Yahoo-Google Search Advertising Deal Runs Into Resistance

Adage reports "Yahoo's agreement with Google for online search ads may be generating some pricing and antitrust worries from advertisers, but in Congress the deal is increasingly raising broader concerns about ad targeting, privacy and competition....could reinvigorate a 10-year-old fight over privacy issues and lead to closer congressional oversight of online marketing activity."

Could this be another nail in a coffin for Yahoo?

Wicked Google PageRank Rumours

At Google Rumours some possible far reaching changes in how Google ranks websitesare outlined, these include:

Google PageRank To Be Reset
PageRank to be reset to zero and replaced
Two clicks for AdSense
rel=”nofollow” replaced by rel=”dofollow”

True or not these are thought provoking ideas...

Google Changing How it Ranks Sites from Links to Relevance

Jim Hedger at ISDB theorises that "Google is radically reworking its primary ranking algorithms" mainly because "Internet users are beginning to use their social networks as web-portals, the same way they once used Google and Yahoo!. Social networks are all about linkage however many if not most links found within social networks are useless from a search ranking perspective."

He also looks at recent patent applications by Google and concludes that " Relevance and location are in, links are likely on their way out."

He does concede that links are still needed for the search engine spiders to find and spider web sites but that relevancy to users will be uppermost - as usual with Google - this releveancy measure will come from Google tracking the path of searchers from query to exit, so to optimise for Google Search Engine Optimisers will have to consider how Google perceives the paths taken by each site-visitor on pages and sites.

Google instant site indexing ..almost

It seems from Matt Cutts official Google blog that Google’s index is getting fresher and fresher. No more waiting trembling with fear for 3 months to find out what the next Google Dance will do to your search engine rankings.. Matt Cutts writes that "Now some documents can show up in minutes instead of hours or days"

The example he gives relates to blog postings and I have to wonder if this applies equally to all blogging formats or just blogger blogs?

This rapid indexing does open up an opportunity - if Google is indexing content almost immeduiatly, it means website owners have chance to rank prominently for important key words and phrases faster than ever before.

To deter spammers using this as another way to fool Google it seems thatthe bloggers being indexed instantly are longstanding bloggs which also tick the other boxes of the Google algorithms.

Google's GBuy Could Be 'Revolutionary' - Forbes.com

Another move away from the "pure" motive of organising the worlds knowledge to compiling commercially usefull knowledge?

Google's GBuy Could Be 'Revolutionary' - Forbes.com: "RBC Capital Markets maintained an 'outperform' rating on Google in light of the impending launch of the company's online payment system, currently known as 'GBuy.'

Consumers using GBuy, which is set for release on June 28, will be taken off the merchant's site to complete the payment...This will enable Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) to capture e-commerce transaction data, driving more precise targeting in future searches.

"If harnessed, the precision of this targeting could be revolutionary," wrote RBC analyst Jordan Rohan

On its core search results pages, Google will designate each merchant accepting GBuy as a "trusted GBuy merchant." "

Why I'll Never Be a Google VP

Me neither!
Why I'll Never Be a Google VP: "Mayer holds many of the personality traits of tech super-stars, the interview also demonstrates two key reasons why I'll never be a Google VP. First, I need more than 5 hours of sleep a night, second, I like spending time with my husband and daughter. ;)"

Google Inc. Tweaks Its Video Service - Forbes.com

Wonder what percentage of video uploads are porn? 90+?

Google Inc. Tweaks Its Video Service - Forbes.com: "Internet search leader Google Inc. is making it easier to post and share online videos on its site, hoping to widen the appeal of a service that so far has been eclipsed by upstart YouTube.com.

Until the system was changed late Tuesday, uploading a video to Google's site required a special piece of software to be installed on a computer. The Mountain View-based company has retooled its service so that step is no longer required...

As online video becomes more popular, Google is trying to gain ground on much smaller company in San Mateo, Calif-based YouTube.

Since its debut a year ago, the video-sharing site has blossomed into a cultural phenomenon. YouTube says viewers watch more than 40 million videos daily on its site."

