All About Content

First it was available in Beta. Then it disappeared and was replaced by the product it was supposed to replace. Now it’s back. Windows Live (nee MSN Search) was available in Beta in all its AJAX-y goodness until sometime last week, when a search returned a page that looked just like MSN Search.

The MSN homepage, I noticed, tried to get all AskJeeves natural language search on me. When I clicked on the “try new search: When did WWII begin?” It pulled an answer from Encarta:

According to a recipient of the MSN Newsletter, the company announced earlier this month:

“In case you hadn’t heard, MSN Search is no longer, it is about to be retired to make way for the all new Windows Live Search experience. It’s simple, fast and accurate, has great new features you just won’t find with other search engines and best of all, it puts you in control.

Goodbye MSN Search, Hello Windows Live Search!”

So Live is back up, minus its AJAX-y interface, so I thought I’d ask MSN/Encarta a timelier question to prove just how simple, fast and accurate Microsoft’s new search engine is: “What was 9/11?”

The answer: September 11, 1935 U.S. tennis player Helen Hull Jacobs garners her fourth straight title at the U.S. Lawn Tennis Association championships; Wilmer Allison of the United States wins the men’s division.

The link next to this answer asks me: Is this info useful? I think the better question is: Does anyone seriously think Windows Live is an improvement on MSN Search?

Niall Kennedy, formerly of Technorati, quit his job at Microsoft after only 4 months, saying the company lacks commitment to the online services platform he was tasked with creating, and that it failed to provide him support and resources. His project was to include unified systems for integrating address books, RSS feeds, photos and other user content across the Windows Live platform. According to Kennedy, Microsoft expected him to accomplish the task alone, which was impossible.

Read Niall Kennedy’s blog posting about his departure from Microsoft.

Many months after Microsoft announced Windows Live to some fanfare, very little has been heard about its progress. Now it appears that’s because they’ve had a single person working on it. Ha! I’m surprised they allowed Kennedy to publicly announce his reasons for leaving, especially since his reason makes it clear that the company’s trash talking about its search competitors isn’t backed up by anything.

Even I have three people working for me, and I’m not tasked with trying to overthrow Google!

Want your site optimized for search, but don’t know where to start? Since it’s probably too late for you to jump on a plane to go to SES San Jose this week, go drop by SEOEgghead.com where Jaimie Sirovich is doing a free SEO clinic every month.

Today some representatives of a major search engine visited us to demo the new PPC ad platform the company (let’s call it Y) will be rolling out later this year. The meeting was covered by a non-disclosure agreement so I can’t talk about anything (specific or otherwise) but I was given the go-ahead to mention the meeting and the fact that it was about a new PPC system. Luckily — and I believe it violates neither the spirit nor the letter of the NDA for me to point this out — other people have already been chatting about the system (here and here) and things I can’t mention (like possible similarities to products by algo-driven competitors. Or not.)

The move to a new system follows the recent termination of a relationship with another search engine, let’s call it MSN, wherein Y provided sponsored search results for MSN. MSN rolled out its own PPC platform in May.

[rant]
Just when I think I have my gag reflex under control when it comes to that overrated behemoth MySpace, I come across this:

Currently, the three largest search related entities are Google, MySpace and Yahoo. Each entity is actually a vast and growing collection of hundreds technologies strung together to form relatively cohesive information storage and distribution machines.

MySpace is one of the top 3 search-related sites/companies? How is it search related? And “relatively cohesive information storage and distribution machines” is an apt description if you take out the “information” part (in fact, at this particular moment, their search functionality seems to be broken and the few profiles I tried to click on are all currently “undergoing routine maintenance”).

On top of being a usability nightmare, it’s also filled with crap, more crap, and extremely badly designed crap. (Anyone remember GeoCities? That’s what this looks like — without the excuse that we just don’t know any better yet) And most of the audience appears to be children and old perverts pretending to be children. Okay, maybe that’s not entirely fair; but quality content is more an exception than the rule. Maybe that’s why Google passed on the chance to buy MySpace — after all, their mission statement is about organizing the world’s information, not about indexing every last thought that anyone has ever had. Or am I still being too Pollyanna?

