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In the past I did not write in my ebook about somethings I did not care for much. I never really mentioned Alexa because I did not view it as a big deal. An epiphany hit me that I should state why I did not care much for Alexa stats.

Over the last few days my Alexa has doubled from around 13,400 to around 6,800. Wow I am great. Not really!

If you looked at my actual server logs you would see that traffic has been fairly constant over the past week with only a small uptick in traffic of about 5 percent. Why the huge increase in Alexa rankings then?

Russia's 'Google' aims for London share listing

Russia's leading internet portal floats on the Alternative Investment Market on Wednesday in a stock market debut that will value the company at more than $150 million.

Rambler Media - the closest the country has to Google - hopes to become the latest in a series of sought-after Russian stocks listing in London. It plans to offer 3.9 million shares priced at $10.25, and use the $40m raised to help it take advantage of Russia's rapid increase in internet usage.

Interesting that many Russian companies are floating stock in other countries, and it shows how important a stable currency and political structure are.

I am not sure what the search engine distribution breakdown is like over in Siberia, but a friend told me that its fookin cold there.

Google Hijacked in Google:
Official Google AdSense site bit by a meta refresh. hmm. Low quality site? more at ThreadWatch

For those who spin all the ethics stuff, do you think Google knew of the problem and was lying when they said it was no big deal? If so, is it ethical for them to tell blatent lies? If not, how is it that SEOs know more about their search engine than they do and they generally disocunt the whole concept of SEO?

Yahoo! Q Challenge:
whats up with a $5,000 prize - that surely is not much payout for the value they could create with that contest. I might need to create a similar marketing program for myself. hehehe

Exalead:
Michael Nguyen posts about some of their search features.

Novice Spam Tool:
I have not tried it, but someone promoted this site http://searchpr.info/test.php, via forum spam of course.

Yahoo! Public Site Match:
Nothing more than a PR stunt? It sure smells the part. A while ago they promoted that program a good bit, but it sure is hard to find information about it nowadays.

Masochistic Behavior:
reading IHY forums. I don't know anywhere else where a single comment can return pages about what a horrible person you are. SEO is doomed. We are all evil. hehehe

Lots of good ones in that rant thread, but one of my all time favorite Doug quote:

Most journalists I know of at least fall on one side or the other.

Another scary thing with that thread is I find myself agreeing with Glengara!

Open Source Rank Checker:
I have not tried it, but a friend pointed me to this software. I am not sure how it plays with Google, since they have been blocking some automated software.

OPD Should Close Shop?
Danny Sullivan weighs in on the ODP's recent site submission status closure.

Black Market Porn:
UK bans selling porn DVDs over the web. UK prostitution market to soar ;)

Funny:
There is a website that qualifies you and prints out your ordained ministor certification in under a minute. A person today tried to justify me giving away my business model to them because they spent the minute to print one out.

Evolution of Yahoo! Search:
article about Yahoo! creating their search service. thnx to RC

In the News:
Knight Ridder, Tribune and Gannett take a stake in Topix.net. With NYT recently purchasing About.com it is clear that newspapers are starting to wake up to the online world.

BlowSearch:
May have launched a new product that "blows"?

You have to respect how quickly they commented on it though. I wonder why more of the small PPC search engines are not actively monitoring their brands and replying to what people say about them.

I'm Feeling Lucky:
Google Bomb for sale. so many creative ideas come to mind.
found on SE Roundtable.

Dear Diary:
Letter from a blog spammer. As long as the algorithms require it people will do it.

SEO Conferences to become the new SEO forum?
SEO Chat is thinking about holding an SEO conference. I can't see the conference medium becoming as saturated as the forum medium with all the associated costs and constraints, but there surely are a good number of conferences.

Amazon added an optical feature to their A9 search by driving trucks with digital cameras on them through about a dozen cities.

My Way or the Highway...
Dave Hawley (who is on my ignore list) recently created a thread to prove that signature links do not count. Given limited sets of data and a desired goal one can, after all, prove just about anything.

