New Research Study shows ‘Google Generation’ is a myth.

The availability of data is not creating more intelligent and web literate generation.

A new study overturns the common assumption that the ‘Google Generation' – youngsters born or brought up in the Internet age – is the most web-literate. The first ever virtual longitudinal study carried out by the CIBER research team at University College London claims that, although young people demonstrate an apparent ease and familiarity with computers, they rely heavily on search engines, view rather than read and do not possess the critical and analytical skills to assess the information and that they find on the web.

The report Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future also shows that research-behaviour traits that are commonly associated with younger users – impatience in search and navigation, and zero tolerance for any delay in satisfying their immediate information needs – are now becoming the norm for all age-groups, from younger pupils and manufacturing degree undergraduates to mba students on through to college professors.

Commissioned by the British Library and JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee), the Google keyword search study calls for libraries to respond urgently to the changing needs of researchers and other users. Going virtual is critical and learning what researchers want and need crucial if libraries are not to become obsolete, it warns. “Libraries in general are not keeping up with the demands of students and researchers for services that are integrated and consistent with their wider internet experience”, says Dr Ian Rowlands, the lead author of the report.

The findings also send a strong message to the government. Educational research into the information behaviour of young people and training programmes on information literacy skills in schools are desperately needed if the UK is to remain as a leading knowledge economy with a strongly-skilled next generation of researchers.

Dame Lynne Brindley DBE, Chief Executive of the British Library, said of the report findings: “Libraries have to accept that the future is now. At the British Library we have adopted the digital mindset and have seized many of the opportunities new technology offers to inspire our users to learn, discover and innovate. Turning the Pages 2.0 and the mass digitisation project to digitise 25 million of pages of 19th-century English literature are only two examples of the pioneering work we are doing.

“We are a trusted and independent source, both in cyberspace and through our vast printed collections, with more than 67 million hits on our website in the past 12 months and 500,000 readers passing through our doors every year.

“We welcome the report findings, particularly on information and digital literacy skills. We focus on research skills, creativity, critical thinking and visual, verbal and information literacy, within our overall learning programme.”

Dr Malcolm Read, Executive Secretary of JISC, welcomed the publication of the report, saying: “These findings add to our growing understanding of subjects that should concern all who work in further and higher education – the changing needs of our students and researchers and how libraries can meet their needs. We hope that this keyword search report will encourage debate around these important questions. We hope it will also serve to remind us all that college students, part time mba students and university researchers will continue to need the appropriate skills and training to help navigate an increasingly diverse and complex information landscape.”

In the absence of a longitudinal study tracking a group of young people through schooling to academic careers, CIBER developed a methodology which has created a unique ‘virtual longitudinal study' based on the available literature and new primary data about the ways in which the British Library and JISC websites are used. This is the first time for the information seeking behaviour of the virtual scholar to have been profiled by age.

The British Library and JISC commissioned report Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future conducted by the Centre for Information Behaviour and the Evaluation of Research (CIBER) at UCL was launched in January of 2008.

Google and Panasonic Set To Launch Internet TVs.

Internet Search Leader Google has announced that it is developing televisions that display Internet content such as photos and videos together with Panasonic that is owned by Matsushita Electric Industrial Company.

The new Internet TVs from Google set to launch this spring allow users to directly browse and access videos from YouTube, a video-sharing Web site owned by Google, and view Picasa Web Albums, a free online photo-sharing service from Google, Panasonic said in a statement on Monday.

"Panasonic's cooperation with YouTube and Google's Picasa Web Albums exemplifies our commitment to leading the natural evolution of the Internet and extending it to the High Definition television," a Panasonic Consumer Electronics Vice President said.

The Google internet TV news sent comes just after Matsushita, the world's top plasma TV maker, said it would take control of a liquid crystal display LCD TV joint venture and may build a new factory, marking a major shift in its strategy for the flat panel TV market. Matsushita has until now invested aggressively in plasma displays in the belief that it was the most cost-effective technology for flat TVs larger than 37-inches, while procuring LCD panels to make TVs for smaller sets.

Microsoft To Buy Norway's Fast Search For $1.2 Billion

Microsoft Corp. said it will pay about $1.2 billion to acquire Olso-based Fast Search & Transfer as part of a move to expand its data-search business in the corporate market.

The Norwegian software developer, founded in 1997, develops search technologies used by business customers to search their databases, although Fast Search has lately branched out into the field of online advertising. Microsoft has been beefing up its MSN keyword search and online advertising capabilities to better compete with Google and Yahoo.

Microsoft (MSFT) said it will pay 6.6 billion Norwegian kroner ($1.23 billion), or 19kroner a share, for Fast Search, representing a 42% premium.

Shares of Fast Search, a company bathed in controversy over the past year, slumped in 2007 after the company acknowledged serious flaws in its accounting methods. Yet Fast Search's core algorithmic search codes and technology was still considered valuable enough for Microsoft to swoop in to buy the company.

