SEO Blog

Privacy International is a London based solitude regulatory group. It has questioned a report which cites privacy practices of Google as the most horrible amongst large online objectives. None of those websites evaluated scored a confidentiality friendly ranking. Some were tagged privacy conscious but needed developments, or treated as generally conscious but with noteworthy lapses. Websites such as, Microsoft Windows Live Spaces, Yahoo, Facebook, AOL were tagged a significant danger. But, according to that report, Google was the most awful offender of that bunch. It got a privacy hostile label of that lot.

The report’s focal point was not Google, but it called out numerous players for their privacy records, although there may be a lure to emphasize criticism on the privacy performance of Google. It is very vital to note that not any one of the graded organizations attained a green signal status. On the whole, the privacy standard of the major internet players is terrible, with some industries revealing either a mindless disregard or willful for the customer rights. The higher performing industries even create lapses that are inescapable. With negligible endeavor most of the organizations can develop their performance by a good margin.

Privacy International spoke with AP, and went after the news reporting with an Open Letter to Google assessing some of Google’s media responses.

You might have been using a particular search engine for long now and with what, total trust on it that it was giving you your desired results? Well, here is some striking stats for you that might get you to think about your whole search pattern altogether. Not more than 1% of the search queries, in fact less, are found to be common in the major search engines as Google, Msn, Yahoo and Ask – striking, isn’t it?

In April 2007, this new updates came out, bespoke by Dogpile, a Meta Search Engine, and accomplished by canvassers in the Queensland University of Technology and Pennsylvania State University that published the following statistics –

1. Only a percent of 3.6 of the non-sponsored query results were found to be same across all major Search Engines.
2. Less than 1% first page results overlapped in Google, Yahoo, Msn and Ask.com.
3. A bewildering figure of 88% results ware exclusive to all the other Search Engines.
4. Only 8.8% of the entire results were shared by any two of all the Search Engines.
5. Only 0.6% results were shared by the major four Search Engines.

Now, if you were sure about your hunt actions been only confined to some specific engine, it could even be the best of the lot, my suggestion after coming across to this study would be to take help from some more guns; or at least research about what are the potencies and limitations of every search machine, in order to be really sure of the gotten results.

One of the most popular things can be found in the World Wide Web is the smileys. Google sure has some upper hands on anybody else in providing the smileys. To have ice on cake there are now even a bigger range of emoticons to give you the independence from the users to choose from it. The Google Talk Gadget has this impressive collection. This flash-based product can be launched in new window, this can also embedded in other places like iGoogle. To get idea about the whole pack all you need to do is to click on the smiley packer in the right bottom and take a look at the smileys for themselves.

The smileys show different emotions. Some are typical, some other are exceptional. Some of them are casual and some can give the impression “Wow”.

Google keeps a basic set of three. One of those three is the animated round yellow ball shaped. Second set is the square ones with yellow colors. The third and only set left to be mentioned is a very typical and black and white smiley. All smileys are animated to show different feelings in different state of mind.

There is one problem, which is not something major. In fact in certain stages it can come to you as blessing. The problem is if your chat partner is not using the same instant messenger service or format to chat s/he can not be shown some of the emoticons.
Google talk can skin the text-generated emoticons according to your preference.

Google desktop results are always more effective and obviously less time consuming than other Search Engines such as, MSN, Yahoo etc. A user can visualize Google desktop results on a quite similar map now. An add-on for Google Desktop is GDS Images and Document Maps is capable of creating a map from his pictures, email messages and documents. The files are positioned on the map by calculating their resemblance. So, if a file is related to any other files, then that file is placed somewhere very close to the similar other, if a file is not related to another file, then those files will not be positioned in a closer place.

A user can pan the map, zoom into a place and focus to that special area of the map by identifying a rectangle using the right button of his mouse. This is particularly useful to see the huge picture if Google Desktop returns a huge amount of results and also to graphically determine bunches of linked files. GDS image and document maps 2.0 help a user to locate word documents, images and emails that he is looking for. This feat requires the aftermath of a Google Desktop Search (GDS) and visually groups related document together. The documents and images are shown on a 2 dimensional map; group of points on the map are linked documents and/ or similar images. The map enable users to narrow down thier search with ease or just to have an overview of the available information.

If your site has been flagged by Google for Badware you want to check your site to see why. There are three categories that your site can fall into. Either it has software for download that has Malware or Badware included or embedded in that software, there is scripts embedded into the HTML of your site that can infect visitors with Badware, or your site is linking to sites that have badware embedded software for download or badware scripts in their HTML code.

The best way to check this is to use SpyBye’s Proxy site to check your pages. Manually set up your browser to use a HTTP proxy. The HTTP poxy setting is you need to use is www.spybye.org and the port is 8080.

When you go to http://spybye.org/ you will see the following site.

Add the URL of the site that has been flagged for badware and start checking the pages.

According to ZD Net Blogger Russell Shaw, a new patent application is published - which may disclose some of the future plans of mobile searches by Google, the largest Search Engine of the world today. The name of this new patent application is Local Search and Mapping for Mobile Devices. It describes a procedure which “geo targets” a local search founded on the text information, a site which is shown on a map at present or by using the GPS detected user which are submitted by user.