DaveN cites the thread stating that he thinks all links will help some, but that he is seeing more theming at play in Google today.

Questionable:
When you know people manipulate information systems and you need to research you should become a Skeptical Business Searcher

New Library:
Internet Archive's Text Archive project will challenge the recently launched Google library.

Search a Bunch of Sites:
GigaBlast allows you to create a custom topic search engine which searches up to two hundred of your favorite domains.

Taking Bets:
Sebastian reviews 2004, and bets that SEO firms will drop like flies in 2005.

Yahoo! Local:
offers new listing services. premium listings cost $10 a month.

MSN Messenger Marketplace (coming early 06):

You heard it here folks, MSN Ebay is here! Buy and Sell within social network, also list wants and share recommendations. List items you want to sell, things you are looking for, and your recommendations. Your buddies notice new items you’ve listed when they login. They can either buy, sell or refer you to one of their buddies. It is like eBay except with people that you already know and trust directly (or a few degrees out). source (via Greg Gilden)

Favorite SEO Quote of the Day:
"Some people have tried to say that Google gives less weight to unreleated content, but this is a load of shit." - Snowblind

Speel Chekrs:
The MSN Search blog talks about their spell checker, as well as linking off to this spelling research white paper.

Why Search Engines Like Blogs:
Amanda Watlington explains it a bit in her article Even Blogs Need Keyword Research

My New Favorite Blog:
Mind Hacks. I am a big fan of learning about how the mind works...recently O'reilly published a book about mind tricks. Here is an example article and their cool Mind Hacks blog.

Position 5:
Has good bang for the buck on Overture according to Andrew Goodman. His latest article looks at how chaning bid price and position can affect your ROI.

The 6:
Myths of Creativity... Few people are creative ...not true. Placing arbitrary awards or other distractions in people's minds makes them more creative...obviously not true. (found on ThreadWatch)

Christmas Site Tips:
The Twelve Tips of Christmas, by Christine Churchill, who recently stated she will be stepping down from SEMPO's board.

New Search Engine:
Accoona

Holy Monkeys:
Google is beta testing GIF AdSense ads.

Bill Gross (of Idealab) brought back SNAP, the old NBCi search engine name.

There are a few interesting concepts behind SNAP:

In January I stated that Lycos is dying a slow death. It looks as though now they just want to get it over with for about $200 million. source.

I would say Google, MSN, and Yahoo! have little need for Lycos, but it could be rather appealing to Ask. We shall see...

MosDex is a new open source search site which is powered from the Nutch core.

At the beginning of this month Lycos switched from AllTheWeb to Inktomi. The Inktomi database powered search appears to be using the same database used to power the AltaVista and AllTheWeb websites. The Inktomi database is a subset of the overall search database used to power Yahoo!.

In addition to being powered by Inktomi, some of the top search results at Lycos come from the LookSmart directory. (source: Search Engine Showdown)

Shopping.com is one of the largest shopping search engines on the web, and the first to file an IPO.

"Shopping.com Ltd., which runs Web sites like epinions.com, filed with U.S. regulators on Tuesday for an initial public offering worth an estimated $75 million." - source Yahoo News

There are a couple smaller SEO news bits I missed during my recent travels.

Quigo got some cash ($5 million) to help build its contextual based ad network.

Soon AdSense will have two competitors. Quigo and Kanoodle will have a ton of work to do to charge the click prices Google can charge.

Some think the Google prices are out of reason. Andrew Goodman, for example, wrote an open letter to Google.

Also from a couple weeks back Froogle now provides a product search for wireless phones

More on Dipsie

For a good little bit Gary Price has stated that he would interview Jason Weiner, the creator of Dipsie.
Gary wrote about the interview on his ResourceShelf blog.

Some of the more interesting highlights of Dipsie are:

Local Search Down Under

Sensis was recently featured in an article which shows how powerful they are in the Australlian advertising market. They believe they will be able to compete with Google for product search due to their strong ability to integrate location with the product.

"The Yellow Pages is a search book. We don't call it that because it's not trendy."