The board of Fast Search has unanimously recommended the offer and shareholders representing 37% of the stock have made a binding commitment to the deal. Those commitments include Fast's two biggest shareholders, Orkla ASA and Hermes Focus Asset Management.

Shares in Fast Search surged 39.3% to 18.60 kroner in Oslo. In U.S. trades, Microsoft stock was down 0.6% to $34.43.

John Lervik, CEO of Fast Search, said Microsoft's sales, online tickets and marketing platform will help Fast grow much more quickly.

"This acquisition gives Fast an exciting way to spread our cutting-edge search technologies and innovations to more and more organizations across the world," Lervik said in a statement.

Erik Hjulstroem, an analyst at Kaupthing Bank, agreed. He said Microsoft will be able to integrate Fast Search's search algorithms across many of its divisions, both to corporate and consumer clients.

The analyst previously had a reduce rating on Fast Search because the company on its own would struggle to build the necessary scale. "We advise investors to accept the bid, given the poor outlook the company has on designing cufflinks or standalone basis," Hjulstroem said in a note to clients.

Jeff Raikes, president of Microsoft's business division, said the acquisition would enable business customers to pick just one vendor to handle all of their needs. "Until now, organizations have been forced to choose between powerful, high-end search technologies or more mainstream, philadelphia apartments infrastructure solutions," he said in a statement.

Microsoft said the deal is subject to approval from shareholders representing more than 90% of Fast's shares and added it expects the deal to be completed in the second quarter of 2008.

Goldman Sachs advised Microsoft, and Merrill Lynch is acting as adviser to Fast Search.

Microsoft President Steve Ballmer Sees Many Growth Opportunities

reprint from Reuters

Microsoft Corp Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said on Tuesday the company sees growth opportunities in emerging countries and the shift to digital advertising.

At Microsoft's annual shareholder meeting, Ballmer said Microsoft's sales in "BRIC" countries -- Brazil, Russia, India and China -- will grow to almost $3 billion in fiscal 2008 ending in June from about $1 billion three years ago.

It is still only a small percentage of Microsoft's estimated total revenue of close to $60 billion this year, but the company is working to increase revenue in those countries with new business models and better piracy control measures.

Ballmer reiterated the company's goal to be an advertising "powerhouse," saying that the $600 billion market for global advertising is moving to digital formats.

Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft surpassed even Wall Street's most bullish forecast with strong first-quarter earnings boosted by healthy demand for computers and the introduction of a new line of unique cufflinks and the hit video game title "Halo 3".

"We're confident that we can continue this momentum throughout this coming year," said Ballmer. "We're looking forward to a phenomenal holiday season."

At the meeting, Microsoft shareholders approved 10 directors to the board including eight independent members. At the board's recommendation, the shareholders also voted down two proposals, defeating one to stop doing business with governments that censor Internet use and another to establish a board committee for human rights.

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates attended his last shareholder meeting as a full-time employee of the company he founded with childhood friend Paul Allen. Gates plans to switch to a part-time role at Microsoft in June, although he will remain the company's chairman.

Many Websites Lose Google PageRank Overnight

Google's Latest Update Targets Illegal Paid Links

The latest Google PageRank update has resulted in many popular blogs and news websites losing some PageRank overnight. The PageRank reduction appears to be a reaction to websites that use link-building schemes that are disallowed by Google.

Google webmaster guidelines encourage site owners not to participate in paid link schemes desgined to artifically inflate google organic keyword rankings. Google had yet to enforce the rule to date, but recently decided now was the time with the holiday shopping ecommerce rush rapidly approaching.

Some popular newspaper and magazine websites experienced a Google PageRank drop including the Washington Post and Forbes.com who both lost two full points of Google PageRank falling from a PageRank of 7 down to a 5 despite thousands of backlinks and their daily content publishing schedules.

Not all of the websites falling in PageRank were using or buying paid links. Some popular blogs lost Google PageRank as a result of being members of a blog network (Splogs) designed to serve Google AdWords and also deliver other paid links from multiple revenue generating sources other than Google. Many of these blogs (spam blogs/splogs) also had plenty of internal cross-links between sites and seemed to be creating volumes of blogs with similar minimal unique content designed primarily to increase backlinks and articifically boost and inflate google organic keyword rankings.

Google identified many of these blogs as members of an automated blog network filled with inappropriate linking strategies. Google's stance to date on link building communities is quite clear yet many publishers and marketing companies are determined to bend every rule possible and continue to implement and participate in bogus link schemes designed with one primary intent ... drive higher organic rankings in Google.

Here's Google's Clear Recommendations on Linking:

"Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank."

Sure many link building techniques exist however if the links are part of a network of "bad neighborhood" why would anyone want to participate or associate their site with any low quality, non-relevant link networks.

The Google update appaears to be the first strict enforcement by Google of the Google webmaster guidelines on linking. As many Google editors have confirmed the number of linking schemes and paid link farms have exploded in the last year and have made delivering relevant search results much more difficult.

