paidContent:UK: World Newspaper Congress: Mirror’s Kelly: We Must Put Search Engines In Their Place
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Matt Kelly: "Not recommendations from a search engine, but from a friend. That’s how to grow a meaningful audience."
Category Archives: search
Steve Yelvington: Lookie Lou isn’t really a customer
"Website users are not fungible. Some of them are very valuable. Some of them are worse than worthless, consuming resources or otherwise making a nuisance of themselves beyond reason. If there is a magic to operating a successful website, it's in figuring out how to identify the valuable ones and harvest that value, while not wasting time, energy or other resources on the others."
HarvardBusiness.org: Why Big Media’s Anti-Google Counter-Revolution Will Fail
Umair Haque: "The simplest flaw in the MicroFox's strategic logic? MicroFox is trying to create artificial scarcity instead of value ... Artificial scarcity is usually a one-way ticket to oblivion, as people simply defect to better alternatives."
Daggle: If Newspapers Were Stores, Would Visitors Be “Worthless” Then?
Essential reading from Danny Sullivan: "As the war of words ramps up between Google and some news publishers, the latest spin seems to be how “worthless” the traffic is that Google sends. In reality, the traffic probably does have value, but the newspapers are likely doing a terrible job of monetizing it."
Techcrunch: How Murdoch Can Really Hurt Google And Shift The Balance Of Power In Search
Michael Arrington: "If other media companies joined Murdoch Google could actually find itself in a very difficult position, where Bing had content that Google didn’t. If you knew that Wall Street Journal and, say, New York TImes content was only in Bing search results, mainstream search users would suddenly have a big reason to go to Bing. This would shift the balance of power away from search engines and to the content sites..."
Boing Boing: Rupert Murdoch vows to take all of Newscorp’s websites out of Google, abolish fair use, tear heads off of adorable baby animals
Cory Doctorow on November 8: "So here's what I think it going on. Murdoch has no intention of shutting down search-engine traffic to his sites, but he's ... hoping is that a second-tier search engine like Bing or Ask (or, better yet, some search tool you've never heard of that just got $50MM in venture capital) will give him half a year's operating budget in exchange for a competitive advantage over Google."
paidContent: Video: Murdoch Making News Invisible To Search Engines? Not So Fast
"Here’s how Murdoch replied when [Sky News political editor David Speers] asked why he hasn’t blocked sites from being seen by search engines: 'I think we will. But that’s when we start charging. We do it already with the Wall Street Journal. We have a wall, but it’s not right to the ceiling.' ... He also raised the idea of challenging the doctrine of 'fair use' in court, then reigned it in a bit. “We’re getting a lot of advertising revenue so we’ll take that slowly.'"
Search Engine Watch: Search Stars in Redesign of Twitter Homepage
...In other words, Twitter's homepage design finally matches the way many people use it - as a real-time search engine.
Official Google Mobile Blog: Search with My Location for iPhone 3.0. And All that Jazz
"[W]e're introducing Search with My Location for iPhone 3.0. Now if I want to know which jazz clubs are near me, I don't have to specify a location - I just search for "jazz clubs"."
ClickZ: Newspapers: Stop Whining and Act
Vin Crosbie: "As they say in Las Vegas, if you don't like the game, don't play. Don't start complaining about the rules of a game that you started playing long ago. ... More than 10 years ago, those companies began putting their content on the Web intentionally so people and search engines could link to it and aggregate it. That was their stated purpose for doing so. They all knew that was the Web's purpose. So why should they now whine because people and search engines are doing just that?"
SEOmoz: A Bad Day for Search Engines: How News of Michael Jackson’s Death Traveled Across the Web
"The events of Thursday demonstrated that Google is falling behind in the emerging real-time web. It was 3 hours and 17 minutes after TMZ first announced Michael Jackson had experienced cardiac arrest before it appeared as a auto completion suggestion on Google's homepage. In the computer age that is a huge amount of time. It is 3 hours and 17 minutes during which consumers may choose to go somewhere other than Google to get the information they want."
Inside Guardian.co.uk: Designing search for The Guardian site
"I did a piece of search log analysis, where I examined the 500 most popular queries used on the site during a month, and classified them into broad types. 28% of the most popular queries were for what I classed as 'Guardian Navigation', i.e. queries like 'crossword', 'G2' or 'podcast'. The second most popular type of query was for a person's name, making up 27%. These names included Guardian contributors, political figures, sporting figures and celebrities. The third most popular type of query was location based. Often these were simple one word searches for a country name, and in total these made up 23% of the top 500 search terms. "
Inside Guardian.co.uk: Changes to search on guardian.co.uk
"The change that has generated the most email by far is that the search results no longer appear in strictly reverse chronological order by default. We took a decision to initially rank stories by relevance, rather than by date. Not everybody has liked this change, and I wanted to explain a little bit about the reasoning behind it."
Folio: How the Financial Times is Using Text Mining to Sift Through the News
"[The] Financial Times recently launched Newssift, a standalone search tool that uses text mining technology to 'sift' through thousands of global business articles to give users results that go far beyond the traditional Google keyword search."