Online Marketing

Recently, changes to Google Trends have been noticed, and today Google is finally announced a new version of the tool on the Official Google blog. The latest version includes a numeric metric dubbed ‘relative scaling’ and the ability to export trends data.

With relative scaling, the numbers will not provide exact data, but will give you ballpark of how certain terms are trending. Here’s how Heej Hwang of the Google Trends team explained relative scaling:

You’ll notice a number at the top of the graph as well as on the y-axis of the graph itself. These numbers don’t refer to exact search-volume figures. Instead, in the same way that a map might “scale” to a certain size, Google Trends scales the first term you’ve entered so that its average search volume is 1.00 in the chosen time period. So in the example above, 1.00 is the average search volume of vanilla ice cream from 2004 to present. We can then see a spike in mid-2006 which crosses the 3.00 line, indicating that search traffic is approximately 3 times the average for all years.

The export function offers two options: relative scaling or fixed scaling. Fixed scaling is data scaled to a specific timeline.

Previously, users noticed the removal of the ability to view trends hourly.

What do you think of the new Google Trends? Give us your thoughts in the comments.

Fully extracted from Search Engine Watch written by Nathania Johnson

More than any previous election, search advertising will influence the vote of the presidential election. Google, in its ever-present planning for the future, planned for this shift when it employed Peter Greenberger as part of its sales team. Greenberger’s job is to convince candidates that advertising on Google search is essential to political success. Recently, ClickZ’s Kate Kaye interviewed Greenberger for his insights into the 2008 election.

Reading Greenberger’s statements, you get the idea that spending on search ads will make or break the election. He attributes the success of John McCain and Barack Obama to their paid search campaigns. Greenberger also points out that Hillary Clinton was inconsistent in her Adwords campaign, dismantling it for the last two quarters of 2007 and starting it up again only after the New Hampshire primary.

Of course, polls during those times showed Clinton with a substantial lead. It wasn’t until after the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries that a tight race was clear. Some political analysts have suggested that the ultimate difference between Clinton and Obama was that Clinton’s campaign was focused on a top-down strategy while Obama’s strategy was more grassroots, building from the ground up. Looking at campaign strategies in that light, it makes sense that Obama would engage a response-directed campaign. But Greenberger’s job is to persuade the candidates that Adwords is the chicken and not the egg.

Greenberger also talked about how Obama used geotargeting during the Texas primary and how John McCain is ahead of the game in the use of video ads. Read the full interview with Google’s political ad guy, Peter Greenberger, over at ClickZ

Extracted from Search Engine Watch written by Nathania Johnson

Five months after the launch of a beta version, Wikia Search has been officially released as a search engine. In the search engine launched by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, users will determine what hits look like. Wales may himself suffer from this approach.

From the outset, this alternative search engine has been criticized for the lack of an index and an incomplete user interface. The release version now turns out to be a search engine that everyone can play with. After entering a search term, any user can rearrange the hit list within the Ajax interface. Menu items appear next to each hit for users to evaluate and comment on individual links. Even the description of the links can be changed. Those who know of better hits can simply add them. If a hit takes you completely in the wrong direction, you can delete it – in which case it is still displayed, but with a strike through. The interface is very flexible. For instance, in a video Jimmy Wales shows how the search fields from other websites can be directly integrated in Wikia’s hit list.

Wikia Search relies on volunteers in a number of ways. To fill up the index, Wikia purchased the open source Grub WebCrawler, which runs both on the computers of volunteers and on a server farm operated by the Internet System Consortium. Despite these efforts, only some 30 million websites have been included in the index to date, making hit lists much less complete than those of the competition. Wikia therefore also includes links to the search results of Google and Yahoo.

But user involvement does not necessarily lead to clearly better results, as Jimmy Wales found out himself. A bout of mudslinging currently taints the search results for the founder of Wikia. For instance, the first hits for Wales are especially critical links. And while a Wikipedia article on syphilis has been deleted from the hit list, the struck-through entry is still displayed. Wales’ nemesis Gregory Kohs, whom Wales once banned from Wikipedia, is especially busy in this campaign; he is currently also a candidate for the Wikimedia Foundation board.

Wikia is not the only firm trying to come up with a user-based search engine. Its main competitor is Mahalo, which primarily relies on its employees to collate the best links on certain topics. Just before the new version of Wikia Search was launched, Mahalo also opened itself up a bit and now allows all users to edit short articles on search terms, though the contributions are reviewed before publication.

Indeed, established search engine providers are also looking into ways to beef up their classic search results. For instance, Yahoo has launched its Search Monkey Project to add external sources to its hit lists. The search results themselves will, however, remain unaffected.

full document extracted from Torsten Kleinz - Heise Online

Today, Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft have come together to post details of how each of them support robots.txt and the robots meta tag. While their posts use terms like “collaboration” and “working together”, they haven’t joined together to implement a new standard (as they did with sitemaps.org). Rather, they are simply making a joint stand in messaging that robots.txt is the standard way of blocking search engine robot access to web sites. They have identified a core set of robots.txt and robots meta tag directives that all three engines support:

Google and Yahoo! already supported and documented each of the core directives and Microsoft supported most of them before this announcement. In their posts, they also list the directives they support that may not be supported by the other engines.

For robots.txt, they all support:

• Disallow
• Allow
• Use of wildcards
• Sitemap location

For robots meta tags, they all support:

• noindex
• nofollow
• noarchive
• nosnippet
• noodpt

With this announcement, Microsoft appears to be adding support for the use of * wildcards (which will go live later this month) and the Allow directive. The biggest discrepancy is with the crawl-delay directive. Yahoo! and Microsoft support it, while Google does not (although Google does support control of crawl speed via Webmaster Tools ).

This isn’t the first time the major search engines have come together for an announcement regarding how they support publishers. In late 2006, all three joined together to support XML Sitemaps and launched sitemaps.org, followed in April 2007 with support for Sitemaps autodiscovery in robots.txt and in February 2008 with more support for more flexible storage locations of Sitemap files. In early 2005, the engines declared support for the nofollow attribute on links (in an effort to combat comment spam).

Extracted from Search Engine Land, written by Vanessa Fox, 3 June 2008

“Microsoft’s live search will be the default search engine on all PCs made by Hewlett Packard for the US and Canadian markets from January 2009.”

Under pressure after calling off its bid to buy search engine Yahoo, Microsoft hopes the deal will attract more people to live search. The toolbar will also have links to HP’s online services.

Google dominates the internet search engine market, handling 10 times more traffic than Microsoft’s live search. Yahoo attracts more than twice as much traffic as live search.

“This is the most significant distribution deal for live search that Microsoft has ever done,” said Kevin Johnson, president of Microsoft’s platforms and services division.

Microsoft has a similar but smaller arrangement with China’s Lenovo Group, while Google has a distribution deal with Dell and Mozilla’s Firefox web browser.