This recent action taken by Google to enforce their webmaster guidelines is only the first step as Google engineers report that they will be enforcing their webmaster guidelines much more diligently in the coming months. The Google search databases and indexes have been grwoing rapidly in recent months faster than ever in history and with this growth comes the daunting task of retaining high quality search results. In terms of Google Search Engine Optimization practices linking and link schemes is the first step in enacting more enforecement as more controls are also approaching with regards to "On Site Manipulation of the Google Algorithms" which will include more enforcement of sites that are selling link placement and offering paid link opportunities or a free pair of hannah montana tickets designed to manipulate the googlebot spiders first and serve users second.

In the case of some blogs losing PageRank, Google looks to have punished blogs that are promoting inappropriate link building techniques. Look for more PageRank updates from Google in the coming weeks.

Yahoo Natural Search - Results Update

Many Websites Lose Top Natural Ranking in Yahoo

Yahoo! has released an update to its natural search algorithm. The update began in late October. The last Yahoo update has been confirmed by Yahoo engineers.

Yahoo search released this statement "Over the last few days, we've been rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing, and ranking algorithms. While we expect the update will be completed soon, as you know, throughout this process you may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index."

The Yahoo results update appears to be somewhat small when compared to Google's search update which targeted specific websites seen as infringing on Google's Terms Of Service TOS webmaster guidelines. It appears that Yahoo wantd to freshen up their search results and clean up their search decks.

Yahoo is attempting to increase content relevancy with their search results. Yahoo has launched the search assist to work more closely with keyword searchers to improve Yahoo search results. In conjunction with releasing a new algorithm update; Yahoo has also expanded Yahoo shortcuts and brought Yahoo images and video further out in front to display more prominently in their keyword search results pages.

Industry sources and some webmasters have been moaning and rumbling about the recent Yahoo search algortihm update. Her's an online forum post from one webmaster: "Every morning I check my Yahoo search results through a Keyword Ranking Tool and to my astonishment I found that 90% of my sites lost top keyword rankings in Yahoo. Many rankings had declined from top 3 into lower top 10 or fell deep into the top 50 and many of my previous top 10 rankings were barely holding on in the top 100 of Yahoo results."

After the Yahoo algortihm update, many websites appear to be falling fast in the Yahoo search results, but the recent updates and clean up of Yahoo search results should help searchers as the Yahoo natural search results finally appear as much more content relevant.

Shopping For Quality Organic SEO Services?

When planning to outsource organic seo services make sure your search engine optimization vendor keeps all work inside.

One recent development in our search engine optimization field is gaining in popularity and beginning to compromise the integrity of our emerging industry. Many full-service SEM firms now providing organic seo services are outsourcing the labor intensive organic seo services portion of SEM contracts to the lowest bidder, usually a new, inexperienced, organic seo services firm based overseas.

Many advertising agencies and large marketing firms have recently created a "Full-Service SEO/SEM Division" and quickly discovered that unlike SEM that can often involve quick management of free software tools resulting in large invoices, handsome margins, and profit taking opportunities. Organic SEO services can be time and labor intensive and requires proven skill sets, all factors that can reduce margins on full-service SEM projects.

Quality organic SEO services involve time, care, and specialized skill sets that require analysis and identification of the unqiue code and link structures that each domain presents. Once the analysis and identification stages are carried out, the process and procedures required to implement the code and link revisions are mapped out and the solutions are uploaded and executed. All of these organic seo services must transpire before actual promotion of the website begins with link building, blogging, publishing, and promotion of the domain(s) content.

Many time-intensive organic seo services are required to achieve keyword ranking success in the major search engines. Maintaining top organic search positions is also labor and time-intensive and lies ahead of the initial development phases.

Clients with larger websites powered either by a content management system or an ecommerce site controlled with dynamic database calls typically have the largest need for proven organic seo services. However to many ONE STOP SEM SHOPS bundling SEO/SEM services and focused on their bottom-line, the organic seo services portion of SEM contracts is viewed as requiring too many man-hours resulting higher expenses and lower returns.

In other words organic seo services can often become too labor and time intensive, taxing too many man-hours and runs the risk of chewing up SEM profit margins.

Outsourcing expensive man-hours and reducing labor costs by moving the organic seo services portion of SEM contracts off-shore could increase returns. That is why outsourcing organic SEO services is gaining in popularity, especially with search marketing firms that have only recently expanded their marketing solutions portfolio to also include organic seo services.

New, inexperienced, offshore organic seo serivces firms are springing up daily with the intent of partnering with many one-stop SEM marketing agencies in hopes of assuming the labor intensive portions of organic SEO services contracts.

Check out this blind partnership request we received from a new overseas based search engine optimization vendor offering $3.00 an hour labor at the ready. Here is the blind email message we received complete with misspellings and grammatical errors.

Many times the same software programs used to create email text by these off shore is used to optimize and publish website content in similar fashion, it's all some sort of new hybrid seo language (? consisting of broken english ... Dubbed: SPAMLISH ) that works to confuse both spiders and users, resulting in url relevancy score reductions and lower keyword rankings.

