May 14th, 2008 Posted by: kristy Comments (0)
Interesting read from yesterday’s Adnews.
Young Aussies are fitting 38 hours of activities into every 24-hour period thanks to multi-tasking, new research from Synovate has found.
The annual Synovate Young Asians study, which covers 11 markets across Asia Pacific and looks into youth media perceptions and consumption, has for the first time published findings on Australian youth.
The survey found that 52% of Australian youth say their internet usage has increased from the previous year, compared to 16% of respondents who reported an increase in TV watching, 17% in reading newspapers, 13% in reading magazines, 30% in playing sports and 27% in “offline†meetings with friends. Read more
May 14th, 2008 Posted by: phil Comments (0)
Powerset, a much talked-about start up search engine has finally launched. It’s not really a search engine, as such, but a clever toolset that interprets natural language queries, and facts on a web page to radically change the way we consume information.
Read more
April 22nd, 2008 Posted by: phil Comments (0)
Google’s VP in charge of search quality, Udi Manber, gives a rare interview to Popular Mechanics.
Here’s a few interesting things from the articles.
1) There were 450 changes (he calls them “improvements”) to the natural search algorithm in the past year.
2) Personalised search is well underway. For users logged into a Google account and have opted to save their search history, Google will utilise your search history to refine the search results, just for you. A key takeout from this is that ranking, as a measure of success for natural search, is of waning importance. Oh, and search results should get better for users.
3) Cross Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) - this is a recently launched feature that can take a user’s query, translate it into another language, do the search in that language, and then translate the results back into the user’s own language, using Google Translation. It’s available in 12 languages. This is huge and opens up billions of pages of new content.
April 8th, 2008 Posted by: Sam Comments (1)
Google has made a policy revision that applies to complaints we receive regarding trademarks in the UK and Ireland. For complaints received on or after Friday, April 4, 2008, they will no longer review a term corresponding to the trademarked term as a keyword trigger. Whilst they have stated they will continue to perform a limited ‘courtesy investigation’ of complaints regarding ad text purported to be in violation of a trademark, it is likely to be just that: a courtesy.
This means it will be possible for competitors to bid on each other’s previously protected brand terms (i.e. Apple could begin bidding on the words “Zune” or “Nokia”) within the UK/Ireland. This represents a lucrative revenue stream for Google as it will draw large SEM spenders, particularly those with protectionist brand strategies, to dramatically increase their bids on those small number of highly used brand words in order to ward off competitors and maintain a top position on the search page. Read more
February 4th, 2008 Posted by: phil Comments (1)
Microsoft has just proposed to buy Yahoo for approximately $46b, a 61% premium over its current market valuation.
A clear and stated goal is for Microsoft to try and take on Google. This will be a multi-pronged attack on search, email, display, maps, local business listings, photo sharing, social networking….
From a search point of view, it will be interesting to see what happens with Search technologies. Live Search has come a long way and is a much better product that previous versions, but it’s still poorly regarded, basically because it’s too easy to manipulate the results which leads to poor quality search results. Read more
January 29th, 2008 Posted by: phil Comments (0)
Publicis’ Maurice Levy and Google’s Eric Schmidt have announced a partnership between the two companies designed to find ways to make online advertising more efficient.
Google has formed a dedicated team to service Publicis, giving early access to new advertising technologies, and Publicis is helping Google to better understand advertiser demands.
Some of the initiatives involve training and talent exchange.
We’ll keep you posted as these initiatives roll out in Australia.
