• Google’s wind power

  Google’s purchase of twenty years worth of renewable energy from an Iowa wind farm (Inside Google July 26 2010)

• What Does Google Read?

  Want to read like a Google exec? Don’t expect any laughs. (Beyond Search July 27 2010)

• Apple Search Engine Lightning Bolt to Strike Google?

  Is Apple working on an app search engine and trying to stop Google from doing the same? (Google Watch July 27 2010)

• Google Images – just like Bing!

  Google Images have had a make over. (P Bradley July 28 2010)

• Can Ask.com's New Search Strategy Work?

  It’s hard not to think of the new Ask.com community search section as a glorified Yahoo Answers (PC World July 28 2010)

• What’s New With Bing & Yahoo Search Alliance

  Yahoo is currently testing Bing powered results on about 25 percent of the traffic. (SE Land July 20 2010)

• Google Images gets major overhaul

  Google tries to ‘get the app out of the way’ (techradar July 2010)

• French Newspapers Partner To Sidestep Google News

  French newspapers is partnering to create an online news site that they hope will be an alternative to Google News. (SE Land July 23 2010)

• How To Hide News Sources in Google News

  Google adds “news settings” or “source preferences” which lets you block some sources (SE Roundtable July 26 2010)

• AOL Keeping Google (And Bing) On Its Toes For Search Deal Pick

  AOL is currently gauging the offers of several companies to power its search (SE Watch July 27 2010)

• Google's Search-Related Music Store Slated For Holiday Season

  Android VP at Google, Andy Rubin, is having “accelerated” talks with music publishing firm Harry Fox (SE Watch July 27 2010)

• Bing Generates More Clicks Than Google

  Google users clicked on ads at a rate of 1.09%, while Bing users clicked on ads 1.67% of the time (SE Land July 27 2010)

• Yahoo Japan Picks Google Search Over Bing

  Yahoo Japan — an independent entity from Yahoo — has decided to forgo the Bing transition (SE Watch July 27 2010)

• See An Offensive Image On Google? Stay Tuned.

  Google’s report offensive image feature is no longer found in the new design. (SE Land July 29 2010)

• The New Ask.com: A Little Bit Search, A Little Bit Answers

  Ask.com is re-launching as a cross between a traditional search engine and the question-and-answer service (SE Land July 27 2010)

• Diller: Ask.com Was The Little Search Engine That Couldn’t

  IAC CEO: “Ask itself is not a large segment of the company.” (SE Land July 29 2010)

• Street Slide: Microsoft’s Next Killer Maps App?

  Next-generation tool for browsing street-level imagery. (SE Land July 29 2010)

• 4 Common SEO Copywriting Techniques That Ruin Your Copy

  Stay on Search: Long outdated SEO techniques based on pure, unadulterated myths. (July 30 2010)

• Google Ordered To Remove Search Results On Sex Charges But Document Still Shows

  The search results were about a sexual harassment case between her and a guy 10 years ago (SE Roundtable July 30 2010)

• Wolfram Alpha Widgets announced

  Beta release for computational engine apps (techradar Jlu 2010)

• Google: The "Last Thing We Want" Is The "Best SEO To Win"

  Jeremy Sussman, a Google Local Product Manager has been pretty frank and clear (SE Roundtable July 30 2010)

• Google With Direct Dictionary Result

  Google now has a onebox of their own immediately offering the definition(s) for certain words you’re searching for. (Blogoscoped July 30 2010)

• Be a Search Engine Land member & get express commenting, library access, videos & more… MEMBER LOGIN >|BECOME A MEMBER > Study Calls Google ‘King Of Malware’

  Google has twice as much malware in its search results as Yahoo, Bing, and Twitter combined. (SE Land July 30 2010)

• Google Acquires Metaweb – Smarter Searches?

  Metaweb is a successful and popular semantic search start-up and it will help make Google’s searches a lot more efficient (Google Tutor July 20 2010)

• The Top Ten Alternative Search Engines

  About.com on the top ten alternative/niche search engines out there on the Web. (July 23 2010)

Video of the week:

Google’s Matt Cutts talk about Google and search engine optimization at Search University in Belgium.

