Brandt made this not-for-profit privacy search engine possible by scraping Google’s search results and providing that information to users of Scroogle without passing on users’ personal information or keeping that information for his own purposes. This gave users the chance to freely search on Scroogle without having to worry about their personal data being shared with third parties.

It is important to note that this scraping of Google was not entirely legal and Google continued to allow Scroogle to scrape Google search results for nearly a decade. Therefore, people should remember this information when making any judgment about the fact Scroogle began being the victim of DDoS attacks. These Denial of Service attacks effectively rendered Scroogle useless and caused Brandt to lose seven servers in the process.

The DDoS attacks coupled with Google finally making a concerted effort to hinder the effectiveness of Scroogle by temporarily blocking the site caused Brandt to make the decision to kill off the site for good. More than likely since this was a non-profit venture for Brandt he was financially affected, making spending the time and monetary resources to keep Scroogle alive a pointless venture.

It really is a shame that Scroogle is no longer a resource for online users wishing to search without having to share their personal information. Take the time to read the links provided below, several of them provide options that provide a similar service to Scroogle.

Have a great weekend!

Search Engine Land – Matt McGee – Scroogle’s Gone? Here’s Who Still Offers Private Searching
Search Engine Roundtable – Barry Schwartz – Scroogle Shuts Down For Good
SEOChat.com – Terri Wells – Searching Privately in a Post-Scroogle World
The Register – Kelly Fiveash – Scroogle unplugged for good this time
WebProNews – Drew Bowling – Scroogle Gets Screwgled For Good After Days Of DDoS Attacks

A December 23, 2011 post from ComScore entitled “State of the U.S. Social Networking Market: Facebook Maintains Leadership Position, but Upstarts Gaining Traction” provided some nifty statistics about the growth of Tumblr in its brief history that spans just under five years. When the report was published two months ago Tumblr had experienced 15.9 million U.S. visitors. That total was an increase of 131% since November 2010, an astonishing increase in users. The majority of that increase according to ComScore had taken place since April 2011. Even more intriguing was the fact that Tumblr was second only to Facebook in terms of how long people were spending on the site in one month.

Silverback Marketing makes these points to our readers because we want you to take advantage of this lesser-known but very strong brand of social media. There are several functions that an individual can perform on Tumblr that are similar to other social networks such as the ability to share someone else’s content on your Tumblr (reblogging), liking someone else’s piece of content and commenting on a reblog.

Silverback Marketing will visit Tumblr once again and provide you with more specifics on how to best use Tumblr in your own marketing campaign. Take some time in the interim to research how well Tumblr may work for you with the knowledge that this is a great social media platform if your goods or service is driven to the 30 and under crowd. Remember, Tumblr is the equivalent of blogging via text message, short and sweet!

On Monday, February 20 Yandex announced that the service would begin to incorporate content from social networks into its search results. Facebook has a presence in Russia but this change will also incorporate content from other popular Russian social mediums such as LiveJournal, Odnoklassniki and VKontakte. Yandex has stated that more than 250 million profile pages have already been indexed as a result of this update. The same day that the press release was issued Yandex launched a beta version of the People Finder service it provides. This is important since there are approximately two million people searches per day on Yandex, with half of those searches concerned with celebrities and a large part of the other 50% having to do with searches for people such as friends and employees. Searches performed that generate more than one user profile for the same search will show one at the top of the search results and list the others grouped together on a separate page. A user can select whether he or she would want multiple profiles grouped together or listed separately.

One day later on February 21 Yandex announced that a deal had been struck with Twitter giving the search engine access to Twitter’s data in real-time. New Tweets will now be able to be read by searching twitter.yandex.ru or can be found just moments after being Tweeted in Yandex’s Blog Search. This deal is similar to one Twitter completed with Bing September of 2011.

This is big news for Twitter and for people using social media in Russia. Take a look at the Yandex website to see what languages are currently serviced through this brand of social media.

Content is more than just the text that you write. Quality content is presented in a manner that engages your audience, often times in a visually pleasing manner. Images are an obvious way to satisfy this type of need. An option when using images is to use pie charts, graphs and other types of diagrams to highlight information you are presenting. Using these types of pictures is an easy and effective way to further engage your audience while they are reading your content.

The use of bullet points is an incredibly simple way to designate particular items of your content as critical items to consider. How can bullet points help?

