What to look for

These child friendly search engines all search safe content, often indexes of content of particular interest to children, so you know the kids don’t stumble upon unsavory content.

A great search engine for kids also has a user interface that is easy to navigate and that appeals to children. This is my favorite part of researching search engines for children: You get to see innovative and user friendly search interfaces and neat presentation of search results. And the winners are:

Ask Kids

Ask Kids is fun to use, easy to navigate and with plenty of useful features. The search page looks like a lined note book. It is neat and uncluttered.

In addition to the prominent search box, there are links to five specialized search tools: Schoolhouse, movies, games, videos and images. For a kid researching a school assignment, a regular search returns universal results: Images, videos, definitions and more in addition to the regular search results.

For most searches, Ask Kids will present a smart search result at the top of the page, which provides an image, a definition and help to refine your search. In the left column, there are links to narrow or expand the search.

Ask Kids has most of the bells and whistles that the regular Ask search engine offers, but presented in a simplified and safe way. A great tool!

Boolify

Children today need to learn how to sift through vast quantities of information. Boolify is a search engine and a tool for learning or teaching how to sift. It offers an easy to use tool to help model Boolean operators.

Boolify does this though a drag and drop interface. The elements of any search phrase (word, and, not, or) are available as puzzle peaces . You start by dragging the word piece into the search field to add the first term. Then you drag a moderator (AND or OR) next to the search term to expand the query.

Search results appear below the search field as the first word is added and the results are updated on the fly every time you modify the query. The process is easy to grasp and even though the primary audience of Boolify is elementary and middle school children, it is certainly relevant for others, including adults.

Quintura Kids

Quintura Kids is based on the visual search engine Quintura and has its very own take on search.

When you enter a query, Quintura Kids presents you with a list of five links: Just the web page title and the URL.

If these are not what you were looking for, a search cloud hovers above: Your search term is highlighted in the middle of related terms. As you point your mouse to the terms in the cloud, Quintura modifies your query and the search results. Even though this might not be as intuitive as Boolify, it is easy to understand how Quintura Kids works.

Like Ask Kids, Quintura for Kids offers preset search categories: Movies, music, sports, TV and games. These categories provide you with the same top 5 search results and a search cloud to explore the topic.

StudySearch

StudySearch is based on a customised Google search engine developed for Australian Primary and Secondary school students.

The customized Google search is combined with a growing database of educational websites. When a search is done, those sites get priority in the search results. The student is still doing a full Google search (with SafeSearch activated) but the results are tuned to display sites that are more relevant.

The sites in the database are contributed by Australian teachers, librarians and site volunteers. These sites are selected based on their content and ease of navigation.

There are separate search pages for primary school and secondary school to provide content suited for each age group. Not much is done in the presentation of the search results. You get the standard list of links, but the quality and suitability of the links is safeguarded.

KidRex

KidRex is another Google Custom Search engine using Google SafeSearch technology. In addition, KidRex maintains its own database of inappropriate websites and keywords. Searches emphasize kid-related webpages.

KidRex has the coolest user interface. The search page is a colorful drawing of a search box guarded by a dinosaur. Like Google’s search page, there is no doubt where to put the query and how to proceed. This search page is suitable for small children.

Unfortunately, the search results are not equally easy to use. Once again we get the ubiquitous list of ten links. This is remedied to some extent by the fact that the search results in my test searches are highly relevant.

More search tools for kids

Pandia Kids & Teens has more search engines for kids and tools to help with homework and more.

photo credit: iwannt

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• Google eyes China as Baidu fumbles

  Baidu’s switch to a new advertising system, Phoenix Nest, may be the catalyst that boosts Google’s market share. (Economic Times Nov 15 2009)



• Google makes concessions on digital book deal

  Internet search leader Google will ease its control over millions of copyright-protected books earmarked for its digital library (SFgate Nov 15 2009)

• Google aims to double Web speed

  Google is hoping to make Web pages download up to twice as quickly using SPDY, a new application-layer protocol in Chrome (MacWorld Nov 13 2009)

• Switzerland Drops Legal Hammer on Google Street View

  Hanspeter Thuer, the Swiss Data Protection Authority commissioner wants Google to ensure that all faces and car plates are blurred and that Google erase images of walled gardens and private streets (Google Watch Nov 14 2009)

• WolframAlpha Makes It to Popular Science

  Popular Science, the world’s largest science and technology magazine, has released its 22nd annual list of the best 100 innovations, and named Wolfram|Alpha as the “Best of What’s New” Grand Award winner (Beyond Search Nov 14 2009)

• In recent weeks I have been impressed by leapfish.com and duckduckgo.com (Victor Keegan, Guardian, Nov 11 2009)”>Why I’m searching beyond Google

  In recent weeks I have been impressed by leapfish.com and duckduckgo.com (Victor Keegan, Guardian, Nov 11 2009)

• SearchFreeFonts – over 13,000 Free Fonts on the Web

  SearchFreeFonts’ collection contains over 13,000 free fonts and over 91,000 commercial fonts. (Alt Search Engines Nov 12 2009)

• Search for rare comics with relaunched ComicSeeker!