But we are back now. Here are some of this week’s headlines, plus a few others from the weeks we were away.

(PS: Could someone please tell the Brits they are driving on the wrong side of the road! It is very confusing, not to say dangerous!)

• The insane world of “No linking Policy” – what happened to the interNET?

  On companies and sites with a “no linking policy” or “linking restriction policy” (State of Search Kuly 15 2010)

• Google Removes WiFi Gear from Street View Cars

  Google cars have resumed their tours of Sweden, Ireland, Norway and South Africa (Inside Google July 9 2010)

• Microsoft’s Search Crawler MSNBot To Be Renamed As Bingbot

  Trivial but a much needed update. (TNW June 28 2010)

• Google Chrome Creeps to 7.2% Worldwide Browser Share

  Microsoft Internet Explorer rose back above 60 percent to 60.32 percent (Google Watch July 1 2010)

• Apple Allows Google AdMob Ads for iPhone 4, iPad

  Despite new language in its developer terms to the contrary, Apple is allowing targeted ads from Google (Google Watch July 2 2010)

• Google News Users Hate Changes, Threaten to Go to Bing

  Many people griped when Google added more refinements to the left-hand rail (Google Watch July 5 2010)

• Google releases 500 scans of Ancient Greek and Latin texts for research

  Google sharing high-resolution digital scans of over 500 volumes of Ancient Greek and Latin, dating from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. (Inside Google Books June 25 2010)

• Bing changes interface

  Options for narrowing a search has been moved (P Bradley June 24 2010)

• China renews Google's ICP license

  Google keeps its google.cn domain ( June 28 2010)

• Rumour: Google Games still on for 2010 launch

  Google puts $100m into Farmville developer (techradar July 2010)

• Microsoft Bing reaches 12% of search market

  Bing and Yahoo both gain ground on Google (techradar July 2010)

• Translating Wikipedia

  Google helps translate more than 16 million words for Wikipedia into Arabic, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Swahili, Tamil and Telugu. (Google Blog July 14 2010)

• Google News Brings Back Its Old Home Page … Kinda

  In response to sometimes loud and angry user feedback, Google News has tweaked its home page (SE Land July 16 2010)

• Picture of New Google Image Search Design

  A new design for Google Images. (SE Roundtable July 16 2010)

• Is Google Getting Sloppy?

  Google Buzz, background images and changes to Google News. Not enough testing? (Marketing Pilgrim July 16 2010)

• Yahoo: We’re Switching to Bing Next Month…or Maybe Next Year

  Expect a full transition to Bing’s search results as early as August (Marketing Pilgrim July 16 2010)

• Google Buys Metaweb To Bolster Answers, Google Squared & Rich Snippets

  Metaweb is a search company that figures out entities and not just words. (SE Land July 16 2010)

SMX West: March 2-4
Go to California!

When Google decided to give the Chinese authorities an ultimatum by stopping censoring Chinese search results, many observers thought they were mad. It looked like they were abandoning the world biggest market. Google must have known that the Chinese Communist Party will not give up on censorship. This is, after all, partly what keeps them in power.

We guess Google knew as much. But the Chinese hacker attack on Google’s servers told them that they had to draw the line somewhere, and for the “Do no evil” company all this censorship was damaging for both morale and image. So when the Chinese refused to give in, they redirected the google.cn search engine to the Hong Kong version of Google. Hong Kong is outside the normal Chinese jurisdiction, due to its colonial past.

Google now risked losing the google.cn domain altogether. As the Financial Times says: “Without the licence, it seemed likely Google would end up closing all its operations in China.”

Google reached out a hand. It stopped redirecting search results directly. Instead it put up a separate page, where mainland China users had to click on a link to get to the Hong Kong results. This didn’t make much of a difference in real terms. Google continued to lead Chinese searchers to uncensored results in Hong Kong, but it gave the Chinese authorities a way to save face.

The Chinese took it. Google’s licence and Chinese domain name has been renewed. Google can still market many of its services in China. This especially applies to non-search products and services, like the Chrome OS and the Android mobile phone operating system.

