Finding Search related Jobs (European search engine)
Finding Search related Jobs Jobs in Search is exactly what it says. Jobs in the search industry. If you are looking for a job at a Search Engine company, Search Engine Marketing firm, Search Engine Optimization company, New Media, Digital Media, and any company that provides services and products aimed at the search industry, this is a site to look into. JobsInSearch.com has special sections for SEO and SEM resources, Events, Search News, and Industry experts. [via Loren Baker]
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Tracking a package through MSN Search
MSN has just announced that you can track packages through its MSN Search portal.
To track packages with MSN Search, simply head to search.msn.com, and enter your FedEx, DHL, UPS, or USPS tracking number.
MSN package tracker is one of the MSN Instant Answer search tools. Its great that search engines are providing all of these additional features to make our lives even more easier. But as the features grow, so does the competition and battle for the top search engine.
Who knew that search could be this exciting?
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YouTube leads the video search marketplace
Like many people, I enjoy a good video. Especially with YouTube. Anything and everything is on there, well pretty much anything.
YouTube hosts any video it seems. From full length feature pirated movies, to news stories, video blog entries, a ton of just plain personal videos of the dog running around, to just plain hilarious videos of senior citizens dancing helping add to the 20 million visitors per month.
Hitwise just released some stats on YouTube, and their amazing 60% share of all videos watched online in the US. Compare that with Yahoo, MSN, and Google’s share of only 3-5%, and you can see why YouTube is a video traffic genius. The company gets around 100 million video’s viewed per day, and YouTube has said that they had 2.5 billion videos watched per day last month.
If you think there is nothing to see in the video search marketplace, look again, it’s hotter then ever, and YouTube is steaming up the web.
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The Spamification of Trusted Words, Ideas, & Organizations
I am going to go on record offering you this powerful life-changing advice that will be the most valuable information you ever consumed. Sound familiar?
If you pay attention to spam you can view the trends and see where it is going before it even goes there. One of the big trends that is rarely talked about is how hard spammers hunt hard to find credible sounding words. In spite of being on the do not call list, every day I get a call from the message center, the card center, the consumer center, or the national consumer protection foundation, etc.
If at the core the business model was created to annoy people and steal from them then the people behind these outfits are going to be results oriented, using whatever techniques they find profitable (auto-dialers, powerful words, fake partnerships with trusted bodies, etc), until they burn away the profit margins.
Some words (and even formats) get so polluted that the perception of value goes down. Free killer ebook to change your world forever…chuck full of affiliate links for products not worth buying. Ebooks take more effort to create than web pages do, and so they were once somewhat trusted, but over time have been associated with spam because the format has been abused. Online video is fairly new, but it is already being heavily abused.
Trusted names and charities partner with businesses to extend out the public relations campaigns of the businesses. As featured in loses its value when anyone can go write a column. Consumer generated content is bolted onto mainstream media sites, but how much of it is as good as leading independent channels? The people who really have something to say probably already run their own websites, and the primary intent of most people participating on media sites is going to be nefarious in nature. Speaking of that, I just got a good idea. 
On the flip side, some words become valuable because other people significantly invest to create the value behind those words. The value is greatest if you are sitting on the exact .com name that becomes popular, but even if people are propping up words in unrelated markets they still can drive up the value of domains with that word in them. These community sites also drive up the value of short domain names that can support a community of their own.
A couple hours ago the sessions table for Drupal needed repaired or emptied because it was not allowing SEO Book users to login. I just emptied it, so you need to login again to comment, but it should work well again. Sorry about that.
Superpages now uses Microsofts Maps
Apparently the Superpages.com directory has made the change into using Microsofts Live Local virtual earth maps. Not sure when this change occurred, but Greg Sterling has recently noticed this update.
It’s a nice new feature for Superpages to ad to their local directory. It adds a nice touch for local searchers. The current version of the maps embedded into the Superpages directory has three views, standard, aerial, and birds eye.
As recently reported, Superpages.com is rumored to be up for sale from Verizon.
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Illegal & Illicit vs Who’s Getting Paid?
Central hubs on the web fight off manipulation to keep their status and profit margins in tact. A side effect of this war on control over information access is the butchering of the English language.
Digg is Illegal?
Digg’s CEO Jay Adelson said:
I’m sure there could be blackmailers out there. We absolutely know that every single day, people try to game our system. Users are involved in illegal or inappropriate activities all the time. They try to set up fake accounts to promote a story. The thing is, we make changes to our algorithm on a regular basis. We plan for that.
Notice how he put illegal and inappropriate right next to each other, as to equate them. This comes from the same company that published this:
We had to decide whether to remove stories containing a single code based on a cease and desist declaration. We had to make a call, and in our desire to avoid a scenario where Digg would be interrupted or shut down, we decided to comply and remove the stories with the code.
But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.
If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.
Sure you can buy votes on Digg, and they arbitrarily ban websites. But does controlling a bunch of worthless traffic give them the right to butcher language to push their business objectives?
Google is Illicit?
Michael Gray’s continued debate about the war on links spurred on additional conversation.
Why is the Yahoo! Directory Considered a Legitimate Link Buy?
In addition to what Jim said, I also believe the following play a role:
- They predate Google.
- Google needs some sort of baseline.
- The directory business model is horrifically inefficient and poses no risk to Google’s market dominence. (Yahoo! demoted it in favor of Yahoo! Answers. Even the Google Directory, a DMOZ clone, has a higher PageRank than the Yahoo! Directory does.)
- Few other sites are comparable to the Yahoo! Directory (especially after the Google directory purge of 2007), so it is not a technique that can’t be easily and profitably be replicated like paying for reviews.
The truth is independent link sellers often exercise more control than directory editors do.
The entire Business.com directory of over 65,000 categories is managed by 6 editors (source). How could they possibly review stuff as well as you or I do? They can’t. But if we all do our business in a direct to direct exchange fashion the central networks and search engines do not get a cut of the action.
Why Google is Different than Digg
Unlike Digg users looking to waste time, searchers have real targeted intent and real value. In response to Michael Gray’s post Danny Sullivan said:
But if he wants to stand up to Google, take the lead and block him from crawling his site — and encourage others to do the same. … No one has a right to Google traffic. Follow the rules, as stupid as they are, if you want it. If don’t like the rules, sure, complain about them — but don’t argue they’re robbing you of anything that is supposedly “yours.”
But unplugging from Google is not as simple as blocking them in robots.txt. They can still pay others to steal your work and wrap it in their ads.
They change the guidelines on an as needed basis (use nofollow or else), apply them unevenly (why is TLA penalized when TextLinkBrokers still ranks?), and if they don’t like you they can penalize other businesses associated with you.
Michael pointed out that the Google’s Webmaster Guidelines butcher the word illicit. In response Danny wrote:
Michael, illicit as used on the Google Webmaster Guildelines page is defined by however Google wants to define it — in that case, doing stuff against the guidelines.
When the networks screw people over it is the fault of “users” or “the algorithm,” but when the central networks do not like what we do we are “criminals performing illicit acts.”
You know what is illicit? Adultery. And Google ads recommend it.
Recently Google has been more than fair to me, but if they want to use the language they are using to try to control others, they need to clean up their ad network. Just because an ad has a high CPC and gets a high CTR does not mean that it is not immoral or illegal. Plenty of people commit crime.
