search marketing blog: ambergreen

As of this afternoon ambergreen is on holiday!

Following our Christmas party last night we all need the next few weeks to recover, so this afternoon we’ll be hitting the road to various parts of the country for a well earned break.

A few of us will still be kicking about the office during the break, but we’ll be up and running with a full crew again on January 3^rd.

So Merry Christmas and happy New Year from all of us here, may your presents be many, and your hangovers short!

Have a great holiday!

Steve Rubel at Micropersuasion posts that Google is building a stealth podcast search engine. Google appears to be prompting Google Base users to upload and share their podcasts. Users are offered opportunities to bulk submit podcasts and are promised potential audiences of millions. A quick search of Google Base shows….

Google on duplicate content – fresh from a round of questions at SES Chicago concerning duplicate content, the Google Webmaster blog discuss what duplicate content is, and how Google approaches it.

User intent – what are people looking for when they type ‘Google’ into Google? what is it that they actually want to find? Search Engine Land discusses how Google and Yahoo! are working to understand user behavior and types of queries.

UK internet retail sales reach £3 billion in a month - November sees the UK’s 25 million online shoppers go crazy for online Christmas shopping, making November the highest grossing online sales month ever.

Time Magazine’s person of the Year is always eagerly awaited, but I bet you never thought that you would be the winner did you?

Referring to all the ‘you’s that have come together to make the year one of the most interesting and innovative years we’ve ever seen in the online world, Time has honoured millions of people all over the world for their contribution to the global community in 2006.

According to Time, “In 2006, the World Wide Web became a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter”

While individuals all over the world have caused mayhem this year in various countries and by various means, Time has honoured the fact that the internet has been the medium for a tremendous force of collective will, a collaboration of millions of people all over the world coming together to share, inspire, discuss and empower – “a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before.”

We have watched as community became king online, and while there are those for whom the online community has done little more than provide footage of Britney Spears talking time travel, or Paris Hilton falling out of yet another limousine (hasn’t she gotten out of enough of them to figure out how to do it with dignity by now?!), the real story is how people have mobilised online to talk about the state of the world, making global media sit up and take notice of the millions of people out there who don’t normally have their voices heard.

As Time says, “Sure, it’s a mistake to romanticize all this any more than is strictly necessary. Web 2.0 harnesses the stupidity of crowds as well as its wisdom. Some of the comments on YouTube make you weep for the future of humanity just for the spelling alone, never mind the obscenity and the naked hatred.

But that’s what makes all this interesting. Web 2.0 is a massive social experiment, and like any experiment worth trying, it could fail.”

Whether it succeeds or fails, Web 2.0 has opened up the eyes and ears of world – long may it continue.

This isn’t something that Thomas the Cat of Tom and Jerry fame suffered, but a problem spreading the internet using world as a result of badly designed and hosted websites, according to research from the UK’s the Social Issues Research Centre.

Characterised by a quickening of the heart, sweating, intense click and bashing of the mouse (it really does sound like an episode of Tom and Jerry), Mouse Rage Syndrome affects all internet users sooner or later according to the study identified key factors that can negatively affect cardio functions, immune and nervous systems

According to the SIRC the “..test results indicate that users want Google-style speed, function, and accuracy from all of the Web sites they visit, and they want it now.”

Unfortunately, many Web sites and their servers cannot deliver this.”

A recent thread at WebmasterWorld saw the debate over whether SEO should be a major part of the web development process rear its head again. The ‘if you build it they will come’ mentality no longer fits with the way in which the internet and search engines work, and major marketing investment is sufficient to make sure that your site stands out from the millions of other websites out there.

Today search marketing is vital, but when it is not integrated into a site’s design, it can make the task of driving qualified traffic to the right products, services or information even harder.

WebmasterWorld’s thread saw the poster “reseller”, a Senior Member, posting “Watch Out For Those Web Designers & Programmers,” and listing aspects of search marketing practice that should be considered when building a new website.

“I just wonder, why site owners don’t “incorporate” SEO Specialists from the beginning as part of the site building / site migration team to be sure that their sites would be “search engine friendly” too?”

Read the full thread and add your thoughts.

Google launches a new version of the toolbar for Firefox, Google Toolbar 3 Beta – this new toolbar allows you to access your bookmarks from any computer, add custom buttons to your, and share web pages via Blogger, Gmail, and SMS.

Blogging set to peak in 2007 says report – analysts Gartner predict that mid 2007 will see 100 million blogs live.

Phising concerns grow as UK sees 8,000% increase in banking scams – FSA warns that it is ‘very concerned’ about the growth in phishing

Google has launched a patent search site in the US which will allow users to perform full text searches of patents filed from 1790 through the middle of 2006, with regular updates adding new patents.

Using the same technology as Google Book Search, Google Patents lets users search by various criteria such as patent number, inventor and filing date.

Yahoo! is celebrating the first birthday of its social Q&A site only weeks after Google put their similar product into retirement.

With 16.6 million users gathered in the past year, Yahoo! Answers might just be one of Yahoo!’s most successful products ever. To celebrate Yahoo! commissioned a survey with Harris Interactive which found that one in three adults have used a Q&A site, with half of these (52%) saying that the answers they received helped them make a decision – and with top quality questions such as Can muhammad ali kelle fight a tiger and kill it?i mean if a tiger gets a punch of his on it face will it die? – that’s both astounding and a little worrying…

In its first year, Yahoo! Answers has seen 60 million answers from its active community, which is unsurprising given that 77% of adults questioned said that they were more likely to turn to the internet if they needed an answer to something their friends and family weren’t familiar with – or more likely that they might freak them out given some of the crazy questions on there. You’ve gotta be concerned.

According to Hitwise data, last week Yahoo! Answers ranked 240 among all categories of websites and 22 in the Hitwise Net Communities and Chat category, based on share of UK internet visits. The market share of UK based visits has grown 9% in the past month, 39% in the past eight weeks and more than 30 fold in the past six months. Pretty impressive.

I love Yahoo! Answers – its supremely entertaining and it really does have a great community feel, as different to Google’s attempt as you could get. Just try not to lie awake at night worrying about how the lives of some of the people are going to turn out….

Pandia has come up with a great list called ‘What we want from Google this Christmas’ which includes

• Make blogger work
• Give us a better mashup
• Consistent navigation
• Spam reduction
• Better bookmarking

If you could have anything from Google this Christmas (sorry, but you cant ask for Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s wallets) what would you ask Search Engine Santa to bring? See what Matt Cutts has to say about the list….