Online Marketing

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

“This morning during his keynote at SMX Advanced, Kevin Johnson, President, Microsoft Platform & Services Division, mentioned a new adCenter tool we’re piloting called the adCenter Desktop Beta. The adCenter Desktop Beta is a free tool that enables advertisers and agencies to bulk manage their adCenter accounts from a desktop application which can be uploaded to an adCenter account. This is the first time we’ve offered offline campaign management for adCenter customers.”

With the adCenter Desktop you can:

• Quickly navigate through multiple accounts
• Copy and paste keywords, negative keywords, match types and bid amounts from the adCenter Add-in for Excel into the Desktop application
• Bulk edit multiple items at once (bid prices, destination URLs, ad group targeting, etc.) —within or across groups of items
• Create text ads
• Scan campaigns for editorial issues before uploading to adCenter
• Receive alerts on performance changes
• Upload changes to the adCenter user interface instantly with one click
• Save full-text Search results to a ‘favorites’ tab in adCenter desktop for future use

“We developed adCenter Desktop in response to customer requests to have the ability to bulk manage their adCenter accounts quickly and easily with an offline tool. It also complements our other Paid Search offerings, including the adCenter Add-in for Excel tool we introduced last winter, by utilizing keyword research functionality to provide advertisers and agencies with maximum transparency into historical keyword performance in adCenter. And unlike other desktop management applications, adCenter Desktop includes the Creation Wizard, a tool that provides a step-by-step guide to create online advertising campaigns – from the selection of specific ad features to previewing the final ad copy.”

The adCenter Desktop is currently in beta. To be considered for participation in the adCenter Desktop pilot program, please fill out our interest form. When registering, be sure to click on “adCenter Desktop Beta” and “yes” to sharing your feedback with Microsoft.

“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.

Last nite, the Electronic Marketing unit at UWA, received Marc Loveridge from Market United, as a guest lecturer. His amazing words traced the new Web 2.0 through the minds of a couple of dozen students, exposed its advance and its nature, defining its changes using real successful examples from its marketing company.

Probably the best lecture lately, in my opinion, he talked about the new communities such as Minti - online parenting advice - powered by users, or as they say “powered by parents”, also talked about new web 2.0 financing and universities websites, adding user participation to provide a broader and more useful repertoire of functions and information. AJAX, Minti, Last.fm, Facebook, Trip Advisor, Wikipedia, Google Apps, and many more were the examples dissecated in class.

I bet many were the minds enlightened by that arvo chat ending our 1st semester of Electronic Marketing, there wouldn’t be a better way. After that we had a quick awards night and a few drinks to celebrate. Certificates were given to the participants on the Google Adwords Challenge, including myself.

A huge thanks to Marc Loveridge (Market United) and Jamie Murphy (UWA Business).

Gabe

All the credit to A/Prof. Jamie Murphy from The University of Western Australia (UWA) who has designed the Electronic Marketing unit for the postgrad/master of Marketing, E-Mkt, E-Business, Info Management, and others. As per his own words:

“Self-selected activities, readings and seminars challenge you to envision electronic marketing benefits for business, government, organisations, events and yourself — now and in the future.” from Jamie Murphy, Electronic Marketing 8502, Semester 1, 2008. I had no better words to spread his will than those ones he’s chosen.

Reaching its end by now, I’ll try to share with you our in-class experiences within the subject. We’ve gone through 12 of 13 weeks of the course, many hands-on activities, active participation in and of the class, weekly quizzes, virtual class/meetings, guests… Special attention to the worldwide Google Online Marketing Challenge, with 2 teams in our class participating and developing projects to real business (Skins - Australia / Kickasss - France); other important projects were the development of an existing website, and the very interesting project including Microsoft Earth and its trial with Tourism Western Australia. The unit weekly topics ranged from:

1. Introductions and orientation
2. A networked and digital world
3. Website navigation
4. Online consumers
5. Web business models
6. eService
7. Standards
8. Online communities (virtual class only)
9. Online and offline promotion
10. Online pricing
11. E-business, electronic marketing plans
12. Putting it all together
13. Digital issues
14. Group project

We’ll go step by step over these topics trying to explore the most interesting points we’ve ran through.

Keep an eye on tags related to studies. Use the search engine within the web.

Hello everyone!

I’m Gabriel, a current student of The University of Western Australia - UWA, where I’m undertaking a Master of Electronic Marketing and Information Management, to be finished by the end of 2008. Experience as Online Mkt Manager at - clickhoteles.com - an online tourism company of hotels booking ’til 2005; a bit of travelling - Brazil to Europe and then Australia -; and now back to internet mkt at ineedhits.com in Perth, Australia (Search Engine Mkt and Google AdWords).

Now proud to present this new blog, willing to come up with news, ideas, researches and all about Electronic Marketing and Search Engine Marketing. I’ll try to include the hi-wanted Submission, Optimisation, and Pay-per-Click information, our experiences, thoughts and up to date news on the web.

I expect this to help fulfilling our needs within the range of the marketing on internet. The advertising on the web is growing very second, and so are techniques to make websites more and more acceptable by search engines, also users nowadays are more aware of quality on the web and requirements much higher.

Keep your antennas directed to this blog, soon bringing great info!