  Collectors of vintage Gold, Silver and Bronze Age comic books can search for their desired comics on the Internet, from a single web page. (Alt Search Engines Nov 9 2009)

• Revised Google Book Settlement Filed & Live Blogging The Press Call

  It formally grants retailers who license out-of-print books covered by the settlement — including Google competitors — a 37% share of sales. (SE Land Nov 14 2009)

• Google Acquires VoIP Company, Gizmo5

  Google has acquired Gizmo5, a Voice over the Internet Protocol network and software provider. (SE Watch Nov 13 2009)

• “Look kids! Big Ben…House of Parliament…”and Bing in the UK!

  We are excited to announce today that Bing in the UK is shedding its beta tag. (Bing Community Nov 12 2009)

• Yandex still biggest in Russia

  The latest numbers show Yandex takes up more than half of all searches in Russia. Considering that Mail.ru is also part of the Yandex network in total they take over 60%. (SearchCowboys Nov 13 2009)

• PubCon 2009 Vegas Coverage Recap

  SE Roundtable covered just under 40 sessions at the 2009 PubCon. Here are the links (Nov 12 2009)

• Gone Google at EDUCAUSE 2009

  Last week the Google Apps for Education team headed to Denver for EDUCAUSE 2009 where the higher education community meets annually. (Google Blog Nov 12 2009)

• Bing Searches Increase 7 Percent in October 2009

  Experian® Hitwise® announced today that Google accounted for 70.60 percent of all U.S. searches conducted in the four weeks ending Oct. 31, 2009. (Press release Nov 11 2009)

• Google China Music Player Gets Makeover

  Google launched a redesign of their Chinese music player (partnered with Top100.cn), which pops up in a new window when you perform a search at the Music base site. (Blogoscoped Nov 12 2009)

• Bing fall update announced: Wolfram|Alpha, weather, more

  Most noticeable is the announcement of a partnership with Wolfram|Alpha to use their APIs and include nutritional information searches and math searches as part of Bing (LiveSide Nov 11 2009)

• Google Adds SafeSearch Locking

  Using the new feature requires users to enter a Google account password, and when the feature is in effect, Google-colored balls will show at the top of the search results page. (SE Land Nov 11 2009)

• Times Online pay wall erected next spring?

  It is full steam ahead for Murdoch’s plans to turn his UK newspaper websites into subscription site (TechRadar Nov 11 2009)

• Google Latitude Rolls Out Location History and Alerts

  Location Alerts notifies you whenever you are near a friends location – that way you can easily contact that friend and perhaps arrange a meet-up at a designated place. (SE Journal Nov 11 2009)

• Bing Integrates MSN Videos and Video Search

  The new Bing Video site combines Bing’s video search engine and MSN video site. (SE Journal Nov 11 2009)

• Does Marissa Mayer’s “Perfect Search Engine” Already Exist In Siri?

  What Mayer may have unknowingly described is Siri, a “virtual personal assistant” that uses artificial intelligence to determine user intent and then match data or applications that can fulfill that intent. (SE Land Nov 10 2009)

• Google, Bing & Yahoo Bribe Users With Free WiFi

  Google, which previously said it would provide free WiFi on all Virgin America flights through early next year, is now going to provide it at 47 US airports through the end of the year. (SE Land Nov 10 2009)

• Google To Murdoch: Use No Index Or Just Ask

  News Corp. Founder and CEO Rupert Murdoch claims Google is stealing their content - the “content kleptomaniacs” as he has termed them. (SE Watch Nov 10 2009)

• Google To Deliver New “Caffeine” Search After The Holidays

  The Google Caffeine Sandbox, where people have been invited since the summer to test Google’s next generation search infrastructure, has been closed (SE Land Nov 10 2009)

• 3 Actual Uses of Twitter Lists

  Create a Group Tweet Widget; Subscribe to Lists by RSS; Monitor Popular Lists, Promote Lists (SE Journal Nov 10 2009)

Video of the week:

Greg Sterling drew our attention to the following video presenting Sixth Sense, an innovation developed by MIT students. They try to liberate us from the limitations of the PC and cell phone interface. Looks a bit rough at the moment, but the implications for search on the run can be enormous!

