Verizon Wireless + Google = Love?
Verizon Wireless and Google announced today that they will be working together to co develop several phones to take advantage of VZW’s 3G network as well as the Google Android platform.
I’m quite thrilled about this, I’ve been waiting for something neat to come out that doesn’t run on the AT&T network — around [...]
OMG Article Directory Google Slapdown!!!
July and August were terrific months traffic wise, the best we have ever had over here at ArticleSnatch.com. It was a nice test of scale for the platform that we are running on. At the end of August we noticed something that other sites have seen – the dread Google Slap!
Google Slap
Toward the [...]
Bing Continues to Boom, At Google’s Expense
The August 2009 search rankings by comScore are out and the news continues to be good for Bing. Microsoft sites grabbed an additional 0.4% share. Meanwhile, Google lost 0.1% share as did AOL, which is powered by Google search. Yahoo! and Ask.com remained steady.
This brings Bing’s market share gains since launch to 1.3% and Google’s loss since Bing’s launch to 0.4%. (See July and June data for reference.)
Meanwhile, Bing experienced the biggest growth among the top 5 in search queries, at 7%, outpacing the percentage growth of overall searches as well.
Google Commands Attention Span in Internet Use Minutes for Brazil, India
Think Google dominates in the US? Well, according to new comScore data, internet users in Brazil and India are even more Googley-eyed. In those countries, almost 30% of total time spent online is spent with Google.
The United States doesn’t even crack the top ten when it comes to minutes spent on Google. The global average is 9.4%.
Alex Banks, managing director of comScore Latin America offered up his thoughts on why it’s Brazil and India that are so Google-icious.
As it turns out, there are interesting similarities between Brazil and India as emerging Internet markets. Google’s prevalence in these markets can perhaps best be explained by the fact that the time at which these markets really began to develop and flourish was around the same time that Google was becoming a major player in the search landscape. As a result, Google became the dominant Internet brand in these markets and its success appears to have bled from search into other areas of the web like social networking.
By the way, these minutes include Google.com, YouTube, Blogger, Picasa – all of Google’s sites.
White Knight SEO Checks Google Cash Scam Artists
Back on September 2, 2009, I posted a story entitled, “Google Cash Scam Artists vs. White Knight SEO Campaign.”
On September 3, Matt McGee of Search Engine Land posted “Google Cash Scams Targeted By ‘White Knight’ SEOs” and Chris Crum of WebProNews posted “‘White Knights’ Take on Fraudulent Results.”
And on September 11, Kaila Krayewski of Inernet Search Engine Database posted “SEOs Try to Push Google Cash Scams Out of Rankings.”
It appears that all the attention to this issue may have prompted Google to block advertising on the term, “Google cash,” as well as another term, “Google money tree.” On September 11, Jonah Stein of It’s the ROI posted “White Knight Checks Google Cash.”
Stein said, “For advertisers playing the Google cash game, this is at best check, not mate. We have not induced a moral decision by Google to protect naive users. This appears to be the narrowest possible compromise, a strategic retreat by Google to avoid the obvious embarrassment of having the organic results overtly exposing the scams advertised on the right. Google is still allowing advertisers to bid on variations like google cash detective and google cash system.”
So, the chess game continues. Still, it’s interesting to note that a handful of White Knight SEO blogs seems to have promoted Google to suspend bidding on a couple of exact match terms. Can the end game be near?
Google Plans Micropayment Platform for Publishers with Paid Content
Newspaper publishers and other media entities have made no secret about their desire to put content up behind a pay wall. The motivation behind it all is the slow death of traditional media and the loss of revenue that has come along with it.
Now, Google is planning to assist that effort by developing a micropayment platform that can help facilitate the paywall plans. It will be an extension of Google Checkout and be available for both Google and non-Google sites.
Of course, it remains to be seen if these paywall plans even work. Most newspapers had them in place when they first launched on the web. They didn’t work, and the paywalls came down.
Google’s smart to monetize the upcoming paywall efforts while they last. But don’t be surprised if the micropayment platform ends up in the Google product graveyard if the paywall plans do indeed fail.
Digg Goes Nofollow to Reduce Spam
Social bookmarking site Digg is incorporating the Nofollow tag to a bunch of links in order to reduce spam. Links on user profiles, comments and not-so-popular posts will get the nofollow tag, meaning it won’t pass along link juice.
Many have submitted content to Digg just for the links. Of course, the more popular a link is, then there’s the added value of a traffic bump.
In their blog post announcing the change, Digg was not specific on how popular a link would have to be in order to get the Nofollow tag removed.
Digg said it worked with leading experts in SEO to come up with the rule. But since Google bullied Twitter into integrating Nofollow, you have to wonder how much of a collaboration this was and who the experts were.
Google Investigating Reason for Widespread Gmail Outages [UPDATED]
UPDATE: Over at the Official Gmail Blog, Ben Treynor, VP Engineering and Site Reliability Czar, wrote that the problem was related to a server upgrade. They underestimated the load that would be placed upon the request server, and things got bottlenecked after that.
Today, Gmail went down around 3:45 EST and the world came to a grinding halt so that millions could take to their Twitter clients and Tweet about it.
You could access your Gmail account via IMAP or POP, if you already had it set up. Some were able to access their GMail via iGoogle”.
While many are speculating the cause, Google is currently saying it doesn’t know what the root reason is and that they’re investigating it.
Google was largely immune to the recent cyberattacks on Twitter, Facebook and LiveJournal. It will be interesting to see what the cause of this outage was. Of course, Google has suffered outages before which had nothing to do with cybersecurity.
Global Search Market Tops Over 100 Billion Searches a Month
comScore has just released a study of the global search market that shows more than 113 billion searches were conducted in July 2009. This represents a 41 percent increase compared to a year ago.
Google attracted significantly more searches than any other search engine with 76.7 billion searches conducted, giving it 67.5 percent market share. Yahoo! ranked second worldwide with 8.9 billion searches (7.8 percent share), followed closely by Chinese search engine Baidu with 8 billion searches (7.0 percent share). Most of the top search properties worldwide experienced significant growth in search query volume versus last year, with Russian search engine Yandex growing at the fastest rate (94 percent) among the top ten.
It is worth noting that Europe accounted for the highest share of searches at 32.1 percent, followed by Asia Pacific (30.8 percent) and North America (22.1 percent). Among the five global regions, Latin America exhibited the heaviest search behavior per person with an average of 13 search usage days in July and 130 searches per searcher. Europe had the second highest overall search volume per person (117 searches per searcher) while North America exhibited the second heaviest frequency (12.5 search usage days per searcher).
This makes it as important to attend SES Berlin November 24-25, 2009, as it does to attend SES Chicago December 7-10, 2009. Why?
As Mike Grehan, the newly-anointed VP and Global Content Director at SES, SEW, and ClickZ, told me earlier this month, search isn’t a static topic. The changes in the industry are accelerating. Can anyone afford to be behind the times in this new era?
Mike Grehan, the new VP and Global Content Director, ties social media to search, SES San Jose 2009
Google Gets Spammed with Searches for “White People Stole My Car”
Via NowPublic.com, Google has been spammed with searches for “white people stole my car.” The effort has been so big that the phrase has been showing up on Google Trends for a few days.
The term, when search, leads to sites that contain viruses and even more spam. According to Google Insights, the phrase began being “searched” August 19.
There are also reports that when people searched for “white people stole my car,” Google returned with “Did You Mean: black people stole my car?” But I find that part to be a bit far-fetched and unlikely to have actually happened.
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