Platinax Internet News

Internet and business news for the UK online

May 29, 2005

Microsoft, the world's largest software company, is planning to reveal its "Virtual Earth" site in the US this summer.

Users of “Virtual Earth” will be able to search their local areas for a range of amenities, including shopping malls, cinemas and small businesses that do not have their own website.

The results will appear as photographs and maps, which will pinpoint the exact location of the business. The images are taken at a 45-degree angle, giving more information than the traditional birds-eye views used on similar sites.

Similar services are expected to soon be available in the UK. A lucrative market for this sort of online information is expected to develop as the web replaces paper directories.

In the US, Yahoo! Maps is already available, allowing users to locate a cash machine next to a location, such as a restaurant, that they are planning to visit. Online retailer, Amazon’s A9 service matches business listings with photographs of shop fronts. This enables users to take a virtual walk down the high street.

Google is planning to release Google Earth shortly, which is considered to be the main rival to Microsoft.

Many of the new services will gain revenues by allowing local businesses to advertise on the sites.

Mobile phone operators are developing similar services, which will provide customers with a combined atlas and Yellow Pages.

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April 11, 2005

A Munich court has ruled that linking to some websites is illegal.

The ruling comes after German IT site Heise Online included a link to Slysoft, a company alleged to be involved in providing tools that help online music piracy.

A body representing the German music industry had taken Heise to court and sued for €500,000, to reflect profit losses argued to have arisen from helping users find the site.

According to the Register report, the link broke German civil law, because:

Heise intentionally provided "assistance in the fulfillment of unlawful acts" and is therefore liable as "an aider and abettor", as described in Section 830 of the German Civil Code.

The ruling sets an awkward precendent on the issues of freedom of the press when applied to the internet. This is an area already under scrutiny in America, after a group of media companies launched a legal challenge against Apple after a US court ruling determined that websites are not granted press protection under the US Consitution.

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April 05, 2005

A group of online advertisers have begun what they hope will be a class action suit against search engine companies, who stand accused of turning a blind eye to clickfraud because it benefits them.

The suit was reportedly filed in February, and companies such as Yahoo!, Google, AOL, Ask, Lycos, and LookSmart are all named as accused.

Leading of this assault on internet giants is named as Lane's Gifts & Collectibles, who alleges that the "companies knowingly overcharged for advertisements they sold and conspired with each other to continue doing so".

The plaintiffs are trying to turn this into a class action suit, which could prove extremely challenging for the companies named - none of which has yet made any public comment on the matter.

Clickfraud is an issue that has been gaining a lot of attention within the internet press.

Online communities have frequently seen discussions involving small businesses raising concerns that clickfraud is not being taken seriously enough, with some implementing their own clickfraud tracking.

The implications are serious - Robin Good detailed concerns last year, and industry commentator John Battelle has also warned of the dangers of clickfraud biting search engine reputation, profits, and online business.

SiliconValleyWatcher even showed a glimpse of how employed for the purposes of clickfraud was being advertised for on the web.

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March 16, 2005

MSN is expected to announce tonight that the first stage of their online advertising and publishing network is undergoing live trials.

Known internally at Microsoft as "Moonshot", the paid listings program is Microsoft's answer to Gooogle AdWords, and is set to go live in France and Singapore, where markets are more tightly focussed for monitoring purposes.

Moonshot is the first stage in Microsoft's MSN adCenter development, which intends to tap into Microsoft's extensive metrics profiling of internet users and use.

Covered in more detail by Danny Sullivan in MSN To Launch Its Own Paid Listings Program, he describes how Microsoft plan to grant complete freedom of operation to advertisers, to advertise under their own targeting - whether it be based on time windows, gender groups, or other metrics that Microsoft can discern from its use of registered user information.

He also indicates that rather than abandon Google AdWords, or hurt Yahoo! Overture, advertisers will be looking to spend on all three advertising platforms.

Additionally, Microsoft are expected to develop the AdCenter project further into a similar scheme to AdSense publishing - which is an area that Yahoo! are already testing for their Overture program.

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February 22, 2005

A range of organisatons aiming to represent the SEO industry are currently in the process of becoming official bodies.

