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WebTrends Releases New Online Analytics Tool

WebTrends is rolling out a new feature to help web markters and developers track specific analytics. The tool is called TagBuilder. It’s online, it’s free and it generates WebTrends data collection tags, which have been rewritten as standardized, object-oriented JavaScript code.

Here’s what you can do with TagBuilder:

Access automated click-event tracking for download links, offsite links, form submissions, image maps and navigation areas
Automate parameter mapping and the capture of information from custom META tags for detailed reporting
Flexibly define the site with options for single or multiple first-party cookies and the choice of single or multiple on-site domains for accurate cross-domain tracking
Integrate conversion tracking with WebTrends Ad Director, an automated search marketing optimization service
Easily create cookies compliant with the U.S. Office of Management & Budget policies for federal government web sites

“WebTrends TagBuilder greatly simplifies one of the most arduous, error-prone tasks of web analytics,” said Eric Rickson, product manager for WebTrends. “This free utility lowers the barriers to rich reporting and analysis by providing our customers with a direct way to take advantage of our innovations in data collection.”

What do you think of this new tool? Let us know in the comments.

Google Maps Adds Comprehensive NYC Transit Directions

Riding the subway, hopping the ferry, and catching the train just got easier in the New York City metropolitan area. Google Maps has added comprehensive transit directions for the region, which includes data from:

Metropolitan Transit Agency (MTA)
The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey
New Jersey Transit
City of New York

To check out the new NYC info, click here.

Writing on the Official Google blog, Chris Harrelson, Tech Lead & Creator of Google Transit said, “Transit is a vital part of the infrastructure that makes cities run efficiently, and can help mitigate congestion, environmental concerns, and increasing energy costs. But until recently, access to that information has been more difficult than it needs to be. Even very prominent train and subway stations were often omitted entirely from maps in many cases. And as for bus lines, well, forget about it! This lead us to the fundamental goal of the Google Transit project: make public transit information as easy to find as any other geographic information.”

Twitter Updates for 2008-09-19

New Blog Post - New Premium Ad Network for Bloggers from BuzzLogic: BuzzLogic is unv.. http://tinyurl.com/53b7ov #
New Blog Post - Powerset’s First Integrations with Live Search: Microsoft acqu.. http://tinyurl.com/4gtad9 #
New Blog Post - Google Makes AdWords Site Stats Logo Optional: Google has made it op.. http://tinyurl.com/4sjuze #
New Blog Post - Street View and Walking Directions [...]

Twitter Updates for 2008-09-18

New Blog Post - ChaCha is Fastest Growing Mobile Text Search Service: Since launchin.. http://tinyurl.com/4q79dm #
New Article - Is the Oil and Gas Industry For Me? Posted By : Gen Wright: What opening.. http://tinyurl.com/3upk9q #
Is the Oil and Gas Industry For Me? Posted By : Gen Wright: What openings are there to people looki.. http://tinyurl.com/529h79 [...]

Street View and Walking Directions Added to Google Maps for Mobile

Google has added Street View and walking directions to its mobile maps. This will be especially useful for those of you lucky enough to live in a walkable city.

To explain the usefulness of this update, Google made a video on just one of the many ways Street View and walking directions could come in handy. Take a look:

Google Discusses Search Evaluation Process

Google had been doing a series of posts about search quality. Today, the latest post in the series discusses how evaluation enters into the the process.

Scott Huffman, Engineering Director, gave four insights into the nuances of difficulty experienced in search evaluation:

First, understanding what a user really wants when they type a query — the query’s “intent” — can be very difficult. For highly navigational queries like [ebay] or [orbitz], we can guess that most users want to navigate to the respective sites. But how about [olympics]? Does the user want news, medal counts from the recent Beijing games, the IOC’s homepage, historical information about the games, … ? This same exact question, of course, is faced by our ranking and search UI teams. Evaluation is the other side of that coin.

Second, comparing the quality of search engines (whether Google versus our competitors, Google versus Google a month ago) is never black and white. It’s essentially impossible to make a change that is 100% positive in all situations; with any algorithmic change you make to search, many searches will get better and some will get worse.

Third, there are several dimensions to “good” results. Traditional search evaluation has focused on the relevance of the results, and of course that is our highest priority as well. But today’s search-engine users expect more than just relevance. Are the results fresh and timely? Are they from authoritative sources? Are they comprehensive? Are they free of spam? Are their titles and snippets descriptive enough? Do they include additional UI elements a user might find helpful for the query (maps, images, query suggestions, etc.)? Our evaluations attempt to cover each of these dimensions where appropriate.

Fourth, evaluating Google search quality requires covering an enormous breadth. We cover over a hundred locales (country/language pairs) with in-depth evaluation. Beyond locales, we support search quality teams working on many different kinds of queries and features. For example, we explicitly measure the quality of Google’s spelling suggestions, universal search results, image and video searches, related query suggestions, stock oneboxes, and many, many more.

Not sure if I’m buying that Olympics example. Google didn’t do a great job with the Beijing Olympics, and surely their algorithm could handle serving up more relevant search results during the time surrounding the event.

