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Search Engine News Weblog Archive March 2003Below find older entries to the Pandia search engine news weblog. For the latest search engine news, go to the Pandia Search World page or the Pandia Search Central home page. New version of ClickTracks(March 26 2003) Anyone being serious about search engine optimization needs to analyze visitor behavior -- where they come from, what search engine they are using, their search queries and so on. US company ClickTracks Inc has launched a new version of their ClickTracks Analyzer, a tool for measuring site metrics. Version 3.3 includes a new report for analysis of click throughs from Google's AdWords partners. "The syndication report shows the URLs which hosted the syndicated advertisement and the number of click throughs from each URL," says John Marshall, CEO of ClickTracks. There is also a new client/server Enterprise version. Unlike other Web metric solutions ClickTracks present results directly on a copy of your Web page. The tool as become very popular among some search engine optimization experts, partly because it presents result in such an innovative way (the aaah! factor) and partly because it helps you measure the rate of return for search engine visitors. It will also present the optimum path taken by visitors that results in a purchase. Search Engine Blog has an interview with Marshall. Google is not going public(March 26 2003) Google's Sergey Brin says that the company is not going public for the moment. However, the company is definitely considering such a move. To News.com Brin said that competitors would gain insight on Google's finances if the company started selling stock. Going public could also cause the company to focus too closely on short-term financial concerns. We see that Webmaster World is prepared for any eventuality, as the discussion board has started its own "Google IPO Watch, Finance, and Business Operations Forum" Search for news on IraqFor the latest headlines on the war in Iraq, use our news search engine. The Pandia Newsfinder also includes shortcuts to the main headlines in a wide number of topics, global politics included. LookSmart plans daily Wisenut update(March 25 2003) ZDNet reports that LookSmart is hoping to use some of its newly acquired technology to refresh its Wisenut search engine database every day. In January LookSmart bought Grub, an US company that has developed software that lets people give their computers' unused processing power to others. This has been done by others before them. SETI, a project that is looking for extraterrestrial life is one of them. Some users of the Google toolbar may donate their computers' unused processing power to a scientific research project at Stanford University. "The goal of this technology is to be able to crawl every document on the Internet every day," says Pete Adams, chief technology officer of LookSmart to ZDNet. "We can only do that if we can grow the number of people that are running the software -- the computing power we would use is a function of how many people we have donating their computer power." It is unclear what you will get in return for giving LookSmart access to your computer. Webmasters cannot, for instance, force the software to crawl their own sites first. However, LookSmart/Grub plans to continue to make the crawl data available to the Grub community of users more directly (through an XML API). At the moment of writing Grub has 159 clients running. It has been crawling 17,311,099 URLs in the last 24 hours, according to the Grub home page. Webmaster World discussion. Fast Data Search adds new features(March 25 2003) The Norwegian search engine company Fast has sold its Internet search unit to Overture. However, the most profitable part of the company -- the Fast Data Search unit -- remains. Fast Data Search is a package for companies that need their own internal search engine, for instance for searching databases or Web based intranets. Fast has now added two new features: The "Live Analytics" feature enables "on-the-fly" data and information analysis where end users can refine the search within the given results set by adding new specifications. As an example Fast gives a computerís RAM, display resolution, etc. "The Business Managerís Control Panel" allows the searcher to adjust the search algorithm in order to fine tune search results. Now, if someone could teach all these companies to write comprehensible press releases. BBC has switched to Inktomi(March 25 2003) Last year the British BBC launched their own publicly owned search engine based on the Google database. As reported on Webmaster World, they have now switched to Inktomi based search results. It is not clear why they have done this. The move will certainly make the BBC search engine a less attractive alternative. Metasearch engine Ixquick tests clustering(March 24 2003) The highly acclaimed metasearch Ixquick engine is testing a new version featuring clustering. Ixquick sorts results into relevant categories on order to help you focus your searching. These categories appear in the upper left hand corner of result pages. To gain access to the beta site, go to the American version of Ixquick. Source: mfagan at Webmaster World Google meets Daum(March 19 2003) Brett Tabke reports that Google is going to power the Daum portal. "Never heard of it!" "Who cares?" Well, as Tabke points out Daum has some 34 million registered subscribers and two million online communities. Moreover, Daum users view an average of 400 million pages a day. Now, that's what we call an important audience. Daum is a Korean portal, and not all Koreans are that fluent in English. Quite a few of them are, however, which makes this an important announcement even for Non-Korean webmasters. See also Korea Times Optimizing the title tag(March 19 2003) As part of the continued series “Getting Back To Search Engine Marketing Basics”, Pandia guest writer Andy Beal turns his attention to the much talked about meta tags. This week he takes a closer look at the title tag. Read about how to optimize your title tag for the search engines. Search engines are finally earning money(March 18 2003) BusinessWeek Online reports that paid-search revenue grew by 40 percent last year, to US$ 1.4 billion. The rest of the online advertising market was shrinking by 17 percent. Pay-per-click search engine advertising distributed by companies like Overture and Google has now 23 percent of this market. According to this article U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray forecasts that search-related revenues, mostly from advertising, will grow 43 percent this year, to $2 billion. According to the article pay-per-click provider Overture made US$78 million last year on US$668 million in sales. In comparison Yahoo! made US$953 million, largely from traditional online ads such as banners. This is good news for search engine companies as well as searchers. The dot.com disaster has taught us that no company can survive long without revenue -- and with no revenue, there will be no search engines. These ads seem to be the solution, and we don't mind as long as they are clearly marked as