Google news - Aussie internship program: ZDNet Australia: News: Software

ZDNet reports that Google has a new program to recruit Australian university students work in projects in Google's Sydney office. Lars Rasmussen, Google's local head of engineering said 5-10 technical and non-technical positions would be on offer. The report also states that Gmail is now available in Australia

Google plans Aussie internship program: ZDNet Australia: News: Software: "Search giant Google will this summer launch a student internship program that will see Australian university students work on projects in its new Sydney headquarters...

as....part of Google's ongoing plans to operate a fully fledged research and development centre in Sydney. The spacious new office next to Google's old quarters in Sydney's Darling Harbour will give those plans a boost...
The local developments will also see well-known Google software engineer Rob Pike split his time between Australia and the United States in an effort to help build Google's Australian engineering offices.

Pike is known for his work on the original Unix, Plan 9 and Inferno operating systems at Bell Labs.


Google also revealed today that it had given Australians the option of signing up to use Google's popular "GMail" Web e-mail service."

Google Press Center: new techie bits

Google Press Center: Press Release: "May 10, 2006 - Today, Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) announced new technologies to enhance and improve the search experience. Three new products � Google Co-op, Google Desktop 4, and Google Notebook � advance the state of the art in search by helping users worldwide find and share more relevant information. The products all incorporate new capabilities that leverage user communities, enabling users to either share more information with others or benefit from other users' expertise to improve the accuracy of search results....

As a first step, Google has worked with partners to annotate web pages related to health and city guides and to offer dozens of subscribed links to specialized content such as restaurant and movie information. Going forward, the broader online community will begin building out new topic areas and subscribed links to help improve the way people find and discover information online.

Users can subscribe to content and providers at www.google.com/coop/directory. Google Co-op is available today on all English language Google domains including Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom...

Google Trends builds on the Google Zeitgeist to help users find facts and trends related to Google usage around the world. Google Trends enables users to learn how popular a particular search term has been on Google over time and see the relevant news articles that ran on that subject.

"For the first time ever, Google is making it possible to sift through billions of search queries from around the world to see what people are thinking about," said Marissa Mayer, vice president, Search Products and User Experience, Google Inc."

Google goes back to its search roots - vnunet.com: "Google goes back to its search roots ...New products focus on core business...

"All these [new] products are centred around search," said Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president for search products and user experience. "Our core, and where we innovate most, is inside search"

Google Press Center: new techie bits

Google Press Center: Press Release: "May 10, 2006 - Today, Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) announced new technologies to enhance and improve the search experience. Three new products � Google Co-op, Google Desktop 4, and Google Notebook � advance the state of the art in search by helping users worldwide find and share more relevant information. The products all incorporate new capabilities that leverage user communities, enabling users to either share more information with others or benefit from other users' expertise to improve the accuracy of search results....

As a first step, Google has worked with partners to annotate web pages related to health and city guides and to offer dozens of subscribed links to specialized content such as restaurant and movie information. Going forward, the broader online community will begin building out new topic areas and subscribed links to help improve the way people find and discover information online.

Users can subscribe to content and providers at www.google.com/coop/directory. Google Co-op is available today on all English language Google domains including Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom...

Google Trends builds on the Google Zeitgeist to help users find facts and trends related to Google usage around the world. Google Trends enables users to learn how popular a particular search term has been on Google over time and see the relevant news articles that ran on that subject.

"For the first time ever, Google is making it possible to sift through billions of search queries from around the world to see what people are thinking about," said Marissa Mayer, vice president, Search Products and User Experience, Google Inc."

a href="http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2155794/google-emphasises-search">Google goes back to its search roots - vnunet.com: "Google goes back to its search roots ...New products focus on core business...

"All these [new] products are centred around search," said Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president for search products and user experience. "Our core, and where we innovate most, is inside search"

Google admits to being disorganised - vnunet.com

Page comments that being disorganised is part of Google culture...how does that reflect on the mission to organise the worlds knowledge? Such internal contradiction may well be Google's achilles heel....

Google admits to being disorganised - vnunet.com: "Google is growing too quickly and has become 'disorganised' as a result, according to the company's co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin."


Google Corporate Information: Company Overview: "Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. "

Schmidt's Google Goes To Authorities About MSN - Forbes.com

Fair or unfair? Schmidt's Google Goes To Authorities About MSN - Forbes.com: "Google, led by Chief Executive Eric Schmidt, seems to be feeling the heat already from the impending update of Microsoft's Internet Explorer, the Web browser which is used by 85% of the world's PCs and which is set to be released with Windows Vista later this year as an updated version 7....

