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Stories Discussed In The Show

• You (& Sort Of YouTube) Named Time Magazine Person Of The Year
  Time Magazine has declared You -- that's you, me, everyone -- to be this year's Person Of The Year. And You in a big way means YouTube, the video sharing site getting a long profile about how it has grown, with some interesting bits on how it now seeks to maintain its "underground image" as part of the "Google empire." So many ironies -- Google as all grown up; YouTube, a place with much of its popularity due to commerical rather than user generated content being shared, as underground. I joked in my SES Chicago 2006 keynote last week...
• New York Times On Buzz Search
  Brands for the Chattering Masses from the New York Times covers a search engine most people can't afford, the "buzz" search that Nielsen BuzzMetrics operates, along with those from others. The idea is that these services can scan what's being posted on the web, in blogs and elsewhere, and generate buzz reports for companies. Personally, I've been pretty dubious of the attention that goes into buzz reporting tools like these, wondering if they aren't going to be too heavily skewed by what "influencers" are writing about rather than actual opinion. It's useful to know what the influences are saying....
• Yahoo Names Nash New Chief Communications Officer
  Valleywag noted earlier this month that Yahoo chief communication officer Chris Castro had been quietly dropped from Yahoo's management page. Her replacement has now been named, Jill Nash, who starts on January 16 of next year. Nash previously was vice president of global communications for Gap. Her predecessor Castro had held the position for nearly five years, since March 2002....
• Yahoo COO didn't get `pink slip', San Jose Mercury News
• Google In Russia & Europe: The International Challenge
  Two articles out today highlight Google's not all powerful in every market. In Russia and some other countries, Google is fighting to gain share. New to Russia, Google Struggles to Find Its Footing from the New York Times shows that Google is number eight in Russia, where Yandex leads the pack, followed by Rambler. The rest of the engines all share only 9% of the search ad revenue in the Russian market. Why is Google lagging behind there? Most cite language and cultural issues, despite Sergey Brin being born in Russia. European search engines take on Google from the International...
• Korea's Top Portal, Naver, Renews With Yahoo
  Yahoo has renewed their partnership with Naver, Korea's largest portal. Yahoo will continue to be, in a multi-year contract, the exclusive provider of sponsored search listings for search queries on the Naver portal and through Naver's toolbar application. This news comes days after Daum dropped Yahoo for Google, Daum is Korea's second largest portal. Below is the full press release:...
• Google Acquired Endoxon: Geo Mapping Software
  Google Operating Systems reports that Google has acquired Endoxon, a company that specializes in internet mapping solutions. Google actually did not acquire the whole company, but rather just half of the business units, including internet, mapping and data processing business units. They were acquired because "Endoxon’s assets and its European network bolster engineering and technical resources for Google. This acquisition of Endoxon will enable us to leverage their analysis capabilities and will help us build out and improve the functionality of Google Earth and Google Maps across Europe." Postscript: The Google blog posted an entry on this acquisition, adding; The...
• Google & Orange Talking Google Mobile Phone?
  The future for Orange could soon be Google in your pocket from The Observer talks about Google and mobile phone operator Orange apparently discussing the creation of a Google branded phone. I can't feel there might be a bit of hype here leaking from the Orange side. Google has a very tight partnership with Orange competitor T-Mobile in the UK. Google's preloaded on all those phones as a search default, plastered in T-Mobile brochures and so on. One quote especially makes me dubious: A source close to the talks told The Observer: 'Google are software experts and are doing some...
• Google Apps For Your Domain Enables Domain Registration
  The Google Blog announced that Google Apps For Your Domain has added the ability to register a domain name, if you do not have one yet. What I find interesting, as I explained here, is that we know Google is a domain registrar for about two years now, but yet they are using GoDaddy and eNom to handle the domain registration information. I suspect they do not want to build out a system to handle that on their own. But what I find more interesting is that they mention that they even support "private registration to protect your personal information."...
• Google Adds Ad Quality & Ad Performance Documentation To Help Section
  Google has been listening, I guess, to advertisers recent complaints over the new AdWords Quality Score and Landing Page update. The Google AdWords blog informed us that Google has added several pages of content to the help section better documenting the changes. Those pages include, and I quote:...
• Google Explains AdWords Trademark Policies
  In a two part post at the AdWords blog, Google has added more detail to their trademark policies. In part one, Google explains how trademark owners can prevent use of their trademarks in AdWords and how they can exclude some advertisers from the trademark policy. In part two, Google explains how advertisers can request to use certain restricted trademarks in AdWords....
• Trademark Infringement Case Against Yahoo In Google AdWords Dismissed
  Steve Bryant reports that the case against Yahoo, brought by JP Enterprises for trademark infringement on the terms lovecity and lovecity.com have been dismissed with prejudice. Back in mid-June, the case was first filed against Yahoo and other companies for bidding on the brand name. Yahoo's nor JP Enterprises' attorneys responded to any comments about the case and why it was dismissed. It appears that there was some type of settlement, since the case can later be filed again....
• Yahoo Publisher Network Adds Domain Level Blocking
  The Yahoo Publisher Network blog announced a new feature to allow publishers to block ads from showing up on the domain or sub-domain level. The feature is called "Ad Blocking" with a large text box, where you enter in domains or sub-domains of sites you would like to block. You can enter in a total of 200 URLs....
• Yahoo Says No Directory Tag Coming January 2007
  I reported this morning at Search Engine Roundtable that Tim Mayer from Yahoo posted in a WebmasterWorld thread saying support for a "No Yahoo Directory" tag will be coming this January. A No Yahoo Directory tag will enable webmasters to tell Yahoo not to use their Yahoo Directory title in the search results. Yahoo began supporting the No Open Directory (noodp) tag on October 25 and promised us that they would support the no Yahoo directory tag equivalent sometime in the near future....