"Our biggest differentiator (from Google) is we have all this local content. So if (you) go to Google today and search for a restaurant in Kew, you might get two restaurants."

Sensis currently combines search results from whitepages.com.au, yellowpages.com.au, whereis.com.au, and cityseach.com.au.

Queryster is a new Friendster rip off design for a meta search which allows you to search any one of about a dozen top search engines at any time. They include a graphic overlay which makes it simple to easily view the search results from one search engine to the next.
(found on SearchEngineLowdown)

Search engine toolbars such as Groowe and UltraBar both make this same function easy without cluttering the page element itself. Of course this is a neat tool if you do not want to download anything.

People use the phrase Search Engine Wars so many times that it's a joke. I think wars are no laughing matter, but the excessive use of "search engine wars" is somewhat excessive and funny.

I feel leftout though, as I have not used the phrase "search engine wars" before this post. I figured that all battles have local fronts. Thus I am extending the "search engine wars" message to the local battle fields.

Meceoo is a meta search engine which searches AltaVista, AllTheWeb and Inktomi.

"Its originality comes from the avaibility for users to create their own "exclusion list" in order to exclude from the result pages specific web sites estimated less relevant. Search results might be therefore entirely different from one visitor to another, according to everyone’s wishes.

Meceoo also allows its users to define preselected list of sites in order to launch a search only in their contents. It is, in this way, possible to generate requests on a given "batch" of web sites, for example inside a community of interest."
(from SearchGuild)

SeekScan is a new meta search engine which shows results from many different engines in their own groupings. They have additional tabs that many search engines do not (such as weblogs). Cool as Meceoo but in a different way.
(from ResearchBuzz)

Is Google using a filter on some of its results?

This is a list of the major world wide search engines.

Name That Tune

FindSounds is a newer sound search engine which was covered in SearchDay today.

If you search for Ozzy it will give no results, but here are some of the examples that do work.

ZDnet has a good article about Big Blue's Web Fountain. Using hubs and authorities (what Teoma uses) IBM plans to create a different type of search product.

The Web Fountain project will be used to track answers to questions such as "what do people think about me?" Its goal is to help people project trends and find answers that would otherwise make no sense to other search engines.

Web Fountain also has an interesting model. Instead of people buying hardware, IBM wants people to lease processor power. Now that is an efficient way to run a business!

Everyone's favorite underdog, Gigablast recently released GigaBits, which is essentially a "see also" search refinement.

A recent article by Mark Evans titled "Keep your Google Mania in check" states that Dipsie will be released later this year with an index of over 10,000,000,000 documents.

"What Dipsie is trying to do is develop search technology that does a better job of retrieving and presenting data. It aims to index many parts of the Web that Google or Inktomi don't. While Dipsie's technology is complex, in simple terms it will use semantic-based analysis to produce searches featuring content and context.

Jason Wiener, Dipsie's founder, is realistic that knocking off Google is a huge challenge. He realizes being a little bit better than Google will not be enough to make Dipsie a relevant rival. Dipsie needs to be several magnitudes better. "If we are 5% better, I should just work at Starbucks and make some lattes," he says."

Later in the article it states that they intend to create a buzz using 100,000 test searchers, and that they intend to hire the same PR firm that NutraSweet used.

The biggest advantage Dipsie has is that there are no expectations or people relying on it right now. They can make major changes and wait to put their index out when the algorithm is really good. In addition nobody is gaming their algorithm the way people are gaming Google.

Google has done some amazing things, and I don't look for them to stop anytime soon. The brand of Google will not be easy to knock off, but if you want to take a chance, Dipsie is hiring!

Everybody loves to search around to find new stuff...alright, at least I think its fun. Many people do not have the time to waste looking through tons of documents to find what they need. Many business professionals are willing to pay a premium to have access to a searchable database of quality documents.

Northern Light was a full fledged search engine which was purchased by Divine, which sort of died. David Seuss, the original owner of Northern Light, bought out the technology and name for $81,000 at an auction last April. With a price that cheap I am surprised competitors did not buy it, just to stab off future competition...dumb.

