people were smart.

Unable to just pick a PDF or two, I invited the applicants to join a Facebook group I had set up. Then I let them meet each other and hang out online.

It was absolutely fascinating. Within a day, the group had divided into four camps:

• The game-show contestants, quick on the trigger, who were searching for a quick yes or no. Most of them left.
• The lurkers. They were there, but we couldn’t tell.
• The followers. They waited for someone to tell them what to do.
• The leaders. A few started conversations, directed initiatives and got to work.

Want to guess who I hired? (It was a paid gig and five ended up spending time with me in NY on a somewhat rolling basis). If you’re hiring for people to work online, I can’t imagine not screening people in this way. This is the work, and you can watch people do it for real before you hire them.

As I went to send a note to the 150 or so who didn’t make the cut, it felt like a waste. A waste for me, surely, because here were a large number of over-talented, under-employed students facing a boring summer. And for them, too, because I thought some might want a chance to continue the virtual experience.

So I started a group on Basecamp and invited the rest of the interns to try an unpaid virtual experience. The idea was that I’d provide a platform and some projects, and they could (if they thought it might be interesting) participate online. No grunt work, just interesting stuff to try. To my amazement, more than sixty took me up on it. The conversations ebbed and flowed, the work got done (or didn’t) but I think everyone learned a lot.

Part of the deal was that active participants would get a shout out here on the blog. So we’ve put together a PDF of handmade bios of some of the coolest interns in the program. A shortcut for anyone looking for smart folks from around the world.

If I did it again, I’d definitely do it again. I think that smaller, more closely managed projects would probably lead to more productivity, but I also know that when faced with opportunity and freedom, amazing people get stuff done.

If you gave this a try, I think it would be a brilliant move, for you and for the people you work with. It’s clear that formal education is failing the smart kids entering our field (not certain what ‘our field’ is, but you know what I mean). We need to create pathways for students to discover that there’s absolutely nothing holding them back.

Read Original: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/typepad/sethsmainblog/~3/380651004/learning-from-a.html

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From: feedburner.com

Karim points us to this update on Kiva.org.

Kiva doesn’t fund factory workers on an assembly line. They fund entrepreneurs who are changing a tiny portion of the world. It scales.

Read Original: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/typepad/sethsmainblog/~3/380634279/the-new-meaning.html

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