An ongoing discussion of web design and web security.
Google has updated Website Optimizer, it’s content testing and optimization tool, with a few new features. The most significant change is the ability remove poorly performing combinations during the experiment. Offline validation of pages used in A/B tests and more intuitive reporting of how the various combinations are performing were also added.
Source: Inside AdWords Blog
Nielsen Online today released it rankings of U.S. search share for July. Overall search grew 3 percent year over year to 8 billion searches. Google had year over year growth of 16 percent and received 60.2 percent of searches. Yahoo! had a year over year decline of 11 percent and received 17.4 percent of searches. Microsoft had a year over year decline of 10 percent and received 11.9 percent of searches.
In a post on the Inside AdSense Blog, it was announced that AdSense for feeds was made publicly available today. According to CNET News, it was “soft-launched to a small group of AdSense users back in May.” AdSense for feeds integrates ads into RSS feeds through Google’s FeedBurner. According to Google, they will be selling cost-per-impression (CPM) ads directly to the largest advertisers and the rest of the ad inventory will be made up of contextually targeted cost-per-click (CPC) and CPM ads. FeedBurner’s former independent FeedBurner Ad Network closed several weeks ago.
The New York Times Bits Blog reports that Google has reached a deal with advertising company Publicis to sell the search engine marketing portion of Performics, which Google acquired as part of it’s purchase of DoubleClick. The business presented a clear conflict of interest as Performics attempts to increase client’s visibility in Google’s search engine. The deal is expected to close in the third quarter.
Google today announced the launch of Google Insights for Search, a tool that breaks search behavior data down by time, region, and category. The tool builds on Google Trends, providing all the information provided by that tool except for data on language. The tool adds a visual display of regional data using a heat map. The tool allows searching within categories and subcategories. If you were looking for search behavior related to apples, you would select the Food & Drink category to exclude related to the computer company. The tool also provides data as to what are the top and rising search terms related to the term searched for. The different search options can be combined to provide specific data. For example data on searches for prius in 2008 in the US state of California, shows which cities have the most search but also what related terms people have also been searching on.
A posting on the Official Google Blog reports that Google’s systems processing links had found one trillion unique URLs and that the number of individual web pages is growing by several billion a day. They do not index all of those URLs as many of them are similar to each other. Google also says that they gather: “updated page information and re-processing the entire web-link graph several times per day”.
Nielsen Online released it rankings of U.S. search share for June on Friday. Overall search grew 6.3 percent year over year to 7.9 billion searches. Google had year over year growth of 19 percent and received 59 percent of searches. Yahoo! had a year over year decline of 12.4 percent and received 16.6 percent of searches. Microsoft had a year over year growth of 12.5 percent and received 14.1 percent of searches.
Google increased it share of US search-ad revenue to 77.4 in the second quarter of 2008, up 2 percent from the year ago period, according to search marketing firm Efficient Frontier. From the year ago period, Yahoo dropped 2 percent to 17.8 percent and Microsoft stayed even at 4.8 percent. Google average cost per click increased 13.8 percent, Yahoo’s dropped 7.3 percent, and Microsoft’s increased 5.6 percent.
Source: CNET News
Yesterday, the U.S. House and Senate Judiciary committees held hearings into the Google-Yahoo partnership. The chief legal counsels for Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft testified during the hearings. During the hearings members of congress expressed concern about effect of the partnership on competition and the amount personal data Google would have on individuals. The biggest moment in the hearings came when Microsoft senior vice president and general counsel Brad Smith claimed that during a meeting Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang: “Look, the search market today is basically a bipolar market. On one pole there’s Google, and on the other pole there is Yahoo and Microsoft both competing with Google. If we do this deal with Google, Yahoo will become part of Google’s pole. And Microsoft, he said, would not be strong enough in this market to remain a pole of its own.” Yahoo general counsel Michael Callahan first refused to address the claim and later stated he had attending the meeting and recalled the conversation as being different.
Source: New York Times
A report by search marketing manager SearchIgnite claims that the cost of a click on Yahoo! search will go up 22 percent if Google sells the ad according to post on the New York Times Bits Blog. SearchIgnite compared the of cost of clicks at the same position on Yahoo! and Google for 15,000 keywords in 12 million clicks paid. They found that for popular searches terms Yahoo! cost more for the first three results and Google for the rest. For less popular search terms, the kind that would likely be filled by Google, Google cost 14 percent more for the first result and for the fifth through tenth it cost 52 percent more.