Looks like the folks at Yahoo! Local have released an update to their product line targeted at local merchants. This new feature set which adds Local Featured Listings, a new and easy way to buy fixed positioning on results pages. The system is basically ’sponsored links’, but with classified/Yellow Page ad component. This release note was just posted on the Y! Search Blog titled Delivering Flowers, Delivering Babies, discussing the ‘new’ benefits of the program to the advertising community.
A screenshot of Local Featured Listings below:
John Battelle thinks:
“it’s looking a lot like what the Yellow Pages do, only online, self service, cheaper, and, well, what I’ve been on about for a while – a step towards the online version of what the Yellow Pages really need to become.”
Most completely agree with Mr. Battelle, and glad we’re not alone in thinking this is a fantastic and long overdue integration of the old Yellow Pages classifieds business model; pay for an ad on the top of the page – and the old print and offline mentality never dies.
So, If you cannot beat ‘em, Join them,” isn’t that the old saying?
Straight from the ‘Official Google Blog : News+Suggest Join Forces‘ looks like Google has incorporated the predictability features from Google Suggest into their famous Google News. We wanted to share this information with all our readers in hopes that they would evaluate the product integration wisely, and wonder if this will influence the way that people read the news or digest public information?
Screenshot below:
Could Google Suggest actually minimize the amount of searching we do? Can it disrupt the natural flow of thoughts, and impede creative thinking? It’s just a hunch…but from MicroPersuasions recent article it looks like Google is going to spread this feature across many of it’s products.
What do the readers think?
This is a screenshot from the first ‘known’ live version of Google available:
As you can see there is a lot of similarity between the original interface and the new one. The primary colors we’re concepted by then, as well as the “submit” box for a particular site, and the “web” at large. Most interesting is the data they made available in the early versions, which unfortunately doesn’t hold true in todays iteration.
As some of you know, Google has removed the total number of pages indexed and a lot of other useful tips for us marketers. Why?
For instance here is a snippit of the original indexes content from December 1997:
Number of Web Pages Fetched 24 million
Number of Urls Seen 76.5 million
Number of Email Addresses 1.7 million
Number of 404’s 1.6 million
Storage Statistics
Total Size of Fetched Pages 147.8 GB
Compressed Repository 53.5 GB
Short Inverted Index 4.1 GB
Full Inverted Index 37.2 GB
Lexicon 293 MB
Temporary Anchor Data
(not in total) 6.6 GB
Document Index Incl.
Variable Width Data 9.7 GB
Links Database 3.9 GB
Total Without Repository 55.2 GB
Total With Repository 108.7 GB
A laughable quote pertains to “performance issues” that we found amusing:
The performance is somewhat poor right now. This is partly due to data going over NFS and antiquated hardware. However, we are anticipating equipment donations from IBM and Intel to help with performance and increase our disk capacity so we can scale to 100 million pages.
The other funny thing to point out, and will be familiar with readers of John Battelles “The Search”, the original concept/index was called “Backrub a ‘web crawler’ which is designed to traverse the web.” Do you think Sergery and Larry have had their backs ‘monetarily rubbed’ now? both are worth over $12 Billion USD. 
For now Google is considered to be major search engine both for number of users and search results relevancy. At least a certain number of people entrusted Google 2.9 billion times to perform information search for them. To say the truth, I am among those people, though I have no idea what part of those 2.9 billion is due to me
Google continues to expand launching more and more services and acquiring new customers. Implementation of such services as Gmail, Google Calendar, Google maps and so on, helps both branding the company and making customers loyal to the search engine.
An example of this “loyalty” can serve not only the fact that according to Nielson/NetRatings, Google was searched 2.9 billion times in March 2006, compared to 2.06 billion times March 2005; but also that (as I’ve once mentioned in the previous article) Google’s first quarter revenue reached $2.25 billion compared to $2.00 billion for the same period last year.
