April 2009

The people over at the Microsoft Live Search blog have started a series of SEM posts intended to help train people.

The SEM 101 posts are intended “to help folks who suddenly find themselves responsible for promoting their organization’s website. I’ve seen many visitors in the forums who ask basic questions, so I know there is an audience for this line of articles. I personally know many folks in my life outside work (there is such a thing, right?) who manage websites for their businesses but know little-to-nothing of SEM.”

I will be keeping an eye on how these posts develop and what level of information is shared. It is always interesting to watch the keeper of the algorithm help people improve there position in the results without tipping their hands to the factors influencing the algorithm.

William Slawski, of SEO by the Sea, appropriately was the one who is reporting that Google is working on developing sea-based data centers that use hydroelectricity harnessed from floating platforms.

The idea is a clever one – very green and very smart. The water can also be used for cooling. The patent filed in 2007 and granted April 28, 2009 details “a system (that) includes a floating platform-mounted computer data center comprising a plurality of computing units, a sea-based electrical generator in electrical connection with the plurality of computing units, and one or more sea-water cooling units for providing cooling to the plurality of computing units.”

Such technology could give a new name to “piracy”.

Gomez and dotMobi have collaborated on mobile benchmarks, and for the mobile search category, Yahoo! snagged first place overall in March 2009.

There were five categories used to measure. Yahoo! tied for first place in two of them: discoverability and readability. Here’s the five categories and how they’re measured:

• Discoverability — how readily a consumer can find the mobile Web site using different URLs.
• Readiness — how well the mobile Web site renders on popular mobile devices.
• Availability — the percentage of successful transactions or the availability of a Web page.
• Response time — how long each page takes to download and the duration of an entire transaction.
• Consistency — how well the mobile Web site performs on different mobile carriers, in different geographies and time frames.

Here are the results:

Related Reading:
Microsoft to Bring Tellme to Windows Mobile Phones
Yahoo! Launches New Mobile Site and iPhone App
MySpace Mobile Application to Support Microsoft Windows Mobile and Silverlight

If you’re a numbers, geography or news junkie, then you’ll love a new feature released by Google to its main search engine. It enables searches for public data. Type in population followed by a county and you’ll get data for that. Type in unemployment rate followed by a location and, again, you’ll get data for that. Those data types are available for almost any U.S state or county. Google hopes to make more public data available for such easy searching in the future.

Related Reading:
Google Launches Toolbar Labs; My Location is First Feature
Google Profiles Offer Some Control and Visibility for Name-Based Results

In a press release this morning, AOL announced that Jeff Levick will join the company as President, Global Advertising and Strategy.

In this new and expanded role, Levick will be responsible for Platform-A, AOL’s advertising business, as well as developing global revenue strategies. Levick comes to AOL from Google, where he was most recently VP of Industry Development and Marketing, The Americas. He will report directly to AOL Chairman and CEO Tim Armstrong.

As a result of this change, Greg Coleman will be leaving Platform-A, where he has served as President since early February 2009.

Levick will officially join AOL in the coming weeks. At Google, he was responsible for business marketing activities for the Americas as well as sales development and strategy for all of the vertical industries covered by Google’s Americas sales organization. He joined Google in 2001 and has held various executive management positions in the company’s advertising sales organization in both North America and Europe.

Prior to joining Google, Levick served as a corporate attorney with a specialty in mergers and acquisitions at the international law firm of Katten Muchin Rosenman, and held roles at various online ventures in Chicago. He currently serves on the board of directors of Helium.com, the advisory board of the College of Communications at DePaul University, and as a member of the SES advisory board.