The complaint has initially prompted some to chortle at what looks to be a case of the pot calling the kettle black--Google happens to have its own search tool integrated into Microsoft's rival web browsers Firefox and Opera. But Google is deadly serious. A spokesman for the search giant, Steve Langdon, said that the company had approached the U.S. Department of Justice and European Commission about the issue, though no formal complaint had been filed.

"We have spoken with the commission as part of its investigation of Vista," Langdon said. "We have expressed our concerns that Microsoft's approach to setting search defaults in IE7 benefits Microsoft while taking away choice from users." He added that Google was not aware of a similar investigation in the U.S. but had also spoken to the Department of Justice "generally about our business and the importance of preserving competition in the search market."
....this points to the fact that Google will not rest on its laurels when it looks like its share of the market is at stake. "

Google - Notifying webmasters of penalties

Does this mean that sites not signed up to Google sitemaps are more likely to be penalised? Cutts writes that Google is testing notiying webmasters of spam issues with their site via the Google sitemaps webmaster interface.


Cutts writes somewhat confusingly as if the spam detection is done by humans carrying the inference that is done manually but it is Google , the entity, that contacts webmasters....

"if the webspam team detects a spammer that is creating dozens or hundreds of sites with doorway pages followed by a sneaky redirect, there’s no reason that we’d want the spammer to realize that we’d caught those pages. So Google clearly shouldn’t contact every site that is penalized–it would tip off spammers that they’d been caught, and then the spammers would start over and try to be sneakier next time."

Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO � Notifying webmasters of penalties

Google’s Webspam team is working with our Sitemaps team to alert some (but not all) site owners of penalties for their site. In my world (webmasters), this is both a Big Deal and a Good Thing, even though it’s still an experiment. Sign up for Sitemaps to try it out.

....as Google grows, we get more of a chance to “go back and fix things,” to build the ideal search engine. And part of doing that is having more and better communication with webmasters...

Pages Dropping Out of Big Daddy Index

Most posters blame duplicate content issues for pages dropping from the Google index....Pages Dropping Out of Big Daddy Index at the Boston PubCon Matt Cutts confirmed that Google is to change the process used to spider pages.

Caching will be implimented on the spider and thus reducing the requests that Googlebot will be required to make of a page."

google travel - Google News

I was hanging fire to blog this to see if anything came of the rumours....not yet it would appear....google travel - Google News: "Travel looks like Google's next target Times Online, UK - Apr 17, 2006
... has kept the subject of the press briefing tightly under wraps, and it is by no means necessarily the case that the London briefing will involve Google Travel. ...

Google Travel Coming Soon?
Search Engine Watch - Apr 17, 2006
... Google: Senior Account Executive, Travel Vertical.' Russell explains that the job posting details 'sounds' that 'Google is building a Google Travel brand.' I ...

Google to launch travel portal?
Monsters and Critics.com, UK - Apr 18, 2006
... account executive for a travel vertical, was posted before the Easter weekend and analysts are speculating that the travel vertical will be Google Travel. ...
Is Google going to launch a travel portal? Eye For Travel
Google Travel Rumor On The Road WebProNews"


Yahoo flexes its muscles in travel search business - Technology - International Herald Tribune: " Yahoo flexes its muscles in travel search business By Bob Tedeschi The New York Times THURSDAY, APRIL 20, 2006

Yahoo announced last week that it had integrated its FareChase technology into its main search engine, so that it could scan multiple sites for airlines, hotels and car rentals and show the lowest-price offers directly in results whenever someone typed in, say, 'lowest fares to Las Vegas.' Previously, users had to click around Yahoo's site to gain access to FareChase, or turn to one of the handful of competing so-called meta- search sites like SideStep, Kayak or Mobissimo for a similar specialized search. The move is perhaps the most aggressive countermeasure a major search engine has taken against the growing number of sites that specialize in searching specific categories, like jobs, medical information, shopping or travel.

Indeed, the competition between Yahoo and its travel-specific counterparts appears to be moving to a new level. Yahoo initially responded to the threat in 2004 by buying FareChase, then SideStep's chief competitor, for an undisclosed sum. FareChase became an obscure corner on Yahoo's site, while speculation mounted as to how the company would ultimately use the technology.

