Below is what happened in search today, as reported on
Search Engine Land and from other
places across the web:
From Search Engine Land:
- Court OKs
Narrow Use of Competitor Trademarks in Search Ads & Meta Tags
A U.S. District Court has ruled that the use of keyword-triggered ads and
keyword metatags using trademarked terms cannot confuse consumers if the
resulting ads/search results don’t display a competitor’s trademarks. This is
a narrow ruling and doesn’t give search marketers carte-blanche to use
trademarked terms. Rather, it means it’s OK to bid on a trademarked search
term that triggers an ad that does not contain the trademark. Similarly, it’s
OK to use trademarks in meta tags, as long as the trademarks don’t show up on
search result pages. Eric Goldman over at the Technology and Marketing blog
has more… - Open Letter To
Wikipedia Editors: Yes, Matt Cutts Is Notable
Dear Wikipedia Editors: I came back from vacation today to discover that in
(some of) your infinite crowd wisdom, apparently the page at Wikipedia about
Google’s Matt Cutts might get deleted. Wow. It’s inept things like this that
can instantly reduce any respect I have for Wikipedia that builds up over
time…. - Advertisers
Cutting Google AdWords Spending With Surge of Keyword Prices
Most Google AdWords advertisers have been facing the problem of rising pay per
click prices. But while in the past many advertisers have gone with the
increased prices as the cost of doing business on AdWords, recently more
advertisers have decided to significantly cut their AdWords spending because
many of the keyword prices have resulted in advertisers being priced out of
profitability. Marketwatch recently spoke with six advertisers who all spent
between $4 million and $10 million in 2006 who plan to spend less in 2007…. - LinkedIn
Answers Launched
Now joining the questions answering game is LinkedIn, with its new LinkedIn
Answers service, just two days old. Jason Calacanis pinged me about it just
via instant message, saying he loves it. Sequoia Capital is an investor in
LinkedIn — and Jason now works for Sequoia — so you can easily assume some
interest in giving me a heads-up. But then again, I don’t disbelieve him
saying he loves it. Jason pointed over to Who’s are the top 10 web designer in
the world today? that he posted a day ago and says he got great answers. I
couldn’t judge,… - An Open Letter
to Paid Search Networks
Search marketer and "recovering attorney" Jeff Rohrs has published The Sausage
Manifesto, an open letter to paid search providers asking critical questions
about billing practices, transparency, click fraud and other issues. He asks a
number of pointed questions, then lists eleven requests that he says failure
to respond to could damage the industry. His requests: 1. Talk, Don’t Lecture
2. Appreciate Our Unique Circumstances 3. Invest in Proportion to the Problem
4. Acknowledge that Tracking Alone Is Not the Answer 5. Improve Click Quality
Customer Service 6. Build a Click Quality Education Resource Center 7. Light a
Fire Under the… - Search Engine
Land: December 2006 Statistics Review
As promised, here’s the first in regular monthly updates on how Search Engine
Land is growing. I hope the traffic statistics look will be both interesting
to the curious and informative about how various places can turn into traffic
generators. For December 2006, we had about 93,000 page views, or about 4,400
page views per day. Actually, those are "AdViews," the number of times ads
were shown as reported by our ad serving software. We only began showing ads
from December 11 onward, so I have to turn to our Google Analytics statistics
to talk about the entire month. Let’s… - Jimmy Wales
Interviewed Live On BBC Radio Five Live
Jimmy Wales was interviewed live on the BBC Simon Mayo programme this
afternoon. It was an interesting conversation, mainly centred on the Wikipedia
obviously, and geared towards an audience who wouldn’t be expected to know
much about the subject. The interview started about 30 minutes into the
programme and you should be able to catch it for a couple of days in the
archive (linked from the webpage) before it disappears. I have done a quick
attempted verbatim report on it in my weblog though cannot entirely vouch for
its accuracy 100%, but it might be of some interest…. - Search Engine
ChaCha Announces $6 Million Round
Led by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos’ Bezos Expeditions, social search engine ChaCha
announced that it had secured a $6 million funding round. ChaCha launched in
Q3 last year and employs a network of live guides (college students, stay at
home parents, retirees) to help answer user queries in real time in addition
to providing traditional algorithmic search. Here’s my most recent write up on
the engine from November. Given its network of distributed guides, ChaCha is
one of the more interesting recent search launches. While it started out quite
slowly, the service and functionality have been getting much better…. - Yahoo
Introduces Yahoo Go 2.0, Mobile Search & Other Apps
Last year at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), Yahoo Chairman Terry Semel
introduced Yahoo Go, an initiative seeking to push and integrate Yahoo content
beyond the desktop on mobile devices and TV. According to the Wall Street
Journal (subscription required) the company is going to introduce an upgraded
version of Go for mobile today at this year’s CES (Postscript: Yahoo Go 2.0 is
now up):…
Search News Headlines From Elsewhere:
- Google’s Media
Ambassador: What About Us Sounds So Unfriendly?, PaidContent.org -
Yahoo China Portal to Be Reorganized, Associated Press - Podcast: Google
Starts 2007 Under Fire; Matt Cutts Says He’ll Leave Google (Someday); Google
Jet Spotted & More, Daily SearchCast
Craigslist Enlists Police, ISPs, and Community to Fight "Spamvertising",
ClickZ-
7 Search Predictions for 2007, iMedia Connection -
SEO: Art, Science, Bollocks Or What?, ClickZ -
SEM and SEO: Rocket Science or Just Plain Science? Part2, ClickZ -
Let’s Review: A Busy Day for Mobile Search, News from Yahoo & Google, Review
of What Others Offer, ResourceShelf.com -
Samsung Phones, Bundled with Google Apps, Google Operating System - Company
XYZ Releases Google Killer, Google Blogoscoped - Google’s
Password Strength "API", Google Blogoscoped -
Playful perks propel Google to top of Fortune’s 100 best places to work,
MarketWatch - Google
means gold for Golden State, Associated Press - Ex-Googlers
Speak Out, Google Blogoscoped -
The Future of SEO in a Personalized Search Interface, Out Of My Gord -
Fraudwall, an anti-click fraud company, raises millions, VentureBeat - Eric Schmidt Videos on
Innovation, Seo By The Sea -
Google Experiments With Utterly Old School Video Ads, Publishing 2.0 -
Digg is New Media, Diggnation is Old Media, Micro Persuasion - Banned on Digg? Try
TinyURL to Bypass Digg Ban, Search Engine Journal -
There Is More to Digg than the Homepage, Pronet Advertising - What To Do
When Google Tells People Your Website Is Dangerous?, TechDirt -
Press releases return to AOL News, Search Engine Watch Blog -
Drive More Traffic to Your Maps API Site – Include KML Files in Your Sitemap,
Official Google Blog -
Guide To Fixing Google Duplicate Content & Canonical URL Issues, Search
Engine Roundtable -
Google to help build telescope, Associated Press -
Jon Schepke Back in Business with SIM Partners, Marketing Pilgrim -
SEO and Website Terminology: Clearing up Common Misnomers, Search Engine
Roundtable -
Interview: Amanda Watlington on Second Life and Blogs, Online Marketing
Blog - Big
Layoffs At Insider Pages, TechCrunch