search marketing blog: ambergreen

Google’s Adwords team is always fielding questions regarding trademarks and how trademarked terms are handled, and it’s something that we here at ambergreen are constantly dealing with too.  Now over at Inside Adwords they have attempted to tackle questions asked by trademark owners and advertisers trying to use their trademarks in ads or keyword lists.

In the first part of a two part series, some common questions asked by trademark owners are addressed, including how to prevent unauthorised advertisers from using trademarked terms in their ads, plus how to add authorised trademark users. 

Yahoo! to white label Yahoo! Answers – Yahoo! to tie up with major UK brands to license its social search service to ISPs and mobile networks.

Google and Yahoo! in duplicate content scrap! – no-one is saying who, but Google seem to have produced an IE7 promo page that is almost identical to one produced by Yahoo! Matt Cutts has even offered an apology.

IBM and Yahoo! to offer free data search tool – corporate search tool set to challenge Google with free version of business-focused search product, OmniFind

Local search gets easier at Google – search engine to offer local businesses free expandable plus box

Four million Europeans write blogs says Forrester Research - the average blogger is young, tends to trust other bloggers, and is more open-minded than the average online consumer according to research

A new McAfee survey has found that AOL has the most trustworthy search results, not listing sites that might be unsafe for searchers. Testing 2,500 results McAfee found that only 3.6% of those sites returned in the top 5 pages for the queries were unsafe or risky.

These figures show that the engines seem to be winning the war against unsafe spammy sites, with the vast majority of results being safe. The red results above are dangerous sites (i.e. giving out adware, sending spam if you give an email address) and yellow sites, which are classified as those which deserve caution (tries to change browser settings, pop-up ads).

Interestingly it was the paid results that were found to be the most risky across all search engines, as seen below.

This survey was first carried out in May, with the update information being added two days ago. Changes over the past 6 months show that since the release of the first study in May 2006, the percentage of red and yellow sites in search results decreased from 5.0% to 4. 4%. But while Google, AOL, and Ask now return safer results than they did in May, while Yahoo! and MSN return riskier results.

Following yesterday’s report on click fraud with Google’s business product manager for trust and safety, Shuman Ghosemajumder, talking to Andy Beal of MarketingPilgrim.com, Ghosemajumder has posted on his blog to clarify his comments and add more information.

It seems that, according to Ghosemajumder, there was a level of misunderstanding and, “I never said that our click fraud rate is less than 2%.

Instead, what I said is that the quantity of invalid clicks which we detect as a result of reactive investigations is a “negligible proportion” of the total number of invalid clicks. Andy asked me if that percentage is less than 2%. I told him that I was not able to provide a bound, but yes, “negligible”

US research has found that most online shoppers see free postage and special deals not available on the high street as incentives to spend more during the Christmas period.

More than 9 out of 10 of those surveyed said that free postage promoted greater spending, while 65% said that special offers helped open their wallets.

The Consumer Internet Barometer report released by The Conference Board also found that 50% of Christmas shoppers would buy more if the goods were only available online, with 50% saying that the ability to return the goods to a high street store would also induce them to spend more money.

“Consumers are clearly willing to increase their online holiday purchases, but only if retailers are willing to offer holiday bargains online that are better than or different from what they are offering in stores,” says Lynn Franco, Director of The Conference Board Consumer Research Center. “If retailers want to increase their share of the online market, free shipping, exclusivity and bargains are sure ways to get consumers to point, click and order more during the holidays.”

That said, most of those surveyed said that they would make their largest purchases at a bricks and mortar store, with only 5% saying that they would spend more than $500 online.

Panama opened up to new US advertisers – Yahoo! has today opened their new ad platform to new advertisers following a successful launch in October.

Wikipedia launches free community website tools – Wikipedia is to offer software, storage and network access free to website creators which they can then keep the advertising revenue from.

NationMaster offers statistics search you can trust – New search engine opens up reliable research repositories for easier investigations.

Google to host free landing pages for local businesses – Google’s Adwords Starter Edition will offer new customers landing pages with basic phone numbers and addresses information.

MarketingPilgrim.com recently managed to have a conversation with Google’s business product manager for trust and safety, Shuman Ghosemajumder, on the subject of click fraud. Ghosemajumder told the site that invalid clicks at Google was “on average is in the single digits, quarter over quarter.”

Then rather surprisingly they managed to get some real Google info on what the issue really looks like from the inside.Showing the site’s Andy Beal an apparently ‘for Google eyes only’ presentation at the recent SES, Ghosemajumder showed how Google determine which clicks are fraudulent, using a four-stage identification and filtering process.

It makes interesting reading and shows that not only are Google apparently becoming a little more transparent, but that they are also becoming increasingly fed up of the speculation which has put figures as high as 30% in some cases.

Google Earth has always been one of the web’s coolest tools, but the introduction of the latest add on to the technology really lifts Google Earth, combining the geographical technology with user generated content to provide a more in depth experience.

As the Web 2.0 march continues on, Google has taken data from Wikipedia, Panoramio and their own Earth community to add another layer to the product, making it possible to fly around the globe and read what other users have written, photographed and posted about various locations.

The use of Panoramio allows Google Earth to connect photos and the locations in which they were taken, meaning that the world is easier to explore than ever before.  

Neilsen/Netratings is to expand its internet audience measurement panel in a bid to improve the accuracy of its services.

The company currently reports on less than 3,000 domains, but will see this increase to 8,300.  Audience demographic reporting capabilities on brands will also be increased five fold to 2,000.

Louise Ainsworth, managing director for Neilsen//NetRatings EMEA, said: “This increased investment in high-quality audience data will reap rewards for UK advertisers by enabling better targeting and a vastly improved understanding of audience behaviour across a much broader portfolio of sites.”

There’s a new visual search engine in town that I’ll be tempted to use for the cuteness of its logo alone. PageBull collects results from several engines, presenting images of each result in a list of results.

PageBull’s results are shown as pictures of the search result pages, doing away with text entirely. Depending on your browser window size you can select different size images, and while its sometimes hard to read the on page text, it gives a goods impression of what the page is all about.

With images generated on the fly and the search term highlighted on the page, Pagebull is really impressive. And so cute - mooo!