Interesting movie about a widget-based Internet-on-the-TV platform that’s currently being developed by Yahoo and Intel. Watch it to learn more details.
Google has launched a new widget for your iGoogle page which keeps you up-to-speed with the current Olympic games. The summer games widget is a highly effective tool to keep track on all Olympic events in a matter of minutes. Check it out!
In Word Visualization on Search Marketing Blogs, Lee Odden uses a cool ‘tag cloud generator’, called Wordle, to describe what the (American) search blogs are actually talking about. Because Across The Web was shamelessly neglected in Odden’s research (:-), we performed the same test and came up with the following stylish result.
Following accusations and even law suits concerning the quality of it’s content ads, Google announces some major updates on the Google Content Network. The new enhancements are the result of Google’s integration with Double Click. Hopefully they will make the content network more efficient and reliable and will provide a better user-experience for anyone who visits a site which has AdSense ads on it.
These are the new features which will be launched on the Google Content Network in the following weeks and months.
* Frequency Capping: Enables advertisers to control the number of times a user sees an ad. Users will have a better experience on Google content network sites because they will no longer see the same ad over and over again.
* Frequency Reporting: Provides insight into the number of people who have seen an ad campaign, and how many times, on average, people are seeing these ads.
* Improved Ads Quality: Brings performance improvements within the Google content network.
* View-Through Conversions: Enables advertisers to gain insights on how many users visited their sites after seeing an ad. This helps advertisers determine the best places to advertise so users will see more relevant ads.
Looks promising. Hopefully these enhancements will be rolled out soon so that we can experience them first hand and find out what they mean for our search marketing campaigns?
Source: The Official Google Blog
In June, Google Trends, underwent quite a few updates such as actual numeric results and the ability to download them to a spreadsheet. Today, Google launches a completely new version of Google trends, called Google Insights for search. New features include related keywords and the ability the narrow your ‘insight’-search to a specific sector, all very useful for search marketeers who want to optimize their AdWords campaigns and/or expand to other markets.
Google explains:
Today, we’re launching Google Insights for Search, a new product designed with the advertiser in mind. It provides more flexibility and functionality for advertisers and marketers to understand search behavior, and adds some cool new features like a world heat map to graphically display search volume and regional interest.
Like Google Trends, you can just type in a search term to see search volume patterns over time, as well as the top related and rising searches. You’ll also have the ability to compare search volume trends across multiple search terms, categories (commonly referred to as verticals), geographic regions, or specific time ranges.
Source: Inside Adwords
The question “What’s a good click-through rate?” is a little bit like asking “What’s your favorite movie?”, in that it really comes down to personal preference. Just as some people might lean toward “The Godfather,” as their fave flick, others might prefer something a little more low-brow, say “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure.”
The same is true for click-through rates on your Sponsored Search ads: The highest possible click-through rate may work for some—but it doesn’t work for all. That’s why the honest answer to the question is, “It depends.”
Yesterday 4 former Google employees launched an alternative search engine, called Cuil (:pronounced Cool). The Cuil founders claim to have indexed over 120 billion webpages (>< Google knows of 1 trillion URL’s) and that their search results are ranked on content and relevance instead of popularity. Noble ideas, but after running some test search queries and coming up with some rather questionable results, I have yet to be convinced about Cuil’s capabilities. Cool design though?
Last friday Google announced that they have indexed over 1 trillion (!) URL’s. A huge leap from the 26 million web pages in the very first Google Index of 1998. How did they manage to find all those pages in just ten years time? Two Google software engineers explain:
We start at a set of well-connected initial pages and follow each of their links to new pages. Then we follow the links on those new pages to even more pages and so on, until we have a huge list of links. In fact, we found even more than 1 trillion individual links, but not all of them lead to unique web pages. Many pages have multiple URLs with exactly the same content or URLs that are auto-generated copies of each other. Even after removing those exact duplicates, we saw a trillion unique URLs, and the number of individual web pages out there is growing by several billion pages per day.
It appears the rumor mill is reporting that Google will buy Digg for $200 million or so.
Rumor has it the two companies have signed a letter of intent and are close to a deal that will bring Digg under the Google News property.
Microsoft has an advertising deal with Digg so the deal would be a competitive blow to the Redmond giant.
This is the third time the buyout rumor has surfaced.
Is it “three strikes and you’re out” or the “third time’s the charm?”
Digg has yet to publicly disavow the rumor but it’s still early on the West Coast.
