Search News: Yahoo Shopping Flops with King of Pop
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Written By James Song | July 2, 2009 | Share This
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Unless you were living in an undersea cave, you know that “King of Pop” Michael Jackson passed away last week. As has been reported, websites around the world were affected when the story broke around 4:30pm EST. Visitors per minute to new websites worldwide increased 30% and social networking sites such as Twitter experienced network lag and outages due to the thousands of users simultaneously trying to update their status. The phrase “Michael Jackson died” became the highest search query on Google that day, which was so overwhelmed by the query volume that they initially thought they were experiencing a network attack.
This made me wonder about the impact of current events search queries on search marketing campaigns. On Thursday evening I searched ‘Michael Jackson died” on Google and saw a paid search ad in 1st position for Yahoo Shopping:
5 Questions: Collecta CEO Gerry Campbell
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Written By Noah Mallin | June 29, 2009 | Share This
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Collecta, a new real-time search engine, went live in beta on June 18th.They intro themselves on their homepage by saying “The web is alive with real-time information. So why search a stale archive? Collecta monitors the update streams of news sites, popular blogs and social media, and Flickr, so we can show you results as they happen.” This is ambitious stuff at a time when real-time is the buzzword in both search and social media circles.
To find out more about Collecta I asked their CEO, Gerry Campbell, to answer our patented 5 Questions. Campbell has a great blog, LuckyRobot.com where he admits to getting “…fired up about making new things.” He’s had a rich and varied background across information media companies like Reuters and AOL and has also been an active investor and advisor to a range of startups.
So what does Gerry Campbell have to say about Collecta and real-time search? Read on…
Search News: Google Adds More Match Types to Play With – How Not To Get Burned
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Written By Vicky Fudali | June 25, 2009 | Share This
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As you optimize your campaigns and check your settings in AdWords, some new options may seem to have appeared on your screen. Don’t worry, you’re not seeing things. Google has recently made two match type enhancements available to help you manage your campaigns even more efficiently – Broad (session based) and Automatic Matching. Please note these enhancements do not replace the traditional big four match types when setting up campaigns – Broad, Phrase, Exact, and Negative. These new enhancements should be seen as being more for analysis and campaign improvement. Read on to see how these match type enhancements can assist advertisers in campaign management.
Search Innovations: The Branding Value of a Search Impression
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Written By Emil Panzarino | June 17, 2009 | Share This
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What is the branding value of a search impression? While most search folks are trampling over and pushing aside impression data to get to the almighty click and conversion data, I ponder the question: Is there a significant branding importance associated with a search text impression?
When we think of branding within Internet marketing, we typically think of Page Takeovers, Interstitials, Page Skins, and a variety of other intimidating sounding nomenclatures.
In fact, some industry-ers scoff at the notion that search (or any text ad) could have any significant value when it comes to branding or awareness. And because the cost of impression is on a per click basis, some search planners /agencies have gone as far as removing impression data from client reporting altogether.
Search News: Google Decides it’s Hip to be Squared
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Written By Noah Mallin | June 4, 2009 | Share This
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At the beginning of the year it looked as if Google was battening down the hatches and withdrawing from its previous flights of fancy – no more dirigible mounted servers or cotton-candy machines in the lavatories for them! Yet the release of new tools like the Wonder Wheel and Google Wave suggest the search giant isn’t ready to rest on its laurels. Now we have the Google Labs release of Google Squared, a promising search tool that needs some work but is likely to find its way into the main search options menu sooner rather than later.
Social Media: Will Google’s Wave Drown Twitter?
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Written By Noah Mallin | June 1, 2009 | Share This
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There I was last week, on vacation in an undisclosed location deep in the Canadian Rockies when all the hubbub over Google’s Wave broke out. For those of you who missed it, Google announced that they will be launching a product called Google Wave later this year that combines some of the functionality of e-mail and IM to create a new open source communications platform.
Search News: Spotted! New Google Navigational Search Ads
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Written By Noah Mallin | May 20, 2009 | Share This
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Our own eagle-eyed SEO –oligist Dr. Naveel spotted the latest in Google’s efforts to place an ad anywhere search results are today. So far this is only a test but Google is approaching their clients about participation and looking carefully at the data in advance of a full roll-out to all users. Google is simply monetizing the navigation box itself, leveraging auto-complete as a display space for advertisers. By the way, that splotch that looks like cat vomit at the top of these screenshots is Google’s logo for today celebrating the find of a partially fossilized “missing link” skeleton.
Search News: Untangling Google’s New Trademark Rules
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Written By Noah Mallin | May 19, 2009 | Share This
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Google’s announcement this week that they are revising their trademark rules to allow more flexibility for advertiser’s to use other brand’s trademarks in search ad text caused quite a round of hand flapping and hair pulling. The gist of many of the takes on this, including the New York Times and BroadPoint’s Ben Shacter was that despite the possible legal ramifications Google is opening the door to say, Coke calling out Pepsi in search ad text. Dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria!
Our reading of the changes are a bit more subtle and nuanced though surely, the great Google will be making more moolah as a result.
Social Media: Do Search Engines Show Us How Social Media Will Prosper?
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Written By Noah Mallin | May 13, 2009 | Share This
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The reaction was swift and merciless last night. “Retweet this if you disagree with Twitter’s decision to hide replies to people you don’t follow #fixreplies.” That message has been going out ever since, now that users have discovered that Twitter has blocked the ability for them to see responses from people that don’t already follow them.
The irony is that folks will just continue to migrate to third party platforms like Tweetdeck that give them the functionality that Twitter lacks, which will begin to dilute the number of folks who log into Twitter’s actual site on a daily basis. My theory on this is that more and more companies like Comcast are using Twitter as a customer service interface and the Twitter folks see this as an area they could charge for within premium corporate accounts.
Social Media: SEO for Twitter Search Set to Boom with Upcoming Changes
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Written By Noah Mallin | May 7, 2009 | Share This
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The news that Twitter Search is poised to make substantial changes to the way results are gathered and presented has caused a frenzy of preparative speculation in this company not seen since Google rolled out Quality Score ranking. Twitter VP of Operations, Santosh Jayaram, has said that Twitter Search will begin to crawl the links included in tweets and not just the content of the tweets themselves. In addition, Jayaram suggested that they were working on an algorithm to define “reputation”, or that they would at least take this into account.