Here is a recent email message we received requesting an organic seo services outsourcing partnership:

We offer services of top-level professionals only. Delhi and Pune are well-known for being a center of programming and software outsourcing services. There are dozens of technological universities in Delhi, educating thousands of software and website deve

We have very good setup for offshore development in Delhi [India] with very less overheads that's why we are able to provide the cheapest rates.

We have everything for development center like 24 hours electricity backup, good internet connection with backu

We are already working with two USA based company as an SEO offshore development center. As per our understanding we make a SEO team with four person [one SEO + two Link builder + one content writer]. One Project manager is needed on above 3 SEO teams.

-- end of email --

I must say to learn of the possiblility of "very less overheads" was most appealing.

At Peak Positions we receive these types of blind SEO outsource offers daily, so do many of our top competitors and advertising agencies. Most of us proven organic seo services firms ignore and delete these blind emails daily.

Lately though it has become quite clear that some of our well known search engine optimization competitors have started outsourcing the organic seo services portion of large SEM agreements to unproven, inexperienced seo firms based far outside of the USA.

Several times in recent weeks we have started on new projects involving some top corporate b2b and b2c ecommerce sites that were previously being optimzed by some well-known, full-service SEM competitors. After cracking into the sites we are encountering glaring evidence of error-filled code. Much of the code produced appears to be the work of foreign-based, machine-driven software programs complete with frequent misspellings and loads of grammatical errors written in SPAMLISH.

In one case with the page code of a large Boston based healthcare provider the page code was masking paragraphs of grammatically incorrect text filled with repetitive and persistent keyword strings in (3) seperate languages. It's no wonder the site had been temporarily pulled from the Google organic listings and was working with Google for reinstatement.

If you are looking for a proven SEO firm to provide quality organic seo services make sure you receive assurances prior to engagement that the organic seo services included will all remain inside. Many indications are that some well known SEM firms could actually be pushing the organic seo services portion of large projects out the backdoor to minimize labor costs and maximize profit on projects.

Do all that you can to ensure that your organic SEO services provider is not shipping portions of your contract overseas to seo firms offering cheap, inexperienced, foreign labor.

As an experienced, market leader in the organic seo services field, demand for Peak Positions has never been greater. I want to reiterate that we keep all SEO projects inside. We do not play bait and switch with anyone. If we take on an organic seo services project we estimate man-hours, provide a fair quote, and manually apend linking structures and page code throughout. We do not mislead pending clients only to turn our backs upon agreement, turn out the organic seo services, crank up the Pay Per Click, cold calls and the self hyped marketing machine and run for more deposit slips. This is all great if you can sustain the model of gaining more new clients than you lose every week.

Our firm offers exclusive, proven, organic SEO services with customized deliverables for each and every client. That's how quality organic services are done. Every site is unique and needs unique care, attention, and customer serivce. That is why our clients rank, succeed, and keep coming back to us. That is why we have never sent a blind email to anyone and we do not make cold calls. Be careful when outsourcing for organic seo services and make sure your seo vendor is actually providing the time and labor intensive organic seo services portions of SEM agreement.

Looking For Higher Rankings in Google Organic?

Get Back To The Basics

Address Core Algorithm Principles and Drive Natural Keyword Rankings

Google Architecture Overview
Here's a high level overview of the Google spidering and algorithm ranking system and how it works ... and it involves so much more than links.

Most of Google is implemented in C or C++ for efficiency and can run in either Solaris or Linux.

In Google, the web crawling (downloading of web pages) is done by several distributed crawlers or bot agents known as Googlebot spiders.

There is a URLserver that sends lists of URLs to be fetched to the crawlers. Web pages fetched by googlebots are then sent to Google's storeserver. The storeserver then compresses and stores the web pages into a repository. Every web page has an associated ID number called a docID which is assigned whenever a new URL is parsed out of a web page.

The indexing function is performed by the indexer and the sorter. The indexer performs a number of functions. It reads the repository, uncompresses the documents, and parses them. Each document is converted into a set of word occurrences called hits. The hits record the word, position in document, an approximation of font size, and capitalization. The indexer distributes these hits into a set of "barrels", creating a partially sorted forward index. The indexer performs another important function. It parses out all the links in every web page and stores important information about them in an anchors file. This file contains enough information to determine where each link points from and to, and the text of the link.

The URLresolver reads the anchors file and converts relative URLs into absolute URLs and in turn into docIDs. It puts the anchor text into the forward index, associated with the docID that the anchor points to. It also generates a database of links which are pairs of docIDs. The links database is used to compute PageRanks for all the documents.

The sorter takes the barrels, which are sorted by docID and resorts them by wordID to generate the inverted index. This is done in place so that little temporary space is needed for this operation. The sorter also produces a list of wordIDs and offsets into the inverted index. A program called DumpLexicon takes this list together with the lexicon produced by the indexer and generates a new lexicon to be used by the searcher. The searcher is run by a web server and uses the lexicon built by DumpLexicon together with the inverted index and the PageRanks to answer queries.