Here is how Google CEO Eric Schmidt commented this point in a release:
Google had an exceptional quarter with strong growth and profitability, from both Google properties and the network. We are driving this growth through investments in our infrastructure and our people, product innovations that attract new users, and relationships with advertisers and partners around the world.
Although Yahoo! trys at every possibility to compete with its fierce competitor, this is turning out to be quite a ‘race’. In order for you to compare mere numbers, here are Google’s and Yahoo’s search-engine use growth rates for the same period (March 2006):
Google – 41%
Yahoo – 47%
So you can easily see, Yahoo! saw even greater increase, but still it’s less than half as many searches in gross total when compared to Googles volume (1.33 billion times).
So, will Google be #1 for a quite long period of time or not – it’s hard for me to predict, the only thing the statistics says is that for now Google is the best.
I’m guessing that almost everyone who reads this article is familiar with social bookmarking (T’rati, digg, Del.icio.us etc). Now, please understand as a SEO specialist the features of social bookmarking are not only useful from the point of comfort, and fun but also from the point of search engine optimization, and linking strategy.
Have you ever bookmarked a page in your browser? And have you ever bookedmarked it on the internet? Try it- it’s very convenient and quite addicting! You do exactly the same as if you bookmarked the page on your local computer, but at the same time make the page accessible for other users. Moreover, you get the possibility to collaborate with other people, create your topical community and exchange valuable links to resources on your particular theme. However, it’s up to you to publish your bookmarks or to keep them private.
Each bookmark can be tagged so that it’s easier for you and OTHER people to search through all the bookmarks, based on ones own interests.
So ask yourself, how could social bookmarking contribute to my SEO process? The approach and methodology is simple.
When your page is bookmarked in Social Bookmark Communities (such as Technorati, OpenBM, del.icio.us and so on) it gains both link and relevance (if the bookmark is tagged with the appropriate keyword). It also helps your page get crawled quicker as search engines crawl sites like Technorati and OpenBM rather often.
So if you still don’t use social bookmarking maybe you will reconsider it because it appears to be good not only in terms of self comfort. What do you think?
Just got word that this new interface testing was going on from the folks at YellowPipe.
So check it out below, Google is testing a new expandable title icon within its search results. It’s an expandable ‘delta’ that when clicked can display more information about a site.
Including:
- Images and a short text excerpt
- Related links
-”Inside this site” links
There is also a search “Search this site” feature – obviously using the same ’search within’ script capability many of us webmasters have installed. We haven’t been able to duplicate the Beta results ourselves, so this is seemingly a very ‘limited’ testing sample size.
As SEO’s we’re personally excited and investigating this new feature, our team is currently analyzing how this added ‘relevancy’ should be taken into account for our own client SERPs. We’d like to hear from any other SEO (Search Engine Optimization) companies and encourage other webmasters to comment…
Perhaps many of us have been waiting for Google reporting of Q1 financials. Why? Just curiosity and unsatisfied craving for poking our nose into affairs of others – especially a companies financial status.
So here is the data: Google Inc. first-quarter profit rose 79%. The revenue for the first quarter of this year makes $2.3 billion. And of that total, the revenue based on pay-per-click advertising forms 97% of the total revenue. That’s 97% from PPC, talk about a cash cow!
On having read Jeremy’s post about Google’s decision to charge advertisers for using their “self-serve” API, it seems to me that Google is going to maintain the rate of their profit increase, through all means necessary.
On the other hand, Google not only makes tons of profit but also quite handy and useful software to improve our lives. Personally, I enjoy many things Google released this quarter like:
- The Google toolbar 4 beta- allows to run un queries directly on any website, create on line bookmarks and receive queries directly on any website;
- Google packs – makes it easy for users to get essential software in just a few clicks
- Google Calendar – free online calendar with many useful features
- Gmail Chat – nice chat opportunity one can find in his gmail interface.
So from my point of view, Google is worth money it makes ,and I wish them good luck for further.