For the Chinese a complete Google withdrawal would be a publicity disaster. The country is trying actively to attract foreign high tech companies. They also know that Google has broad support in the new Chinese middle class — several hundred million people the Communists need to keep happy.

Google on the other hand, with founder Sergey Brin (who grew up in Soviet Russia), takes a long term “Chinese approach” to the problem. Historically speaking nearly all countries with a strong middle class ends up as democracies. There may come a day when a democratic China stop the censorship. At that point in time Google will come out as the moral victor. That means a lot, also business-wise.

Facebook, Twitter and Youtube Marketing.
Hourly rates $15 to $25.

Disclosure: qmpeople is a Pandia Sponsor.

Pandia: Your site has been online since 2004, but it wasn’t launched in earnest before 2008. Did you do a lot of market analysis before launching the site?

Marina Cianfarani: Yes, even though we did have clear ideas in mind for our site since the start. We have seen that many social networks had the same characteristics and lack of personality so it has been simple for us to develop qmpeople.

Nevertheless we understand that nowadays it’s crucial for anyone to know the market, actual and potential competitors and emerging trends. For that reason we initially launched qmpeople only in Italy (our country of origin) and after more than six months of 360 degrees analysis we decided to expand our initiative to the international arena.

Outsourcing

Pandia: We understand that you are a rather small company. How do you manage to keep it running. Through outsourcing?

Marina Cianfarani: Yes, we outsource a large part of our activities.

For example, we chosen our SMS gateway in South Africa, hosting solution in USA, domain management distributed across several authorities/providers thanks to a custom DNS solution, legal experts on Internet laws in Ukraine as well as many young collaborators in different parts of the world.

Pandia: Does this mean that you make active use of computing in the cloud? Will cloud computing be the key to online success for publishers and social web site owners?

Marina Cianfarani: At qmpeople we use cloud computing but we think that the most important key factor on a long time basis is the ability to fulfil the end users needs, better than competitors do. Anyway in these times of global crisis, resources are important so cloud computing can provide important resource optimization.

Language and culture

Pandia: You are based in the UK, but are clearly trying to reach large parts of the world. How do you cope with the needs of different languages and cultures?

Marina Cianfarani: qmpeople is borne as a multilingual platform to allow people from any part of the world to communicate, share interests and contents, play games and enjoy themselves.

To accomplish that task we are running our network on several localized versions of the most common languages such as English, German, French, Spanish and Russian, with native support of different time zones, currencies and languages.

Dating site?

Pandia: So what is qmpeople? The first impression is that it is a dating site. The next is that it is some kind of social web site. A bit Facebook like, perhaps?

Marina Cianfarani: Our slogan is “qmpeople – A world of friends” meaning that qmpeople is a place where people from any part of the world can meet and interact. It seems a simple and common slogan but our vision is that qmpeople will reinvent the idea of friendship on Internet.

In fact we are focusing on people who want to make new friends (not only already existent friends like on Facebook) by using a different paradigm than existent social networks. They allow people to make new friends only in a virtual way, without real interaction.

qmpeople want to solve that problem by introducing resembling real friendship activities, such as “help me” in which you can help friends in their time of need: no virtual gifts, virtual kisses and so on but real help.

The use of design

Pandia: I am fascinated by the visual design of the site. You have deliberately chosen a comic book like design with bright colors and simplistic icons. Is this a way of lowering the anxiety threshold of your visitors?

Marina Cianfarani: Yes. Social networking is almost often too serious. Sites like LinkedIn need a formal design because they are involved in business activities, but in our case we think that people would enjoy a funny and informal environment.

Pandia: This is a social networking site. Key to success in that industry is to reach critical mass as regards the number of active users. What are you doing to achieve this?

Marina Cianfarani: We are exploring all marketing opportunities to promote our initiative but we are focusing on contents and market analysis.

Discussion groups

Pandia: The site goes beyond dating. There are, for instance, discussion groups for topics as diverse as the TV show The Office and Haiti relief. But there is not much traffic in all of them. Can you tell us what you hope to achieve with these groups?