See also Wire: TED: MIT Students Turn Internet Into a Sixth Human Sense

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Ben Behrouzi, Founder and CEO of LeapFish asks these questions in a recent blogpost.

LeapFish used to be a regular meta search engine. Last week, the new LeapFish was unveiled: A multi-media and real-time search, communication, and sharing platform.

How it works

The core functionality of LeapFish is still search, but the search box now has two buttons: “Real Time” and “Search Web”. The second button gives you standard search engine results. If your query has news relevance, news results will top the list of results. Google is default search engine, but you can easily toggle between Google, Bing and Yahoo.

The “Real Time” button leads to a mosaic of real time results: News, trending topics, relevant top stories on Digg, fresh tweets and video results. In spite of the large amount of information, the search results are easy to navigate.

Each item in the search results can be shared. When you point your mouse to a particular item, “Share” and “Like” buttons appear. Clicking the “Like” button will give input to LeapFish’s ranking algorithm. The “Share” button lets you post the item to Facebook, Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon, Mixx, Reddit, Delicious, Technorati, Yahoo Buzz and Kaboodle.

In addition to the search features, the new LeapFish lets you personalize the home page. If you sign up for a LeapFish account, you can sign in to Facebook and Twitter to monitor the activity and post updates from the LeapFish home page. You can also add news sources and widgets like dictionary and thesaurus.

Is it any good?

I recently tested a lot of real time search engines for the article Top 5 sites for social search. The new LeapFish would have had a place among them — it is a well designed and useful search tool.

Not all social search engines present real time results. LeapFish has real time results from a large number of sources, including multimedia. The results are relevant and easy to navigate.

The home page that can be personalized is a nice touch. But at the moment, the number of widgets available does not impress me. And why isn’t there an option to add RSS?

The two buttons are likely to confuse users. I wish the regular search results could have been integrated with the real time results somehow. Or the “Search Web” option could be eliminated altogether. The new LeapFish is a real time search engine and might be better off leaving standard web search to others.

Here is a not entirely hype free intro to the new LeapFish:

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• Google Music Search: 3 Major Implications for the Music Business

  Googlers already search for songs, artists, and lyrics en masse, but the immediate click-to-listen and buy options that Google now provides could very well make them less likely to take the extra step back over to iTunes. (Mashable Nov 7 2009)

• Marissa Mayer Chosen As A Glamour Magazine Woman Of The Year

  Google’s Vice President of Search Product and User Experience Marissa Mayer was recently profiled in a Vogue Magazine article (TechCrunch Nov 6 2009)

• Microsoft Sites Captures Largest Share of Time Spent Online Worldwide

  Facebook and YouTube Combined Account for Nearly 10 Percent of Time Spent Online Globally (ComScore Nov 6 2009)

• Going Down The Long Tail of Local Search

  Because so many searches are now localized a long tail of local phrases are emerging within major metropolitan areas. (SE Guide Nov 5 2009)

• Explore Music Albums and Songs with Yahoo! Video Search

  Yahoo Search Blog: We have hooked into the “Web of Things” to intelligently extract the most popular albums and songs for artist or band queries. (Nov 5 2009)

• Google NEAR Operator & Exclude Faces on Image Search

  There are two threads at Google Web Search Help where there are two search suggestions that Google has listened to as a possible addition to Google’s advanced search. (SE Roundtable Nov 5 2009)

• Google Makes it Easier to Add Custom Section to Google News

  Now, you can create your own topical news streams based on keywords that you would normally use if you want to get the latest news on a particular topic. (SE Journal Nov 4 2009)

• Google Friend Connect Gets Personal

  In addition to allowing members of your site to send each other private messages, now Google is bringing its personalization home to your site with Friend Connect. (Marketing Pilgrim Nov 4 2009)

• How Google & Yahoo Make Money Off A Twitter Typo Domain

  Google has a program known as AdSense For Domains, previously known as DomainPark. Got a tasty domain but no content for it? AdSense For Domains will put lucrative ads up on it (SE Land Nov 5 2009)

• Experimenting with Digg Trends

  Digg Trends will surface certain highly active stories as they’re trending to Digg’s homepage so people can vote on whether or not they feel the story actually belongs there. (Digg Blog Nov 4 2009)

• Bing & Google Maps Update Map Imagery

  The Bing blog announced an additional 9,460 square kilometers of imagery added to Bing Maps. (SE Land Nov 4 2009)

