Weekly Search Roundup: This Week’s Search News Fully Vetted for Counter Governmental Rhetoric – Now Go Watch The Olympics

Written By Noah Mallin | August 8, 2008 | Share This |

Smog Wall

The glorious Olympics games are here! Everybody enjoy the sweet-smelling fog that has enveloped Beijing – it is all natural and not in any way related to industrial activity. Kindly remove the insulting facemask and enjoy the following news. Or else.

Girls Gone Wild Yahoo Style

Forrest Gump once mused that “Life is like a box of chocolates – you never know what you’re gonna get…” Less nauseating but still chocolate boxey, automated tagging within articles can produce a similar “Surprise! You just bit into coconut!” effect. Automated tagging is when you drag your mouse over a word in an article online and it opens a box (not of chocolates) that directs you to more information on that topic – often sponsored. This is all well and good until the phrase is “underage girls.”

Yahoo’s Shortcuts automated tagging feature took people to pictures of youngsters illegally drinking when they rolled over the “underage girls” phrase (in an article on Eliot Spitzer no less), which I suppose is better than taking them to pictures of young girls in illegal sweatshops.

Facebook Wanes in Japan while Orkut, uh, Waxes in Brazil

While Facebook keeps gaining share and infecting people with worms here in the United States in Japan, not so much. It’s a good reminder that social media use varies from country to country so global marketers need to remember to change up their approach in each market. Google for instance has had much success with their Orkut social net in Brazil and India, which has spurred them to locate their Latin American development team in the country that continues to innovate in all areas of bikini related technology.

Death by Widget

Plenty of websites that use Sitemeter to monitor traffic got an unwelcome surprise last weekend when Internet Explorer users were unable to load the sites. Affected sites included the entire snarky Gawker Network blog colossus. Turns out a bug in a new update to Sitemeter wreaked the havoc. The lesson? Keep an eye on your widgets. (Illustration from the Onion)

Search – More Popular than Fun, Less Popular than E-Mail

Pew research came out with data comparing online activity on a “typical day.” Search was number 2 behind e-mailing which makes sense. Overall 49% of people used search while online – assuming they know what that phrase means (can you tell I used to work with polls in a previous life?) While the figure seems low consider the army of elderly who only use “the internets” to see pictures of the grandkids.

Getting Bossy With It – Yahoo Shows Best Sites So Far

While Yahoo is probably relieved that we aren’t bringing up their vote count debacle – whoops slipped that in there! - for every slap we give them a sweet kiss. Thus is the nature of our abusive relationship. Yahoo announced their favorite sites built using their build your own search BOSS open platform. As I’ve suggested before, this may be the first fruit of a Yahoo Search revival. (smooch!) However Jerry Yang may not be around long enough to receive the credit for it (slap!)