advertising and not mixed with regular search results. It is interesting isn't it? Some years ago experts predicted that online advertising would be dominated by high tech animated and interactive adverts. For sure, you will find them, but the most profitable online ads these days are bland text ads. There are several reasons for this. One is the limits of technology. A large number of Internet users use old fashioned modems and have not got the time to wait for the latest in Flash downloads. Then there is the fact that Web surfers have learnt to ignore graphic ads. They do not see them! Plain text, however, has not lost its credibility. Clickable underlined text with a call to action, still seem irresistible: Click here! Upcoming search engine conferences and workshops(March 15 2003) Are you looking for the latest on the SE scene, itching to meet colleagues and competition or do you simply need some inspiration? Why not check out some search engine conferences and workshops? Read the Pandia SE traveller's guide for upcoming conferences. Search engine referrals go up(March 14 2003) WebSideStory reports that the percentage of search engine referrals has almost doubled over the past year. Search engines now delivers some 13.4 percent of global referrals, up from 7.1 percent the previous year. The statistics are based on information from Internet users who visit sites using WebSideStoryís HitBox marketing analytics services. 13 percent, 7 percent, does it really matter? It doesn't amount to much anyway, does it? Well, yes, actually, it does. The numbers may seem low, but remember that there may be two reasons for sites not getting a large percentage of search engine visitors. The first one is that the web site owners have not optimized your site for the search engines. If you are not listed in the major search engines, or you are ranked low, searchers will not find your site by using Google, AlltheWeb, AltaVista or Lycos. However, it could also be that they actually have succeeded in their search engine marketing strategy. The Web surfers do find their sites, and they like them so much that they bookmark them. They come back, again and again, without using the search engines to find these sites. A large number of returning visitors will necessarily lead to a lower percentage of search engine click-throughs, and that's a good thing. The same applies to the Web as a whole. Web users are becoming more Internet savvy and target oriented. They apparently do not spend the same time surfing aimlessly around. The use the search engines to find information, and when they find a useful site, they stick to it. A large percentage of visitors coming from the search engines may actually mean that your site is not good enough. The visitors do not find what they are looking for or they do not like what they see. If this is the case, search engine optimization will not help you. If anyone says that statistics like these mean that search engine optimization is of little importance, they are wrong. You will have to spend a huge sum on advertising to compensate for low search engine rankings, because even the loyal visitors will need help to find your site the first time. Northern Light is dead (...ah, but wait, it's moving!)(March 7 2003, update March 10) It's been a while since we mentioned Northern Light, once one of the Web's most advanced search engines. The search engine facility has been closed to the public for quite a while now. Recently Divine, the company that owns Northern Light also removed the pay per view article collection. Divine has filed for bankruptcy and has been delisted from the NASDAQ stock exchange. As we reported on March 7, the news search database has not been updated for some time. Today (the 10th), however, Internetbrus.com reports of a new update of the news database. Never say never! Google AdWords on your site(March 9 2003) Google AdWords is Google's text ad program. By paying Google a certain fee per click through, you ads will be presented on relevant Google search result pages. Google has also several search site partners that present these ads, and recently the company launched a new Content-Targeted Advertising program that delivers such ads to other sites as well. These sites include various Web logs powered by Blogger.com, recently acquired by Google. But what about your site? Could your site be a potential Google AdWords partner? Well, possibly, if your site generates more than 20 million page views per month. If not, you may at least see how your ads would look, if your site were accepted. The Spanish site google.dirson.com has made as script that makes use of Google's own Blogger javascript in order to generate text ads of relevance to the content of your site. It is clear from this that Google determines the topic of your Web pages automatically, and not manually. Content-Targeted Advertising FAQ More European search oriented sites(March 9 2003) Pandia asked its readers for tips on more European sites devoted to Internet searching and search engine marketing. And yes, we did get the response we hoped for. Click here for more European search engine oriented sites! New MSN Search is out of beta(March 7 2003) MSN has implemented a new and leaner interface on its Web search pages, which is good. Pandia believes, however, that MSN should reconsider the way it mixes results. Read more about the new MSN Search. StatLynx search engine campaign analysis tool(March 6 2003) The Danish company E-builder.dk has launched a new search engine tracking service called StatLynx. StatLynx differs from most search engine rank check programs in that it focuses on rate of investment monitoring of search engine and pay per click campaigns. The idea is to gather information on which search engines deliver the most qualified traffic, how, where and when visitors turn into customers, and where the most profitable customers come from. This is not a piece of software, but an online service. As soon as you have included a tracking code on all relevant Web pages and entered your budget projections on the Web site, you are ready to go. Pandia has not tested the service. Hack HotBot!(March 5 2003) Last year Fast invited visitors to redesign the AlltheWeb search engine interface by the use of cascading style sheets. Now Lycos is inviting you to "hack" the HotBot search site and create your own customized skins. Beginning today, and running through April 3, users can enter the Hack HotBot Contest and win a giant a 57-inch projection television, an iPod MP3-player or a t-shirt (whether the TV is PAL-compatible is not known). If the previous sentences mean absolutely nothing to you, this is probably not your cup of tea. However, the hackers among you may visit the Hack HotBot home page. New Kartoo(March 4 2003) European metasearch engine Kartoo has been given a radical face lift, presenting a dark blue and (we normally do not use such terms for search engine interfaces) beautiful interface. While most other search sites including AlltheWeb (see below) presents stripped down text oriented designs that loads fast in any browser, Kartoo has decided to make use of the most advanced presentation technology. Flash included.
