Search News: Search Insider Summit Triangulates Search with “Three Sides” Panel
|
Written By Noah Mallin | December 4, 2008 | Share This
|
|
In a past life I spent some time in Park City, Utah as a journalist covering the Sundance Film Festival for The Amsterdam News. It’s a lovely city with some very good, expensive restaurants and stunning mountain vistas.
So I’m a little envious of you folks who are off to this year’s Search Insider Summit in that very location, even if you don’t get to rub shoulders with Maggie Gyllenhaal and Jim Jarmusch.
That being said, the Rashomon–esquely titled panel There’s Three Sides to Everything promises to open up some interesting dialogue between publishers, marketers and agencies around search engine marketing. Here’s the description:
Social Media: Putting Up Walls Just So Facebook Can Scale Them
|
Written By Noah Mallin | December 1, 2008 | Share This
|
|
The conventional wisdom has been that websites, especially media sites, benefit in traffic from having as much free content out there as possible, optimized for organic search. The New York Times was roundly criticized for making members pay for some content as has been the Wall street journal among others. After all, the growth in online profits is most likely to be driven by advertising growth and walling off a portion of your site limits the number of people who will use it.
Still, social media sites, while remaining mostly free of charge, rely on walls to protect the integrity of their users’ personal information. This hasn’t hurt their popularity at all and in fact the biggest sites boast audiences that other online sites are salivating to get their hands on and market to.
Search News: Last Night a SERP Saved my Life – Cyberchondria and SearchWiki
|
Written By Noah Mallin | November 25, 2008 | Share This
|
|
My wife and I have a particularly naughty cat at home. Like many urban dwellers we find it necessary to place those little Raid roach discs around to keep unwanted visitors from parading through our kitchen area. This cat is obsessed with the discs – if they are not placed somewhere very inaccessible she will invariably locate it and bat and bite it to her heart’s content.
The first time we found a disc in the middle of the floor full of bite marks we freaked out, convinced that she had poisoned herself. While my wife called the vet I did what any right-thinking idiot would do and looked up the roach trap ingredients online to see what pet interaction warnings there were. To my relief, while not recommended, the discs would not kill her outright or even make her sick if she wasn’t regularly chowing them down whole.
In retrospect though, perhaps the interwebs wasn’t such a great place to turn to for feline health advice. After all, when it comes to human health the Internet is anything but infallible.
Search Engines: Is Google’s SearchWicki Wack?
|
Written By Noah Mallin | November 24, 2008 | Share This
|
|
Response to Google’s new search tool, SearchWiki, upon rollout last week was not so much acclaim as confusion. Why now? Why at all? Why go uncharacteristically right past Beta? Why mess with the core search experience? Oh so many questions.
Already there are users out there who want their old Google back and don’t want to log out to get it. This is why GreaseMonkey was invented – it’s a measure of SearchWiki’s unpopularity in some quarters that there’s been code written to kill it.
So why would normally fussy Felix Unger-like Google transform user’s search results into a free-for-all that resembles Oscar Madison’s bedroom to some?
Social Media: Is Social Media Marketing a Predatory Pursuit?
|
Written By Noah Mallin | November 19, 2008 | Share This
|
|
The quote du jour today was from Ted McConnell, General Manager of Interactive Marketing at Proctor and Gamble, who said this about Facebook in AdAge:
“I think when we call it ‘consumer-generated media,’ we’re being predatory…Who said this is media? Media is something you can buy and sell. Media contains inventory. Media contains blank spaces. Consumers weren’t trying to generate media. They were trying to talk to somebody. So it just seems a bit arrogant. … We hijack their own conversations, their own thoughts and feelings, and try to monetize it.”
Though the quote seems to have stirred mixed feelings around the blogosphere I think it’s a pretty common initial reaction to the idea of advertising within user-generated content. This is especially true for a company like P & G which is still feeling it’s way online while still spending the bulk of its ad dollars on “traditional” offline media.