The application specifies some probable page navigation pages as well. It goes into the details with saved history of queries, and some visual insinuations of which track on the map has more search results to an active query and click to dial functionality. This application is a computer implemented process that reveals contents received on a mobile appliance and a search query affiliated with the geographic location. It provides more than one search results responding to the search query. Each search results are being affiliated with its geographical location and presenting a graphical demonstration of the computing tool icons matching with each search result, and also identify each computing machines with a unique key or id.

The inventors of this application are Bliss, Crady, Chu, Jenson, Mavinkurve, Sacks and Morrison. It relates to a graphical user interface, specially to generate customized graphical user interfaces for mobile devices.

This news came to me quite as a surprise. The domain SEO.com was sold for $5M to Mike Mann.

He previously sold BuyDomains few years back for $65+ Million but he didn’t go quietly into retirement. He started WashingtonVC, a Venture Capital firm in Washington DC. Mike has always known the value of good domain names. Most of his startups have excellent Generic Domain Names and he tries to build solid companies on top of those domain names. That is a great formula for success.

Just to give you an idea, here are all the recent $1M+ sales, from dnprice

SEO com $5,000,000 Jun 07
Porn com $9,500,000 May 07
Scores com $1,180,000 May 07
Tandberg com $1,500,000 Feb 07
Vodka com $3,000,000 Dec 06
Cameras com $1,500,000 Oct 06
Branson com $1,600,000 Jun 06
Diamond com $7,500,000 May 06
Software com $3,200,000 Dec 05
Fish com $1,020,000 Nov 05
Sex com $14,000,000 Jan 05
Business com $7,500,000 Jan 05
Beer com $7,000,000 Jan 05
Casino com $5,500,000 Jan 05
Shop com $3,500,000 Jan 05
CreditCards com $2,750,000 Jan 05
Men com $1,300,000 Jan 05
VIP com $1,200,000 Jan 05

ClipBlast, a directory to find the most professional and relevant videos on the web, recently pointed out an interesting fact in stats released by them. In their study, they found that “video news” is the fastest-growing category in its class. ClipBlast has found that video news now makes up about 32 percent of all the video that they index every day. In January, it was only 15 percent of the total, but it experienced this rapid increase in the recent months.

Now everyone is interested to know the reason behind this change. Local television stations are the pioneers in this category, as they are constantly enhancing their coverage with streaming video news displayed on their Web sites.

According to Hitwise the share of traffic leaving News and Media websites and going directly to Entertainment. Multimedia websites increased by 196% from April 2006 to March 2007. News events that involved user-generated video helped to increase traffic between News and Media and Multimedia websites, and as a result succeeded in catching the attention of viewers.

Nowadays viewers are getting accustomed to getting almost all news coverage from the television. But the surfers are now searching video news on the Web in an increasing volume. Whether it is the execution of Saddam Hussein or the cruelty of American army with Iraqi soldiers, spectators now expect to find a video on the web regarding different issues. This should drive even more traffic to news clips on the Web and the searches are expected to go high in the future.

In recent times Microsoft Company is trying very hard to be the top online advertising company. But Microsoft is facing a steep competition against Google. To be number one in the online advertising industry - Microsoft does not need to buy Yahoo anymore due to the purchase of aQuantive and its other advertising assets. This information was disclosed by Microsoft Chief Advertising Strategist Yusuf Mehedi in 247WallSt.com

Stats revealed in the 247WallSt.com show that Microsoft’s US search share has dropped from 12.6% in April 2006 to 8.5% last month while Google’s market share increased to 65.3%. These stats are really a worrying sign for the Microsoft Company. Though number of searches or hit numbers are not everything in building a successful online advertising business, but it’s obviously a Big Deal. Microsoft is hoping that the new aQuantive’s ad serving platform and MSN and Microsoft Live will enable the company to compete against the giants like Google, hoping to ultimately restore the company’s market share in the recent times. Douglas A. McIntyre of 247wallst.com site said, “Microsoft may hope its new aQuantive’s ad serving platform and MSN and Microsoft Live can dig that company’s online business out of its hole.”

In my opinion the initiative that the Microsoft Company took to increase their market share is really a wonderful step. But nothing other than time will only be able to tell us whether these steps taken by Microsoft would be effective or not.

The social networking is following search engines according to the rankings of most used and favorite internet tools. The continuous growth of these sorts of sites has brought some excellent opportunities for both web 2.0 entrepreneurs and online marketers. A statistics shows that MySpace has the majority of the shares of social networking (80.74). This popular social networking is followed by others like FaceBook and Bebo which are also showing frantic signs of improvements.

UK has opened the window of opportunity for the marketers and entrepreneurs of a specific area. FaceBook had a significant increase of 38% in April amongst the UK users ranging from 3-7 millions. Bebo with a 6% increase in March also had some upper hand.
In Asia, things are no different. On May 9th, 2007 30K visitors were hit by MySpace China. Other such networking is also expanding inside China. Google supported social network Friendster also had some portion of market under them as they have some good impact on the Southeast Asians including Japan.

Orkut can be considered as the most famous social network in Brazil. The growth rate of this social network is still positive and many mention it as the MySpace of Brazil. Despite some recent improvements in South American regions, MySpace still has to face stiff competitions. As the population of South American countries going online is increasing day by day, MySpace should focus on building a larger market in that part of the world and try to establish a better position in the European nations.