Northern Light has brought back unlimited access to the Business Resource Library for the low low price of $19,500 per year. Access to these documents to the general public will begin in March.

Currently a couple other business research search engines are High Beam and Hill Search.

Going Gone ... Gone Gone Gone? GoHook is a new auction search engine. It archives the auction results from sites such as eBay, Amazon, UBid and a few others for years.

What Can GoHook Be Used For? If you are selling stuff this can give you a good approximation of price. In addition after data adds up it can be used to track price over time for trend analysis. Tracking enough data can also show you which creatives are the best to use and what time of day, week, or month is the best for sales. Future upgrades may even contain moon phase.

Of course the obvious reason to use GoHook is to check past prices to see what you may want to bid on something for sale right now. You may also need to know if that item in the antique shop is worth the $3.74 that is on the sticker.

Before you buy from an online auction I recommend checking a few of the price check search engines. Froogle is my favorite, but some other people like Shopping.com, Yahoo Shopping, MSN Shopping, Bizrate, PriceGrabber, MySimon...and other random ones...I probably left a few good ones out...ooppsss

How Much Does GoHook Cost? Free now. They are still trying to build value before they extract profits...

Want to Learn More? GoHook FAQ's

(another cool find from ResearchBUZZ)

What did you say? Due out next month: http://searchlimo.com/.

While the concept is appealing, the current search seems a tad bit cluttered for my tastes...I am sure that sometime this year (or next at the very latest) Google and other top search engines will enable voice activated search.

Software such as Dragon Naturally Speaking has came a long way in voice recongition technology in the past couple years. The first major search engine who can fold this type of technology in with their search will have a huge advantage...What is stickier than mobile, voice activated search?

I keep reading these marketing books which say that markets are conversations and over at SearchGuild we recently had two distinctly different types of people come to the forums. Each came to represent their product and they fared way differently.

While the quality of my articles may vary, I think my timing is delicious. At about 2 am this morning I was finishing up a small article titled "The Problems With Search Engine Personalization," when I found out about Eurekster.

Many of the top search engines and search engine experts believe that personalization is going to be important to the future of search. In all honesty it scares me as much as it interests me.

Danny Sullivan just wrote a good article about Eurekster, which is currently powered from user feedback and AllTheWeb.

In marketing the power of the weak tie is astronomical. If you ask a large cross section of society "Who found a job through a weak friend?" the percentage will be exceptionally high. Our friends typically share much of our environment and lifestyle. People who are friends of a friend live in a totally different world and know realities which are completely foreign to us.

Friendster is a free dating and social interaction network which opperates using this idea. Reports have stated that Google wanted to buy them last year for $30 million, but they did not sell.

Google organizes the web based on the social structure of the linking of the entire web. Newer technologies are allowing them to better find local clusters, but The Bost Globe reports that today a new competitor will take this field using the direct route.

For Eurekster to be effective features such as categorizing friends and settings such as trust friends of friends a certain number of levels deep will be necissary. Eurekster works by allowing you to cast a silent vote for a site based on the time you visit the site. Read the official Eurkester about us and Eurkester how it works information.

They hope to get you to download their toolbar and to tell friends about Eurkester via email. Two things which I believe to be errors in spreading this message are that the name of the search engine is hard for me to remember, and that they have a somewhat cluttered home page when compared with the current major search engines.

Just a reminder that the strongest competitors may not initially seem like direct competitors. IBM Webfountain article.

From Research BUZZ...

Useful little listing of Blog Search Engines and Blog Directories...

There are only a few major players in this field. Look for this to change drastically this year with the advent of other blog directories such as Kinja

Most search engine traffic comes from the top few search engines. Time spent registering a website with all kinds of small random third pary engines is just a waste of time. As hard as it may be for you to promote your own business imagine how hard it would be to promote a search engine, especially one with no technological advantage over those already in existance.

As part of my service to do good on the internet I will point out crap offers for garbage software I do not use.

Today I got spam from brainfind@eliteconcepts.com for BuildTraffic.com