• Google Celebrates Anniversaries For Sesame Street, Wallace & Gromit & Many Others

  It is the 40th anniversary of Sesame Street and Google made a Doodle for it (SE Roundtable Nov 4 2009)

• Microsoft launches MSN Music download service

  msn-music-hits-open-beta MSN Music hits open beta Microsoft has revealed that it has finally opened up the doors of its long-awaited music download service - MSN Music. (TechRadar Nov 3 2009)

• MSN Introduces Dramatically Improved Redesign, Portal Drives Nearly 50% Of Bing Queries

  The redesign makes video more central, incorporates Facebook and Twitter, creates a dedicated new local area and emphasizes search. (SE Land Nov 4 2009)

• Research & Build Links with Followtopia Search Engine

  Backlink checker that generates a list of most powerful pages and shows if “Nofollow” attribute has been applied to the external links on the page (SE Journal Nov 3 2009)

• Cutting back on your long list of passwords

  Google Blog on hybrid onboarding: sites sharing registration IDs and passwords

• Turkish government claims Google owes €32 million in taxes

  The Turkish government claims it is entitled to additional taxes because of the fact Google operates its online advertising in the country and even boasts offices and a registered subsidiary there while bills and payments originate from Ireland. (TechCrunch)

• Google Adds “Page Preview” To Search Options

  If you go to Google, search on something and click on “show options,” you can then look towards the button on the left hand side and click on “page previews.” (SE Land Nov 3 2009)

• Rise Of The Web Librarian: An Elegant DMOZ Solution

  Using libary and information science graduates to edit the Open Directory (SE Land Nov 3 2009)

• Google Related Links (Again)

  Google Related Links (II) shows further links from a given domain which are deemed relevant to a particular page the widget is embedded on. (Google Blogoscoped Nov 3 2009)

• Google launches local news in France

  After the US, the UK, India, Canada and Germany Google has launched their local news service in France. (Search Cowboys Nov 3 2009)

• Google Search by voice travels the world, finds Nokia, learns Chinese

  Google search by voice is available for Nokia S60 phones, and now understands Mandarin Chinese (Google Blog Nov 2 2009)

• Illegal downloads drive online music sales

  New survey suggests downloaders end up spending more in the end (techradar Nov 1 2009)

• Google News Ranking Algorithm

  The USPTO document that caught my interest was US20090276429, Systems and Methods for Improving the Ranking of News Articles.” Like most Google patent documents, the claims are interesting. (Beyond Search Nov 8 2009)

• Google Sidewiki Under Fire from Reframe It

  Today I posted this piece about Web annotation startup Reframe It, which believes Google’s Sidewiki looks and feels a little too much like its own Web annotation service. (Google Watch Nov 6 2009)

• Microsoft Responds to Gmail

  Microsoft and Google are seeking customers that want to outsource the management of e-mail systems. (Beyond Search Nov 6 2009)

• OneRiot Confirms They’re Building Yahoo’s Real Time Search Engine

  OneRiot results will appear in the main Yahoo search results page for certain queries (TechCrunch Nov 3 2009)

• Microsoft questions Google Apps’ momentum, touts 1M online business suite customers

  Google said last month that it now had 20 million active users for its Google Apps at 2 million companies. (Computerworld Nov 2 2009)

• MSN and Bing - a Match Made in Redmond

  MSN gets a new home page (Bing Community Nov 3 2009)

• Would Google Be Evil for Buying The New York Times?

  Bloggers and reporters are reviewing Ken Auletta’s new book, “Googled: The End of the World as We Know It,” in which the New Yorker writer notes that Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Google co-founder Larry Page considered buying The New York Times. (Google Watch)

Search videos

For this week’s videos we have selected a couple of Google’s 15 second search tips. You can watch them all over at YouTube.

Using Google as a dictionary:

Searching for weather information:

Unit conversions:

SMX East: NYC Oct 5-7
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The idea behind this feature is, according to Google, to provide you with greater transparency and control over your own data.

The Dashboard gives Google users an overview over 20 products and services, including Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Web History, Orkut, YouTube, Picasa, Talk, Reader, Alerts, and Latitude.

We are not so sure that Google users will find this overview over what Google knows about them comforting, as this is quite a lot if you are an avid Google user.

We are not too concerned about this, however. We believe Google (GOOG) is doing everything in their power to keep this information under lock and key. One single newspaper story about Google leaking private information would undermine the public’s confidence in such a way that it could damage the reputation of the company forever. They won’t risk that.