Major Data Structures
Google's data structures are optimized so that a large document collection can be crawled, indexed, and searched with little cost. Although, CPUs, private student loans, and bulk input output rates have improved dramatically over the years, a disk seek still requires about 10 ms to complete. Google is designed to avoid disk seeks whenever possible, and this has had a considerable influence on the design of the data structures.

BigFiles
BigFiles are virtual files spanning multiple file systems and are addressable by 64 bit integers. The allocation among multiple file systems is handled automatically. The BigFiles package also handles allocation and deallocation of file descriptors, since the operating systems do not provide enough for our needs. BigFiles also support rudimentary compression options.

Repository

Repository Data Structure
The repository contains the full HTML of every web page. Each page is compressed using zlib. The choice of compression technique is a tradeoff between speed and compression ratio. We chose zlib's speed over a significant improvement in compression offered by bzip. The compression rate of bzip was approximately 4 to 1 on the repository as compared to zlib's 3 to 1 compression. In the repository, the documents are stored one after the other and are prefixed by docID, length, and URL as can be seen. The repository requires no other data structures to be used in order to access it. This helps with data consistency and makes development much easier; Google rebuilds all the other data structures from only the repository and a file which lists crawler errors.

Document Index
The document index keeps information about each document. It is a fixed width ISAM (Index Sequential Access Mode) index, ordered by docID. The information stored in each entry includes the current document status, a pointer into the repository, a document checksum, and various statistics including doc scores. If the document has been crawled, it also contains a pointer into a variable width file called docinfo which contains its URL and title. Otherwise the pointer points into the URLlist which contains just the URL. This design decision was driven by the desire to have a reasonably compact data structure, and the ability to fetch a record in one disk seek during a search. Additionally, there is a file which is used to convert URLs into docIDs. It is a list of URL checksums with their corresponding docIDs and is sorted by checksum. In order to find the docID of a particular URL, the URL's checksum is computed and a binary search is performed on the checksums file to find its docID. URLs may be converted into docIDs in batch by doing a merge with this file. This is the technique the URLresolver uses to turn URLs into docIDs. This batch mode of update is crucial because otherwise Google must perform one seek for every link which assuming one disk would take more than a 7 weeks to cover the Google link dataset.

Lexicon
The lexicon has several different forms. The current implementation keeps the lexicon in memory on a machine with 256 MB of main memory. The current lexicon contains 14 million words (though some rare words were not added to the lexicon). It is implemented in two parts -- a list of the words (concatenated together but separated by nulls) and a hash table of pointers. For various functions, the list of words has some auxiliary information.

Hit Lists
A hit list corresponds to a list of occurrences of a particular word in a particular document including position, font, and capitalization information. Hit lists account for most of the space used in both the forward and the inverted indices. Because of this, it is important to represent them as efficiently as possible. We considered several alternatives for encoding position, font, and capitalization -- simple encoding (a triple of integers), a compact encoding (a hand optimized allocation of bits), and Huffman coding. In the end we chose a hand optimized compact encoding since it required far less space than the simple encoding and far less bit manipulation than Huffman coding. Google's compact encoding uses two bytes for every hit. There are two types of hits: fancy hits and plain hits. Fancy hits include hits occurring in a URL, title, anchor text, or meta tag. Plain hits include everything else. A plain hit consists of a capitalization bit, font size, and 12 bits of word position in a document. Font size is represented relative to the rest of the document using three bits with 7 values as 111 is the flag that signals a fancy hit. A fancy hit consists of a capitalization bit, the font size set to 7 to indicate it is a fancy hit, 4 bits to encode the type of fancy hit, and 8 bits of position. For anchor hits, the 8 bits of position are split into 4 bits for position in anchor and 4 bits for a hash of the docID the anchor occurs in. This helps Google with limited phrase searching. Google uses font size relative to the rest of the document because when searching, you do not want to rank otherwise identical documents differently just because one of the documents is in a larger font.

Looking to Secure and Maintain Premium Keyword Rankings in Google?

Get Back to the Basics.

Address The Principles of the Algorithms.

At Google and Peak Positions Its All About Code!

Discover Algorithm Synchronization > an exclusive Peak Positions Technology.

Yahoo Manages Short Term Surprise

In founder Jerry Yang's first quarter as CEO, Yahoo! managed to surprise investors on the upside, by sending its stock up 9%. Although net income at Yahoo was down 5%, sales rose 12% driving quarterly net income to $1.8 billion before expenses. These earnings are much better than projected yet Yahoo the former undisputed kings of keyword search still face many challenges. Jerry Yang made sure to drive home that his mindset and focus is on the entire $45 billion online advertising market, not just keyword search a "lucrative subset of it".

Jerry Yang is stressing that Yahoo intends to be more active with "one-off services" around the world that will be cut off, much as Yahoo did in folding Yahoo Photos into Flickr, shutting down the revenue losing, resource draining, and clearly unpopular Yahoo Podcasts, as well as deemphasizing subscription-based music services and online tickets services in favor of ad-supported music programs.