Marina Cianfarani: Groups will boost user experience thanks to several services we are going to introduce during next months. We have deployed a first beta version of them so they simply need some time to reach the same level of user interaction as other well know tools such as those to exchange off-line and real time messages.

Videos

Pandia: There is also the possibility of uploading videos. Is this a good way for contact seeking people to present themselves?

Marina Cianfarani: Videos are very appreciated by Internet users, as YouTube demonstrate. They can be a good way for people to present themselves to other users so we are developing specific applications to facilitate the submission, the internal and external sharing, and enhancing activities such as tagging.

Help Me

Pandia: What’s the deal about the Help Me section?

Marina Cianfarani:The Help me service allows you to give help to your new friends in their time of need. It could be seen similar to Yahoo Answers, but it even allows users to ask for economical help. Yes, thanks to native PayPal support, any registered user can send money to fulfill one or more help request. Please, take a look at how the community decided to help pwilkins by donating him some money to repair his motorbike.

Content production

Pandia: To succeed in the search engines, a site needs a lot of relevant textual content. Do you try to get your members to become active content producers?

Marina Cianfarani: Yes, qmpeople is a closed platform at the moment because we think this approach would increase the user experience.

We are different from Facebook because we have no third party applications but, of course, user generated contents is very important so we are using a viral approach to stimulate our users to write lots of contents such as their statuses, comments, what they like/don’t like and niche contents on specific groups.

Advertising

Pandia: You make active use of Google Ads on your site. There is even a row of Google Ads links that could be interpreted as menu links.

I guess there are some of our search engine marketing readers that would be interested to know why you are doing this. Aren’t you just driving visitors away to other contact sites?

Marina Cianfarani: Advertising is a key factor to obtain important resources to develop our network. That can sound as a risk to drive visitors away because a lot of other social networks are currently interested in promoting their sites on qmpeople. But we think, and our experience demonstrates, that users come back to qmpeople because they love it. In other words, we don’t see the promotion of other social networks as a risk, but as an opportunity.

Pandia: What is the qmpeople secret?

Marina Cianfarani: We can summarize it like this: powerful functionality, originality and simplicity.

photo credit: ginnerobot

A World of Friends!

SMX East: NYC Oct 5-7
Click Here for Agenda!

Privacy and search engine data storage

It is not easy being a search engine.

Giants like Google and Bing would really like to store your searches and link them to your IP address, cookie or logon information, as this coupling gives them data they can use to improve their search engine algorithms and tailor search results to your personal taste.

On the other hand people like you and me feel uneasy about this invasion of privacy and would prefer Google and Bing to know as little as possible about our search habits.

The Article 29 Working Party

It is not easy being the European Union, either.

The European Commission and its Article 29 Working Party (not to be confused with Written Declaration 29 — see below) considers itself a champion of the little people — that is people like you and me — and has therefore put a lot of pressure on Google and its siblings in an attempt to reduce the amount of personal data stored by search engines.

The search engines have at least partly complied, by deleting IP adresses (the id number your computer or your ISP gives the search engine when you do a search) earlier than before. Bing is to cut the amount of time it stores the IP addresses associated with search queries from 18 months to six months.

One of our favorite search engines, Duck Duck Go, does not store collect any information about its users. Some meta search engines too, like Ixquick and Yauba have made privacy part of their business model, promising not to store any personal information.

Data Retention Directive

Unfortunately, another part of the European Union wants desperately to use all this data for police work and surveillance. There has been an intense discussion in many European countries regarding the ratification of the so-called Data Retention Directive.

The very controversial directive requires the member countries to store traffic and localisation data on people’s use of phones, mobile phones, email, Internet usages and so on. This is information on who’s communicating with who, when, how and where from. The police wants this data to crack down on crime, but it can, of course, also be used for Intelligence work and surveillance.

Hence, at the same time as the Commission is trying to protect you from Google’s surveillance it is actively working for increasing the amount of public surveillance.

The Smile29 initative

Now the European Parliament has gone ahead and demanded that search engine data should be included in the Data Retention Directive.