(That being said, we would not be surprised if Google is providing such data to the US authorities, if this can be of help in cases of national security.)

The Google Dashboard does give you a good way of checking the status of your Google account, however, and it helps you find errors and inconsistencies in the various settings of these services.

Here’s a Google promo video on Dashboard:

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Google (NSDQ:GOOG) has now added a separate entry gateway for magazine search. At the top you will find a search box that lets you limit your search to the content of magazines.

Below is a grid featuring the covers of various magazines. Click on one of them and you get access to a scanned copy of that particular issue.

And no, you will still have to buy the latest issue in the shop. The magazines presented here are at least one year old. Furthermore, the number of magazines included is limited and they are all American. This means that this service is more like a case study showing the future potential of Google’s magazine search than a real magazine repository.

Amazon is already selling digital copies of newspapers through its Kindle e-reader. Our guess is that Google is preparing Google Books for an era where they will sell copies of magazines directly over the Web.

Jeffrey Peng, the software engineer that designed the page, tells more about this over at The Inside Google Books blog.

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What kind of sites came into consideration for this short list of great social search engines? I have not been looking at sites that simply index social networks. I’m not looking for simply for information from social networks. I want search tools for general web search powered by information from social networks.

The sites on this list all search information that has been recommended by someone, and to some degree this recommendation influences the way the search results are listed. This brand of search engine give you search results that appeal to real people, not just search engine spiders. And the winners are:

Delicious

Delicious is a social bookmarking site, not a search engine. So what is it doing topping a list like this? Delicious is the world’s largest social bookmarking site. This means it is in essence a collection of web sites that have been hand picked by real people, then categorized and annotated for your convenience. Why Yahoo (who owns Delicious) have not made better use of this fantastic resource for their regular web search engine, I will never understand.

However, about a year ago, the search options inside Delicious were upgraded. You can search

• all bookmarks on Delicious
• all of your own bookmarks
• your network’s bookmarks
• the bookmarks on any Delicious page

The search engine will suggest queries as you type and you can filter your search results by tag or by the age of the bookmark. The search results show the most popular tags associated with it and how many Delicious members have bookmarked a site.

If you click on the field indicating the number of bookmarks for a particular link, you are presented with a list showing who has added the bookmark, what tags they have used and — this is very convenient — short summaries or notes that users may choose to add to their bookmarks. This all ads up to make Delicious a great research tool.

OneRiot

OneRiot is a search engine for the real time web, which also makes it a social search engine — social media is what constitutes the real time web. It crawls the links people share on social networks (mostly Twitter and Digg), then indexes the content on those pages.

This way, OneRiot is a great way to find really fresh content. It is also easy to determine how real people respond to or view current events.

But people don’t just share news on social networks. They share whatever they find useful. And with all of the millions of people submitting their links to Twitter and Digg, OneRiot’s index contains hand picked sites on most aspects of human life.

Each search result contains a title, excerpt URL along with info on which social network it was submitted to, how many times the link has been shared and by whom, when it was last shared and even who shared it first.

The default search present the the most “socially valued” content as related to your query — a ranking that takes into account the number of shares, rate of shares, and several other determining factors. You can choose to present real time results instead. This way you get the freshest content.

StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon was conceived as a network for recommending and discovering interesting web sites. After a re-launch recently, there is now an added focus on search features.

The search box is not prominent on the main page, but the search engine is quite powerful: It searches an index comprised of pages recommended by StumbleUpon’s 8.5 Mill members. You can search the entire index or narrow the search to your own favorites or the favorites of your friends. StumbleUpon also suggests ways to narrow your search.

A great bonus on StumbleUpon is the fact that members are encouraged to contribute a review of the site when they add it to the index. Most search have one or more review. Browsing these reviews is a good way to decide which search result are the best.

Scoopler

Scoopler is another real-time search engine. We reviewed Scoopler when they launched back in May and liked it a lot. Since then they have come a long way: They have added features and landed funding.

Scoopler indexes sites like Twitter, Flickr, Digg, Delicious and more. When you search for a topic on Scoopler, the search results in the middle column give you the most relevant results for your query from among the links submitted to the indexed services. You can choose to view all content or to filter by media type: Video, links or images.

In the right column you get real time posts — the most recent items on Twitter, Delicious etc that contain your query.

Real time channels is the newest feature. This is a bar right above the search box, linking to predefined categories: entertainment, technology, sports, world & business, science, gaming, politics, and lifestyle. Even though these categories might not appeal to everyone, they demonstrate the wealth of information that Scoopler makes available. It is for broad queries Scoopler really proves its worth.