• Bullet points usually indent the content you are highlighting, making it obvious to the reader this is content to pay special attention to and read carefully.
• Bullet points will contain either the bullet as shown here or numbers if the web content writer wishes to present his or her list in numerical fashion.
• Bullet points make it easy to provide your readers with lists, a style of content that many times helps facilitate comments from readers.

One more way to add to the flair and effectiveness of your content is to embed links to other pages on your site within the content. Do this in a manner that will benefit you in the long run by using keyword rich anchor text as the foundation for the link you create. The page you link to will possibly experience an increase in page rank as well so using anchor text could serve a dual purpose.

These are three more ways you can improve how readers and search engines view your content. You took the time to write it, make it an experience for your readers!

If you are a novice online here is a brief description of the difference between a URL with the S after HTTP in the location bar at the top of your screen and one that does not. Anytime you see that S you will immediately know that the page you are currently visiting is a page with a secure setting. This means that outside people will not be able to retrieve your personal information from one of these pages because you need to be logged into the website using your secure user ID and password to have access to that page. This is critical when visiting websites such as your bank’s home page, eBay, Amazon and any other website where there is critical information such as debit or credit card account numbers that you are providing on the page.

Due to all the issues that many websites have regarding privacy issues the option of utilizing your favorite social mediums with encrypted pages is a welcome option. This option is particularly critical if you are accessing your Twitter account in a public arena such as a coffeehouse using its Wi-Fi access. Before when the URL simply showed the http: in the location bar it was possible for another individual to hack into someone else’s account. By making the default login option when initially accessing Twitter a URL with the https: enables Twitter to better serve and protect its users.

Twitter announced this option on its blog a week ago on Monday, February 13. Last year the https: function was added as an option for Twitter users. If you do prefer to eliminate the secure setting you can change the default option in the settings on your Twitter account.

Facebook continues to be the king of all social mediums in terms of number of users. The social network has approximately 850 million users as of this month, a truly astonishing number. When Facebook was first launched some considered the social medium a more adult alternative to MySpace, but today the number of children and teenagers comprise an enormous percentage of the Facebook universe. Facebook continues to make changes to its system on a consistent basis in an effort to maintain its top ranking. Typical with any popular service some changes are embraced by the online world while others are mocked.

Google+ launched the summer of 2011 and continues to grow in popularity. However, many critics point to the fact that nearly one year later Google+ has not offered the serious threat to Facebook that many felt could happen. It is still way too early to count out this social medium, especially since there are a number of nifty characteristics about the site. The launch of Search plus Your World may ultimately hurt the service though since many people are unhappy about the ease Google has now to link all Google accounts that a user has.

Pinterest is the newest member of this group of five social networks. It also may be the social medium that is creating the heaviest buzz at the present time with the number of users joining the network exploding. Other social media websites give users the opportunity to share pictures and videos but Pinterest has created a unique way in which to accomplish this task. The use of Pins has led many people to flock to the site and start sharing media that is relevant and important to them.

Twitter may be the simplest social media platform to use and certainly one of the more powerful in terms of attracting people to your own network. It seems incredible that a mere 140 characters could create such fervor in the online world but one Tweet can and will cause a firestorm at any given time. Observing what occurs when a celebrity Tweets something controversial is testament to this theory.

It is amazing that MySpace, the original social network compared to the rest of this list of five, is even a member of this group today considering just how low the social medium had sunk in terms of popularity. While MySpace has not completely recovered the social medium made a wise move by shifting its focus away from social networking to concentrate on an area it always provided exceptional service in; music. If you have not visited MySpace lately and are even a casual fan of music you need to take the time to see what this site has done recently.

If you do not like those five there are plenty more social mediums online to choose from folks. Enjoy and have a great weekend!

Complete Pulse – Lindsey Mark – MySpace’s One Million Users: Is More Really Better?
Mashable – Ben Parr – Twitter Adds Permanent HTTPS Setting to Improve Security
Search Engine Journal – David Angotti – Facebook Launches Verified Accounts: Nicknames and Pseudonyms Now Allowed
SEO.com – Lauren Jacobson – Pinterest … What Is The Big Deal? – Part 1
SEOMoz – Erica McGillivray – Google+: The Ultimate You-Sourced Search Engine

Twitter users know there are a variety of hashtags that appear when using the social network. The uninitiated may be confused as to what each hashtag (#) means but Twitter veterans not only know what the symbols represent but know how to use them to gain more Followers and engage a wider audience. Let’s talk about the #FF hashtag known as Follow Friday.

