Online Marketing Blog

An ex-Microsoft employee who now works for Google started a blog which has interestingly been removed from the Google index.

From various sources including SEO Roundtable

An interesting post from one of the blog posts that was removed includes a comment after attending the Google sales conference:

“so after the interesting financials, the products team gave presentations reviewing product performance in 2004 and giving sneak peeks of the products we’ll unveil in 2005. if you guys thought gmail and google groups were cool, you ain’t seen nothing yet! ”

Full content of the blog can still be viewed at bloglines.com

As a follow up to the post on Nick’s excellent post on Folksonomies, here are some additional notes on sites that use tags to organize information.

Tagsurf - In the tagging spirit of Flickr and Del.icio.us, Tagsurf is an online message board which uses tags to help organize subjects instead of threads or channels. Currently in “Alpha” but seems to be picking up steam. Definitely worth checking out.

Excellent post over at Threadwatch: Tags & Folksonomies - What are they, and why should you care?

I posted about tags as part of an overall list of tactics for effective tags, folksonomies, blogs, marketing

Google made it’s beta video search live tonight. Google has been indexing since late December 2004 and content is limited at the moment to:

* Bay area stations
ABC (KGO) *
KRON *
KQED *
NBC (KNTV) *
PBS
C-SPAN
Fox News
C-SPAN2

It appears that preview screen shots are searchable right now, but no video yet. Other live Video search services include: Blinkx.tv, Yahoo Video Search. SearchEngineWatch posts a more comprehensive list of Video search tools. Thanks InsideGoogle for the heads up on Google Video.

Tags: Google, video, search, engine

From msnsearch’s WebLog . For information on promoting your blog and/or RSS feed on My MSN, visit Syndication: Guidelines for Publishers

Tags: MSN, RSS, Reader, Blog, Search Engine

Via Yahoo SearchBlog: “… we’ll be adding a Video Search tab on the front page of Yahoo! tonight.”

Yahoo will extend it’s video feed partners beyond Real Networks, AtomFilms, and IFILM to include TVEyes which includes broadcast video from Bloomberg, BBC, and BSkyB.

Tags: Yahoo, Video, Video Search, Search Engine

Via Slashdot, Ben Goodger, the lead developer for Firefox is now a Google employee.

“As of January 10, 2005, my source of income changed from The Mozilla Foundation to Google, Inc. of Mountain View, California. My role with Firefox and the Mozilla project will remain largely unchanged, I will continue doing much the same work as I have described above - with the new goal of successful 1.1, 1.5 and 2.0 releases. I remain devoted full-time to the advancement of Firefox, the Mozilla platform and web browsing in general. I’m sure you have many questions. While I will be spending more time at Google, I will work out of the Mozilla Foundation offices regularly as the need arises. For all questions regarding Google, I ask that you contact Google directly, rather than myself.”

The results of a new survey from the Pew Internet & American Life project conducted by telephone among a sample of 2,200 adults was published. While many searchers appear confident about their ability to find information, a suprising number can’t tell the difference between paid and unpaid search results.

Commentary from Wired:

“…only 38 percent of web searchers even know of the distinction, [between paid and unbiased links] and of those, not even half –47 percent — say they can always tell which are paid. That comes out to only 18 percent of all web searchers knowing when a link is paid.”

“This might be one of the biggest announcements for the PPC community in a while. SiliconValleyWatcher.com reports that Google [is] to provide AdWords API to Advertisers.” From - Search Engine News Journal

Tags: google, adwords, search engine

Yahoo has relaunched it’s Yahoo Ticker with added support for RSS. It also includes search functionality and operates from your desktop. From Yahoo! Search blog: My Yahoo! on Your Desktop

Technorati Tags: yahoo, yahoo ticker, search engine

Now that MSN has dropped Yahoo in favor of it’s own search engine and AOL has made major changes to it’s search engine, there’s no doubt competition for search is heating up again. While Google still sends the vast majority of referring search engine traffic to most sites, make note of these recent search engine changes as there are an increasing number of opportunities to diversify your search marketing portfolio.

To get an idea of where search results data comes from with each search engine, take a look at these search engine relationship charts:

AOL Search rolling out new features including personalization, result clustering and local search results.

Other coverage:

BetaNews - America Online Relaunches AOL Search

SearchEngineWatch - AOL Search: Playing In the Big Leagues Now

John Battelle’s Searchblog - AOL Puts A Stake In The Ground

Threadwatch.org - Can AOL become a Major Player in Search?

Technorati Tags: aol, aol search, search engine