Google Social Search

Google Social Search is an experiment on Google Labs. To use it, you need to switch it on from the Google Experimental page. You also need a public Google Profile. Once you have one, you can add your social networks to your profile like I have done in my Google profile.

Google then proceeds to index your profile and the links to your social network. If the thought of his freaks you out (like Dan Costa at PCMag), rest assured that the whole process is opt-in.

If you choose to opt in, Google will index the networks you have added to your profile — your friends and their friends for an extended social circle, as Google calls it. If you use Google Reader, results from the RSS streams will also be added to your social search results when relevant. The social search results are delivered (when Google’s algorithm deems it appropriate) at the bottom of the regular search results page, clearly marked.

It is too early to say yet if Google Social Search will add much value for most web searchers, but if Google makes good use of this huge reservoir of systematized information, it certainly could.

Here is a short intro:

And here is an explanation of how it works:

SMX East: NYC Oct 5-7
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It started in 2001, in London. Search engine marketing enthusiasts met at the Cittie of Yorke pub to discuss the search scene and have fun. There were no speeches or stands, just a lot of networking.

Image: Keynote speaker Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.

From Pub Conference to PubCon Las Vegas

Since 2001, Webmaster World has developed a large scale conference version of the pub gathering: PubCon. This year PubCon returns to Las Vegas, giving participants a new chance to learn about the search engine scene, listen to experts and network with fellow search engine marketers.

It all starts on November 9 at the Las Vegas Convention Center, with a networking “kick-off blast”. The next three days there are a large number of parallel sessions covering a lot of topics of relevance to internet and search engine marketing.

Session tracks

There are several tracks, including:

• Search engine optimization for organic search
• Search engine marketing (SEM)
• Social media marketing (including Twitter)
• Affiliate marketing
• The Webmaster World (coding, ecommerce, video etc.)
• Interactive Site Reviews
• Emerging Media (mobile, viral, video)
• Analytics and measurement
• Advertising, branding and PR
• Social, brand and reputation management
• Linking
• Forums & communities: building, management, and optimization

Among the speakers you’ll find people like Tony Adam and Jeff Arena of Yahoo!, Loren Baker of Search Engine Journal, Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim, Jim Boykin, Aaron Wall, Bruce Clay, Matt Cutts and Frederick Vallaeys of Google, Rand Fishkin of SEOMOz, Vanessa Fox, Nathan Buggia from Bing, Todd Friesen, Heather Lloyd-Martin, Elisabeth Osmeloski of Search Engine Land and many, more. Brett Tabke, the leader of it all, is obviously also there.

Click here for more information about PubCon.

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• Google’s Creepy Social Search

  Google released Social Search, which prioritizes results from your friends’ Twitter feeds, FriendFeed updates, Facebook pages, LinkedIn profiles, and Picasa libraries. (PCMag Oct 10 2009)

• Bing loses users faster than impressions, says Chitika

  Users’ share down to 5.44% in October from 6.7% in August (CBR Oct 30 2009)

• Google quashes rumours it’s making an Android handset

  Google’s Android chief has put the kibosh on rumours that the search giant is creating its own phone. (cnet UK Oct 31 2009)

• Chinese Newspaper Accuses Google of ‘Malicious Revenge’

  The official newspaper of the Chinese communist party has accused Google of intentionally blocking access to its website by displaying an allegedly unnecessary malware warning (ISE db Oct 30 2009)

• Revisiting Google Squared

  The idea is simple - you tell it what you want to find, it creates a matrix filled with goodies based on what it discovers. (Phil Bradley Oct 30 2009)

• Social Media Accounts for 18% of Information Search Market

  Social media sites such as Wikipedia, blogs, and social networks account for 18% of where searches begin (PR 2.0 Oct 28 2009)

• Google Sidewiki Now Available on Google Chrome, Apple Safari

  With the Sidewiki bookmarklet, you can utilize Google Sidewiki on any browser, even if you don’t have the Google Toolbar installed. (Google Watch Oct 29 2009)

• 4 New Google Docs Features Rock Document Management!

  This week, Google Docs introduced a cool new way to download a large number of documents out of Google Docs, onto your hard drive. (Google Tutor Oct 29 2009)

• The Risks of Personalized Social Search

  The clueless searcher will get results and assume that their search expertise has returned exactly what the user wanted. Wrong. (Beyond Search Oct 28 2009)

• Bing fiascos continue

  I really want to like Bing. Really I do. However, they insist on ensuring that I can regard them as nothing more than also rans in the search game. (Phil Bradley Oct 24 2009)

• Twitter Job search engine & Biosearch

  On the basis of semantic filtering-techniques jobtweet.de enables you to search twitter-posts (”tweets”) for job openings. (AltSearchEngines Oct 23 2009)

• Media search engine Spezify – a Rising Star of the North!

