Search Engine Marketing

Yahoo Announces upgrade to Search Advertising System

No surprise after losing MSN in the US Yahoo has announced an upgrade to its rather old interface and new analytics offerings. First step is to upgrade core technology and analytics platform then to roll out new marketing campaign interface. No one likes the current interface and one wonders why it has taken them so long to actually do this.
I can't wait is all I can say. We must thank Google for giving away webstats via old Urchin product as now MSN and Yahoo have to follow suit.

MSN AdCenter Opens the door in the US

The new MSN AdCenter has gone live in the US, I will be setting up accounts over the next week so will post some thoughts after i have used it a bit and seen some results. MSN lacks traffic in the US, but the interface and possibilities look great.

Google buys Orion an advanced text search algorithm invented by Ori Alon

Ori Alon an Israeli student developed this algorithm whilst at our own Uni of NSW in Australia. The 3 majors chased this technology with Google winning in the end. Ori went to Monash then did his PhD at University of NSW. His search engine is designed to complement the results returned by search engines i believe. I first heard of this in Septmeber last year. Ori now works for Google in California.

Yahoo trials new search model code named Panama

Yahoo has notified high volume buyers of search traffic that it will be testing a new ad model. Supposedly this will result in higher click through rates. Using methodology like Google, who uses a CTR * quality score ad model, rewarding ads that get good CTR. No release date has been published as yet.

Google is building speciality Search Engines

There is no doubt Google is taking over the internet, we all wondered what Google Base was all about. Now we have Google Real Estate, in the US if you do a search for "homes for sale" a whole bunch of information is presented. Searching for Real Estate may never be the same again. Go here to see what Shimon and Avi uncovered. http://www.shimonsandler.com/?p=126

Google testing click to call

That phone icon in search results is a new facility Google is testing, click to call. More info can be found here; http://www.google.com/help/faq_clicktocall.html

Yahoo Index Update

Priyank Garg Product Manager Yahoo! Search posted on the their search blog (www.ysearchblog.com) that they have just completed an index update. Also to expect extra crawler activity. If anyone experiences or sees any major fluctuations please let me know.

Google Big Daddy Update complete

Hi according to Matt Cutts the BigDaddy update is fully deployed at every data centre.

He states on his blog that: "Yes, I believe every data center now has the Bigdaddy upgrade in software infrastructure, as of this weekend" (27 March 2006)

Also answering this question re the Mozilla Googlebot;

Q: “What’s the story on the Mozilla Googlebot? Is that what Bigdaddy sends out?”
A: Yes, I believe so. You will probably see less crawling by the older Googlebot, which has a User-Agent of “Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.google.com/bot.html)”. I believe crawling from the Bigdaddy infrastructure has a new User-Agent, which is “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)”

Google Search Commands - Date Syntax

Hi want to search for a subject or keyword in google using a date range? Well you can but you need to convert the date to a julian number. Who said that life was easy? What the hell is a julian date?
To Quote;http://www.maa.mhn.de/Scholar/times.html#juli
The Julian day number -- or simply the Julian day -- is a continuous count of days, starting with the day 0 that began on the 1st of January, 4713 BC at 12 o'clock noon.
Dig on the internet for more info on this story ....

Anyway so you want to find;
The date range syntax does wonders for narrowing your search results.
Peter Wells the guitarist just passed away, he was a legend and a awesome slide guitarist. To find info on Pete from 01/01/2000 to 27/3/2006, you would enter the following into Google;

"Peter Wells" "rose tattoo" daterange:2451545-2453822

Cool hey?

If you come across any good search syntax for google, msn or yahoo be sure to let me know.