webRED Issue 14 January 2006

Optymise would like to wish everyone all the best for the New Year. The office is now open again for 2006, so if you have any enquiries or would like to boost sales with a campaign upgrade for the New Year, please feel free to contact us!

The Month (and Year) That Was

Welcome back everyone; we hope you had a wonderful Christmas holiday and are rested and revved up to take on 2006!

The past year was fantastic for all of us here at Optymise, as well as the search industry as a whole. Constant activity as well as new tools and services has meant the Search world has sky rocketed last year, 2005 being dubbed "The Year of Consumer Search" by search guru Danny Sullivan.

I found this great "sum-up 2005" poem from SearchView Media Manager Kyle Lee, thought I'd share it:

Twas the night before the Holiday Party
And all the offices were locked tight.
Agencies and search engines
Were ready to party the next night.

Alone in her cubicle, space heater by her side,
Sat one industry blogger, with nothing to hide.
Keystrokes are flying, the year she's reflecting,
From IPO announcements to the last convention.

With Google announcing their public offering,
Stocks selling for $113 were a bargain.
Gmail became the Internet "in" thing,
And Keyhole was acquired for satellite imaging.

Google for books and videos without limit.
See the Numa Numa video of a kid lip syncing in it.
CPC's are on the rise - no kidding!
Thanks to Google's Quality Based Bidding.

Some updates to brands to become more familiar:
Miva was FindWhat, Yahoo! was Overture.
Now there's the move for the next Search Engine King
Creatively named Yahoo! Marketing.

Onwards Tier I's, On Google and Yahoo!
And all of a sudden, there were more than two.
Microsoft announced MSN Search.
A new choice for advertisers was now unearthed.

The launch of MSN was not without flaw.
Quickly as they came, quicker was the withdraw.
Other engines caught up to industry trends,
Jeeves gets paid search and AOL more new friends.

Our blogger proofed her latest entry without fail,
And opened up Outlook for one last mass email.
"Happy Holidays to the industry-wishing much success,
Here's to revolutionizing Search in 2006."

Happy reading

Until next month
Robyn

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Google Launches Online Video Search

It's here, video.google.com. Google's mission is to organize the world's information, and that includes video. Now Google has launched Video Search which offers viewers a way to see material from archived TV programs, educational videos, personal productions and more.

Just type in your search term (for instance, "ipod" or any television programme) and Google Video will search the closed captioning and text descriptions of all the videos in our archive for relevant results. Click on a video title on your results page and you can view still images from the video and, where a transcript is available, short snippets of transcript text.

Google has been collecting video from users since April, but until now that content has not been accessible. Google now allows you to keyword search user-submitted video content, and if you download the new Google Video Viewer you can watch the content directly in Internet Explorer or Firefox on computers running Microsoft Windows.

"We have a lot of content that we've received via the upload program, and we've been overwhelmed with the quality," said Peter Chane, senior product manager for Google Video. The content covers a wide range of subject material, and includes both amateur and professionally produced material.

To find content to view, search for it through the Google Video Search. This is the same interface used to search the television programming that Google has been indexing since December of last year.

The difference is that you can actually play videos uploaded by users, while you can only see stills and transcripts from the television programming. Viewable videos are indicated by a triangular "play" icon at the top of a search result.

To view videos, you first need to download the new Google Video Viewer, a small applet that allows you to click on Google Video Search results and watch the video play directly within the search results. Until now, Google Video has ironically offered only still images of the television programming it has indexed. The video viewer is adapted from the open source VideoLan (VLC) player, a small application that plays the mpeg audio and video formats that Google requires for user submitted videos.

Google Video search looks at metadata encoded with the video. Chane said many videos were also submitted with transcripts and annotations that are time-coded, allowing playback to begin at the point where your search terms are located in clips. If your search terms appear in multiple locations, results will display thumbnail stills and snippets from those locations, as well.

At this point, there is no categorization, directory-type structure or any other information that lets you know what kind of video content is available - you just have to search and hope for the best. To be fair, the same is true for most other video search services, such as Yahoo! Video, though Yahoo! does offer an advanced video search that gives you more control over your results.

Chane said that Google plans to continue to add content, and will also make the Google Video Viewer available for other platforms sometime soon.

Google also plans to offer the ability for content owners to charge a fee for users to view video. Google will take a small portion of the fee to defray its costs. Chane did not say when Google plans to implement this pay-per-view feature, though it's likely to use the online payment system that Google is developing.

Source: SearchEngineWatch.Com

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Search World Highlights

2005's Top Search Terms!

BBC's report on 2005's top search engine terms was interesting. Ms Jackson's name was the top query on the internet following her, erm… "wardrobe malfunction" at the 2004 Superbowl, along with natural disasters, consumer products and stars. Here it is (the list of combined search engine's top searches):

Central to Google Pack is the Google Updater, a new tool that downloads, installs and maintains all the software in the Google Pack.

Once installed, it will let you know when updates and new programs become available. Google Updater can also be used to uninstall software.

At this time it is only available for Windows XP.

Now, why would Google go to the trouble of developing a bundle of free software?

According to Marissa Mayer, Vice President of search products and user experience at Google, the pack was developed to give users a way to painlessly install all the essential software they need in a matter of minutes.

That seems all very philanthropic, but keep in mind that one of the things Google does best is making money by giving things away for free.

If Google Pack becomes popular, it will bring new types of users to Google. And because the bundle includes Google Toolbar and Google Desktop, this in turn means more searches and more money for Google.

In his article about Google Pack and Google Video Store John Batelle sees this double launch as a sign that Google is starting to act like what he calls a Really Big Company.

To suss out the Google Pack, and download some free software for yourself, see pack.google.com.

Source: Pandia.Com

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This Month's FAQ

This month's Q & A discusses Search Engine Spam

Question: What is Search Engine Spam (Or SEO Spam)?

Answer: In the search engine world, spam is defined as the manipulation of a web page to give it an artificial boost in the search engine rankings. Generally, spam is what the search engines say it is. i.e., it is defined by the search engines themselves. Each of the major search engines provide specific guidelines describing what webmasters should and should not do to their web pages in order to achieve a better search engine ranking, though that has not always been the case.

Several methods are universally deemed search spam, including hidden text, spammed doorway pages, and mirror pages. The major search engines identify these as spam and avoid indexing them in searches.

Source: SEO Logic

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