SMA-UK - the Search Marketing Association of the United Kingdom, set up by industry names such as Mike Grehan, Barry Lloyd, and Ammon Johns, has announced in SMA-UK countdown to lift-off begins that they are now becoming a formally organised Trade Organisation and is calling for elections.

Meanwhile, Ian McAnerin has moved forward with the development of an introductory site for the formative SMA NA - Search Marketers Association of North America.

Additionally, another group has formed the WAA - Web Analytics Association, intended to provide privvy information and internet marketing metrics for members.

The overall movement into the formation of these groups comes after SEMPO - the Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organisation - underwent a year of heavy criticism, not least a perceived failure to communicate with members, as well as complaints of secretive payments to executives.

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February 12, 2005

SearchEngineWatch editor, Danny Sullivan, crunched numbers from Nielson/NetRatings and Comscore to produce two separate but complimentary reports on search engine traffic, usage, and market share, according to both analyst groups:

1) Nielsen NetRatings Search Engine Ratings

2) comScore Media Metrix Search Engine Ratings

Although the statistics were for US markets specifically in December 2004, both reports can be taken as indicative of general trends likely to be effective in UK markets up to near present.

Despite disparity in actual figures, both agree on core general trends - namely, that Google is the clear dominant leader of search, with Yahoo! a distant second, and MSN third.

Nielsen has Google (including through AOL use) as having nearly 62% of search market share, with Yahoo! nearly halfway behind on 32%, and MSN as following close after on 25%.

However, after analysis of comScore research, with distributors fully factored in with suppliers, Danny Sullivan reveals a 3-2-1 distribution of search markets, with Google taking up three times of much of the market as MSN.

Both studies clearly illustratethe market dominance of Google as a search engine in the current climate. However, with Microsoft putting full corporate backing behind its new launched MSN Search, and recent apparent problems with Google search, the market remains open to dymanic changes.

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While rumour and speculation concerning a Google browser remains rife, Ask Jeeves have unexpectedly announced that they, too, are looking to develop a Jeeves browser based on Mozilla foundations.

Posted in Mozilla's On Fire on the Ask blog, developer Tuoc Luong explains how he discussed three specific issues with the Mozilla foundation:

1) Open-source development of Ask desktop search
2) Development of Ask browser
3) Application of Ask's Octopus software in conjunction with Mozilla's use of the XUL platform.

This marks a continued period of aggression by Ask Jeeves in the search market, after also recently announcing the acquisition of bloglines, which is the world's most popular RSS feed aggregator.

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February 06, 2005

Small but significant search engine Ask Jeeves is strongly rumoured to have bought out Bloglines, the world's largest RSS feed aggregator.

If proved true it could prove a major coup for Ask, and put them at the heart of information generation.

Although Bloglines CEO Mark Fletcher had already talked about monetising bloglines to Jupiter analyst Eric Peterson, one of the potentially biggest features of Bloglines is the scale of personal user profiling that can be mined from Bloglines subscribers.

The announcement has yet to be made public, but has already been broken out by Mary Hodder in Ask Jeeves Buys Bloglines at Napsterisation.

The news would continue a sudden warming by the search engine to blogs - recently they launched their own Ask company blog.

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January 25, 2005

Google and Yahoo! both released beta versions of video search today, starting what will ultimately be a very hard run race to conquer internet video & digital media.

Google video search comes in the form of a subdomain, while the Yahoo! video search exists as a tab on the usual Yahoo! search bar.

Interestingly, both search companies are taking different approaches. While Yahoo! is an archive of movie files found on the internet for keywords, the Google video search is geared towards tracking regional TV listings, and undoubtedly is gearing towards encouraging the search and development of search for TV broadcasting companies.

Some commentators have suggested that

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January 19, 2005

SPECIAL REPORT

A new tag is to be introduced to the internet, instructing search engine spiders to ignore specified links, and major search engines Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft will support it. Publicly claimed to be for the fight against blog spam, it effectively leaves the search engines asking webmasters to help improve their results.

A simple attribute, the new tag is intended to be placed inside a link anchor, like this:

rel="nofollow"

and is placed within the link anchor code.