As we reported on June 8 MEPs Titziano Motti of Italy and Anna Zaborska of Slovakia in their Written Declaration 29 (also known as Smile29) ask for the search engines to store IP addresses and more to make that information available to law enforcement in order to catch paedophiles and sex offenders.

In a clarification Motti and Zaborska says that the proposal “has the only objective to persecute children related pornography and sexual harassment online.”

This is naive. As the Commission clearly has communicated to the search engines, the very existence of such data is a threat to privacy.

The Commission must act

Written Declaration 29 totally undermines all the work the Commission has done to protect privacy.

Admittedly, the Declaration does not (yet) have the status of law, and as far as we understand it the European Commission could in theory ignore it. However, it acts as a formal invitation to the Commission to take action to address the issues raised by the Declaration, and given that it has a the support of the majority of MEPs, it would be hard to ignore it.

Now the Commission may have to include the search engines into the Data Retention Directive and ask them to keep such data and to give it to the police when deemed appropriate.

The Commission could — probably — ask the search engines to store data related to searches for and visits to sex and paedophile sites only, but how they are going to define which sites and searches these are to be beats us.

As it is now, the Data Retention Directive does not allow for storing the content of communications, only the traffic data and timestamp. If you want to track down sex offenders you would also have to store the search query and the content of the sites they are visiting.

The legal privacy issues involved are mind numbing.

Do the MEPs know what they are doing?

Christian Engström, Swedish MEP of the Pirate Party, argues on his blog that “It is understandable if many Members of the European Parliament have been misled into signing the declaration, since the Data Retention Directive is never mentioned in any of the marketing material for the declaration, and is only referred to by its number 2006/24/EC in the declaration itself.”

He is probably right in believing that many of the over 300 MEPs who have signed the declaration do not understand the consequences of what they are doing.

Swedish MEP Cecilia Wikström from the liberal group has asked MEPs to withdraw their support for the declaration. She says:

“The review of the Data Retention Directive is currently underway, with a report expected from the Commission in September. The Directive was adopted under the previous legislature after severe pressure from the Council and despite being repeatedly rejected by the Civil Liberties Committee.

Following such a difficult adoption in the European Parliament, implementation problems in Austria, Belgium, Germany, Greece, Romania and Sweden and in advance of the Commission’s report on implementation of the Directive, it is clearly inappropriate for the Parliament to take a position on this topic now.”

The point Wikström is making is that the Data Retention Directive is about storing data for a long time, allowing law enforcement to use these data to fight crime. The Data Retention Directive is not about early warning, stopping crime before it happens.

Ixquick’s protest

Ixquick has seized the opportunity to get some additional PR. In a press release they argue that the Written Declaration 29 is targeting them:

“Since Google, Yahoo, and Bing already retain users’ search data, this proposal is clearly aimed at Ixquick and our English-language subsidiary Startpage,” said Robert Beens, CEO of Ixquick. “We have worked hard to create a privacy-friendly search engine that embodies the spirit of EU Privacy Protections, in line with the strict recommendations of the EU Article 29 Data Protection Working Party. This Declaration is evidence that the left hand of the EU does not know what the right hand is doing.”

We doubt very much that the Motti and Zaborska have heard about Ixquick, but it is certainly true that their directive will underminde Ixquick’s policy of not storing search and searcher data.

Ixquick points to the fact that this surveillance is unlikely to stop sex offenders. They quote Alexander Hanff of Privacy International who says that:

“Sex offenders exchange files through underground networks. They don’t find this stuff through search engines. I spent eight years helping law enforcement track down online sex offenders and never once did we see a case where search engine data was useful.”

Privacy International will now write to more than 200 European organisations to form a campaign to fight the adoption of an EU proposal to require the retention and analysis all European Internet search traffic.

List of names of MEPs supporting the Written Directive 29

A World of Friends!

SMX East: NYC Oct 5-7
Click Here for Agenda!

Norway has a very high Internet presentation, but we have always found the number of 2.6 million registered users to be too high. That would mean that half of the 5 million inhabitants have Facebook accounts.

