Used To Be The Best Blog Search

Technorati used to be the place to go for blog search. Google, though, has usurped their position and left Technorati far behind. The site is now floundering about, trying to find a reason to be.

in reference to: Technorati (view on Google Sidewiki)

China's Alternatives To Banning YouTube

Instead of just banning YouTube and keyword-filtering on Google News, the Great Firewall Of China could have been a bit more creative with the way they handled their problems with Tibet.

Chinese users trying to access YouTube, the Yahoo! home page and even the UK Guardian just see a blank page. When they search Google News for anything related to Tibet, they also see a blank page.

Instead, when people searched for Tibet, the government of China could have delivered:

• A Google page saying "Did you mean China?"
  

Or, when someone searched for Tibet, they could have delivered a Google page saying:

• No such country found!
  

Live Search Users 3 Times More Interested In Sponsored Links

According to the latest post on the Microsoft adCenter Blog searchers on Live Search are 3 times more likely to look at the sponsored listings first than those using Google.

Additionaly, they have published a chart (shown below), based on research done in partnership with Nielsen NetRatings, which shows that searchers on Live Search are significantly more likely than those on other search engines to regard a website more favourably if it appears in the sponsored listings.



Microsoft users might trust sponsored results more than Google users do, but this is probably more due to the type of users that visit each of the search engines rather than better quality or trustworthiness of one over the other.

Microsoft Live search users tend not to be as sophisticated. They tend to be older people and non-tech savvy users who use the default settings on their PC rather than using Google, which is widely recognised as being technically superior, by those in the know.

These same people also probably do not even realise the difference between Sponsored Links on Live Search and their organic results, and therefore just trust whatever they see right at the top of the search resuts pages.

Yahoo! Search Marketing Changes Reserve Prices

Yahoo! Search Marketing announced yesterday that minimum bids will no longer be fixed at $.10 for Sponsored Search.

Google removed their limits ages ago. Yet Yahoo! did nothing.

Yahoo! launched their new Panama system after Google had removed their limits, and yet they didn't think to eliminate their reserve minimums at that time either.

Now when they have almost no market share to speak of, and everyone's moved on, they go and make this lame announcement. Why do they even bother?

Inside AdWords: Advertise on more than 1,700 AM/FM radio stations

Back in april 2007 Google inked a deal with Clear Channel broadcasting to tap into their vast network of radio stations and offer their ad inventory to Google AdWords customers. Today, almost 7 months since that announcement was made, Google announced on the Inside AdWords blog that AdWords Advertise could now reach the audience of Clear Channel's 1,700 AM/FM radio stations.

Clear Channel's reach is is far flung and covers all major US cities. AdWords audio ads can now be considered to be a full-fledged product and not just something Google were trying on the side.

Time will tell whether Audio Ads turn out to be anywhere near as successful as Video or Plain Text Ads.

Showing location under your AdWords Ad

Ever wondered why some AdWords ads include the name of the location underneath the ad text?

Well Google has just clarified this on their blog post AdWords Ads: what's your location?

According to the post, the location is included below ads that are regionally targeted when the search query or visitor IP address match the user to the target location of the ads.

For advertisers, this means that they must start by geo-targeting their ads and/or include location names alongside regular keywords in order to have the location included along with the ad.

Having this location show up alongside ads is beneficial because it differentiates your ad (5 lines versus 4) from the rest.

Microsoft Heading For Shopping Comparison

Microsoft announced that they have acquired Jellyfish.com, a Wisconsin-based company that provides shopping comparison search. This announcement comes shortly after Live Search's update that provides special attention to the shopping vertical.

The software giant are relentless in their pursuit of Google. This new acquisition will most likely result in Microsoft developing a competitor for Google Product Search.

Jellyfish provides a good mix of social shopping and discount shopping in one easy to use shopping search site.

Step By Step Calculation For Top Ad Placement

Earlier today the Inside AdWords blog announced an upcoming change to the top ad placement formula. The new formula uses a keywords Maximum CPC rather than average CPC to calculate whether or not the ad will get placed above the organic search results.

The way the placement / bid process will now be worked out is as follows:

1. Calculate Quality Score using CTR, ad quality, relevance
   
2. Retrieve advertiser's Max CPC for the keyword
3. Is the Max CPC higher than Top Placement threshold?
   • Yes: Eligible for placement above organic results
   • No: Not eligible. Ad will be placed only on right
     
4. Calculate Ad Score = Quality Score * Max CPC
5. Determine ad placement by comparing with other advertisers' Ad Scores
6. Is ad position within Top 3?
   • Yes: Is ad eligible for placement above organic results?
     • Yes: Place in one of the 3 positions above organic results
     • No: Place ad in the right-hand column
       
   • No: Place ad as per normal method
     

Spanky New Version of Google Analytics

More than a year after its launch, Google Analytics is now being updated to provide a spanking new navigation system and look and feel.

Official announcement of the New Version of Google Analytics!

The prior version's navigation was not always intuitive... i often had to walk clients through it and had great trouble trying to explain how they can view various reports, and most probably never bothered after the first time!

Hopefully, the new version of Google Analytics will be better. I'll blog about it when our account gets updated.

Google Responds To Viacom - Let The Fun Begin!

While the official Google blog has sunny posts about their Sydney and California offices, their legal team have been working on much more serious (or so we would think!) matters...

They have prepared an official response to Viacom's lawsuit alleging that Google's YouTube infringes copyrights by hosting material that users upload, which Google knows to be in direct violation of Viacom's copyrights.

Google's official response was basically "meh!"... Viacom pushed for the DMCA law that limits webmasters' liability for content published by users, so they should now live with the consequences!

Viacom's rather valid response was that Google claims to "organise all the world's information", so they'll be damned if they accept that Google doesn't know what's in it's own backyard! ... in other words, everyone's gotta believe Google can easily detect what's being uploaded to YouTube, and stop it from being published if they want to.

True... hear! hear!