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Does your site maintain its usability across many browsers? If not, you could end up leaving money on the table this holiday season. Browsers such as Firefox, Chrome, and Safari (which comes standard on Macs) now make up about 30% of the browser market. Firefox alone enjoys 20% of the overall market share.

Matt Poepsel, vice president of Gomez, Inc., whose services test and monitor the performance of websites says that the increase of non-Internet Explorer browsers could cause some e-tailers grief.

“This year more than ever, websites can look and function differently from one browser to another. Online retailers can no longer assume that all shoppers are using Internet Explorer. They must ensure their sites look good and work well across a wide range of browsers - or risk frustrating customers and losing the sale.”

Google AdWords is beta testing a new AdWords interface. The beta test includes a small group of U.S. advertisers. If your account is included in the test, you should see a notification upon signing up to the account.

You can also request to be included in the beta test by signing up here.

Note that this beta test is for the interface and doesn’t change how AdWords campaigns work (i.e. bidding, Quality Score, etc.). They’re looking to improve the way users navigate their campaigns and edit campaigns across multiple ad groups.

Have you been included in the beta test? Let us know your first impressions by leaving a comment.

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Walmart has sent a DMCA notice to TechCrunch and SearchAllDeals.com, a shopping search engine and deals aggregator. (Think of it as the Techmeme for deals on the web, with a Google custom search engine to boot.)

Both sites posted some information about “Black Friday” sales for discount giant Wal-mart. But Wal-mart is claiming copyright infringement. It’s also saying the info wasn’t supposed to be out before November 24th.

The problem is SearchAllDeals doesn’t host content. It simply links to it. This amounts to free advertising for Wal-mart.

And since TechCrunch also has the info, then Wal-mart has a leak problem, which is neither TechCrunch or SearchAllDeal’s problem.

If I were a competitor such as Target or K-mart, I’d be stepping up to the plate and making the most of this “controversy” by freely offering up my own deals.

h/t TechDirt

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Judge Throws Out Copyright Infringement Suit Against Online Video Site Veoh
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Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND) is planning to introduce a net neutrality bill in January, according to Reuters. President-elect Barack Obama has said he supports net neutrality, though it is not yet clear whether he backs Dorgan’s bill.

The bill would prevent Internet Service Providers (ISPs) from blocking web content. Net neutrality supporters say some ISPs have blocked content because of concerns over the amount of bandwidth used by customers. Others have slowed downloading activities for the same reason.

Internet service provider AT&T told Reuters it would be crazy to block content because the customers would just jump ship to an ISP that doesn’t. Blocking content would be akin to shooting themselves in the foot.

Indeed, the bill would pit ISPs such as AT&T, Verizon Wireless and cable companies against content providers such as Google and Microsoft.

Yes, in Washington, enemies make the strangest bedfellows.

Related Reading:
Uncle Sam Says: Thumbs Down on Net Neutrality
Without Neutrality, What Happens to Search?

Google announced early this morning that they have updated their Site Search product to provide for on demand indexing of your site. What this means is that if you are using Google’s Site Search feature to provide visitors to your web site with a tool to search your site, you can always keep that on site search tool up to date. It is important to note that this new tool does NOT provide on demand indexing for your site in Google’s general index.

Nonetheless, this is a very cool tool, so let’s walk through a quick scenario. Imagine that you have a site where you have added a substantial amount of new content. Perhaps you have added 100 pages of new articles and data to the site. Prior to this announcement, you would have had to wait for the Googlebot to come along and find those changes, and for them to be incorporated in the index before your Site Search would be able to search on that new content.

Now, with today’s announcement, you can go into the configuration screen for your Site Search, request on demand indexing, and a fresh crawl will be done of your entire site. This data is then made available to users who use Site Search on your site, in real time.

This is a really neat enhancement, ensuring that you can always offer users a full and robust search function on your site, even immediately after you have made massive changes.

Last night I spoke with Nitin Mangtani, the lead product manager for Google Enterprise Search, and he indicated that the new functionality would not be possible without Google’s cloud computing architecture. Basically, the index for your Site Search is unique in nature.

If there was only one copy of that index (perhaps on a Google server near your web site’s hosting location), people all over the world would have to access that server (causing potentially large latencies) to get the data from that index. The cloud computing architecture used by Google results in your unique index being distributed across the globe, and eliminates those latencies.

Earlier this year, Google launched a media measurement tool called Ad Planner, designed to assist media buyers in their purchasing decisions. The tool was available in limited release by invitation/application only.

Now, the tool is available to anyone with a Google account. There are also some new features for Ad Planner.

Define your audience by keywords and geography - You can use search terms and location to help determine your target audience

Site results management - Choose among three new ranking methods to display results from the sites you’re considering running your campaigns on. Select from niche sites, larger sites, or a balance of the two.

Interactive bubble chart - this feature helps offers a visual that helps you compare demographics, frequency, traffic, and unique visitors.

International demographic data - Check out audience data from France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the UK.

Related Reading:
Does Google Analytics Share Data with Google Trends and Ad Planner?

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President-elect Barack Obama ran on a technology platform that included creating a new cabinet-level position of Chief Technology Officer (CTO). Many names have been thrown around as possibilities with the most prevalent of them all being Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

But Schmidt says that’s not going to happen. He’s happy at Google and he has no plans to go anywhere. He does intend to remain an advisor to Obama.

This is good news since Google likely needs Schmidt to stay put right now. Search advertisers, like many other companies, are bracing to see just how big of a hit they’ll take during the tough economy.

Related Reading:
Google CEO Calls Internet “Cesspool”
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How does one go about getting a job in search, or enhancing their career as a search professional? In today’s SEM.edu column, “Build Your SEM Network — Get LinkedIn,” Ron Jones explains that a partial answer to this question is to use a social networking tool like LinkedIn, where professionals link to one another’s resume-like profiles.

» Full story

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