The intention is that the "nofollow" rel attribute is used to indicate to search engines that the link should not be followed.

While a number of people in the world of blogging are touting this as a solution to blog spam, the actual effect is likely to cripple the link popularity blogs have so readily enjoyed between one another, while additionally providing a tool that webmasters can use to hide useful content from search engines.

A number of options have already existed for blog software development companies, such as:

• Allow only registered users to post
• Disallow HTML in posts
• Use a jump script to mask the target URL
• Place comments in a folder and allow only registered users to access them
• Place comments in a folder and use the "nofollow" meta-tag
• Place comments in a folder and use a robots.txt file to block search engine spiders

Although some blog developers have employed one or more of these methods, some very popular releases have continuously failed to address the problem. For example, Blogger blogs suffer relatively little comment spam - yet SixApart only set the default installation of their very popular MovableType release to registered users only for comments at the start of the year.

The "nofollow" tag is just another option on top of an already rich set of possibilities, that many responsible web publishers have already employed themselves, to help cut out comment spam altogether.

However, it is very unlikely that the new "nofollow" attribute will actually prevent comment spam - it will simply mean that search engines will be asked to ignore it.

More to the point, if implemented to any small degree, it can only encourage more aggressive action from automated blog spamming scripts, and worms such as Santy have already shown how search engines themselves can be used to implement this on a large scale.

There also remains the problem of abuse of the "nofollow" tag itself. For example:

• Webmasters trying to hide reciprocated links, so that search enignes think the link popularity is all one-way,
• Directory owners trying to preserve PageRank by crippling content links,
• Webmasters hiding links in RSS feeds they publish, thus gaining content without search engines being able to attribute it to source
• Exploitation of Creative Commons material, by distributing it (modified or not) on other websites, but preventing search engines from being able to attribute source
• Forum admins crippling member links, to gorge on the PageRank preserved

When looked at in these terms, it is difficult not to think that Google and other search engines, see this method as a way to make Webmasters police themselves - presuming anyone takes up the new attribute for the long term.

Here's how the internet movers are covering this issue:

Search Engines:

Not surprising, the search engines themselves cheer the move. After all, they've just asked the webmastering community to police the internet for them, and help them remove a process that automated spam filtering could not work against:

• Preventing comment spam: Matt Cutts and Jason Shellen at Google report from that this is intended to tackle blog, guestbook, and referrer list spam. They list helpful guidelines for the application of the "nofollow" tag among the webmastering community, to whom they appeal to apply it - yet despite being informative on the technical side, the announcement itself reads as cold.
• A Defense Against Comment Spam: Jeremy Zawodny writes in the Yahoo! blog that he expects this to start combating comment spam right away. Although he tries to indicate that a particular concern is reducing server load for blog hosts, he tellingly comments "In the coming weeks you can expect to see the changes reflected in our web index." In other words, Yahoo! effectively sees comment spam as a major factor in making Yahoo! provide irrelevant results.
• Working Together Against Blog Spam: MSN warmly relates on times in student halls, and makes no claim to the tool actually having affected the MSN index, nor of comment spam being solved by this issue. However, there is a clear invitation to accept/reject/comment on the matter, while Search Development Manager Ken Moss suggests it will be a "good thing" and "put bloggers back in control."

Search Engine commenters

The rest of the internet sees things a little differently, though. There is a mixture of enthusiasm, pessimism, resignation, and also real concern that should a move, if widely implemented, could indeed cripple the blogosphere of the very "free exchange of thoughts and ideas" that created it:

• Support for nofollow: Six Apart publish blog software, but until now have done precious little indeed to combat comment spam effectively, though options have been available. It was only at the start of this year that the public version of MovableType even defaulted to comments being moderated - which should have been one of the first defences to be implemented long ago. For the most part, the company is upbeat - but perhaps more because it is seen to be acting in some way, even if it doesn't actually address the issue.
• The Social Impacts of Software Choices: Anil Dash waxes lyrical about how only "spammers" will suffer from widespread implementation of the links, and suggests are its only real critics. He also cheers Six Apart's implementation of the tag, yet fails to point out that users will still end up with comment spammed blogs - it's simply that search engines won't have to look at the mess.
• Google Admitting Defeat over War with Spammers?: Nick Wilson brings together a number of threads at Threadwatch, and the general tone from experienced SEO's and webmasters - lack of faith that the attribute will combat spam, but instead will be easily abused.
• Google, Yahoo, MSN Unite On Support For Nofollow Attribute For Links: Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Watch enthuses over the fact that search engines are trying to address some webmaster concerns - but he concedes that this move in itself is unlikely to stop comment spam behaviour.
• Report: Google to Put Kibosh on Blog Comment Spam: Steve Rubel welcomes the move - if it actually addresses the issue.
• Fighting blog comment spam – what companies need to know: Charlene Li at Forrester suggests that companies should be safe to turn on comments, and that the nofollow tag should protect - but she fails to mention that just because search engines may not credit a link, does not mean to say that automated spam bots won't leave company blog comments filled with spam hawking adult, pharmaceutical, and gambling services.

• Follow On No Follow: John Battelle realises that there are implications way beyond simple elimination of comment spam, and expresses unease - responding to comments on how blog linking may be adversely affected, he ponders that there may be serious consequences for ordinary bloggers if widely implemented.
• Fighting blog comment spam Silicon Valley reports on its scepticism that the nofollow tag can overcome the greater resourcefulness of comment spammers - and also pauses to express unease
• Comment spam - it's going to get a little better: Alex Barnett simply welcomes the move - but as a dedicated supporter of RSS marketing, does he realise how badly RSS feeds could be abused by this by provision of content for search engines, without the source site being attributed?
• Google to Kill Blog Comment Spam?L Darren Rowse notes that it would require large-scale implementation to have any effect, and also notes that this could serious impact not only how blogs interact, but also kill search traffic to sites that are maintained by links from other blogs.
• Winer set to deliver comment spam knockout: BlogHerald imagines that the announcement will mean that all comment spam will disappear over 12 months - but presumes that all blogs will somehow auto-update to ensure this happens.
• More on the Rel=NoFollow Tag...: Aaron Wall at SEO Book is resigned to the move being widely applied, and simply points out that comment spam had offered "low-hanging fruit" for people to easily abuse. However, he also points out that where the markets move, so does the money - if "nofollow" is effective, other methods will be applied to achieve similar means.
• Massive weblog anti-spam initiative: rel="nofollow": MT-Blacklist recognises the fact that blogs will lose out in popularity - both in terms of linking and traffic - if this method is widely applied. Interestingly enough, the issue is seen as fair-trade for over-valuation of blogs in the first place, which has especially created the problem.
• The Spammers have Won: Andy Wismar points out that the blogosphere was created and defined using comments and trackbacks - and if the "nofollow" attribute is used, it effectively means the deconstruction and devaluation of the blogosphere.

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January 10, 2005

Ian McAnerin has resigned from the board at SEMPO, and come out with a rounded attack on its methods and memebership, declaring his intention to form the SMA-NA - the Search Marketing Association of North America.

This follows directly in the footsteps of other SEO/SEM organisations such as SMA-UK and SMA-EU, which were formed to address markets and marketing that the US SEM organisation, SEMPO, was clearly believed to have failed upon, as reported

In specific criticisms of SEMPO, Ian McAnerin claims in Search Marketing Association of North America - SMA-NA that SEMPO are focussed entirely on developing revenue rather than addressing the needs of the SEM business community:

I also discovered that although SEMPO is, in my opinion, fundamentally broken, there are a lot of very good people who joined it because it's clear the industry needs a trade association.

The problem is that SEMPO is designed to cash in on big bucks sponsors and SEO firms. Key members have even stated that small SEO firms are "not their target audience".

When resigned, during his conversation with SEMPO president, Barabara Coll, he writes:

Although the majority of the conversation was confidential, it was made very clear that SEMPO considers the SMA-NA to be a direct threat and a competitor for membership and sponsor dollars. Interesting that the SMA-UK and EU were not considered the same way. To me, that really confirmed the regional blinkers SEMPO wears. The concern about the money rather than the industry was also very interesting. Although it was mentioned that the industry would be better off with only one group (I agree BTW ;) ) this was mentioned in direct relation to funding. She also repeatedly demanded the names of the others on the SMA-NA working group.

