Lee Odden

Significant changes to Google AdWords are in store in the next few weeks:

* Target users by site – pick which sites your ads appear on, allowing you to view who Google content partners are.
* New max CPM bidding option – The CPM ads will compete with traditional AdWords ads with a minimum CPM of $2.
* Additional ad formats – banner, leaderboard, inline rectangle, skyscraper, wide skyscraper.

SearchEngineWatch:
“What we’re expecting customers to do here is open themselves up to all of the types of opportunities at Google,” said Tim Armstrong, vice president of ad sales for Google. “This will be a way to keep the scale but use the feature to also target.

The beta version of the new Yahoo News was made live today. I had previously posted on the Sneak Peek at the new Yahoo News a few weeks ago listing several of the upcoming features.

Yahoo News beta selects news from a smaller universe of media properties than Google News but does allow users to add their own news from any site or blog that offers RSS.

The new design allows you to quickly tab through different sources and the Y!Q feature has also been incorporated. The Y!Q feature highlights a particular term and places an icon next to it to let you know alternative sources of information regarding that word or phrase are available. Clicking on the the icon displays a Y!Q popup window with links to related search results.

Friday was the last day to complete the survey for consideration of inclusion in the 4th Marketing Sherpa Buyer’s Guide to search marketing firms. The newest version of the report has been named the “SEO & PPC Buyer’s Guide”. There were many more detailed questions asked this year plus there were two surveys instead of one. Options to take either the SEO or PPC or both were provided.

Competition for good Search Marketing firms is heating up and this guide could provide the additional information some companies may need for selecting a vendor.

I have asked for the availability date and cost for this newest edition and will post when Marketing Sherpa gets back to me.

“Yahoo Inc. is donating hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment and resources to the nonprofit group behind Wikipedia, the Wikimedia Foundation” – via ExtermeTech

The Yahoo blog posts a guest entry by Jimmy Wales president of the Wikimedia Foundation on Wikipedia and Yahoo! Google also provides support to Wikipedia by donating bandwidth and servers.

When searching Wikipedia, I was pleasantly surprised to see someone add this SEO blog to the Search Engine Optimization page. Cool.

Yahoo News now offers custom RSS feeds. If you use Yahoo News alerts now you can easily switch to custom RSS feeds and read them in My Yahoo! or any other RSS reader.

“Yahoo! News is now offering the following feeds in the RSS format. The feeds are free of charge to use for individuals and non-profit organizations for non-commercial use. Attribution (included in each feed) is required.”

The feeds are keyword-based and very easy to set up. Via makeyougohmm.com and Google BlogScoped.

Custom RSS feeds from search results are available via MSN Search. (look at the bottom left of your search results). You can also get them from a search on MSNBC Newsbot. MSN also has it’s own web based RSS Reader.

The blogging service from Microsoft called MSN Spaces has come out of beta. Storage has been increased from 10 MB to 30 plus they’ve added more themes. 4.5 million Spaces accounts have been created so far.

More info on the launch of Spaces and Messenger 7.0 via [email protected]

Speaking of MSN, Rand has posted an excellent interview with the MSN Search team on his blog.

For the future, MSN Search team mentions: “Local, blogs, mobile, API?¢¬Ä¬ôs and RSS are all important next areas of development for us and anyone serious about Search.”

The inteview covers topics including:
– creation of MSN search
– community input
– search and hardware
– crawling
– corpus size
– competing against Google
– quality testing and spam
– working for MSN search
– the people behind MSN search
– non-search technologies
– future developments

Here are a few search engine related spoof sites you might like. There must be a more complete collection of these out there somewhere, if you know of one, feel free to comment.

UnderGoos – “Maximise your comfort and user experience with UnderGoos. Our staff aren’t shy, even Sergey’s been trying out both the mens and ladies ranges. Google has spotted a chance to bring our unique innovation to yet another underserved market.”

Sixf00! 660 – Parody of Yahoo! 360
“You need an invitation in order to use Sixfoo! 660, but you’re probably not special enough. Sign up for the feta waiting list, then cry from the corner of the playground while the kewl kids enjoy the the foursquare court. Why not round up all your 12-sided dices and go beg for a Gmail Account, sucky baby?”

Google has updated AdSense to allow real time reporting. This should be very useful for high volume publishers. Unfortunately, this blog is not there – yet.

MediaPost notes with recent AdWords updates you will be able “to compare the conversion rates of ads in different channels, including Google’s search rival, Overture.” Now that’s pretty interesting and potentially very threatening to Overture and MSN’s new PPC program. It could really provide advertisers with a direct comparison of ad network performance.

SEOBook also notes the launch of Google AdWords Budget Optimizer. A way to further automate AdWords PPC bid management. He also posts some interesting comments on how useful such a tool would actually be. We’ll try it out and post comments in a month or so.

“We’re going to start taking video submissions from people” in the next few days, Page told a crowd at the National Cable & Telecommunications Association show here. Later, in response to a reporter’s question, he called the move an “experiment in video blogging.” From CNET News

Google Video allows you to search the closed-captioned text of a selected number of regional programs. Search results show still-shots captured at various intervals with text excerpts.

It will be interesting to see what Google will do with submitted videos and who they’ll take them from.

Other video search tools I’ve used include Yahoo Video and Blinkx TV search which both differ from Google Video in that they show links to full videos rather than still shots.

Mark Glaser of the Online Journalism Review reports on his visit to Yahoo to sit in on a production meeting related to the redesign of Yahoo News which is due to launch in public beta later this month. (screenshot)

New features include:

• “Toggle” feature lets you see news headlines from a particular news source at a glance.
• “My Sources” tab on each section lets you see your RSS headlines — and you can add feeds to the page.
• Tabbed navigation on top of each page, with more weight and space given to the top story package.
• Y!Q technology embedded into key words in stories brings pop-up box with links to relevant Yahoo and Web pages. (this is cool)

IAC and Ask Jeeves are not officially commenting yet, but plenty of media and blogs are in regard to a $2 billion stock deal for IAC to acquire Ask Jeeves.

New York Times: “IAC/Interactive Corp., the Internet company headed by Barry Diller, is close to an agreement to acquire Ask Jeeves Inc., the nation’s fourth-largest search engine company.”

Wall Street Journal:
“Barry Diller’s IAC/InterActiveCorp last night was near a deal to purchase the fifth-largest Web-search service, Ask Jeeves Inc., for around $2 billion in stock, according to people familiar with the matter, marking an aggressive move by the electronic-commerce company into the Internet’s most competitive arena.”

Yahoo is planning on offering a blog service called Yahoo 360 that will be more like MSN Spaces than Google’s Blogger.com. Beta testing starts March 29 and will offer initial users the option of inviting friends to use the service, similar to how Google promoted Gmail.

Users will be able to draw upon content from other Yahoo services as well as share posts and photos of their own. Yahoo 360 is part blogging and part social networking.

From CNET News.com:

“It’s really about keeping connected to people you know,” said Julie Herendeen, vice president for network services at Yahoo. “Yahoo 360 allows consumers to conveniently connect with the people they care about by creating and sharing blogs, photos and other content across Yahoo.”