Google last year began offering some travel-specific search results where users who typed in a travel route and dates were given a search box with some information already filled in, along with links to online travel agencies to find prices and book the flights. But analysts say Google's offering is far less sophisticated than Yahoo's or that of meta-search competitors. (Google declined to comment on such comparisons.)

Other analysts say they believe that Google and MSN may simply follow Yahoo's lead and buy the niche search players. "If someone wants to play catch-up fast, that's the way to go," said Dougherty, of Nielsen/NetRatings.

Life just got easier for travelers looking for bargains on the Web, while for some of Yahoo's competitors, things just got a bit more complicated.

Yahoo announced last week that it had integrated its FareChase technology into its main search engine, so that it could scan multiple sites for airlines, hotels and car rentals and show the lowest-price offers directly in results whenever someone typed in, say, "lowest fares to Las Vegas."

Previously, users had to click around Yahoo's site to gain access to FareChase, or turn to one of the handful of competing so-called meta- search sites like SideStep, Kayak or Mobissimo for a similar specialized search.

The move is perhaps the most aggressive countermeasure a major search engine has taken against the growing number of sites that specialize in searching specific categories, like jobs, medical information, shopping or travel.

Indeed, the competition between Yahoo and its travel-specific counterparts appears to be moving to a new level. Yahoo initially responded to the threat in 2004 by buying FareChase, then SideStep's chief competitor, for an undisclosed sum. FareChase became an obscure corner on Yahoo's site, while speculation mounted as to how the company would ultimately use the technology.

It also comes on the threshold of a major media campaign by a rival travel search engine, Kayak.com.

"This is a very smart move for Yahoo," said Heather Dougherty, an analyst with Nielsen/NetRatings, an Internet measurement company. "It's the first time any of the big search engines have tried to integrate this type of searching into their results. And FareChase finally isn't going to be off sitting on its own."

Rather, it is central to a Yahoo user's experience, or at least close to it. Last week, for instance, typing in a search for "flights New York to San Francisco" returned the lowest price for that flight over the next few months - $279 for a trip from May 5 to May 9 - and a box offering the chance to search other dates. If a user's location has been indicated in previous Yahoo searches - on the site's Local or Maps sections, for instance - simply typing in "flights to San Francisco" will produce the same result.

"This is definitely a step for Yahoo, and a step for the industry," Jasper Malcolmson, director of Yahoo travel services, said about the integration of meta-search with general search results. The integration of FareChase highlights a series of upgrades to Yahoo's travel offering, including introduction of a satellite map service showing hotel locations.

Yahoo's new functionality could significantly increase user exposure to this type of service, which has until now struggled to attract attention. Just 12 percent of Internet travel shoppers now visit such meta-search sites, according to a recent survey by Forrester Research, a technology consulting firm. But that figure is twice what it was just a year ago, despite the fact that none of these services has done much advertising at all.

Roughly 4.4 million people visited such sites in March, according to Nielsen/NetRatings - a tiny number compared with the number of visits to Expedia, the leading travel commerce site, which attracted 16.4 million.

But FareChase and its two biggest competitors, Kayak.com and SideStep.com, offer a significantly different experience from other travel sites. SideStep, for instance, scans the inventories of 100 airline sites, as well as that of the online travel agency Orbitz.com, and lists the best fares on a single page.

In terms of revenue, travel search sites have much ground to make up to challenge the general travel sites. SideStep and Kayak are privately held, and Yahoo does not break out revenue figures for its FareChase division, but analysts said these sites earned only a small fraction of what the big travel agencies did, because they handle far fewer bookings and have fewer sources of revenue....

Kayak and SideStep earn undisclosed commissions for customers they refer to suppliers, but as Rob Solomon, SideStep's chief executive, said, "The challenge for all of us is scale - how to go from three to five million users to seven to 10 million."

Google last year began offering some travel-specific search results where users who typed in a travel route and dates were given a search box with some information already filled in, along with links to online travel agencies to find prices and book the flights. But analysts say Google's offering is far less sophisticated than Yahoo's or that of meta-search competitors. (Google declined to comment on such comparisons.)

