Archive for August, 2005
Saturday, August 13th, 2005
On Hotmail Blog you can find a new set of screenshots
From those you can see the lack of huge ugly image banners. I hope they will stick to that and is not only for internal testing.
Anyway those movements should stimulate the Yahoo Mail Team, to roll out the beta mail for he general public.
Edit:
Regarding image banners there is a beta user saying:
I haven’t been able to create nested folders yet. The screenshots above are slightly deceiving though, because when the ads come in they take up both header and right side screen area.
Heh I knew it was good to be true. Aren’t they learning the lesson? Gmail among other things has perfectly integrated ads that don’t disturb the user, and that’s why it’s so popular.
Posted in General | 1 Comment »
Friday, August 12th, 2005
Search engine market shares in July 2005: Google - 59.2%, Yahoo! - 28.8%, MSN - 5.5% by ZDNet’s ZDNet Research — HitWise says Google, Yahoo! Search and MSN Search accounted for 93.5% of US searches in July 2005. Google garnered 59.2% of searches. Yahoo! Search and MSN Search captured 28.8% and 5.5% shares, respectively.
Posted in Google, Search Engines News, Yahoo | 1 Comment »
Thursday, August 11th, 2005
The new version of Audioscrobbler is out. They merged the Audioscrobbler and Last.FM into one single site.
Among the new features
- tags
- Ajax Flavour
- desktop player (no more clumpsy browser player)
Posted in Breaking News, General | No Comments »
Thursday, August 11th, 2005
On a SES Session Summary we see the following:
Q: I have a client that has a great site, lots of links but the anchor text being used throughout the web is the same.
A: Matt said that is very unnatural. Most natural links are not 100% one exact phrase to the site. It won’t hurt you, there is no OOP, but all the links might be devalued.
Tim agreed with Matt on it being unnatural.
K. Let’s consider the following situations:
- I have a web services company (services from hosting to web design) and I put my link on all my clients
- I have a cool freeware PHP script and I have included a link to me in it.
How unnatural are those situations? To mee it seems pretty normal….but maybe it’s just me
Another one:
Q: Reciprocal links; we have them now, we have plans to do more, what should I do? There are 20 of them links.
A: Matt said here is my rule of thumb, pretend you are my competitor, what would they think of it? Plenty of people have reciprocal links but if its excessive, then you need to be careful. Editorial given links and independent links are best.
Danny then asked 4 people in the audience to point to each other and then asked several to point at each other.
Matt said if you go into “graph theory” you have a “clique”, that clique is when everyone in a network is pointing at each other, that is not natural.
K. I have a blog. I read other blogs. I find some interesting and I quote them or link to their main page. Analyzing logs or seeing comments, the others bloggers decide quoting me or linking to me. I have not beg for links, I have not payed for them. Is natural
In other order. I know that at the examples above there are hundreds of illegal counter-examples. My point was:
“The search engines could tweak their algos in order to spot natural/unnatural within the same behavior?”
Perhaps the answer is no…or not now
Posted in Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »
Saturday, August 6th, 2005
Of course a post about Google 
Spotted through Search Engine Watch there is a note mentioning the fact that Google is not talking to CNET writers. Following the trails, we find this:
“Google representatives have instituted a policy of not talking with CNET News.com reporters until July 2006 in response to privacy issues raised by a previous story.”
Source
A previous story…about Eric Schmidt (Google CEO) and some facts about his financial status. Those data were obtained by using Google and other public records (nothing illegal).
I really don’t understand why Google is pissed off on that. Johnny Long has been showing from quite a long time that Google likes storing various kinds of data and a good partof that data people would like to keep it private.
See also John Battelle’s post on this and Slashdot. And for a smiling closure of this don’t forget to check Fuckedgoogle.com’s point of view
Posted in Google | No Comments »
Saturday, August 6th, 2005
By way of Search Engine Watch Moderator, OptimizeOnline, Google Launch Phase 2 of Longer Ad Text Beta Programme. Basically, Google AdWords will up the description character limit to 200 and then test the CTR rates of those ads versus the original ads. OptimizeOnline …
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/index.php?p=1992
As it was obvious, Google didn’t contemplate Yahoo launching their contextual ad network and already is making it’s move to consolidate the grounds
Notice anything different in your Yahoo News listings on Yahoo’s homepage, My Yahoo, and other pages within the Yahoo network where Yahoo News stories are listed? Yahoo is placing a little TV screen next to some news stories to showcase its News …
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/index.php?p=1986
This is quite a goody. Why watching only CNN when you can choose to watch multiple video versions of the same story. Add this to human moderated news (Google does that automatically) and you have a good contender to the role of news king
The Mozilla Foundation this week went “for profit” with the launch of a commercial subsidiary which will focus on the Firefox browser. The for profit version of Mozilla (Cashzilla?) will also be responsible for the development, testing, and distribution of the organization’s open …
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/index.php?p=1985
I just hope that this step will lead the way to Firefox branded browsers. Today I was looking too see if clones of Firefox exist and I was amazed to see that there are none. I mean what’s wrong in the picture? IE is not open source but clones like Maxthon and Avant Browser (to name just a few) are here for quite a long time. I expect (and also want) a Yahoo branded browser to give me quick access to the Yahoo services for example. And the ways to explore this are vitually unlimited
P.S. I am doing this kind of post as an experiment. If it works I will stick to it. The ideea is the following:
1. I have installed Blog Navigator and inserted my daily readings (more to be added soon) 2. From the daily posts I will make a selection of the most important (from my point of view) and try to add some personal comments
Posted in Google, News Reviews, Yahoo | No Comments »