Yahoo president Sue Decker says that Yahoo Panama, the much-delayed search ad system, is beginning to work. Revenue per search category was up 20%. And display ad revenue was also up 20% a rare acceleration after more than a 15 months of downward trends. No mention was made concerning declining PPC conversion levels or any new, sustainable click fraud prevention measures.

Yahoo executives stress that YHOO is more focused than ever on becoming the first stop for most people online, and will try to facilitate connections between people only as it supports the Yahoo starting-point strategy.

Given that social networks such as Facebook are increasingly the starting point for many people online, as well as Yahoo's previous emphasis on connecting users with other people and their passions, it is not clear what Yahoo's next steps are in the emerging social networking arena.

Wall Street Shows Lust for Google and Caution For Yahoo.

Search Engines Continue To Lead Technology Stock Plays.



Internet earnings season shifted into high gear this month with the major search engines drawing the largest spotlights. Yahoo the once proud grandfather of keyword search is being viewed with caution and the ever elite Google guys are drawing sheer lust with daily run-ups topping $600 per share. Some investment analysts (still unsure of the keyword search space) are happy plodding slowing along as they increase their stakes with Yahoo and continue to look for optimistic signs of its ability to catch up with Google’s keyword advertising strength.

Deutsche Bank analysts predict Yahoo results to be in-line with expectations or just slightly below as they place a humble and down $24 target on Yahoo shares which is nearly 15% lower than Yahoo's recent share price trends of $27+. Other high rolling investment firms clad in french cuff shirts and designer cufflinks expect Yahoo’s earnings to drive and support a confident $30 target, suggesting that Yahoo stock will rise nearly 8% during the next year.

Yahoo shares are up 9% so far in 2007, and the company has been through some significant changes with the departure of former CEO Terry Semel, who was replaced in June by co-founder Jerry Yang. The Yahoo Panama advertising platform was launched to help the former king of search better compete with arch rival and long-time Yang friends Google for the coveted search-advertising dollars. Recent speculation and hints by Jerry Yang that Yahoo will be sold off in chunks with AT&T gobbling up many profitable parcels have also helped Yahoo prop their share prices up. Some market analysts including a leading broker from a flint hospital also view Yahoo as more successful than Google in getting advertisers to spend more money on search ads quarter-over-quarter. Those hidden Yahoo Pay Per Click account re-charges might drive short-term results however they also spike advertisers frustration levels and push quality PPC accounts away from Yahoo toward Google and MSN.

Speaking of Google the lust for GOOG is running huge on the street, Goldman Sachs analysts deemed Google as their top pick in the Internet industry and view Google and keyword search as the primary driver of the Internet stock sector that is up nearly 50% year-to-date. “We continue to view the Internet sector as our favorite sector across communications, media and entertainment given the benefits of strong secular growth trends and significant international exposure, both of which offset a U.S. slowdown, especially in newspaper, radio, and television advertising.”

One analyst added “The performance-based nature of keyword search advertising and its ability for direct response lead to higher portions of advertising budgets being allocated to the major search engines, especially Google AdWords. We do have a concern with one aspect of Pay Per Click Search Advertising: Click Fraud.”

In researching the numbers "we find few companies as well positioned as Google.” Google Investors are looking for new updates on Google's continuing transformation of YouTube and quality of overlay advertising within the online video space.

MSN Working Hard To Improve Keyword Search System

MSN Live Search Goes Through Upgrade.



Microsoft has been quite busy rolling out new updates on the MSN search engine as they try to better compete with Google and Yahoo.

Microsoft is now searching deeper and gathering more urls, in fact the MSN search databases have recently quadrupled in size, and the core algortihm of the msnbot spiders that power MSN Live search results have undergone an overhaul according to corporate vice president for Microsoft’s search and advertising group, Satya Nadella.

MSN keyword search updates will be pushed 'live' in stages as the 4th quarter progresses. MSN Live Search will be improved to interpret misspellings, and variations from the original word structure. Nadella also claims that Live Search will be better at detecting “stop words” which are phrases or keywords that are not considered unless they are in a specific context or combination.

Microsoft continues to place at a distant third in the battle for keyword search share.

The Most Recent Keyword Search Share Numbers Are:

# 1 Google 70+%
# 2 Yahoo 19%
# 3 MSN 9%

Microsoft hopes to increase their share of search by improving local searches, maps, health, shopping and entertainment, while they revamp and clean up the look of MSN search results pages.

Some of the fun new gadgets on Live search include: products ratings with links to products, improvements to b2b business search, maps, a health search site (move over webMD) called MedStory, and many new interactive entertainment features designed to hook searchers and spice up keyword search.

General Manager of Microsoft’s search business group, Brad Goldberg said that the company is first focusing on the 70 million users that already go to Live Search as opposed to the users who usually search on Yahoo and Google, creating incentive programs for loyal customers.

The task to dethrone Google is substantial, and MSN is preparing for a long battle. Rumors of a Yahoo acquistion/merger are still very hot in Sunnyvale as Microsoft continues to work towards pulling Yahoo into the "Redmond Realm" and instantly secure 30+% of the lucrative keyword search pie.

