September 30, 2007

LookSmart Closes Wisenut Search Engine

LookSmart seems be trimming their suite of search related products as they have closed the doors on the Wisenut.com website, which was once a respected search engine technology and helped to power LookSmart search.

Wisenet has been swept under the carpet for years as LookSmart has repositioned itself as a paid search network & enterprise technology, with a foundation of content driven niche portals and Furl bookmarking, so not very many people will be missing it.. except for Gary Price, who noticed the closing over on ResourceShelf.

Thanks Gary, I’ll be missing Wisenut too :)

Filed under Search Engines by Loren Baker, Editor

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Searching for News (Weekend Wrap-up 39)

It is the end of the week again and Pandia presents some of the most important headlines of the last seven days. But first we will take a look at news search.

Netscape becomes Propeller

AOL’s experiment with turning Netscape.com into a social web portal is over. The new site is actually the pre-summer of 2006 site — a regular news site edited by AOL’s own staff.

There is nothing much there now that distinguishes it from other news portals, and we doubt that it will make much of an impression.

AOL has not abandoned the “new” Netscape all together, however. The new Netscape was AOL’s attempt at emulating digg and other social news sites, where users suggested and voted on new news stories and blog posts found around the Web.

The new Netscape has been reborn under the name of propeller.com. Propeller.com is — apart from the name and logo — identical to the old “new” Netscape.com (Boy, is this confusing!)

Fortunately, Netscape.com does still include the main Propeller headlines.

See also our article: Netscape returns to being a regular news site

Newser: An alternative to Google News?

Newser.com is a new news search site that combines the traditional human edited front page with computer based search algorithms a la Google News.

In the words of Newser: “Newser selects the day’s most important and most talked about stories from the 100 top news sources.”

The main headlines are presented in nine squares on the home page, all with photos.

There are subcategories for World, US, Politics, Business, Science and Health, Technology, Sports, and Culture and Society.

The Newser search engine lists the news stories as they are presented at Newser, not the source articles found on the Web. Hence a click on a search engine result brings up Newser’s own summary of the story, followed by a link to the source (as well as other related results).

Newser is the child of Patrick Spain, CEO of Highbeam, Michael Wolff of Vanity Fair, and Caroline Miller, former editor-in-chief of New York Magazine.

The Pandia Newsfinder

By the way, we have added quite a few new sites to our Pandia Newsfinder, in particular social web sites that can be used to track the most popular stories of the day.

Take a look!

This week’s stories at Pandia

The New Microsoft Windows Live Search
Podanza - the podcast search engine
Webmasterradio adds premium SEO podcast membership

Search engine news and articles from around the Web:

Google Trends Now With Daily Updates
Google Trends now comes with the ability to track different search trends and compare on a daily basis with new daily updates. (Unofficial SEO Sep 25 2007)

Yahoo tops Google in quality of searches, study says
Yahoo posted the best referral result among search engine vendors, the Compete survey found (Computerworld Sep 28 2007)

(more…)

Manage PPC Better ? Free Webinar

Filed under Search Engines by PSKoch

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The New Live Search

Microsoft’s Live Search had a major update this week.

Live Search (also known as Windows Live Search and MSN Search) went through a metamorphosis this week, the main changes being the following:

The index has quadrupled in size

The numbers are not official, so we do not know how many documents are indexed by Live. Mary Jo Foley believes the number is 20 billion.

The ranking algorithm has been “enhanced”

This means that it has been tweaked to sort out spam and to deliver more relevant quality sites. Microsoft says that it is using user “click-stream data to inform ranking and relevancy processes”. This means, for instance, that they track how long a searchers spends on a site before returning til the Live search result page, looking for more.

Vannessa Fox reports that the improved ranking algorithms use neural networking ranking that are loosely modeled from biological neural networks.

There is now an autospell correction

If Microsoft believes you have misspelled a word, it will suggest an alternative.

Live has improved its stop word handling

Meaning that it will ignore common words like “the”, “an”, “of” etc.

(more…)

Download Free SEO Software

Filed under Search Engines by PSKoch

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September 29, 2007

Jason Calacanis Confirmed as Keynote Speaker for Affiliate Summit West 2008

Sam Harrelson broke the story over at ReveNews that Jason Calacanis, CEO of Mahalo, has been confirmed as the keynote for this winter’s Affiliate Summit West in Las Vegas, NV (February 24 to 26, 2008 at the Rio Hotel and Casino).

