Search Engine News

A few travel experts are themselves completing a trip this morning.  Google's managed to get the folks behind Ruba - a travel site - to join its organization, and they're all going to the Googleplex.

Ruba is 15 months old, and prior to this arrangement, was backed by Benchmark Capital (which has also invested in eBay, Twitter, and Yelp) and Draper Fisher Jurvetson (of Baidu, Hotmail, Skype, and Tesla Motors fame).  That speaks to some pretty interesting things taking place.

A post on the official Ruba Travel Blog hinted at a travel experience with heavy social underpinnings.  It explained, "[W]e've worked to create a unique and fun visual travel site and community focused on guides, photos, maps, and interactive tour listings to improve the online travel research experience."

And "we," by the way," refers to at least Mike Cassidy and Arnaud Weber, Ruba's cofounders.  Cassidy's previously sold business to Ask, Viacom/MTV, and a company called Artisoft.  Weber actually last worked as a technical lead on Google Chrome.

Unfortunately, one unknown detail is how much money changed hands.  Still, the last travel-related purchase Google was rumored to be considering might have cost it $1 billion, and it's a sure thing this arrangement involved a lot less cash, anyway.

Facebook has surpassed Yahoo to become the leading publisher of display ads in the U.S. according to a new report from comScore.

In the first quarter Facebook delivered 176 billion display ad impressions, representing 16.2 percent market share. Yahoo sites ranked second with 132 billion impressions (12.1%), followed by Microsoft sites with 60 billion impressions (5.5%) and Fox Interactive Media with 53 billion impressions (4.9%).

Overall, U.S. Internet users received a record 1.1 trillion display ads during the first quarter, marking a 15 percent increase over the same time period a year ago. Total U.S. display ad spending in Q1 reached an estimated $2.7 billion, with the average cost per thousand impressions (CPM) equal to $2.48.

"Following a severe ad recession that began in late 2008 and continued through the first three quarters of 2009, we've been seeing a strong resurgence in the online display ad market," said Jeff Hackett, comScore senior vice president.

"The first quarter of 2010 posted strong volume in online display ads, coinciding with increasing expenditure from advertisers and higher CPMs for publishers. This pickup in activity should bode well for the online advertising industry as we move forward in 2010."

AT&T led rival Verizon as the top online display advertiser in Q1 with 26.3 billion impressions, accounting for 2.4 percent of display ads. Verizon trailed with 21.9 billion (2%), followed by Scottrade with 16.4 billion (1.5%), Experian Interactive with 15.6 billion (1.4%) and Sprint Nextel with 10.1 billion (0.9%).
 

Apparently Facebook is not content with only taking over the web, but wants to get some penetration into the physical world as well. Taking a cue from another dominant company, Google, Facebook is now giving brick and mortar businesses decals to put in their windows. While Facebook tells WebProNews the decals are currently only a test with a small number of businesses, I would expect this to be expanded in the future.

Is Facebook a worthy competitor to Google? Tell us what you think.

Increasing Competition with Google

Google has been sending decals to businesses as part of its Favorite Places program. In fact, they even just announced the expansion of this last week. Whereas Google's decals include a QR code pointing to the business' "Place Page," Facebook's include a link to the business' Facebook Page.

Google has its fair share of competition from a variety of angles. Apple is getting a great deal of the attention in this regard (making two big moves yesterday), but Facebook is up there as well. Facebook is already a key competitor in terms of where people spend their time online. Facebook expanding its presence all over the web only increases that, and will likely play a big role in the diversification of how people obtain information - in other words, maybe a little less Googling. Some of us have even speculated on the possibility that Facebook could one day create it's own AdSense-like network.

Implications for Local Search

In a recent article, we already touched upon the idea that Facebook is positioning itself to have a greater presence in how people find information at the local level. Even before Facebook's latest announcements, business pages have been a great way to engage with local customers.

In that article, I referenced a quote from Search Engine Land contributing editor Greg Sterling, who says, "It [Facebook] could do nothing in particular or it could build the single most effective local directory and search site that exists. This data will be more valuable than anything Google has or any individual local publisher-partner possesses. That includes Yelp, YPG or anyone else that joins the Open Graph and implements these new Facebook platform tools."

All of the "liking" of local businesses that will be facilitated by Facebook's new Open Graph strategy may be further facilitated by these decals. We don't know at this point how many businesses are getting these, but if this becomes widespread, it could be pretty powerful for businesses, and perhaps even more so for Facebook itself. As Facebook notes in a letter to those who receive the decals, businesses are already including their Page URLs on various materials - receipts, napkins, storefronts, etc.

Does Facebook Want to Replace the Website?