You may click on these islands to get to the sites, or you may click on a topic to rephrase your search. Click on a plus sign and the term is added to your query, click on a minus and it is excluded from the results. Experts have shown that perception is facilitated considerably by visual aids. Furthermore, quite a large percentage of surfers are said to be visually oriented. These surfers may find the text oriented search engines confusing, but might feel right at home with engines like Kartoo. Note, however, that due to the use of advanced graphics, Kartoo may be a bit slow on some machines. Those of you who are more text oriented will find the sites and the search terms find in the left hand column of the result pages as well. New AlltheWeb(March 4 2003) There is a new version of the AlltheWeb search engine. This has apparently nothing to do with the fact that Overture is to take over AlltheWeb from Fast. In January AlltheWeb introduced true Boolean searching. This time the changes are more cosmetic. There is a leaner front page with a new color palette. The result pages have been simplified and the banner ads have been removed. Search engine marketers would probably find the "AlltheWeb URL Investigator" interesting. By entering the Web address (URL) of a site into the search box the results will tell you who owns the domain, what language the site is written in, its sub domains and size, the date it was last updated, and a link to see how the site looked in the past. AlltheWeb will for instance give the following data for a search for "www.alltheweb.com": Find all 3,204,867 external web pages that link to "www.alltheweb.com" And no, AlltheWeb has not introduced a cache feature similar to the one at Google. The "used to look" link goes to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine Traditional search engine optimization vs. pay per click(March 2 2003) Guest writer David Wallace looks at the difference between traditional search engine optimization and the use of pay per click text ad services. He argues that pay per click can never fully replace traditional optimization techniques. Why Google bought Blogger(March 2 2003) Pandia has reported on Google's acquisition of the Blogger Web log software. It has now become clearer why Google has ventured into the world of online content delivery. Google can use the blogs published by Blogger to distribute highly targeted Google Adwords text ads. A new service, called Content-Targeted Advertising will display text ads on content pages, as well as search pages, of sites including HowStuffWorks, Weather Underground, Blogger, and others. AdWords customers will get the relevant click-throughs for free until March 12. Blogger and Google FAQ Pandia is "cooled" by the Open Directory(March 1 2003) We send our heartfelt thanks to the ODP team. We can also inform our readers that we have moved the search field on the Powersearch page to the very top of the page for improved usability. This change has been made on the basis of a suggestions sent us by one of our readers. If you have any ideas on how we may improve our site, do not hesitate to contact us! New search engine copywriting tutorial(March 1 2003) Well known SEO experts Heather Lloyd-Martin and Detlev Johnson have edited a new online tutorial on web copywriting and search engine marketing. And it's free! The online guide consists of excerpts from the forthcoming book Writing for Search Engines. Basically, it is a collection of several articles describing the art of writing text that satisfies search engines as well as your readers. Among the topics covered are key phrase copy editing and using Google Adwords. By the way, Lloyd-Martin reports that the previously announced TagLine newsletter will be published monthly from now on. New version of the IBP SEO software(March 1 2003) Axandra.com has launched a new version of their Web site promotion tool Internet Business Promoter (IBP). IBP contains tools to optimize Web pages, to analyze the keyword density and to check search engine rankings. The new version 2.0 adds a tool that compares your Web page with the top 10 ranked pages for any given keyword on one out of 250 search engines. It then suggests what to do to achieve a similar ranking. IBP is available in a freeware lite edition, a standard edition and professional and business editions designed for Web agencies. Go to weblog search engine news entries for 2001 Please note: The links on archived search engine news pages will not be updated! | ||
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