In a clearly self-promotional search "taste-test," Albuquerque, N.M.-based Gigablast found that 55% of users found the alternative search engine's results as good as or better than a Google search. So why did Loren Baker feel the need to give the survey results a write-up? It's about the quality of the results and their status as a true alternative core search contender. "I've been a longtime fan of Gigablast, and have always considered their algorithm as one of the majors that I track client rankings on," Baker says. "I'm excited to see more coming out of Gigablast." More than …

Does your client's Web site lack a defined objective? Is the whole idea of a target audience a little muddy? Perhaps the homepage takes so long to load that there's no way to get searchers to stick around--let alone move further along the purchase pathway. While it seems like common sense to have answered these questions before a Web site gets built, Gary Klingsheim notes that sometimes business owners don't think about these things before launching a site. So the sooner you figure out why their Web site is failing to perform, the sooner you can figure out …

Despite some bugs in the interface, Marshall Kirkpatrick says that Mefeedia, the online video community that offers multimedia search, "is now a better media search engine than probably any other available." That's a tall claim, but Kirkpatrick backs it up by illustrating the various kinds of media that Mefeedia can sift through, including video from major video sharing sites like YouTube, Veoh and Metacafe, TV sites like Hulu, music from Imeem, podcasts and even SlideShare presentations. "Mefeedia isn't doing any fancy speech-to-text analysis or probably anything other than searching titles, description and tag fields - but that's ok," …

"If we control 1 top ranked PPC ad, and 1 top ranked search engine position, we can control the entire mood of the niche," says XCMP, the elusive search pro behind the Slightly Shady SEO blog. "We can give people their first impression of the products, and use both things to control their thought process." XCMP serves up two examples (one "white hat" and the other veering toward the shadier side) of how to combine paid search with a strong organic ranking to own a niche. We'll take the white hat example, which starts with a bit of …

Geo-segmentation (not just geo-targeting) is a must for paid search advertisers marketing products to different geographic regions, because it makes it easier to optimize multiple campaigns. Slicing your campaigns up by region not only allows you to better target the audience, but analyze them regionally when it comes to factors like cost per conversion and keyword productivity. Charles Nevery also notes that geo-segmenting your campaigns allows for more effective day-parting, as you can "make sure that your ads are showing at the appropriate time, by time zone, to target your prospective audience."

In February, query volume dropped by 5% or more across the Big Five search engines, according to comScore. But as David A. Utter notes, it probably should be attributed to fewer days in the month (even with a Leap Year Day) than January. Not surprisingly, the engines remained in their respective places when it came to market share, as Google gobbled up most of the (smaller) pie with almost 60% of all queries. Yahoo remained in second place, though it gave up a tiny bit of share to the giant--leading Utter to wonder if "Jerry Yang's claims of …

Why would someone want to use lowercase filters in Google Analytics? "If duplicate entries of the same page are appearing in your reports, one that contains uppercase letters and one that does not, you probably should set your lowercase filter," says Caitlin Minteer. The giant's analytics suite sometimes tracks the same page multiple times if users can access it via www.samplesite.com/Widgets or www.samplesite.com/widgets--skewing your reports. Lowercase filters can help alleviate that problem. Minteer walks you through the filter set-up process, with the one caveat being that it will only apply to data moving forward--so you'll still …

The first quarter of '08 is almost out the door, but there's still time for postulation about where the search industry is headed this year. Manoj Jasra sat down with Jeffrey Pruitt, executive vice president of corporate partnerships at iCrossing, to get his take on the "search marketing trends and paradigm shifts" yet to come. First up is the convergence of search and display--which will cause a real shift in the way search firms operate. "The fastest growing inventory on the Web is non-premium display, which is driving the convergence between search and display," Pruitt said. "This is …

AdCenter users have a new hub for product info, service updates and troubleshooting help, as well as sharing both positive and negative feedback on Microsoft's paid search platform--the adCenter Community. The software giant has expanded its adCenter blog to include upcoming product details (from adCenter Labs), as well as separate blogs for adCenter API and adCenter Analytics users. There's also a Q&A-style knowledge base, which allows community members to create profiles and help answer each other's questions. In addition, the new community offers forums and multimedia content--including how-to videos, industry interviews and podcasts.