  In addition to more media types, more useful functions has been added, such as better search result filtering, zooming, ability to save and send favourites and more. (AltSearchEngines Oct 23 2009)

• Google’s Halloween-Themed Robots.txt

  User-agent: Kids Disallow: /tricks Allow: /treats (Google Blogoscoped Oct 31 2009)

• Despite PageRank Dropping In Webmaster Tools, Google Pushes Toolbar PageRank Update

  Google has updated the PageRank values in the Google Toolbar sending a mixed message to webmasters and SEOs. (SE Land Oct 30 2009)

• Google Flu Trends Intense in Canada, High in United States

  Google has found that certain search terms are good indicators of flu activity. (SE Watch Oct 30 2009)

• Twitter Lists Goes Live

  Lists are basically a way for Twitter users to create groups of Twitter users into categories. (SE Land Oct 30 2009)

• The Deal Implementation Between Microsoft and Yahoo! Delayed

  Yahoo! has filed a document with SEC saying that Microsoft failed to finalize the deal by October 27, 2009. (PageTraffic Oct 30 2009)

• What’s coming for Live.com?

  The Live.com URL will redirect to Bing.com for 45 days after launch. After this period it becomes the front door for all Live services including Office Live and Windows Live. (LiveSide.net Oct 30 2009)

• Using RSS/Atom feeds to discover new URLs

  Google: In order for us to use your RSS/Atom feeds for discovery, it’s important that crawling these files is not disallowed by your robots.txt. (Google Webmaster Central Oct 29 2009)

• StumbleUpon Updates Design Again (Abandoning Social Search?)

  The homepage, same as the beta featured earlier this month, highlights recent activity from Mutual Subscribers (Oct 29 2009)

• Google Launches Comparison Ads, Starting With Mortgages

  In the new system, those search for “mortgage” or “refinance” or related terms may see an special ad from Google itself inviting them to view offers (SE Land Oct 29 2009)

• Yandex and Google good for 96% share in Russia

  Yandex takes the biggest share with 54,4% of all searches. (SearchCowboys Oct 29 2009)

• Google Maps GPS Navigation: The New Feature for Android 2.0

  With the recent addition, the Google Map will give turn-by-turn directions, automatic rerouting and 3D views. (PageTraffic Oct 29 2009)

• Yahoo’s Time on Homepage Up 20% Since Redesign

  The two biggest differences were the ability to personalize apps to add content to the homepage, and ditching dozens of links to less popular Yahoo services. (Marketing Pilgrim Oct 28 2009)

• Tweet This: 19 Percent of Internet Users Use Twitter

  19 percent of Internet users now say they use Twitter or another service to share updates about themselves, or to see updates about others. (SE Watch Oct 28 2009)

• Beware Google: Bing Is Going to Suck Your Blood, Um, Market Share: The New Commercial

  The software giant taps into vampire mania, playing into Halloween and the next chapter in the “Twilight” movie series, “New Moon.”(BoomTown Oct 28 2009)

• Bing Twitter search launched in the UK

  Search Cowboys Oct 28 2009.

• Similar Images graduates from Google Labs

  For example, if you search for jaguar, you can use the “Find similar images” link to find more pictures of the car or the animal. (Google Blog Oct 27 2009)

• Does Google PageRank Count Anymore?

  Obtaining a high PR7 or PR8 simply means more business and revenues… regardless of how Google is or is not using PageRank. (SiteProNews Oct 28 2009)

• Diller Says He’s Willing To Sell Ask.com

  Diller also called the future of Ask.com “speculative” during today’s call, citing the “fierce” competition in search. (SE Land Oct 27 2009)

• Google Custom Search Celebrates Birthday with Updates Galore

  Now you can customize the look of Custom Search on your site with themes, which can be tweaked for color, font, background and feature adjustments. (SE Watch Oct 27 2009)

• The End is Here: Yahoo Closes Geocities

  Life will go on, of course, but early web adopters will no longer be able to amuse themselves by looking back at their earliest web creations. (SEJ Oct 27 2009)

• Introducing Google Social Search: I finally found my friend’s New York blog!

  Most people on the web today make social connections and publish web content in many different ways, including blogs, status updates and tweets. (Google Blog Oct 26 2009)

• Google Wave gets its own app store

  Where the application now seems kind of ‘empty’, successful apps can help users get the most out of the possibilities of Wave. (Search Cowboys Oct 27 2009)

• DMOZ: A Solid Directory Or The Great Pumpkin Of Search?