Criticism of SEMPO - the Search Engine Marketing Porfessionals Organisation - erupted last summer, when industry figure, Mike Grehan, publicly attacked SEMPO's lack of industry action and secret payments to board members from the $250,000 accrued in subscription fees.

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December 30, 2004

Gigablast following closely on the release of their user-built search engine for users, Gigablast have now released Gigablast Sitesearch tool.

This allows webmasters to use Gigablast search technology to create a search facility for their websites. Although indexing is promised to occur at least weekly, Gigablast also suggest that for content that constantly changes, indexing could be hourly.

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December 28, 2004

The online search market is currently booming and dominated by the big three companies of google, Yahoo, and MSN search. As they continue to vie to increase market share, their continuing development has seen a string a new patents awarded and filed, as Gary Price helpfully and clearly lists in New Patents for Google, IBM, Yahoo & Others at the Search Engine Watch blog.

Almost suprisingly, IBM continue to collect a string of significant patents, and in IBM and Search, the technology giant is reported as making strong moves that could see it as a possible entrant in the search engine war - not least with it's Piquant and Webfountain search technologies.

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December 20, 2004

Search Engine Gigablast has made a surprise attack on the search engine market with a powerful new tool: custom build your own search engine, using Gigablast tecjnology to search up to 200 URLs: Build Your Own Topic Search Engine.

Initial play suggests that it's a great idea, where practicable - up to a point. Unfortunately, the tech seems eager to return the same site multiple times for the same search term - so if a site contained the searchphrase as internal linking anchor text in a default navigation menu, then every page with the menu on bearing that searchphrase would be returned.

Is that simply a limitation of the Gigablast engine, or the actual custom search itself?

Either way, expect to see movement from the major players quickly following this up, to counter Gigablast's otherwise surprise foray into the mainstream user base.

Still, it's easy to see this catching on,

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December 14, 2004

A very interesting cautionary tale in Eight Months of Click Fraud in Oregon, in which an online marketer found repeated ad clicks originating from a Portland IP.

According to the article at Clickz, the extra clicks amounted to clickfraud costing the Oregon company around $300 per month. So they went in search of a solution, and came up with www.whoslclickingwho.com:

For $30 dollars a month, WhosClickingWho allowed Hendison to get more data on the suspect IP address and send a customized pop-up window to the person behind it when he or she clicked on his ad. The message, which Hendison wrote, read, "Stop, you weasel! I know who you are and have reported you to the proper authorities."

"I never got another click from that address afterward," Hendison said.

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The Search Engine Marketing Professional Organisation (SEMPO), released a report suggesting that the overall search marketing market will be worth $4 billion in 2004.

According to the SEMPO press release:

The research, conducted by Executive Summary Consulting, Inc., is based on an extensive survey of 288 search engine advertisers and marketing agencies, executed via IntelliSurvey, Inc., as well as in-depth interviews with 30 leading industry experts. The final report breaks down advertiser spending for 2004 in several areas: $3.058 billion to search media companies; $618 million on SEM-related in-house expenses within advertising corporations; $380 million to search engine marketing agencies, and $30 million in SEM technology licensing fees. The report also estimated that marketers will spend (including both in-house and external media, service and licensing expenses) $3.342 billion on paid placement campaigns; $492 million on organic search engine optimization; $182 million on paid inclusion, and $72 million on SEM-related technology services.

Not only does this report reflect on the credible strength of the search marketing industry, but it also adds credibility to SEMPO, who have faced severe criticism this year from major industry figures for failing to deliver anything for member subscriptions.

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December 05, 2004

As if search could not become more diversely applied to the world - surprise! - the University of Massachusetts is now developing search for handwritten documents:

Researchers create tool to automatically search handwritten historical documents

So what? Surely this is just a novelty? Not quite - note that this method relies on the use of comparing images to a database of words. Effectively, we're talking about the application of image search here, grabbing useful information from static images. I'm sure that won't be lost on too many people in SEO.

