Home > News and Views > Newsletter > January 2007

Adwords live on MySpace, Google Pagerank Update, Wikipedia attempt to halt spam. Dmoz "suggest a site" returns, XXX domains?

1. Wikiasari

   • Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is planning to launch a new search engine next year, to be called Wikiasari. He's clearly aiming for Google. He says:

   "Google is very good at many types of search, but in many instances it produces nothing but spam and useless crap. Try searching for the term "Tampa hotels", for example, and you will not get any useful results?Essentially, if you consider one of the basic tasks of a search engine, it is to make a decision: 'this page is good, this page sucks'. Computers are notoriously bad at making such judgments, so algorithmic search has to go about it in a roundabout way - But we have a really great method for doing that ourselves. We just look at the page. It usually only takes a second to figure out if the page is good, so the key here is building a community of trust that can do that."

2. .xxx domain going to happen after all?

   • ICM is saying that the domain should be readily available for registration as early as this summer.

3. YouTube to get own TV channel?

   • YouTube is reviewing its plans for moving into television following interest from various networks, according to the company's VP of content, Kevin Donahue.

4. DMOZ 'suggest a site' back up

   • It appears that DMOZ may be back. Navigate to a category and you can now click on suggest URL and fill out the submission form. Until recently this page was closed off.

5. Google Continues To Gain Market Share

   • comScore has released their search engine market share numbers for December 2006, and it shows Google continuing to claim more searches as their competition struggles. For 12/06, Google reached 47.3%, a new all-time high, while Yahoo reversed three months of decline to gain .3% and claim 28.5% of the market. At current rates, Google will own 50% of the search market by April.

6. Yahoo Launch Mobile Search

   • Yahoo! have launched 'Yahoo! oneSearch' mobile search.

7. Google pagerank update?

   • There was a Google Pagerank update on or around 11/01/2007 (dependant on data centres).

8. Alexa Image Search in Beta

   • Alexa announced the release of their Image Search in Beta, and they have some new search platforms too.

9. Yahoo! Search Index Update 19/01/2007

   • Yahoo! are in the process of rolling out some changes to their search results. As usual, you may be seeing some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages that are included in the index throughout this process.

10. Google and other (non-Yahoo!) Ads on same page.

    • Google changed the program policies for AdSense this past week, with the most significant change being that you can now run different contextual ad programs on the same page.
    Yahoo! still has the same rule Google used to have, although they are reportedly considering relaxing their stance

11. Google Releases Confidential User Information

    • TechCrunch is reporting that Google's anti-phishing blacklist contained confidential usernames and passwords of individuals, apparently including logins for bank accounts.

12. Yahoo! to change the way they rank PPC ads

    • On February 5, 2007, Yahoo! are introducing a new ranking model in the U.S. that considers an ad's quality and bid amount. The new model is designed to help advertisers spend less time in bidding wars and more time creating the most relevant, effective ads, which can help drive better results for their business.

13. Wikipedia combating SEOs

    • Following an SEO contest (GlobalWarmingAwareness2007), Wikipedia have made the decision to combat SEOs to the extent that all external links are now rel=nofollow.

14. Google AdWords Goes Live on Myspace

    • Google’s AdSense for Search has gone live on MySpace.com. Clients currently running ads on Google’s Search Network are now eligible to have their ads served on MySpace.com searches for US-based traffic only.
    • It is important to note that it's part of the search network, so if you're an AdWords advertiser you cannot simply opt out of your ads appearing on MySpace.