The New York Times Bits Blog reports that Comcast filed a suit in the United States Court of Appeals in Washington to challenge the FCC’s sanctions over it’s throttling of certain protocols on customers connections. Comcast is challenging the FCC’s ability to sanctions companies without first publishing a rule about the issue at hand. Under the current FCC chairman Kevin Martin, the FCC has published broad principles and has only taken action when it finds practices it objects to. Comcast complains that by bypassing formal rules, their ability to put forth their side of issue is restricted.
NebuAd Suspends Controversial Advertising Technology
The Washington Post reports that NebuAd has suspended it controversial advertising technology. The technology uses deep-packet inspection to monitor all unencrypted traffic through an internet connection to gather information to target adds. Publicity, including an inquiry by the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee, led to ISP’s participating with NebuAd to suspend their use of the technology. In an email to the Post company spokeswoman Janet McGraw indicated that the company was looking to channels other than ISPs to deploy the technology. Earlier in the week, the company announced the CEO Bob Dykes was stepping down from that post.
Google Releasing Web Browser
In a post on the Official Google Blog, Google has announced that they will be releasing their own web browser. The browser, called Google Chrome, is built on the WebKit rendering engine used in Apple’s Safari. The browser uses a V8, a JavaScript engine developed by Google, that Google says is designed to “power the next generation of web applications that aren’t even possible in today’s browsers”. A beta version for Windows will be released shortly, with Mac and Linux versions in the works.
Google CEO Says Yahoo Partnership On Track To Start in Early October
In an interview with Bloomberg Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that Google search advertising partnership with Yahoo! is preceding to start in early October. He also said that regulators have so far “not indicated one way or the other how they’re dealing with us.” The partnership is currently under review by U.S. state and federal regulators, as well as Canadian regulators.
Target Settles Lawsuit Over Blind Accessibility to Website
Target has settled a lawsuit over the inability of the blind to access their website. CNET News reports that Target will establish a $6 million dollar fund for settlement claims and promised to “make its site fully accessible to blind visitors”. The basis of the suit was that the lack alt-text tags for images on the site made it difficult, if not impossible, for blind customers to use site and that this was a violation of state and federal disability rights laws.
Google Adds Search Suggestion Feature to Google Search
In a post on the Official Google Blog, it was announced that Google Suggest, Google’s search suggestion feature, will be a part of Google’s homepage. The feature provides suggested search terms in drop box below the search box as a search query is being typed into the search box. For example, if baseball were typed into the search box, terms like baseball hall of fame of fame, baseball reference, baseball games, and baseball america would show up. The feature also detects misspellings and typos and suggest correction like “Did you mean?” feature already available on the search results page. This feature has previously been available as opt-in feature as a Google Labs experiment.
Microsoft Restarts Talks Over Disposal of Avenue A/Razorfish
According to AdAge, Microsoft has restarted talks with advertising agency WPP to get rid of Avenue A/Razorfish. Microsoft acquired Avenue A/Razorfish as part of is deal for aQuantive that was completed in august of last year. The contemplated deal would swap Avenue A/Razorfish for WPP subsidiary 24/7 Real Media’s publisher ad-serving tool Open AdStream and cash.
Yahoo Launches Updated Site Explorer
The Yahoo! Search Blog today announced the release of an update of Site Explorer, it’s service similar to Google’s and MSN/Live Search’s Webmaster Tools. The update brings a new interface to accommodate unspecified future feature roll outs. The number rules for Dynamic URL Rewriting was increased from 3 to 10 as part of the update. The new version can be reached at http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/new, and will be made the default version soon.
Google Adds New Features to Website Optimizer
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
July U.S. Search Share Results
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.