The GPhone

New Google Wireless Cell Phone in the cue.

The latest on gphone developments & Google Mobile Search Optimization from The Economist and Peak Positions.

Silicon Valley is abuzz with excitement around rumours that Google, the web-search giant that is Apple's neighbour in Silicon Valley, could enter the market with its own “gPhone”. Google's boss, Eric Schmidt (a veteran of the telecom industry), has already said that the firm plans to bid for a prime slice of American wireless spectrum in a forthcoming auction, something Apple is also said to be considering. In short, both mobile operators and handset-makers could soon be confronted with two of the world's sexiest brands as direct rivals.

Publicly, Apple and Google are being diplomatic so far. The industry is a stool with three legs—network service, devices, and the software and content that goes on them—and “I don't think any player in the ecosystem trying to glue it all together will be very successful,” says Dipchand Nishar, who leads Google's mobile-phone strategy. By this he may simply be conceding the obvious, which is that Google would not build hardware, even if it made the other two legs.

But Google seems to be up to something when it comes to wireless phones and wireless mobile search applications. It bought a company called Android in 2005 that specialises in mobile-phone software. It has Google Talk, a free internet-calling service. In July it bought GrandCentral Communications, a firm that gives users one single phone number for life. And it recently filed a patent application for a new google checkout expansion & mobile-payment technology.

It would certainly be tempting to tie all these bits together into a new software “platform” for mobile phones and offer it to handset-makers as an alternative to existing smart-phone operating systems such as Symbian, Palm or Microsoft's Windows Mobile. Naturally, Google's search, e-mail and document services would be tightly integrated, along with its advertising technologies, which might pave the way for mobile service that is partly or wholly subsidised by advertising.

As a strategy, this might be just different enough from Apple's to assure harmony with its ally. Mr Schmidt sits on both companies' boards, as does Arthur Levinson, the boss of Genentech, a biotech firm. Google already supplies map and video software for Apple's iPhone. It would suit neither firm to open hostilities. So Google may concentrate on software for mobile ecommerce transactions such as: trips, travel, concert tickets to be made with mass-market wireless phone devices, leaving Apple to make elegant, high-end hardware.

Hardware aside, the more intriguing possibilities concern the spectrum auction. Next year America's Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the telecoms and media regulator, will sell a band of radio wavelengths that will become available in 2009 as television broadcasters migrate from analogue to digital technology.

The usual buyers for such spectrum would be America's existing telecoms operators, such as AT&T and Verizon. Their “walled garden” model does not allow consumers to choose among handsets, operators and software applications, or even to roam around the open internet. In July, however, Mr Schmidt sent a letter to the FCC in which he pledged Google's intentions to enter the bidding, provided the FCC forces any winner to open up the new network.

The FCC accepted some but not all of Google's advice, so the winner will have to give consumers the freedom to choose wireless handsets and wireless applications. Mr Schmidt declares himself happy enough and says that Google will “be a player in some form”, either alone or in concert with partners. Such as Apple, perhaps?

Plan for the future and take steps now to ensure that your website is optimized for mobile browsers. Peak Positions offers exclusive code technologies that communicate with WAP browsers and convert your website (now matter how large or small) to render properly in WAP browsers. Discover Mobile Search Optimization with Peak Positions the leader in algorithmic code technologies since 1999.
Contact our Organic SEO Firm

New Keyword Search Market Share Numbers Released

Yahoo Holds Steady as New Teams Settle in at Headquarters.

Microsoft's Search Gains Fall in August 2007.

Google's Share Now Officially Tops 70%
Here's a Review of the Latest Keyword Search Market Share Numbers.

MSN / Microsoft seemed to some sources, maybe for a day or so, to be making a decade overdue positive advancement in the keyword search space. However the most recent search numbers indicate that MSN has fallen even further in its long race to compete with Google for the coveted keyword search audience. MSN has fallen once again and this time quite hard. After moderate gains in share in 2nd quarter of 2007, MSN and the new MSN Live search engine lost market share in the most recent surveys.

Google, the ever dominant search engine, accounted for just over 70% of all keyword search traffic, its highest level ever .

Google continued to make even more significant gains in market share and overall search volume. The gains are leading to even more control of the search advertising marketplace much to the chagrin of Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, senior executives and the formerly all-knowing internet power tribes in Redmond.

Meanwhile back down in Sunnyvale Yahoo slowed the flow of key resignations and also held steady in keyword search share garnering just over 18%.

Ask remained flat despite a huge national advertising campaign and held just above a flatline according to the most recent keyword search data.

Here are the takeaways from the latest keyword search market share report:

Google market share rose to ts highest level to date, with significant year-over-year gains in keyword search queries.

Yahoo search market share was flat as the Yahooligans continue preparations for a new IIS corporate structure.

MSN search market share retreated back to the pre-live search levels.

Ask has yet to find any users despite (14) months of heavy advertising.