• Yahoo's IM update bugs users, News.com
• 'Reverse Engineering' Google Local Results
  Search engine marketer Mike Blumenthal on his blog, "Understanding Google Maps & Yahoo Local," has been doing an interesting investigation to try and understand the Google Maps and local search algorithm and what factors influence those rankings. As a basic matter, Google uses different algorithms for general and local search results. I spoke with Mike on Friday, and he said that one of the surprising takeaways from his ongoing research is that Google also appeared to be using different factors to determine results in the top three local results that appear on Google.com ("OneBox") and the rankings of results that...
• ODP Founder Skrenta On Dying Open Directory
  DMOZ had 9 lives. Used up yet? from one of the Open Directory's founders Rich Skrenta covers how some of the ODP's data has apparently been lost due to a main server crash, with backups not having been done. There's apparently some attempt at recovery, but as Rich points out, does anyone at AOL really care? Sadly, it's felt like not for many years. As with Rich, perhaps the best way forward is to just close the project. If not, c'mon Google, acquire it and reshape it somehow....
• Google On Using Images
  Vanessa Fox at the Google Webmaster Central Blog posted tips on using images on your site. In short, she explains that: (1) Don't put the bulk of your visible text in images, use real text (2) Use alt tags to describe the images (3) Do not keyword stuff the alt tags (4) Alt tags are more important when your navigation is all images (5) A webmaster should be watchful of the "image-to-text ratio on your page" (6) Vanessa then pitched Google Sitemaps, with "Taking advantage of Image search"...
• Google's Picasa Add Photo Search & Other Features
  The Google blog announced that Picasa, Google's photo sharing application, now enables you to search photos. You can search your own or your friends' public albums captions, album titles, and album descriptions. Picasa also added the ability to print your pictures with Shutterfly or PhotoWorks and a feature to enable you to upload your videos for easy sharing in Picasa....
• Eurekster Swicki Improvements
  Eurekster have quietly rolled out some interesting improvements on their swicki system. Swickis are search engines created by individuals and used by groups which learn from their users and deliver more focused and targeted results. There are currently over 40,000 swickis in operation on websites and weblogs, with over 13,000 unique publishers, delivering 21,000,000 searches in November, according to Steven Marder (Eurekster CEO), who I spoke to earlier this week. The improvements to the service allow much greater input from each swicki user community, to let publishers leverage the knowledge of each community in order to better understand their traffic...
• Yoople For Collaborative Searching
  Yoople is a collaborative search engine that I discovered over the weekend. Very simple idea - run your search and Yoople grabs results from Yahoo and displays the first 10 for you on the screen. You can then click and drag a result and place it in a different position in the top 10 if you think the result should be higher or lower than Yahoo has placed it. It's a nice idea in theory, but when it comes down to the practicalities I'm less convinced. It would be lovely if we all lived in a world where everyone does...
• Decipho Personalized Search Engine
  Decipho officially launched on December 14th after having been available since October. It's an interesting search engine because it takes the concept of social search another stage further, while at the same time offering very useful personalisation. There are lots of things that you can do with it, but I would recommend registering and then uploading a list of your bookmarks to start you off. Unfortunately these have to be from your browser, rather than any other bookmarking services at the moment. Once you've done that, take a look at the search interface itself. Very straightforward, following the Google model...
• UTube Monetizes Mistaken YouTube Traffic
  Philipp Lenssen takes a look at how UTube changed their approach on their suit against YouTube. Philipp notes that when you arrive at UTube.com you now see a search box with suggested search terms below the box. When you search or click on the suggested search terms you are taken to ads by SearchFeed. In addition, if you click on the UTube logo you are taken to a whats hot page with more of these searches. I wonder how well UTube is doing on this recent influx of 70,000+ unique people per day....
• SES Chicago '06 Comic Reel
  The folks at SEOMoz have done it again, this time they designed this unique comic reel of what took place at SES Chicago a couple weeks ago. They did an excellent job capturing much of the action at the conference. I love this spin, great work guys. See the full comic strip by Rebecca. I took out one image, specifically for Lisa Barone over here....
• Top Searches At Windows Live Search (MSN Search) For 2006
  The Live Search Blog posted the top searches for 2006 list. Here are the overall top 10, for the categorized top tens, check out their post. Top Overall Searches at Live Search in 2006: Ronaldinho Shakira Paris Hilton Britney Spears Harry Potter Eminem Pamela Anderson Hilary Duff Rebelde Angelina Jolie...
• Top Searches At LYCOS In 2006
  LYCOS sent me the top searches data from their database in 2006. Here it is: The LYCOS 50 Top 10 Search Terms for 2006 are: Poker MySpace RuneScape Pamela Anderson Paris Hilton Pokemon WWE Golf Spyware Britney Spears...
• Top Google Search Terms Of 2006
  I went looking for Google's top terms of 2006 today after seeing that some of them had been leaked to the UK press. Nothing public was up on either the Google press releases page (no surprise, typically hours behind when Google actually releases news) or the main Google Zeitgeist page or the 2006 page. I should have remembered to do what Garett Rogers thought of -- follow the regular URL patterns from past years to see if they'd been posted but not publicized. Nice job, Garett. Google Zeitgeist 2006 is live. Top terms for 2006 were:...
• Blog Tag: 5 Things You Don't Know About Danny Sullivan, Daggle
• Tag I’m It - 5 Things You Never Knew About, David Naylor