But apparently the surfing (and searching) masses disagree: MySpace, which Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. bought for a cool $580 mil, claimed 4.46% of all U.S. Internet visits for the first week in July 2006, beating out all three search giants for the No. 1 most visited site according to just-released HitWise data.
[/rant]

MSN is second-best, even in its own eyes, according to a hilarious post by Philipp Klöckner, in which he sets out to prove, successfully, that MSN Search results are so easily manipulated that anyone can outrank the MSN site search.msn.de on a search for the term search.msn.de.

Source: Philipp Lenssen’s Google Blogoscoped

There are now more web documents online than there are people on the planet.

Americans keep their computers on 9.2 hours a day, TVs on 8.9 hours a day, says the Harrison Group says. (I, of course, keep my computer on 24 hours a day — but that doesn’t mean I’m actually on it that much. Usually when my TV is on, I’m actually watching it.)

Rosner Research says that 30% of 18-24-year-olds worry about getting harassed or stalked online. Meanwhile, 78% of young people have a personal web site or blog. (And 85% of people 25 and older are sad to learn that they are no longer considered “young people.”)

HitWise said recently that Google sends about 1% of its traffic to eBay. In turn, 2.7% of Google’s traffic originated on eBay.

According to the Newspaper Association of America, advertising on newspaper web sites rose nearly 35% in Q1 2006 from Q1 2005, while print ad revenue rose 0.3%.

Bill Tancer of HitWise postulated that general keyword searches in the main index make up about 80% of all Google traffic, followed by image search at just under 10%.

Some other interesting stats on ZDNet’s IT Facts blog.

I just needed to vent. What is UP with Blogger these last few days? If you can get anything to load at all, odds are that none of it actually works. I’m trying to update the blog with lots of great Pulitzer-worthy stuff that will make you want to come back every day, I truly am, but Blogger won’t let me. I’d consider migrating over to TypePad or something, but that would mean having to rebuild the template, which, you may have noticed, was just rebuilt for your viewing and usability pleasure.

Most analytics programs, including the free-if-you-can-get-an-account Google Analytics, will show you not only the most popular entry points and how your visitors got there (for example, x number of visitors got to your homepage from a link in the Yahoo Directory), but also your top exit points (what the last page they viewed on your site was before clicking away), but many analytics programs don’t make it easy to figure out which of your blog’s links sent your visitor off your site. Clearly this is important to know if you’re trying to figure out what topics are interesting or valuable to your readers, and which elicit more yawns than clicks.

One of the blogs I read regularly has a feature I really like: when you mouse over any outgoing link (i.e., a link to another domain), it displays how popular that link is relative to others on that page. If you hover over the pop-up, it also gives you link to another page which tells you how many people clicked on the tracked link.

Here’s a screenshot of what it would look like on your site:

This feature is powered by MyBlogLog via some simple JavaScript code snippet you can drop into your blog’s template. It doesn’t use any kooky redirects either, so your links will keep passing PageRank (if you’re into that sort of thing).

If you follow the MyBlogLog links, you see the number of clicks a given link received:

I don’t know anything about this company, and they don’t have the slickest looking site, but I like them* based solely on item #5 in their FAQs:

What is the meaning of life?

What we’ve come up with can be reduced to two fundamental concepts. One, people are not wearing enough hats. Two, Matter is energy. In the universe, there are many energy fields, which we cannot normally perceive. Some energies have a spiritual source, which act upon a person’s soul. However, this soul does not exist automatically, as orthodox Christianity teaches, but has to be brought into existence by a process of guided self-observation. However, this is rarely achieved due to mankind’s unique ability to be distracted from spiritual matters by everyday trivia.

* Like them in a I’m-giving-them-props-on-my-site-for-being-funny kinda “like them.” Not necessarily a I’m-going-to-become-a major-investor like them.

McAfee Inc released a report titled “The Safety of Internet Search Engines Report,” showing that sponsored search results (i.e., PPC ads) are up to four times more likely to lead to phishing sites, or sites that attempt to install spyware.

The security company studied the results of over a thousand popular keywords on major search engines Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL and Ask. It estimates that in the United States 285 million clicks lead to “hostile sites” every month. The report makes a point to highlight that sponsored search, rather than being safer because there is a vetting and approval process, is actually much worse than the natural results. Fully 8.5% of sponsored links were determined to be dangerous, versus 3.1% of organic search results.

“We are troubled by the untrustworthiness of search engines’ ads. Search engines sells ads to sites that send users literally hundreds of e-mails per week…and sites that infect users’ computers with adware programs,” according to a statement in the report.

Updated: Read McAfee’s report The Safety of Internet Search Engines