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November 30, 2004

Nick Wilson at Threadwatch covers an almost alarming move - Search Engine Marketing going mainstream: Public Relations meets Search Marketing

After all, with the Search Engine Wars being so high-profile nowadays, SEO/SEM has experienced a meteoric rise in webmaster awareness.

However, as Alec makes a point of noting in his reply:

This may not be a bad thing. There is nothing more revenue hungry than a big ad agency - prime real estate in major centres, expensive fixtures, pricey girls at all the phones, fat cat senior execs - so they really can't compete with a good lean small shop.

They may serve to raise the profile of the industry and the rates.

More than a few of us will get hired into the agencies as they seek to expand their inhouse capabilities.

Sounds like all the more reason to fast-track into specialist areas, as no doubt mainstream marketing and ad companies will be unwilling - to payroll all but general SEO's for on-page and design elements for in-house employment, outsourcing to specialists at proper industry rates as required.

Meanwhile, the video conference Leveraging Search for Greater Impact in Your Public Relations Programs may well be worth tuning in for - not least to guage the mainstream movement of SEO to coporate drumbeats.

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November 28, 2004

I might have missed MSN's moves to multi-lingual search, if Barry Schwartz at the Search Engine Roundtable hadn't posted this up last night: MSN Improves Search with Rosette Linguistic Analysis.

Apparently, MSN has selected the Rosette Linguistics Platform, which was reported in a press release on Yahoo! a few days earlier here: Basis Technology to Enhance Multilingual Search in New MSN Search Engine.

However, with uncertainties still ongoing about the performance and release date of MSN's new search, the English form still currently in beta, it'll be interesting to see how the multilingual search actually pans out once MSN finally releases its new search technology.

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Having trouble finding new bands to discover? Tired of the same old manufactured pulp leavnig the record giants? Trying to find your roots back into the music underground?

Then try this: the GoFish Music Search Engine.

I ran a few searches for my own music, which had once topped the MP3.com classical charts, and had afterwards been found on Kazaa. No show as yet. Still, as I'm be releasing new recordings soon, it'll be interesting to track their progress on GoFish - and especially see whether this project will offer a real and unbiased view of commercial and independent music releases - or whether, like MP3.com, it will fall victim to the predations of the RIAA companies and simply becmoe a showcase for them.

This follows on the heels of news of the launch of the Singingfish multimedia search engine, which is powered by AOL.

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November 24, 2004

Here's an interesting industry read, going through the highs and lows of Ask Jeeves:

Ask Jeeves at USA Today

Whilst Ask Jeeves may not be in the same league as the Google/Yahoo!/MSN triumvirate when it comes to search, it still holds for a significant fourth place Caesar.

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November 22, 2004

There's an intereview with Vivisimo CEO Raul Valdes-Perez at ~CNet here: Narrowing the search

What is especially interesting is his comments on the limitations of personalised search, which states plainly some key points:

• People are not static; they have many fleeting and seasonal interests. A student might intensely research Abraham Lincoln for a school project but may care nothing at all about the subject later on.

• The surfing data used for personalizing search is weak. The data that online booksellers like Amazon.com use is strong: I'm paying $20 for a book and committing 10 hours of my life to reading it. (Let's ignore the problems with gift purchases.) Surfing data involves the minimal commitments of a mouse click and a few seconds to look at a page before leaving.

• If the data used for inferring user profiles is the whole Web page that the user visited, then it's misleading. In this case, the user's decision to visit the page is based on the title and brief excerpt (snippet) that are shown in the search results, not the whole page.

• Home computers are often shared among family members, whose surfing interests obviously diverge.

• Queries tend to be short. My own spouse couldn't figure out my interests from a one or two word utterance, so how is a computer going to do better?

Personal search - as a general fory into inevitable personal advertising - has been a buzz-word in search for some time now.

However, as Microsoft proved long ago with that annoying animated paperclip in Word, just because a company thinks it's being helpful, doesn't mean that it actually is...

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November 21, 2004

After heavy recent criticism about how how SEMPO has been developing itself (or not), SEMPO has been slowly moving itself into more constructive directions, such as board members posting replies to SEMPO issues, the development of a SEMPO member forum - and now, the annoucement of baord nominations for key board positions.

More information here: SEMPO Board of Director Nominations

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November 18, 2004

What Google does, others will follow...