Only Iceland has a higher Facebook usage per capita.

Facebook tells advertisers that it has 1.6 million users in the capital Oslo. The problem is that Oslo has no more than 600,000 inhabitants. If you count the greater Oslo metropolitan area, the number increases to 900,000, but even if all of them used Facebook this would not be enough

Facebook’s press spokesperson Jan Fredriksson tells Dagens Næringsliv that Facebook is using IP addresses to identify where the users come from.

Given that Oslo is an important Internet hub, that could explain part of the discrepancy. But not all, though. Espen Grimmert, Market Director of the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten says that the Facebook advertiser tool tells him that there are 850,000 Facebook users between the age of 20 and 29 in Norway. Too bad there are only 613,000 people in this age cohort in the country.

For most other Norwegian cities the number of Facebook users is lower than the number of inhabitants. The coverage is suspiciously high for some of them, though. The coverage in Tromsø is 67.6 percent, in Ålesund 79.4. The coverage in Stavanger is 101.1 percent.

Fredrikssons admit that the advertiser tool is “a guide that is to help advertisers design a campaign” and that it is not always exact.

Facebook says it has 400 million users world wide.

Image: Oslo Opera House by Snøhetta. Photo: Susanne Koch.

A World of Friends!

SMX West: March 2-4
Go to California!

The two Parliament members want to extend the European Data Retention Directive to include search engine data in order that the police may take swift action to stop child pornography online. Earlier this week, they declared that they have secured 325 votes already and are only 45 votes away from securing a vote in their favor.

Opponents claim that surveillance should not be the answer to most political problems and hold that there is no evidence that the suggested extension of the Data Retention directory would be effective in trapping paedophiles.

photo credit: fabbio

Facebook, Twitter and Youtube Marketing.
Hourly rates $15 to $25.

No real time image search at Google

With the recent addition of the sidebar tools, it is easy to filter your Google search to get the most recent results or to get images, but once you have chosen to see only images, the option to filter by time disappears. So Google doesn’t do real time image search.

Collecta

Collecta is among my favorite real time search engines. It is easy to use and offers a number of filtering options (in the left margin, right below the search box and your query):

• Stories (blog posts, articles)
• Comments on blog posts
• Updates (Twitter, Jaiku, Identica)
• Photos (Flickr, TwitPic, yFrog)
• Videos (YouTube, Ustream)

Nachophoto

Nachophoto is a real time photo search engine that launched in April. Like all good real time search engines, they offer trending topics. The search results hold a lot of information:

You get sets of 20 photos, the most recent at the top and then more sets below of more recent photos, sorted by source and time stamped. My favorite feature is a time slider at the top. Drag the slider to determine the time range. Nachophoto will get photos as old as one month. There is an rss stream from each search, so you can subscribe to new photos in your favorite rss reader.
Filtering by photos and videos, you get a great visual representation of recent events.

Why real time image search?

Nachophoto founder Anuj Agarwal sent us a case study showing the relevance of real time image search. The search term used was ‘iPad’. This was the 4th most popular term searched on internet on the day iPad was launched on 3rd April.

The keyword has undergone a series of semantic changes: A Nachofoto search for ‘iPad’ around 27th Jan showed images of Steve Jobs announcing the iPad. On April 3rd, an early morning search displayed images of crowds queuing up for the iPad outside the Apple store.

Shortly after 9 am the same day, the search term produced images of people checking out the iPad at the Apple store. Around noon on same day, you could see pictures of people unboxing their brand new iPads.

Search results for the same query on a standard image search engine remained same, missing the development that took place around iPad.

An intro to Nachophoto

photo credit: mikebaird

Facebook, Twitter and Youtube Marketing.
Hourly rates $15 to $25.

