There are several venues for meeting fellow search engine enthusiasts and marketers: Danny Sullivan’s SMX, Search Engine Strategies, the Webmaster World conference and the PPC Summit. Here are the upcoming events.

Webmaster World PubCon

The Webmaster World “pub conference” stated out as a simplistic meeting of people over some beers in a pub in London in 2001.

Since then the show has turned into something much bigger, with a huge annual search engine marketing conference and expo in Las Vegas.

This July 24, however, PubCon is back at the Cittie of York pub in London for an informal afternoon.

The next big event is in Las Vegas November 10 to 13.

Search Engine Strategies
on August 10 to 14.

The next Search Engine Strategies Conference and Expo is in San Jose in California

Europeans may want to take part in the Berlin conference on November 24 to 25.

SMX Search Marketing Expo

SMX is all over the world this year. Just look at this itinerary:
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It’s Sunday and Pandia gives you the most important search engine news headlines of the week.

• Google Rules Mobile Search — for Now, Report Says

  Popular search engine Google not only dominates the web game but has taken to lead the mobile search domain globally as well, a report from Web browser company Opera said recently. (PCWorld June 27 2009)

• Great Wall of Facebook: The Social Network’s Plan to Dominate the Internet — and Keep Google Out

  Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg envisions a more personalized, humanized Web, where our network of friends, colleagues, peers, and family is our primary source of information, just as it is offline. (Wired June 22 2009)

• More real-time search startups join the fray

  Real-time search allows users to find out what’s happening now on any topic, unlike traditional search engines, which bring up the most authoritative results over time as judged by page links. (The Industy Standard June 26 2009)

• Study Suggests People Prefer Bing’s Design To Google’s, But Still Won’t Switch

  Prior to the test, all the subjects used Google as their main search engine. Following the test, 4 out of the 12, or one third, said that overall they preferred Bing. (TechCrunch June 25 2009)

Click here to read the rest of this article!

At the end of two and a half years, the EU project CHORUS concluded its work at a conference in Brussels recently. The conference focused on status and challenges of multi media search engine technology, but also addressed the challenges, gaps, commonalities, difficulties, targeted/expected impacts and success criteria related to search initiatives.

CHORUS has been a European Coordination Action which aims at creating the conditions of mutual information and cross fertilisation between the European projects dealing with Multimedia Content Search Engines. National and international initiatives have also been included.

The conference was accompanied and animated by a stand exhibition of 11 research projects participating in the CHORUS cluster and two external research projects (all in the domain of multi media search engines). The complete list of projects can be found at the end of this report or on the Conference Web site.

All Powerpoint presentations from the conference are available, as well as video of of the talks.

The conference was attended by more than 120 people from a wide range of professional backgrounds, covering private and public research institutes (various universities, INRIA, IFAAR, IDIAP, CERTH, Fraunhofer), industry (Nokia, Yahoo, Exalead, Thomson), public bodies (The European Commission, German Ministry of Economy) and national initiatives such as THESEUS and QUAERO.

photo credit: david.nikonvscanon

Pandia discusses the role of search engine rankings in online marketing and reviews a new tool that helps you keep track of your own results.

There used to be a time when a number one position in the search engines was considered the highway to online marketing heaven. More people used to click on the three top positions than all the others combined.

Mixing different types of results

Lately things have become slightly more complicated.

Google’s Universal Search mixes results from various databases, including regular web pages, news sites, image and video listings and blog posts.

Bing sorts results into several topic sections, encouraging searchers to scan the whole of the first search engine result page before clicking.

This means that more of the first page of results become valuable marketing property.

That doesn’t change the old saying, though: Being on page 1 for a popular search query will bring you a lot of traffic.

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Here are some of the search engine news articles we found interesting this week:

• China to Google: No porn, or else

  Google has acknowledged that the Chinese government asked it to disable a search feature with the goal of censoring pornography (Cnet June 19 2009)

• Google’s censorship struggles continue in China

  On June 4, 2009, Google.cn blocked all searches for “Tiananmen Square,” even ones not related to the massacre that took place on that date in 1989. (Cnet June 16 2009)

• Google Street View Imagery Leads to Arrest

  Dutch twin brothers who mugged a teenager in the northern town of Groningen were arrested after being caught on camera by a car gathering images for Google’s online photo map service (Blogoscoped June 19 2009)

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Ask and Ask Jeeves go back to basics and launch an enlarged question and answer database that allows for natural language search queries.

Those who have followed Ask.com AKA Ask Jeeves since 1996, know that it started out as a natural language query search engine. The idea was that you should be able to enter a regular question in the search box and get a sensible reply in return.

Originally: a human powered Q and A directory

Given that computers are pretty stupid beasts at best, Ask Jeeves used human manpower to generate a database for the most common questions and answers.

In that way the search engine was more like a human edited directory than an automatically generated search engine.

Click here to read the rest of this article!

PickySite is a brand new social networking site for webmasters, internet marketers, web designers, web developers, and SEO experts. Along with PickySite’s editors, they write group and individual blogs and communicate with other members sharing the same goals.

How it works

On PickySite you can start your own personal group, or corporate blog and share information, links, and photos. You can also start conversations around posts, or show that you like someone’s article by posting comments or voting on the post. The most interesting or important articles will make it to the homepage of PickySite.

Most of the users of PickySite are Web professionals. Consequently, the website could prove to present valuable resource. Currently, blogs cover 35 topics, such as:

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It is widely known that dissidents in China have had their blogs deleted and in at least one case a major search engine (Yahoo) have contributed to the arrest of a Chinese journalist. This, along with the Iranian regime’s poor track record when it comes to human rights, is why many Iranian protesters use the a search engine that guarantees search privacy.

Ahmed Hossain, CIO of Yauba, tells Pandia: “Our traffic from Iran has jumped 300% over the past several days, as many of them are using the Yauba Search Engine and the anonymity proxy filter to access blocked sites and get news from foreign sources.”

Search and privacy

After pressure from the EU commission, Google last September reduced the period the search engine stores personal data in its logs from 18 to 9 months.

The metasearch engine Ixquick used to store IP addresses for 48 hours. Now they don’t store IP addresses at all.

Hossain explains that Yauba goes even further: “We are the only search engine that offers 3 levels of privacy protection for our users:

• We use no cookies
• We do not store any of our users’ search (or any other personally identifiable) information
• We provide our users the ability to visit third party sites with the same level of privacy protection”

More information about Yauba.
Reporters Without Borders on repression in Iran.

photo credit: .faramarz