According to eWeek, Ask has apparently revealed plans for Desktop search, to be released in December 2004.

Google launched their's earlier this year, and Microsoft has already announced plans for desktop search. All that remains is for Yahoo! to come out and announce what their Desktop search plans are.

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November 11, 2004

MSN Search has finally gone live - though it is currently only a beta:

MSN Search - beta

For the moment at least, the actual results served on MSN are being supplied by the regular MSN Search.

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October 22, 2004

A trade association for UK SEO's has been launched: The Search Marketing Association.

Currently it's headed by Barry Lloyd, and supported by names such as Mike Grehan and Ammon Johns. I spoke with each of them at September's SEO Roadshow in London, and the idea was already gaining momentum then, so it's great to see it become a reality, especially when there has been so much uncertainty and stinging criticism of SEMPO, an organisation created in the US apparently to support and promote SEO good practice.

I've signed up for the newsletter and will no doubt join - I have great respect for the people involved - not simply because they are very experienced in the field of search marketing, but also because there is a very real will expressed in getting a very real, active, and practical association for SEO running in the UK.

And here's a copy of the press release:

UK to have its own search engine marketing association

London - 21st October 2004 - A working group of search engine marketing professionals in the UK has come together to plan the formulation of a UK based trade association.

The proposed Search Marketing Association UK (SMA-UK) will provide a platform to inform and educate the marketplace of the benefits of search marketing in the overall marketing mix, as well is giving its members an industry voice.

Barry Lloyd of search marketing firm MakeMeTop is acting Chairman of the group, with Andy Atkins-Kruger of search marketing firm Web Certain as acting Deputy.

The Chairman and Deputy Chairman were elected by a secret ballot, single transferable voting system monitored by the Electoral Reform Society with votes being cast by the members of the working group.

"We intend all elections will be held in the same manner in the future, with early elections from the full membership to be held as a matter of urgency" said Barry Lloyd.

"Presently, we are a group of people working to create an association, but we felt it was important to sidestep the trap of being seen as self-appointed so we chose to use the Electoral Reform Society to conduct an independently verified secret ballot of the group to elect the Chairman and Deputy Chairman" added Andy Atkins-Kruger.

An existing US based association was not seen by the group to be appropriate in its operations for the UK market. Barry Lloyd, commenting on the reason for a new UK based association said: "The UK search engine market is currently the second largest in the World outside the United States. After looking at the way trade associations are being developed internationally it has became apparent that the UK should have its own association for this growing sector, set up in a manner to reflect the specific way that both businesses and trade associations operate in the UK and other parts of Europe."

Andy Atkins-Kruger sees the first priority of the working group as rapidly developing a strong membership base: "Now we have an embryonic organisation, a set of objectives and a direction - we need more professionals to come and support our already enthusiastic group to help make the association successful."

More information here:
http://www.sma-uk.org/

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October 20, 2004

John Battelle speculates on the future of Google's desktop search, and considers the possibility of Google merging its Desktop Search with Orkut, to produce a network of "mircosites" running from Google HTTP servers.

It's certainly not hard to imagine Google developing technology from Orkut and creating it's own network that people would effectively build from their own PCs. When you add Blogger to the mix...

Now there's something to think about.

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In Search Memories, Mike Grehan relates a sessions at the summer's SES in San Jose, when old hacks discussed the older days of search.

One by one, top staff at Infoseek, Excite, and Alta Vista, related on how they were approached by Larry Page and Sergey Brin with their PageRank algorithm - and one by one they shoved them out - Steve Kirsh, then director of Infoseek, telling the boys from Stanford to "Go pound sound".

Instead, Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google. The rest is history.

Nowadays, Steve Kirsch is apparently lot more receptive to students from Standford. :)

Posted at 05:55 PM
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October 18, 2004

And Yahoo! search now has a new look:

http://search.yahoo.com/

Familiar, no? :)

Posted at 06:49 PM
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Personally, I think that meta-search is the way forward.

Ask has great clustering technology, but often this can be seen as useless in the commercial environment, as commercial competitors certainly do not link to one another as freely as free reference resources do.

