Archive for the ‘Search Engines News’ Category
Tuesday, March 6th, 2007 |
A new option for sellers to expose their products for free: Live Product Upload from Microsoft; From product description:
What it is
The Live Product Upload, a free service for merchants interested in making their product catalog available in Live Product Search. This easy-to-use gateway is designed to enable online retailers to:
• Showcase products on Live Product Search
• Upload accurate and up-to-date product data directly into the Live Search index
What it does for you
Here is a quick glance of functionality accessible through this service
Catalog Management
Upload you product catalog in any of the formats support, i.e. text or XML through either HTTP upload or FTP. Products can include images, description, price, and links to web addresses on your site. You can upload any number of catalogs with no specific limits. Once your catalog is successfully published and has passed the validation steps it will be searchable through Live Product Search.
Easy Signup
You will need a Live ID (formerly Passport) to login and signup. Fill out a simple application that describes your business and optionally fill out more business details.
Reporting
Keep up to date on the status of your catalogs and keep track of your products on Live Product Search.
Posted in Microsoft | No Comments »
Monday, March 5th, 2007 |
After Blogger (forced) transition to the new system on all existing blogs a very ugly bug appeared. The previous posts component, instead of showing 10 previous posts relative to the current in view, showed only the 10 newest posts relative to the last one.
As of tonight it seems that this is fixed and everything works as before.
Posted in Google | No Comments »
Monday, February 26th, 2007 |
It looks like Google has started a new (as far as I know) experiment. Results from Youtube and Google have the attached video that can be seen in the SERPs by using the show video link.
This thing I saw it just once in Firefox and couldn’t replicate it again, neither in FF and neoither in IE7.
For details see attached screenshot
Posted in Google | 9 Comments »
Thursday, February 8th, 2007 |
January 2006:
Yahoo! Go Desktop
Yahoo! Go Desktop is a suite of applications that will make it easy for consumers to keep up-to-date on and interact with their world of information. Consumers will be able to use the individual Yahoo! Go Desktop services to connect to the information that matters to them online, but without having to open a browser window on their personal computer.
The initial services available as part of Yahoo! Go Desktop will be the Yahoo! Widgets Engine and a Yahoo! Go Desktop dashboard. The Yahoo! Go Desktop dashboard will connect consumers’ personal content to their services and their Internet community. For example, consumers will be able to link their personal contacts to Yahoo! Local, which will make it easy for them to update their address book with their favorite local businesses.
(Yahoo! Press Release)
One year later:
- The whole Yahoo! Go concept has been reduced only to mobile (link)
- Yahoo! Go Desktop is now officialy just the old, plain, boring and pointless Konfabulator (link)
Well…after I stoped believing in fairy tales, I need to stop believing all the fake demos made at CES using probably some flash movies and not real applications.
YOU BASTARDS!
EDIT: In a strange coincidence ( 
), Guillaume asked himself the same questions and also got some official answers
Posted in Yahoo | 1 Comment »
Thursday, February 1st, 2007 |
For the past 2 months I noticed that Google Analytics, at least weekly if not daily is missing traffic data for a few hours. This is getting very annoying especially with the death of Performancing Metrics and the lack of usability on Feedburner Statistics.
Does anyone else know a good (and free) blog analytics solution?
Posted in Google | 6 Comments »
Wednesday, January 31st, 2007 |
From Techcrunch:
Yahoo’s brand-centric sites, announced in November 2006 and dubbed “Brand Universe”, have started to go live. These sites each revolve around a single popular brand - like this one on the Nintendo Wii - and have almost no original content. Instead, Yahoo is taking content from Flickr, Del.icio.us, Yahoo Answers and other Yahoo properties, along with some slick graphics, and hoping for page views.
[...]
Yahoo doesn’t seem too concerned with monetization of these pages yet, and they aren’t working directly with the brands themselves.
Ok, someone please explain me what’s the freakin difference between what Yahoo does and search engine spamming. Those are black hat websites by the book with a Yahoo logo on them:
- no original content
- aggregated content based on RSS feeds around a central keyword
- subdomain hosted on a core authority domain
- lots of ads (soon)
When Wordpress did that a few years ago they were called spammers and blacklisted for a while from Search Engines. When regular black haters do it are called splogs and flushed from SERPs. When Yahoo does it is brilliant.
Posted in Search Engine Optimization, Yahoo | No Comments »
Saturday, January 27th, 2007 |
As of today, it seems that ALL the old blogger accounts have been moved to the new version and you cannot access them anymore unless you have a google account. Crossing fingers right now as I am moving a lot of my blogs
Posted in Google | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, January 24th, 2007 |
They finally added them but in a crippled way. As I was saying before I was expecting detailed data not overall stats and only queries with a certain number of hits. Perhaps all the small sites will see something like:
No queries were sufficiently popular to be listed.
and the reason for that is:
The most likely explanation is that no query occurred sufficiently often to make it “popular”. Our definition of popular tries to balance your curiosity about your Custom Search Engine traffic, and our requirement that we take reasonable steps to protect your users’ privacy.
Why is this happening? Because of the AOL data scandal, where idiots were searching for their own credit card numbers. The probability for this is very small to occur in Google’s CSE but they wash their hands and protect the morons innocents. Why this is pointless? Just because Google said that CSE is a better alternative to an inhouse search engine. Well dear Google CSE team, an inhouse search engine will provide those queries and no one can protect the users from themselves.
What I wanted?
- Number of users
- Queries
- Labels Usage
- Results for the queries
- Queries with no results
Posted in Google, Search Engines News | No Comments »
Tuesday, January 16th, 2007 |
Today while performing a query I saw attached to one of the results an address and a plus sign:
using the plus sign I got a map (of course from Google Maps and more details about the address):
Now (beside that I don’t know if this is new or not) here is what I find interesting:
- This is not a regular one box result - That specific page was the 7th result on the page
- Where the data comes from? The address is listed on the website’s first page but is in an image format and I don’t think that Googlebot can read it. Still this is the same data that appears on the whois listing
Posted in Google | No Comments »
Thursday, January 11th, 2007 |
Google CSE team, announced on their blog that they made available the top Google CSEs categorized by various criteria.
I am a user of CSE and I think is the best service in custom search engines, allowing the users to do a lot of twaekings and also get some income for their work.
I am curious though, when they will provide advanced statistics about CSEs usage. What I am thinking is:
- Number of users
- Queries
- Labels Usage
- Results for the queries
- Queries with no results
This could greatly improve user experience and will help a lot webmasters to better understand their communities and their needs, tweaking the CSEs for the best performance
Posted in Google | 1 Comment »