• The Australian Federal Police tackle Google

  An official Australian investigation into the search giant’s Wi-Fi privacy debacle has launched. (apc June 6 2010)

• Google using search engine to muscle into Internet businesses, study finds

  Universal Search favors Google’s properties with prominent listings in its results (Inside Google June 2 2010)

• Google Health Is Alive and, Er, Well

  Is Google Health, the company’s effort to help patients access their personal health records, dead or in stasis? (Google Watch June 2 2010)

• Clusty becomes Yippy

  It’s one of the few search engines that I’ve come across that actively promotes censorship. (P Bradley misses the old Clusty June 1 2010)

• The Ultimate Guide to Torrent Search

  Torrent search engines, torrent clients, torrent sites, and more! (About June 4 2010)

• A graphic display of what Google knows

  Scott Cleland has pulled together a snappy one-page graphic on Google’s Total Information Awareness Power (Inside Google June 4 2010)

• Yahoo! Predictalot Goes Global, Takes On World Cup 2010

  Predictalot , a massive crowdsourcing experiment cooked up in Yahoo! Labs, is going global. (Yodel June 4 2010)

• Google Increased The Title Tag Limit To 70 Characters?

  Google is showing the blue clickable link with a maximum character limit of up to 70 characters (SE Roundtable June 1 2010)

• Google ditches Windows on security concerns

  The directive to move to other operating systems began in earnest in January, after Google’s Chinese operations were hacked (Financial Times May 31 2010)

• Attorney In Google Maps Lawsuit: It Was Dark; She Thought Google Was Leading Her To Sidewalk

  Woman blames Google for directing her onto a highway where she was struck by a vehicle. (SE Land June 1 2010)

• Steve Jobs At D8: The Search Engine Edition

  Cupertino won’t be going into the search business or building its own search engine (SE Land Jun 2 2010)

• YouTube Still Owns Video Share; Vevo Gaining Viewers

  YouTube’s 43% market share remains light years ahead of everyone else in the space (SE Land June 2 2010)

• Bing, Google Offering Dueling “Health Maps”

  Both introduce “health maps” that enable data visualization on a mapping interface. (SE Land June 2 2010)

• How To Move Your Company's Google Street View Image

  What happens if you have a street view image for your business listing in Google Maps that you are not happy about? (SE Roundtable June 3 2010)

• Google Backs Down, Will Give Street View Data To Privacy Officials

  Google will initially give the intercepted data to officials in Germany, France, Spain, and Italy (SE Land June 3 2010)

• 3 Search Types All SEOs Should Know

  Common wisdom, supported by various research projects, has identified three primary types of searches: navigational, informational, and transactional. (SE Land June 4 2010)

• A Farewell to Bing cashback

  The last day you can earn money searching Bing will be July 30, 2010. (bing community June 4 2010)

• How Google sees branding & your brand can shine in search

  When you search for flat panel LCD TVs, you will find a set of links at the top of the page that says, Brands for Flat Panel LCD TVs (Search Cowboys June 4 2010)

• We Could Be Lovers: AOL Courts Google & Microsoft

  Coy AOL is trying to get as much as it can for its flat to declining search volume from either current partner Google (SE Land Jun 4 2010)

SMX West: March 2-4
Go to California!

Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery, they say. In fact, much of the most productive innovation taking place in the business sector is copying, and we are not the ones to complain if copying leads to a better search experience.

We actually think Bing’s home page looks great. The background picture does not add much in terms of functionality, but it does look good, and we humans are aesthetic beings. Ask.com added the option to add skins (a background image on the search page a long time ago. As Apple has understood, the looks of a product may be as important as how it works.

Google has now added its own way of adding a picture to the home page. Unlike Bing the company lets you choose the picture.

Click on the link “Change Background Image” in the bottom left hand corner of the Google home page. This opens a separate window where you can choose among different picture files:

• From your computer
• Picasa Web Photos (if you have an account with images)
• Editor’ Picks
• Images from a Public Gallery

Phil Bradley is not too happy about the feature. He points out that Google does not give you enough information about what kind of images you can use:

“Anything less than 800×600 is rejected, but you only find that out afterwards. If the image is too large Google just chooses a bit of it, which may not be the bit that you want. I tried it with a few image sizes, and two that worked for me were 1233×600 and 3472×1689 – so roughly twice as wide as tall. Expect to do a bit of fiddling around therefore.”

SMX West: March 2-4
Go to California!

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