Other analysts say they believe that Google and MSN may simply follow Yahoo's lead and buy the niche search players. "If someone wants to play catch-up fast, that's the way to go," said Dougherty, of Nielsen/NetRatings"

Google & Gambling Ads

Not new news but I know for a fact that Google adwords for gambling relating sites including casinos many on gambling sites are still making money... so unless Google is assiduaosly handing over all that revenue it is still profiting from illegal gambling proceeds....Search Engine Journal � Yahoo and Google Sued Over Gambling Advertisements

Two years on from the above judgement and Google are still displaying gambling related adwords - many times on gambling related sites so are still raking in a fair portion of dollars from this multi billion pound industry in direct contradiction of their own T&Cs..Evil? Or a failing of their technology? Why not just ban gambling ads for the whole of America and let the rest of the world operate according to their local legislation?

Google wins rights to Aussie algorithm - Breaking - Technology - smh.com.au

Google wins rights to Aussie algorithm - Breaking - Technology - smh.com.au "The algorithm, or search engine tool, is called Orion and was developed by UNSW PhD student Ori Allon at the university's School of Computer Science.

Orion works as an add-on to existing search engines to improve the relevance of searches and won praise from Microsoft founder Bill Gates last year.

The algorithm is a problem-solving computational procedure and is the building block for all search engines such as those operated by Google and Yahoo!

Orion finds pages where the content is about a topic strongly related to the key word. It then returns a section of the page, and lists other topics related to the key word so the user can pick the most relevant.

The results of the query are displayed immediately in the form of expanded text extracts, giving the searcher the relevant information without having to go to the website - although there is still that option."

SMH previously interviewed Allon "The Sydney Morning Herald Blogs: MashUp / Google buys Aussie invention Archives: "Contrast the difference between September when the University of NSW unveiled the project to today, when all they can say is that Ori is now working with Google."

See Google's Redesign

See Google's Redesign Experiment

I cannot get it to load but the screenshots show the new layout...

Google employees' wireless patents published | CNET News.com

Three new patents from Google signal their move into advertising in the wireless market..

Google employees' wireless patents published | CNET News.com: "The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has published three wireless-related patents filed by Google employees as the search giant seeks to delve deeper into the wireless market.

The patent applications, filed by Google employees Wesley Chan, Shioupyn Shen and former Google product management director Georges Harik, propose lowering the cost of wireless access by offsetting the costs via advertisements on the service....

Patent application No. 20060058019 seeks to develop a system for dynamically modifying the appearance of browser screens on a client device when connecting to a wireless access point. Under the patent, the browser's appearance would be modified to reflect the brand associated with the wireless access-point provider...

No. 20060059044 and No. 20060059043, cover ads based on wireless access points and wireless access at a reduced rate, respectively."

In another privacy flap, Google email riles spam fighters - MarketWatch

If your gmail is not being delivered this could explain why.....In another privacy flap, Google email riles spam fighters - MarketWatch:

"The problems experienced by Schwingel and possibly thousands of other Gmail users are a consequence of Google's sometimes-hawkish policy on privacy. In an unusual practice, Google makes Gmail users virtually anonymous. That's led some spam blockers to occasionally blacklist entire Gmail servers, the massive Google computers that hold many Gmail accounts, because they can't separate the spammers from the legitimate emailers.


Some publicly available black lists, including the widely used Spamhaus list, have a hands-off approach to Gmail to avoid blocking legitimate email. Others, most notably IronPort Systems Inc.'s SpamCop, aren't willing to give Gmail a free pass.

"Gmail has taken an extreme position on privacy that inhibits the antispam community from doing their job, and it's ticking people off," says Tom Gilles, co-founder of IronPort...

....assessing reputation, which requires knowing a senders' identity, is now at the cutting edge of antispam technology. Black lists, which are rosters of spammer IP addresses, are used by many organizations as a first line of defense, though experts stress they should be used with care to avoid blocking legitimate email.

Google's strategy seems to be to attain both reliability and privacy for its email service through the sheer force of its engineering prowess, rather than by hewing to the informal protocols of the Internet community...

Gilles of IronPort says Gmail servers only land on the SpamCop list "every few months," and that Google is good at keeping spammers out of its system and at fixing any problems so its servers are delisted."