  Love it or hate it, the Open Directory Project (ODP or “DMOZ”) always seems to creep into the conversation when we’re discussing links and/or SEO. (SE Land Oct 27 2009)

• 4 Reasons Why Including Social Networking Results is Smart

  Because information is what search engines are all about, it’s only logical that they want to include that information in their search results. (SE Journal Oct 26 2009)

• Champagne Pops at Yahoo as Carl Icahn Resigns Board Position

  It appears that Carl Icahn isn’t happy unless he’s getting his way, and for all intents and purposes, he’s had his way with Yahoo. (Marketing Pilgrim Oct 26 2009)

• Bing for mobile now live at m.bing.com

  In addition to being a great resource for local searches, quick answers, and maps, we have some new features to tell you about (Bing Community Oct 30 2009)

As this week’s video we have selected a new ad from Microsoft. It is one in a series based on a horror theme, which is perfect for Halloween.

By the way, all Twitter users should now have access to the lists feature, meaning that you can subscribe to sets of selected twitterers focusing on specific topics. If you want to keep track of the tweets of some of the major names in the search and search engine marketing fields, go to twitter.com/perkoch/searchengineintelligence

photo credit: peasap

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Google’s economic success has been based on its pay-per-click text ads. You will find such ads accompanying search results, emails in Gmail and so on. Any company relying on only one revenue stream is vulnerable, though, which is one reason Google (NSDQ:GOOG) is trying to diversify.

Selling books and ebooks

Recently Google announced that it is going to launch an online ebook store, called Google Editions.

That makes perfect sense. Since Microsoft gave up on its book scanning program, Google is the only serious contender for the book search throne. A lot of people already use Google Book Search to find information about books: reviews, excerpts and in some cases, complete online copies of books.

Through agreements with book sellers like Amazon and Barnes & Noble they already provide links to online shops that sell physical as well as digital books. What could be more natural that to sell books directly from Google’s sites, getting a larger piece of the pie?

Google Editions

Google Editions, to be launched next summer, will not be linked to one specific e-reader or platform. The files will be accessed on the web, and buyers can read the books on their e-readers by downloading a cached version of the file. As we understand it the search interface will be Google Books, which means that such search results also may appear in regular Web search results.

Google will both store such ebook files on its own servers “in the cloud” and add links to publisher web sites.

We are pretty confident that ebooks will do for publishing what MP3 did for music. This means that Google will in fact become the largest store front for books in the world. Amazon has reason to be worried.

Entering the music market

It does not end here, however. It now seems clear that Google also plans to get a bite out of the music market, in time maybe even challenging Apple’s iTunes. This week Google announced that they have improved the music search capabilities of their regular web search engine.

The Google Blog says:

“Now, when you enter a music-related query — like the name of a song, artist or album — your search results will include links to an audio preview of those songs provided by our music search partners MySpace (which just acquired iLike) or Lala. When you click the result you’ll be able to listen to an audio preview of the song directly from one of those partners.”

This service is somewhat similar to Yahoo’s: If you search for an artist name (but not song or album) on Yahoo, Yahoo will provide buttons and links that lets you listen to the full length track or buy the file (from Rhapsody).

At Google you may also enter fragments of song lyrics (if you cannot remember the title or the artist), and Google will try to find the song for you.

Google will now add links to several partnered sites, i.e. sites that lets you organize, listen to and download music online. Google will get percentages of the sales.

These are the sites included:

• Rhapsody (online music store)
• imeem (social music site)
• Pandora (internet radio - US only)
• lala (online music store)
• iLike (social music site)

This is not the same as having your own music store. You cannot buy music from Google directly — yet. But Google may still consider storing and selling its own music files at a later time.

Music files stored by Google?

In 2006 there were some rumors that Google would open an iTunes like music store. That never happened. At the time Google was focused on helping people find content delivered by other sites and services.

Since then Google’s philosophy has changed, and the company has become more open to the idea of selling products on their own. The Google Editions project proves this.

Moreover, the current practice of selling books through Google Books and music through Google Web Search, tells us that this is not so much about launching new sites, as including some additional links in traditional search results. The searchers will hardly notice that the seller is Google as opposed to Barnes & Noble or Rhapsody.

Whether Google will take the final step and start selling music on their own is unknown. Our guess is that they will, as they often do, bide their time and experiment with the current “link-to-other-sellers” model first.

photo credit: RossinaBossioB