According to The Economist Google ~ The World's Internet Superpower is Facing Testing Times?

Here's their article, anything to drive newstand sales and print subscriptions these days.

Who's afraid of Google?
From The Economist 2007 print edition

The world's internet superpower faces testing times.

RARELY if ever has a company risen so fast in so many ways as Google, the world's most popular search engine. This is true by just about any measure: the growth in its market value and revenues; the number of people clicking in search of news, the nearest pizza parlour or a satellite image of their neighbour's garden; the volume of its advertisers; or the number of its lawyers and lobbyists.

Such an ascent is enough to evoke concerns—both paranoid and justified. The list of constituencies that hate or fear Google grows by the week. Television networks, book publishers and newspaper owners feel that Google has grown by using their content without paying for it. Telecoms firms such as America's AT&T and Verizon are miffed that Google prospers, in their eyes, by free-riding on the bandwidth that they provide; and it is about to bid against them in a forthcoming auction for radio spectrum. Many small firms hate Google because they relied on exploiting its search formulas to win prime positions in its rankings, but dropped to the internet's equivalent of Hades after Google tweaked these algorithms.


And now come the politicians. Libertarians dislike Google's deal with China's censors. Conservatives moan about its uncensored videos. But the big new fear is to do with the privacy of its users. Google's business model (see article) assumes that people will entrust it with ever more information about their lives, to be stored in the company's “cloud” of remote computers. These data begin with the logs of a user's searches (in effect, a record of his interests) and his responses to advertisements. Often they extend to the user's e-mail, calendar, contacts, documents, spreadsheets, photos and videos. They could soon include even the user's medical records and precise location (determined from his mobile phone).

More JP Morgan than Bill Gates
Google is often compared to Microsoft (another enemy, incidentally); but its evolution is actually closer to that of the banking industry. Just as financial institutions grew to become repositories of people's money, and thus guardians of private information about their finances, Google is now turning into a custodian of a far wider and more intimate range of information about individuals. Yes, this applies also to rivals such as Yahoo! and Microsoft. But Google, through the sheer speed with which it accumulates the treasure of information, will be the one to test the limits of what society can tolerate.

It does not help that Google is often seen as arrogant. Granted, this complaint often comes from sour-grapes rivals. But many others are put off by Google's cocksure assertion of its own holiness, as if it merited unquestioning trust. This after all is the firm that chose “Don't be evil” as its corporate motto and that explicitly intones that its goal is “not to make money”, as its boss, Eric Schmidt, puts it, but “to change the world”. Its ownership structure is set up to protect that vision.

Ironically, there is something rather cloudlike about the multiple complaints surrounding Google. The issues are best parted into two cumuli: a set of “public” arguments about how to regulate Google; and a set of “private” ones for Google's managers, to do with the strategy the firm needs to get through the coming storm. On both counts, Google—contrary to its own propaganda—is much better judged as being just like any other “evil” money-grabbing company.

Grab the money
That is because, from the public point of view, the main contribution of all companies to society comes from making profits, not giving things away. Google is a good example of this. Its “goodness” stems less from all that guff about corporate altruism than from Adam Smith's invisible hand. It provides a service that others find very useful—namely helping people to find information (at no charge) and letting advertisers promote their wares to those people in a finely targeted way.

Given this, the onus of proof is with Google's would-be prosecutors to prove it is doing something wrong. On antitrust, the price that Google charges its advertisers is set by auction, so its monopolistic clout is limited; and it has yet to use its dominance in one market to muscle into others in the way Microsoft did. The same presumption of innocence goes for copyright and privacy. Google's book-search product, for instance, arguably helps rather than hurts publishers and authors by rescuing books from obscurity and encouraging readers to buy copyrighted works. And, despite Big Brotherish talk about knowing what choices people will be making tomorrow, Google has not betrayed the trust of its users over their privacy. If anything, it has been better than its rivals in standing up to prying governments in both America and China.

That said, conflicts of interest will become inevitable—especially with privacy. Google in effect controls a dial that, as it sells ever more services to you, could move in two directions. Set to one side, Google could voluntarily destroy very quickly any user data that it collects. That would assure privacy, but it would limit Google's profits from selling to advertisers information about what you are doing, and make those services less useful. If the dial is set to the other side and Google hangs on to the information, the services will be more useful, but some dreadful intrusions into privacy could occur.

The answer, as with banks in the past, must lie somewhere in the middle; and the right point for the dial is likely to change, as circumstances change. That will be the main public interest in Google. But, as the bankers (and Bill Gates) can attest, public scrutiny also creates a private challenge for Google's managers: how should they present their case?

One obvious strategy is to allay concerns over Google's trustworthiness by becoming more transparent and opening up more of its processes and plans to scrutiny. But it also needs a deeper change of heart. Pretending that, just because your founders are nice young men and you give away lots of services, society has no right to question your motives no longer seems sensible. Google is a capitalist tool—and a useful one. Better, surely, to face the coming storm on that foundation, than on a trite slogan that could be your undoing.