And although Google has great indexing technology, and generally returns "good" results, the general feeling in the webmaster community seems to be that the results could be better - if only Google would stop fiddling with the algorithm.

Combine both with Yahoo! and MSN and you have a consensus of opinion - just as pages are rated on being "approved" by other sites via links, so are results "approved" by running them via different search enignes that master different elements of search.

There are a number of meta-search engines out there, but many do not seem to be catching the user imagination - a predilection for "sponsored results" on top of organic results kills a search engine's usefulness, in my opinion.

So what does the Jux2 meta-search engine have that the others don't?

USer control - you can select which of the other search engines you would like to get results from, and even order them to your preference.

Meta-search is looking much more promising.

Posted at 05:50 PM
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October 02, 2004

Well, it seems that everyone wants a toolbar these days. Whilst Microsoft get ready to open up with their new search engine with new previews, lo! and behold - a Microsoft toolbar is released.

On the one hand, this looks like just another company jumping on the bandwagon. In reality, it shows that Microsoft are taking the battle for the search engine market.

Like Yahoo! before them and the Yahoo! toolbar, that follows long on the heels of the firmly established Google Toolbar, what we're seeing is an absolute battle taking place for the lucrative search engine market.

And why are the toolbar's important?

Well, for a start, we're talking about Permission Marketing here - and the ability for a provider to help push their own products, without filling their own home pages full of advertisements for their competitors.

More importantly, the toolbars collective extensive marketing data - tracking information, demographic usage, that all in all present mountains of potentially valuable personalised marketing data to the giants of the search engine world.

Like people who provide free advertising to billion-dollar coporations by wearing branded clothing, so billio-dollar search engines have found a way to collect extensive maketing data on millions of individuals.

The search engine market continues to move forward towards personalised marketing and wider definitions of relevancy based on past user information.

The search engine war continues in earnest.

Posted at 04:33 PM
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September 28, 2004

I'm currently reading Mike Grehan's Search Engine book, and it's a very enlightening exploration of how search engines work, packed with very useful information. The worst part of it is that I'm reading the Second Edition, which basically covers up to 2001 in great detail, with only a few sections updated since then - though a Third Edition is apparently due very soon, and I will definitely be reading that,

The point of this post though is to point out Mike Grehan's other site, E-marketing News, because that also appears to contain a lot of useful information - and it's all free, too. One of Mike's key strength's is that he has made a point of interviewing a number of people within the search engine industry itself - the develops and managers of search engines. For example, check out the April 2004 archive, for an interview with Jon Glick, head of Yahoo! search...

Posted at 07:04 PM
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Nick W takes a moment to share one of those rare SEO secrets, in this thread entitled Installing a Powerful - SE Friendly CMS in 10mins.

In short, he highly recommends using Drupal, with "clean URLs" selected in the admin options.

I'm going to have to test that out and see how it works. But you can be sure, if it does work, and it's a great SE solution, then most of the people reading this news entry will completely fail to attempt to use this tip anytime within the next couple of months. I've seen it happen before, when John Scott at v7n recommended using Xaraya for similar purposes.

Posted at 06:57 PM
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A thread at the Search Engine Watch forums raised the subject of a "Scalable Topic-Based Open Source Search Engine", and the methods being mooted for developing a more relevant algorithm.

Somewhere among the tracking of information on what the project was up to, and what bots were used - which can be found in this thread here - Bob Massa, of SearchKing fame, suddenly stepped in and stated a couple of home-truths that absolutely require repeating here.

When someone on the thread asked (regarding an open source search engine): "How would they deal with the fact that people would look at the algo and optimize for it though?"

That is how it should of been from the very beginning. Optimizing your site should not be a bad thing. Every webmaster SHOULD optimize their sites. Optimizing your site does not a spammer make. Optimizing your site just makes you a better webmaster.

Making up and changing the rules of the game and then penalizing people for breaking self-serving guidelines is what should have been recognized as the problem all along. It never had to be that way. It could have all been looked at differently right from the start. We, as an industry, have tried to commit virtual hari-kari on ourselves by sitting idle and allowing major corporate propaganda machines to cause us to divide against ourselves."
- Bob Massa

Posted at 06:16 PM
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