I’m not saying that search query intent evaluation is easy, just that the Olympics query is not quite as problematic as Google is making it out to be.

The rest of the points are things we’ve been hearing from Google for a long time. We know they’re progressing on universal and personalization search efforts, all in their famous intent to create the best user experience.

So, what methods does Google employ to address these evaluations? Huffman offered up the following:

Human evaluators. Google makes use of evaluators in many countries and languages. These evaluators are carefully trained and are asked to evaluate the quality of search results in several different ways. We sometimes show evaluators whole result sets by themselves or “side by side” with alternatives; in other cases, we show evaluators a single result at a time for a query and ask them to rate its quality along various dimensions.

Live traffic experiments. We also make use of experiments, in which small fractions of queries are shown results from alternative search approaches. Ben Gomes talked about how we make use of these experiments for testing search UI elements in his previous post. With these experiments, we are able to see real users’ reactions (clicks, etc.) to alternative results.

What do you think of Google’s search evaluation? What evaluations would you like to see them conduct? Discuss in the comments.

Google Makes “My Location” Circle Smaller, Larger Depending on, Er, Your Location

Google has made some adjustments to the blue “My Location” circle on the mobile version of its mapping product.

If you’re in a metropolitan area, the circle will be smaller. If you’re in a rural area, the circle will become bigger. The reason behind the change and the sizes has to do with cell tower triangulation.

Google gathers data from cell towers near your phone to determine your location. If you’re in an urban or suburban setting, you’re likely to be close to more towers, giving Google the ability to pinpoint your location more precisely. If you’re out in the boondocks, you have access to fewer or maybe just one tower, so the location is more approximate.

What do you think about the change? Let us know in the comments!

Live Search to Be Integrated with Blackberry Browser and Maps

Microsoft and Research in Motion, the company behind the Blackberry, have announced a partnership regarding the smartphones and Live Search. Microsoft’s search product will be integrated with Blackberry Browser and Blackberry Maps. Users will also be able to access Live Search via Mobile.Blackberry.com.

“This joint endeavor with RIM is a strategic indicator of our increased focus on securing broad-scale distribution for Live Search,” said Brian Arbogast, corporate vice president of the Mobile Services organization at Microsoft. “Microsoft is committed to extending our services across mobile platforms, and we are very pleased to be joining forces with RIM to help bring Live Search to millions of BlackBerry users worldwide.”

18 U.S., 3 International Systems Added to Google Transit

Whether you live in or visit cities with transit systems, it’s always good to know when and where the buses and trains are running. Google has been teaming up with transit systems across the country and around the world. Today, they’re announcing the addition of 18 U.S. transit systems and 3 international city systems to Google Transit.

United States

MetroLink Transit (Los Angeles, CA metropolitan region)
Irvine Shuttle (Irvine, CA)
OMNITRANS (San Bernardino County, CA)
Roseville Transit (Roseville, CA)
AC Transit (Alameda & Contra Costa County, CA)
Broward County Transit (Broward County, FL)
Miami-Dade Transit (Miami-Dade County, FL)
Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (Atlanta, GA)
Metro Transit (Minneapolis, MN)
Mountain Line (Missoula, MT)
Capital District Transportation Authority (Albany, NY)
Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority (Cleveland, OH)
Central Ohio Transit Authority (Columbus, OH)
Cleveland Area Rapid Transit (Norman, OK)
Island Transit (Island County, WA)
Jefferson Transit Authority, (Port Townsend, WA)
Green Bay Metro Transit (Green Bay, WI)
Mountain Line Transit Authority (Morgantown, WV)

International

Ottawa in Canada
Olsztyn, Poland
Moscow, Russia

YouTube to Launch New ‘HotSpots’ Feature

According to Abbey Klaassen of Advertising Age, YouTube plans to launch a new feature called HotSpots this week that will allow “video creators to monitor how viewings rise and fall within a video.”

Klaassen writes, “HotSpots plays a video alongside a graph that maps whether the audience is lower or higher than average for a particular length of video. When the graph goes up, the video is ‘hot,’ and more viewers are watching — because there’s either less attrition or some viewers are fast-forwarding or rewinding to isolate a particular point in the video. When the graph goes down, the video is ‘cold’ because viewers are leaving the video or skipping to another part of the content.”

Klaassen adds that YouTube plans to unveil another service, called Visible Measures, which measures audience engagement within a video.

I can’t find any additional information about YouTube’s HotSpots or Visible Measures, so it appears that Abbey has a scoop.

In her article, Klaassen also interviews Matt Williams, a senior at State University of New York-Brockport, who makes funny videos and with his friend Andrew Reynold under the YouTube channel name StanleyJenkins. Williams estimates that optimizing videos based on YouTube Insights data has doubled his traffic.

Williams also noted that most of his video traffic was referred from related videos. That’s something that I also highlighted during my presentation at SES San Jose last month.

Li Evans of KeyRelevance interviewed me following the Video Search Engine Optimization (VSEO) session about the importance of related videos — and the benefits of reaching out to influential bloggers to ask them to embed videos in their blogs. Check out Li’s interview below.

VSEO - Video Search Engine Optimization - with Greg Jarboe