• Early Online Deals Could Herald Changes In Holiday Search Behavior
    Something happened on the way to Black Friday this season -- and it's a trend that could change how consumers shop and search online during the holidays. Many retail stores began offering brick-and-mortar specials, online, as early as the prior Monday before Thanksgiving Day -- and some as early as Nov. 1 -- rather than waiting until the following week's traditional Cyber Monday.
  • Why Google Will Buy Milo.com
    One piece Google needs in its retail shopping engine, Google products, is the ability to determine if the items searched for online are in stock at local brick-and-mortar stores. Acquiring Milo.com would instantly give Google the technology to make that happen. So, my recent phone conversation with 23-year-old Jack Abraham, Milo's co-founder and CEO -- in which he almost seemed to mention a possible deal -- came as no surprise.
  • Can News Corp. Syndicate Its Content For Search Engine Use?
    What if New Corp. built a syndication or license model specifically for search engines? That might improve the economics of New Corp. media sites better than cutting a deal to block its content from indexing on Google. News Corp. can consider syndication examples forged by companies like Reuters, along with issues like creating premium versus commodity content.
  • Could Microsoft-New Corp.'s Deal Mean Sharing Ad Profits?
    A potential deal between New Corp and Microsoft could see Bing gaining ground in the search engine wars, but publishers could come out the big winner. The deal could demonstrate Microsoft's willingness to share with News Corp any profit from paid search advertising related to content from sites, such as The Wall Street Journal's.
  • MSN's SEO And Content Teams Standardize Efforts
    Aligning content with search engine marketing and optimization has become one of Duane Forrester's top priorities. The senior program manager of SEO for MSN at Microsoft in the Americas says management wants to get more involved in the process, since having companies manage their content correctly during SEO can produce double-digit percentage growth for inbound traffic.
  • Oodles Love Google, But Wouldn't Exactly Call It 'Fun'
    Drum roll, please. Search engine Google topped Forrester Research's survey of consumers' favorite online brands, but it appears the company has a few weak points. Consumers gave Google low ratings on qualities like "relevance," "trustworthy" and "fun." Though if you want to know where the fun is at, according to those 18 to 24 it's in social brands.
  • Last Minute PPC Holiday Shopping
    This year holiday shoppers will rely on the Web more than previous years to research gifts like never before. We know what you're thinking: The holidays are around the corner and there's no time to spruce up those paid search campaigns. Think again...
  • Ask Reimagines Search, Adds Relevance Algorithms, Real-Time Capabilities
    Ask.com's newly appointed U.S president, Doug Leeds, says he intends to reinvent the "question and answer" engine, and has embarked on a project to take the company in a new direction. The technology relies on query signals that Leeds insists have not previously been built into search. To extract and rank existing answers, rather than ranking Web pages that contain information, Ask has developed a set of algorithms and technologies based on relevance signals geared toward questions and answers.
  • How ICANN's Non-Latin-Character Domain Names Will Change Search
    ICANN, which oversees the Internet's naming and numbering systems, opened registration today for non-Latin-character domain names, but some SEO experts believe it will create both benefits and chaos as companies take brands international. For one, the shift will become important for search engine optimization experts that branch out into driving traffic across non-English speaking markets.
  • Google's Doodlers Prepare For Thanksgiving
    Approaching the Thanksgiving holiday, less than two weeks away, doodle-lovers have begun to anticipate the celebratory doodle that will grace Google's home page to commemorate a day of thanks. The Google doodle is a relatively long-standing tradition, first begun with the doodle that appeared on the home page Aug. 30, 1998, celebrating the Burning Man Festival. The doodle appeared as sort of a "gone fishing sign" to tell folks that many of the Googlers would be out of the office for a while.
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