There has been some discussion lately that perhaps Facebook was going to make Facebook Pages obsolete by putting the "like" button all over the web and changing the "become a fan" button on Facebook Pages to "like". The thinking here would be, what's the point of liking a Facebook Page for a brand, when you can just like that brand's site? I think Facebook has the opposite in mind.

As I've discussed in the past with regard to Google's Place Pages (and to some extent, Facebook Pages), maybe they'd rather make the website obsolete and have the Facebook Page (or Google Place Page in previous examples) take their place. If Facebook wants to be the new web, and it wants "likes" to be the new links, why wouldn't they want Pages to be the new sites? The decals point to Facebook Pages.

In reality, businesses are not going to be giving up their websites anytime soon and handing over full control to Facebook. However, businesses that don't even have a website may find that a Facebook Page is pretty easy to set up and can connect them with a whole lot of people (much like Google's Place Pages can). Maintenance is much less of a hassle when it comes to a Facebook Page as well, and some may find that attractive in itself.

Mashable suggests that in the battle for the more dominant decal (in terms of what businesses actually want to display), Facebook may have a leg up with its 400 million+ users and "the value of an instant Fan". While Google has no shortage of users, that "instant fan" concept carries a great deal of weight. When someone visits a Place Page on Google, they can find information about the business, sure. But if they're already at the business, how much value does that really have, when compared to the one which will put that person essentially on the business' mailing list - the Facebook version. When they're a fan, you can communicate to them and with them directly. 

Facebook says businesses that promote their Page off-Facebook tend to see a 20% or greater increase in connections.

Which would you rather have in your window, a Facebook decal or a Google decal? Would you display both or either? Let us know.

Google today introduced yet another way it is personalizing search results (we talked about social search with the company at SMX). Now Google is letting users "star" search results that they like, just like the star feature in other Google products like Gmail, Reader, and Google News.

This almost seems like an obvious move for SERPs now that it is there, but it has not been present until now. Essentially, when you star results you like, you will get them at the top of your results the next time you search a query relevant to them. 

"With stars, you can simply click the star marker on any search result or map and the next time you perform a search, that item will appear in a special list right at the top of your results when relevant," the company explains. "That means if you star the official websites for your favorite football teams, you might see those results right at the top of your next search for [nfl]."

"The great thing about stars is that you don't have to keep track of them," the company continues. "You don't even have to remember whether or not you starred something. Simply perform a search and you'll rediscover your starred items right when you need them. Stars sync with your Google Bookmarks and the Google Toolbar, so you can always see your list of starred items in one place and easily organize them. Even beyond the results page, while browsing the web you can quickly click the star icon in Toolbar to create a bookmark, and those pages will start showing up in the new stars feature."

Interestingly, the feature replaces Google's existing SearchWiki feature, which apparently didn't catch on too much. According to Google, people don't much care for rearranging the order of search results. I can't say I blame them. The annotation feature that came along with that is pretty much what you get from Google's other product - SideWiki, anyway, and Google suggests using that if you want to leave a comment on a particular result.

The new star interface will be rolling out over the next couple days. It will only work if you are signed in of course. Do you like the result starring concept? Share your thoughts.

A couple weeks ago, Google acquired reMail, a popular iPhone app, and pulled it from Apple's App Store. Now, Google has made it open source.

"After looking at a number of options to make reMail available in some form, we decided to open source the code, which is now available on Google Code as remail-iphone under the Apache 2.0 License," Google Communications tells WebProNews.

reMail was created by a Gabor Cselle, who used to work as a software engineer on Gmail. On the reMail blog, Cselle says, "As someone who is passionate about mobile email, my hope is that developers interested in making email-related apps can use reMail code as a starting point. Part of the reason email apps are hard is because you have to pay the tax of figuring out how to download email via IMAP, parse MIME messages, handle attachments, and store data. reMail has already solved these problems. If you have a great mobile email idea, I hope you will find reMail's source code helpful in your quest."

Cselle has documented the source code so developers can quickly start on any ideas they have. "If you like reMail and want to improve it, I have also listed some potential projects with implementation tips," he says. "Most of these projects are features that users have requested in the past. I encourage you to contribute improvements back to the project. I've also created the group remail-iphone on Google Groups, which is a great place to ask questions."

This page will tell you how to build using the code, let you see some project ideas, and show you how the datastore and UI work.

A while back, WebProNews had a conversation with RateItAll President Lawrence Coburn about how the long tail of search is getting more competitive. Companies like AOL and Demand Media are working on dominating long tail searches with content across a broad scope of article subject matter. We had another conversation with another company that is doing this, called Suite101, which is placing an increased amount of emphasis on SEO to up the competition in this space even more. Suite101 President and CEO Peter Berger took a break from Olympics mania in Vancouver (home of the company's headquarters) to tell us about it.