This hashtag is a way for you to tell your Followers about someone in the Twitter world that you feel offers interesting content. It is a way for you to directly promote that person or group on Twitter. Part of social media is creating a network and utilizing that network to expand your own by actively engaging with the people you are connected with in some manner.

The basic idea of Follow Friday is tremendous. Promoting another Twitter user is the exact opposite of being egocentric, a wonderful quality. However, there are several Twitter users that feel Retweeting a #FF that mentions them is okay.

Think about it this way. If someone gives you a compliment common sense tells you to say “thank you” and move on with your life. Someone that is self-centered would go out of his or her way to let as many people as possible know about the compliment. That kind of action somewhat negates the good nature of the positive statement.

The same theory applies to Retweeting a #FF about you. The people that read the Retweet already Follow you so not only is the Retweet completely pointless, it clearly comes across as being egotistical. There is a possibility Retweeting in this type of grandiose style could actually cause you to lose some Followers.

Your best line of action is to send a Direct Message to the individual that mentioned you in a Follow Friday Tweet and thank him or her. That simple show of goodwill and manners just may gain you more Followers in the long run!

Lawmakers sent a letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook on February 15 that expressed considerable concern over how app developers could be acquiring the address books of iPhone users without the consent of those individuals. There was a recent case of a mobile social network by the name of Path that was able to acquire that same type of information without users’ knowledge. The CEO of Path, Dave Morin apologized for the actions and promised that data would be deleted from the company’s files.

The letter to Tim Cook was a reaction to the events that occurred with Path. Since Apple is such an enormous player in the mobile device world lawmakers are concerned that Apple could just as easily acquire a user’s personal information, storing it for future reference and possible selling that information to third parties. Democratic Representatives G.K. Butterfield from North Carolina and Henry Waxman from California were the lawmakers that created the letter to Apple.

“As we have done with location services, any app wishing to access contact data will require explicit user approval in a future software release.” This was a statement released by Apple spokesperson Tom Neumayr today. The government has asked Tim Cook to answer a series of questions related to this issue by February 29 with one very important question being how many iTunes apps first ask permission of users before transmitting data from address books.

Due to the number of people using Apple products this is going to be an important issue to follow!

Be cognizant the next time you are performing an online search for just about any topic using Google. The first SERP will more than likely feature a Wikipedia page with many of those results outperforming the official website for the subject matter you were searching for, a trend that upsets many webmasters. Think about it – anyone can edit a page on Wikipedia, which means that quite often the content on that site is poorly written and full of grammatical errors. A webmaster that takes the time to craft relevant, well-written content is sure to be irritated if pages from his site rank lower than Wiki pages on the same topic.

This does not appear to be a trend that will change anytime soon. According to the study performed by Intelligent Positioning a Wikipedia page has a 56% chance of appearing as the Number One spot for any search, a 96% chance of appearing within the Top Five and an absolutely staggering figure of 99% to appear in a Top Ten search. That 99% becomes even more astonishing when an individual considers the fact that the Intelligent Positioning study showed a mere eight terms that did not generate a Top Ten Wiki result: flight; mail; national; news; phone; sweets; trainers and wardrobe.

The study researched 1000 different nouns. Critics will exclaim that 1000 is too small a number to generate conclusive results which is true. However, this small study does at least give us a small indicator of how often Wikipedia does appear on page one of searches performed on Google. Try typing in a few different searches on Google and see for yourself how often a Wiki page appears on page one of the SERP.

The new Google bar features links to the Google services you use underneath the Google logo that appears in the left hand corner of the screen. If there are additional services that you wished to add there is a “More” link at the bottom of the links that are listed, enabling you to add services that are pertinent to your Google experience. The whole purpose of adding this bar was to further simplify a user’s navigational experience and enable him or her to more easily share information on a Google+ profile.

One thing that Google does is listen to its users. It may not always change based on the desires of its clientele but occasionally enough people voice similar opinions that changes are made to make people happy. That has been the case with the new Google left hand nav bar. Therefore, on Thursday February 9 a new post about the Google bar that directly addressed the concerns and suggestions of the Google public since the new bar first became active just over two months ago was submitted.

Many features will remain the same, such as the ease of sharing content on Google+ and a unified search box. However, when this new bar rolls out live in the next few weeks the bar will move to the top of the screen with an expanded set of links, effectively replacing the current bar on the left hand nav bar.

If you are a Google user compare what the left hand navigation bar that you currently see looks like compared to the image above. What do you think of the upcoming change?