He must have received notice of that via email or twitter, because the official Affiliate Summit blog does not report anything yet. It does not surprise me though, because I can imagine how busy the Affiliate Summit staff is now, because of the first Summit in jolly old England, which is currently being held in London.

That will be an interesting keynote. Considering Jason?s history and opinion about search engine optimization, which Is also an important subject for affiliate marketers, am I eager to hear what nice things he might has to say about the industry that is infected with adware, email spam, trademark abuse and typo-squatting hehe.

I remember the keynote conversation with Danny Sullivan at SES Chicago 2006. “SEO is bulls$#@!” is how Barry spelled out what Jason actually said in his keynote transcript for Search Engine Roundtable.

[SEJ actually covered this first, but nice citations for SERoundtable :) - Loren]

You can download the audio from the Daily Search Cast web site or watch keynote conversation video on YouTube (three parts: part 1, part 2 and part 3). Search Engine Marketing Gurus made a condensed version of the keynote available for anybody who does not want to spend 40+ minutes watching/listening to the whole thing.

The keynote followed another attack on the SEO industry from his blog, which remains a recurring thing since then. If he really means it or if it is just a marketing trip to draw attention to his own search project Mahalo is not clear, but no matter what the case might be, one thing is sure. Jason did not make many friends in the search engine marketing space since end of last year.

Affiliate marketers are still somewhat neutral when it comes to the opinion about whether or not Jason is a good or bad person. I wonder if that will change next year. If he had that kind words for the SEO industry, which had far less issues than affiliate marketing, I would honestly be surprised if he turns out being an evangelist of performance marketing. I can’t wait to see that.

Cheers!
Carsten Cumbrowski
Internet marketing and web development resources portal at Cumbrowski.com for small-business entrepreneurs and corporate marketers.

Filed under Search Engines by CarstenCumbrowski

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Google StreetView Goes To London?

Google Maps is global so why not Google StreetView as well? A London expansion is suggested by this image of one of the vehicles that takes the 360 degree street images. (Google has done some of the photography itself, but also uses partner Immersive Media in the U.S.). StreetView image collection is apparently underway in Canada, although there are some legal issues surrounding privacy and consent to be photographed that make it somewhat more complicated than in the U.S.

Click to continue reading...

Filed under Search Engines by Greg Sterling

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September 28, 2007

SearchCap: The Day In Search, September 28, 2007

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

Deconstrucing Google's Billboard Experiment
Last week's coverage of Google's Goog-411 billboard in Olean brought forth a number of other sightings of the billboards in San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose, Ca. & Tonawanda , Buffalo and Limestone (even smaller than Olean) NY. While there may be others yet to appear and more billboards coming...
Sphinn: Our Internet Marketing News Site & Discussion Forums Leave Beta
It's official. Sphinn (we pronounce it like "spin"), our social news and discussion site for internet marketing, is now out of beta. OK -- so the logo still says beta at the moment, but that will change in a matter of hours. Since we launched back in July, we've been...
Searcharazzi: Bubble About to Burst?
As fall settles in, another chill is in the air. Rumor has it that a top tier search and interactive services shop is about to have a management shake-up. M&A in the space appears to have slowed down as shops that should have taken their first offer decided to...
Google Buys Mobile-Social Site Zingku
Google Operating System reports (and confirms) that Google has acquired a mobile service called Zingku, which had been in private beta. Around since 2005, the service uses text messaging and picture messaging to provide a platform for (what appears to be) entertainment and events-related communication but also has commercial potential....
MarketingSherpa Report: Challenges To Bringing Search In-House
MarketingSherpa has just released the fourth annual edition of its Search Marketing Benchmark Guide. The Guide is a comprehensive benchmark for all things related to search marketing, including things such as expected search spending for 2008, how search ROI stacks up against other tactics, difficulty in SEM staffing, new ways...
Senate Hearing On Google-DoubleClick & Post Office Metaphors
After all the buildup to yesterday's hearing in the US Senate on the Google-DoubleClick deal, the actual hearing itself sounded to be a bit anti-climatic. Below, a look at what was said and how it doesn't seem like it will influence the ultimate decision by the US Federal Trade Commission...
Coupons Coming To AskCity
Ask has partnered with IAC sister company EPI, publisher of "The Entertainment Book," which offers coupons and discounts to local businesses. Entertainment, which has had several false starts with online distribution, is planning to pump 75 percent of its coupons into AskCity. They may also eventually make their way to...