"Making sure well-written articles get found online involves continuous hard work and search engine knowledge," says Berger. "We know that in order to help our writers get their stories found, we need to increase our expertise in the area of search." That's why the company just hired search strategist Aaron Bradley as its SEO Director to implement new SEO tactics across its articles.

Berger tells WebProNews Suite101 attracts over 25 million unique monthly visitors. The company's revenue comes from advertising - mainly AdSense, but other networks have been integrated as well. They don't charge writers fees, but they have a strict submission process. Only 20% of writers are accepted, with 80% being turned away. Writers are required to submit work samples and resumes before being accepted. The first article must be submitted before it goes live, but after that, articles go live and are then reviewed by editors.

Berger says "quality is key," and is the reason he doesn't seem too worried about competition from big name brands like AOL. That, and he says most writers want to write for numerous publications, so even if a writer does work for AOL, there's a good chance they'll submit to Suite101 as well.

Presumably Berger is hoping the hiring of Bradley will help with the competition in terms of search engine traffic, the company's biggest traffic source (though they do see spikes from social media as well). One writer for Suite101 achieved a monthly earnings record of $5,000 for articles published at the site, which splits revenue with its writers. It will be interesting to see how quickly that record is surpassed with the company's new SEO efforts.

Naturally, the more quality articles the site is able to obtain, the more content it will have out there in the search engines, and if their SEO efforts are as effective as they hope, they will be getting a lot more eyeballs and clicks on their ads. Berger thinks writers like Suite101 because it’s the "closest" they can et to "actual professional editors in a lot of cases. Quality, he says, is the "key differentiator" between Suite101 and its competitors. 

There has been a lot of talk about how SEO practices can hinder quality, because you should write for people, and not search engines. Berger thinks they can achieve both.

Google announced via Twitter this week, that public status updates from Facebook are now included in the search engine's real-time search feature. That means the largest social network in the world is getting play in Google's real-time search alongside Twitter, MySpace, and others, and these real-time results are often featured prominently on the first page of search results for the hottest queries.

Apparently only updates from Facebook PAGES are indexed, and according to Danny Sullivan, that includes links, status updates, photos, videos shared by page owners (not comments made by the fans).  Any Facebook update (from regular user profiles) can be shared publicly, so I wonder why these aren't being pulled. Results from Twitter and other places aren't only from branded sources.

This seems to indicate that brands should be getting a good amount of play for Facebook appearances in Google's real-time search results, and possibly in the real-time search results in general (due to Facebook's huge user-base). Right now, Facebook isn't dominating the results, but that is bound to change with it being the largest (by far) social network on the web.



A lot of brands who don't have Facebook pages in place are likely going to consider this a new reason to create one. Here are some tips for making a good one and promoting it.

This should also lead to Facebook Pages getting more fans, due to the increased exposure. Beware, however, that running a promotion on your Facebook Page may cost you ten thousand dollars, because Facebook's policy guidelines indicate that you must get written approval from a Facebook account rep. In order to get one of those, you must spend that much in advertising, according to Eric Eldon of Inside Facebook.

Now Google's real-time search results include (as listed by Sullivan) Facebook, MySpace, Twiter, Google Buzz, FriendFeed, Jaiku, Identi.ca, TwitArmy, Google News links, Google Blog Search links, new web pages, and freshly updated pages. At this point, Google generally only shows the real-time results for newsy/trending topics. 

Note: At the Online Marketing Summit out in San Diego, WebProNews talked about a different kind of real-time search that involves local businesses, with RateItAll president Lawrence Coburn. It's not local search as you would traditionally think of it, but it involves location, which one might consider a new kind of query.

Update 2:  Google offered the following statement: "Buzz can only expand to show whatever was in the underlying feed. For example, if an item is truncated in the feed to only include 200 characters, then Buzz will only show 200 characters."

So, in other words, Bloggers can prevent their full content from showing in Buzz just like in a reader, depending on how they set up their feed.

Update: So far, Google has referred me to the same response they gave Stay, but I've inquired further. We'll keep you posted.

Original Article: If you were under the impression that the controversy surrounding Google Buzz was starting to die down, think again. So far, we've mostly heard about privacy issues, which Google has publicly addressed. They've also made changes based on user feedback. Now, we're hearing about possible copyright issues. Google appears to be republishing full articles without permission, and stripping out any ads that may be in those articles.

One can easily see why any blogger or publisher wouldn't be very pleased with this scenario. Not only are they serving up full articles that others have written without sending authors the traffic or even ad clicks, but if a user reads the article through Buzz within their Gmail account, they will likely see the ads Google itself serves.

Blogger Jesse Stay of Stay N' Alive brings the subject up in a post, claiming that this is exactly what is happening to his content. However, Google did respond to him, saying they would "have the ad scraping issue fixed by next week." That would solve one problem, but presumably, this doesn't change the fact that they are showing full article text, which is an interesting choice on Google's part, considering the controversy surrounding how Google News aggregates publishers' content.

That is a different situation entirely, because Google News does not publish full articles (unless they come from one of their partners). They simply provide a title, small snippet, and link to the original source, hence driving traffic to that source. Based on Stay's story, Google will not likely be driving much traffic by showing full articles in Buzz. We've contacted Google for comment on this (we'll post when we receive it).

One might compare reading an article through Buzz to reading one through a feed reader, like Google Reader. Sometimes you can read a feed in its full text, but the author has the ability to prevent this. With Buzz, the full-text articles appear to be coming simply from people sharing the articles, which is out of the author's control (we asked Google if their is a way authors can prevent this...again, we'll post a response when we receive it).

There is an interesting discussion going on in our WebProWorld forum about search engine optimization post Microsoft-Yahoo deal. For those unfamiliar with the topic, Microsoft and Yahoo recently gained regulatory approval on a search and advertising deal announced last year, which will see Yahoo using Bing's algorithm in its search results. The discussion is about whether or not this means businesses and webmasters will only have to worry about optimizing for 2 search engines (Google/Bing) rather than 3 (Google, Yahoo, and Bing).

Will you focus your efforts more heavily on Bing? Discuss.

What Bing Coming to Yahoo Means

It's important to note that Microsoft and Yahoo still have plenty of details to work out before anyone knows just how the product of this deal will function. We know that Bing will be used in the back-end of searches on Yahoo, but we don't know what other elements Yahoo will still be incorporating into the search experience. For example, Yahoo said last week that the companies will still be discussing how SearchMonkey and BOSS figure into the mix.

Optimizing for Yahoo is not going to be limited to showing up in Bing's results. That's not to say that showing up in Bing's results won't have its advantages for Yahoo search, but there is a lot more going on at Yahoo than that. The company has been stressing that it is still very much focused on search, and under the deal with Microsoft, Yahoo will still be controlling the user experience at Yahoo.com.

Right now, Yahoo.com has plenty of elements to consider, from news and trending topics, to a whole slew of "applications" that users can customize on their Yahoo homepage. Among these are Facebook and Flickr. If you want to get in front of Yahoo users, it's not limited to Yahoo search results. That said, Yahoo search results also have their own thing going on. Keep an eye on the box that appears under the search box after you enter a query. It contains related queries, and "related concepts". This is one area that could conceivably be independent from Bing (although that remains to be seen at this point). Yahoo is not shy about putting brands in these "related concepts" either. You can find WebProNews in there for a query like "ebusiness news".



The point is, Yahoo has made it clear that it will continue to control the user experience, and that means there should be plenty of areas within Yahoo that are out of Bing's control. This leads me to presume that Yahoo will not be something you'll want to ignore, just because Bing is integrated into it. Remember that at this point, Yahoo controls a much greater percentage of the search market than Bing.

All of that said, you may want to pay closer attention to your Bing rankings if you haven't done so in the past, because while Yahoo will still be Yahoo to its users, the deal also means there will be significantly more eyeballs on what Bing determines to be the most relevant results to searches.

Why Stop at Google, Yahoo, and Bing?

These may be the biggest three search engines in terms of market share in the United States, but there are still plenty of people using others. For one thing, YouTube is number 2. Not Yahoo or Bing. If you are concerned about simply being found where people are searching, you should have a YouTube presence. That of course means having a video strategy, but that doesn't necessarily mean you have to have a huge video budget.

There are still people using Ask as well. In search industry coverage, it often gets overshadowed by the others, but there are still a lot of people using it. In fact, the Ask Network's market share grew by 6% from December to January. Ask.com's market share grew by 1%. A lot of people search with AOL. AOL's search is powered by Google, but it doesn't always return the same results as Google.

Facebook's search market share grew by 13% in that same period of time. You may not think about Facebook for search as much, but people are spending more and more time on Facebook, and it stands to reason that they'll be conducting more and more searches from Facebook. Granted, Facebook's web search feature is powered by Bing, but that's only a piece of the Facebook Search puzzle. If you don't have a Facebook strategy, you may be missing out on a lot more searches. By the way, did you know that Facebook recently passed Yahoo as the 2nd most visited site (just under Google)?

These are just a few examples. People are searching from a lot more places. Rather than just optimizing for Google, Yahoo, and Bing, perhaps you should think about all of the places where your site/business would make sense when a user searches (consider niche sites as well).

Does the Yahoo/Bing deal make optimization easier? Weigh in with your thoughts.