There's been a ton of buzz about Freebase lately: a newly launched collaborative database of cross-linked data. I'm not going to jump on the bandwagon and get all crazy excited about it, because to me it looks like another geek-centric technology that is exciting to the techies but useless to 99.9% of the population (...
Have you noticed the plus sign within some Google SERP that started showing up next to invitations to map an address or get a stock quote a month ago? Pundits are quick to conclude that this is a portal feature and that Google.com is compromizing their search-only philosophy to become a “portalized non-portal.” (RC Jordan) They accept the obvious explanation that Google is e...
Just a short one that Mystery Guest pointed out to me in a huff tonight - Yahoo! search team, I think you owe her some apologetic flowers after this one. Her exact words after showing me this search were "do you love her?": ...
Have you paid any attention to personalized search yet? If you stay logged into one of your Google accounts such as Gmail, your search history will start to accumulate. As your history grows Google starts to modify the SERPs that they send you in ways that they think will be more pleasing. I first noticed this a few days ago when Google seemed to know which site belonged to me in the SERPs....
The man behind Stone Temple has got some great material that simply hasn't been getting the attention it deserves. First off, there's this from his interview of Tim Mayer: Eric: We saw in the d...
Danny Sullivan was in town over the weekend and on Saturday night, Vanessa Fox from Sitemaps invited Mystery Guest and me over to Google's Kirkland offices. We had a ton of fun and got to meet some new (and very friendly) Googlers. Just a few photos: ...
A Wired News article from yesterday - How Yahoo! Blew It - comes to some interesting conclusions: Semel has been Yahoo's CEO for nearly six years, yet he has never acquired an intuitive sense of the company's plumbing. He understands how to do deals and partnerships, he ...
Late last night Rand emailed me this article about the concerns over Google filtering "good porn" out of their search results. I think it's funny how Google has been, as Danny Sullivan put it, "tweaking porn filters" when their image search results frequently return some serious (and often n...
For several years now, Google has disabled its link command via web search. Actually, what it's done is worse, providing mis and dis-information, causing thousands of search marketing professionals to receive questions every day on why "Google only knows about 10 of my links." However, I was thrilled today to find that their link search works flawlessly in their ...
Since I've been mean to Googlers recently (or, at least, confrontational), I owe them credit where credit's due, and in this instance, it's due. Adam Lasnik wrote about how Google recognizes duplicate content and how webmasters ca...
With Mrs. Cutts out of town, Matt's blogging like... like a... well, like an SEOmozzer. I don't want to take up too much of Matt's very precious time, but I do have some questions I'd love to get answered so, since Matt couldn't make it to Chicago to be on any any panels, let's see if he's willing (or able) to run through some multiple cho...
Ever since I first saw Matt Cutts, Google's head of search quality, "investigating" sites through his super-secret application (during an SES conference in NYC); calling out spammers and identifying crawl and ranking issues for curious site owners, I've wondered about the content of his tool collection. What secrets can Googlers pull up on comma...
In addition to the brilliant editing of the WebProNews team, this video actually has a lot of great content from Vanessa - she tackles questions in a straightforward manner that you can't help but appreciate. Thanks, Vanessa. ...
A few months ago, I was out of my office for an appointment with a client in downtown Montreal. Since I knew (well, I thought I knew!) how Google Adwords IP geotargeting system worked, I wanted to give him a demo with a concrete example. I used, as my example, my own firm's Adwords campaign, which had the keyword “conception web” (translation: “web design”) geotarge...