Online Marketing Blog

I just had a chance to watch part of the webcast of Google’s Searchology presentation with Marissa Meyer, Craig Silverstein and others.
Software Engineer Ben Gomes talked about PageRank:

Kerry Rodden talked about usability testing:

and the various Google search products were also discussed.

Danny lists links to live blogging of the event from TechCrunch and AppScout.

While there were hints by a few blogs that have been talking about Searchology day that an announcement of some sort would be made, my “in and out” viewing of the web cast did not catch anything in particular. However, if something of note was presented, I’m sure Search Engine Land will cover it.

Google is always testing tweaks to their search results but today I noticed a very interesting feature that I think is called Google Categories. Below is a screen grab of SERPs for “dvd players”. “motorola cell phones” also triggered these results but things like “lawn care” and “art museums” did not. It’s obviously product focused.

Notice the bold headings on categories of search results including: Comparison Shopping, Reviews, Stores, References and Others. There’s also a link to turn this feature off at the top right, “Turn OFF Categories for these results”. There are other categories including Forums, News and Manufacturers.

The good people at Ask.com pinged me this morning that Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft Live Search and Ask.com announced support of autodiscovery for Sitemaps today.

WebProNews published an announcement about the search engines Google and Yahoo agreeing to work on a common sitemaps standard and the launch of sitemaps.org at the WebmasterWorld Pubcon conference in Las Vegas last year.

The new open-format autodiscovery allows webmasters to specify the location of their sitemaps within their robots.txt file, eliminating the need to submit sitemaps to each search engine separately. The updated Sitemap protocol has benefits for site publishers, the search engines as well as searchers. Ask.com is also supporting manual submissions of sitemaps via a ping url.

Yesterday when I was searching Google on my partner’s laptop, I noticed down the left side of the search results the tabs that are normally displayed horizontally on the home page: Images, Maps, News, Groups, Books, Froogle and More with the option of drilling down your search using those filters.

I was using Firefox and not logged in to Google but was able to replicate it several times on that machine. When I tried on my own laptop, it was a no-go.

Here’s a partial screenshot:

Here’s a link to a larger screen shot.

Yahoo Takes Down Panama Geo-Targeting

Online Marketing Blog ranked #5 in top 150 Marketing Blogs - Todd And Power 150

Google Image Optimization - Chris Pearson

SEO Blogs get hacked - Search Engine Land

Optimizing Flash - Jonathan Hochman

Findory to fade away - Greg Linden

DMOZ taking submissions again - Search Engine Roundtable

Ron Belanger from Yahoo does a decent job explaining, “Engagement, Search and Social Media” in a video over at iMedia Connection. I like the context in which he presents social search - as a third channel to organic and PPC. Now if iMedia just offered some social bookmark links for the video!

WSJ posits a good question: “Google Tests New Ad Offerings — But Will Advertisers Follow?” In order to accomplish the transfer of ad dollars to other ad formats, Google will need to change existing mindsets about advertising in print, on radio and TV as being too expensive or complicated.

For some good humor, check out the following posts by Jeremy Zawodny from Yahoo and Matt Cutts from Google. Jeremey points out a striking similarity between the Yahoo and Google MSIE splash pages. Google has changed the splash page to something else by now.

Matt responds in that very politically correct and polite way that Matt does and then he points out how Yahoo has been copying Google’s PPC ad layouts.

It’s been six months since Google launched their Finance offering and Google announced today that several new features have been added including:

• Enhanced Charts: Up to 40 years of historical data for US stocks is now available.
• Market Trends: A “top-mover‚Äù module on the Google Finance homepage now highlights the market’s top moving companies which are featured categorically by price, market cap, volume, and number of queries.
• Customizable Portfolios: You can now store multiple portfolios and upload information from other online portfolios with several customization options.

Google’s posting a cool Edvard Munch inspired logo today based on his painting, “The Scream”.¬† Check out all of Google’s Holiday logos or these collections of fan logos.

Checking out the expo hall, there are always a few great deals and lots of free iPods to sign up for. I skipped most of the iPods this year as I was a afraid of all the follow-up emails and/or sales calls.

However, here is some good swag that I did pick up.

Click the image for layover descriptions.

• Google color changing orb.
• Unica Keychane game.
• Lycos fish stress ball & document clip.
• Netconcepts climbing hook and compass.
• Yellowpages highlighter with built in Post-It flags
• Network Solutions multi-color lightup pen.

In the tradition established this summer at Search Engine Strategies in San Jose, there are more video interviews here in Chicago with interesting people that work in the search marketing industry. I’ve been shooting short videos with my trusty Sony Cybershot which you can see below.

First up is Gord Hotchkiss from Enquiro who discusses a few details of their most recent eyetracking report which compares Google, Yahoo and MSN search results. Online Marketing Blog did a short review of this report in November.

You can find out more about Enquiro here and Gord writes a handy blog over at Out of my Gord.

Today I had lunch with Joe Dolson and Mike McDonald as well as several hundred other search marketers in the Google Sponsored - Google Webmaster Central session.

I took several photos below as well

Danny, Amanda and Vanessa

Amanda and Evan from Google

Adam Lasnik from Google

I know what you’re thinking, where’s the blog post about this session?¬† It was lunch so I decided to take photos and a few videos instead. It will take a while to get the videos uploaded to Google Video, but I will update this post with those links later this evening.