Search News: YouTube Tests Embeddable Search Bar – Can Ads be Far Behind?
|
Written By Noah Mallin | November 14, 2008 | Share This
|
|
I think I have mentioned Google’s incredible …um…testiness before. They love to try out new ideas before sending them into perpetual beta (hello Gmail) or actually launching them as real offerings. This has been less evident over at Google-owned YouTube — though with all of the fretting over making their investment back it’s only a matter of time before they begin to randomly beam “Chocolate Rain” into people’s cerebellums. Just to test the technology out.
This morning came word via eagle-eyed Anthony Iaffaldano, Reprise Media Marketing Director, that YouTube had actually sprung a little test action on his watch. While embedding a video on a totally non-geeky message board he was surprised to find that his embedded clip came with a search toolbar:
Search News: As More Eyes Turn to Alternate Vid Sites, blinkx May Finally Come Into its Own
|
Written By Noah Mallin | November 13, 2008 | Share This
|
|
Blinkx has been around for quite some time now – since 2004 to be exact – and their image-based search algorithm has always held promise. As they describe it:
“Unlike other multimedia search engines that attempt to re-purpose technology built for the Text Web, blinkx uses a unique combination of patented conceptual search, speech recognition and video analysis software to efficiently, automatically and accurately find and qualify online video.”
Which is great except Google and others are pursuing similar technology and Google in particular has the deep pockets to outdo anyone’s search algorithm. Ultimately blinkx will have to do more than just roll out a better level of search technology to become a challenger to YouTube or universal search on Google.
Search News: Using Search Engines to Mine for Information – The HoHeGriS Principle
|
Written By Noah Mallin | November 11, 2008 | Share This
|
|
The Internet is a giant treasure trove of information – some of it erroneous and some of it valuable. Search engines are the card catalog (ask your parents) and the librarians wrapped into one – sifting and categorizing this information to allow users to find the most relevant and valuable responses nearly instantaneously (longer if you’re still on dial-up).
However, like David Bowie in his Ziggy Stardust phase, this goes both ways. Knowing what people search for, how they search for it, where they search from and when they search can yield up insights and data that can be of tremendous use to marketers. The best example of this is what I call the HoHeGriS Principle.
Paid Search: Using Bankruptcy to Gain Customers with Search Marketing
|
Written By Noah Mallin | November 10, 2008 | Share This
|
|
There is an old adage that says that “all news is good news.” This was never truer than in search engine marketing and yet, companies like Circuit City persist in wallowing in the bad without reaping the good. Circuit City announced this morning that they are filing for bankruptcy. This is becoming more common in our post-economic boom landscape with many retailers feeling the pinch of reduced consumer spending. However going bankrupt is no excuse for missing out on an opportunity to gain customers.
Consider this:
The search term “circuit city bankruptcy” ranked in the top 10 on Google tends all day. What did those searchers see? A lot of news stories on the bankruptcy filing. Now I’ll grant that a good chunk of that traffic were shareholders looking to see just how much of a hole was just blown into their portfolio. Another group of searchers are undoubtedly concerned about their jobs either at Circuit City or at another company that relies on them. Still, It’s a good bet that another chunk of searchers were folks like me who thought “Sounds like an ideal time to pick up that Sony flatscreen I’ve been dreaming about.” Especially in this environment there are a lot of bargain hunters looking for a great price on almost everything imaginable.
Search News: Don’t Boo-Hoo Over GooHoo Booboo - Here’s What Yahoo Can Do
|
Written By Noah Mallin | November 6, 2008 | Share This
|
|
The nation awoke yesterday morning to stunning, world-shaking news - the ad deal between Yahoo and Google was kaput, finished, finito. Naturally this was cause for dancing and celebrating in streets and cities the world over but spare a moment of thought for Jerry Yang and the Yahoo crew. What now, after such a crushing defeat. Do they go it alone, and if not, who can they turn to? I put on my thinking helmet earlier today (the bottom half of a salad mixer with a few stray wires hot-glue-gunned to the perimeter) and came up with a few options for Yahoo to consider: