If you’ve been paying attention the last few days, you might have noticed an uncharacteristically* low number of posts on all my blogs. The reason: I have embarked on a new career as a cable television repairman.
See, my wife and I moved into a new apartment last Friday (it’s lovely, by the way), and with that came the peril of getting cable installed so I could keep blogging without interruption

After an alarming number of security problems (Gmail contacts exposure, flaw in Blogger Custom Domains plus last month’s problems), things got back to normal. Google removed the self-promoting tips, started to show stats for Google Reader and for custom search engines. January 2007 brought a lot of updates for Google web search: new or updated OneBoxes (blog search, local, maps), related searches

A selection of stories posted to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with search-related headlines from around the Web:

Google reported strong earnings today, with income of 1.03 billion on revenues of $3.21 billion, up 67 percent year-to-year.

Google-owned sites accounted for $1.98 billion, or 62 percent of total revenues, in the quarter. That’s an 80 percent increase over the year before, and a 22 percent increase over the third quarter

Following the share-of-search statistics from Compete and comScore, we now have numbers from Hitwise and Nielsen/NetRatings.

SEO, social media optimization & link building experts Neil Patel and Cameron Olthuis have announced on their Pronet Advertising blog that they have been hired by Text Link Ads as Text Link Ads Evangelists.
As the newest Text Link Ads employees and probably the highest profile staff members since Andy Hagans, Neil and Cameron will help spread the gospel of text link advertising, link baiting, article distribution and paid reviews at SES, Pubcon and other conferences while also working to build

Retailers should move beyond their traditional paid search campaigns and pay attention to SEO and shopping search engines, according to a new study from TrafficLeader. We talked to the authors for today’s SearchDay, “Search Presents Challenges for Retailers.”

Just landed. Everyone knows Google crushed it again. But the stock seems to be priced already for crushing performance, because it did not pop in after hours. In fact, it dipped.

Seeking Alpha has the transcript of the earnings call. It’s really worth a read if you want to geek out - esp. Larry and Sergey’s comments on search and advertising, and the Q&A from the analysts.

Despite all of the grief that came my way yesterday, the MyBlogLog contest is still alive and well.
All you need to do is join our MyBlogLog community and you’ll automatically be entered to win a Microsoft Zune - or if you hate the idea of owning anything MSFT, we’ll send you an iPod instead

On a recent interview with ShoeMoney on Net Income, Google AdSense Product Manager Brian Axe confirmed that YouTube will be using Google AdSense to share revenues with the YouTube users, and they only need an AdSense publisher ID.

Working with the public, librarians encounter people from all walks of life, and various cultures and backgrounds.  It is inevitable that at some point during your career as a librarian that you will encounter a patron that does not speak your native language.  Where I currently work, I have run into a number of people who speak only Russian, Polish, or Spanish.  Thankfully I studied Spanish for four years while I was in school, and much of it has stuck with me, so I have been able to help those

An important part of search engine optimization (SEO) is link building.  As it relates to rankings, off page factors have become more and more important, which means link building and link popularity can pretty much make or break a site within the search engines.
Link popularity, put simply, refers to the number and quality of the incoming links that are pointing to your site.  A link from another site is like a vote, and the more votes you can get, the higher you will rank in the search engine

Who knew such a cold month would have so much going on? Awards shows, African
American History Month, Johnny
Cash’s birthday…February’s looking like a full dance card. Look to
Smart Answers to give you the info you need.

FEBRUARY: Smart Answers for Important Dates
Feb 1: Thomas
Edison completes the world’s first movie studio (1893)

An interesting discovery made through "Google in Your Language" gives us a few hints about an unknown service called "Fensi".  The requested translations for the service make it sound like a social network site — but I'm not sure about that since they have Orkut securely under their belt.  Here is a screenshot:

A [...]

Google today announced its financial results for the fourth quarter of 2006 - a total of $3.21 billion revenue, an 67% increase compare to the same period last year, and 19% compare to the previous quarter.
You can find the full report on Google’s Press Center, or download it in PDF format.

Google’s 2006 Q4 earnings beat Wall Street expectations when they announed today that revenues were up 67% over Q4 2005 and 16% more than last quarter.
From the Google Earnings Press Release:
Q4 Financial Summary
Google reported revenues of $3.21 billion for the quarter ended December 31, 2006, an increase of 67% compared to the fourth quarter of 2005 and an increase of 19% compared to the third quarter of 2006

Regular service on this blog will resume as soon as the media hype about Sweden building a virtual embassy in Second Life dies down and my waking hours return to some semblance of normality — I mean, it’s cool and all, but not that big a deal, is it? Not as big a deal as the ongoing genocide in Sudan, surely?

I hope everyone is still as enthusiastic when the embassy actually opens, sometime in April. You’re all invited:-)Comments (0)

Last week when visiting Google, I had a long background discussion with
Shuman Ghosemajumder about click fraud issues. Shuman is Google’s business
product manager for trust and safety. I’ll follow up on some of our discussion
as I’m able to get some material cleared. But one of the most fascinating things
was his explanation on how some third party auditing firms don’t appear to be
matching up estimated fraud figures with refunds or even actual clicks
registered by advertisers.
Some of what he explained is now covered in two blog posts up on his personal
blog: Why Third-Party Click
Fraud Estimates Don’t Add Up and
Why Third-Party Click Fraud
Estimates Don’t Add Up - Part 2

In response to Matt McGee’s list of the four most underutilized pages on your site, Brian Geddes at eWhisper.net blogged today on what he thinks is the most underutilized page on your website: the “Thank you” page. Brian says of “Thank you” pages:
[D]o you give someone the ability to continue to interact with your site? Or are you saying ‘Thank you very much, now go away’? Don’t just lose that customer interaction, continue to engage them towards other aspects of your website or business.

Brian’s on to something here: once you’ve acquired a lead for your business, are you taking full advantage of their interest? Do you offer them more opportunities to find what they need from you or other things that might interest them?
MarketingSherpa’s blog this week suggests that you should definitely include offers on your “Thank you” page

Reed Elsevier is one of the largest, most influential publishers in the world, a powerhouse in the science and medical, legal, education and business markets. But the company also has a major online presence, with more than 1,000 web sites in just its business group.

Last year, Reed Business decided to leverage this significant online presence by creating Zibb, a business-to-business search engine that allows users to search across all of Reed Business’ web sites

Our very own Martin Omander can be found guest starring over at the O’Reilly Windows DevCenter. Martin has written a detailed and enjoyable tutorial on implementing a .NET application using the Google Checkout API. Insightful reading for Google Checkout users, even those that work on a different platform or in a different programming language. Read the full article at: Build a .NET App for Google Checkout.

If you want to have desktop icons for your favorite Google Talk contacts, there’s an easy to do it.Right-click on your desktop and select New / shortcut. Then type:gtalk:chat?jid=[Gmail-Username]@gmail.comand the name of your friend (of course, replace [Gmail-Username] with the actual username). When you click on the shortcut, Google Talk will open a new window where you can chat with your friend

Java-developer and entrepeneur Paul Tyma applied for a job at Google, got through the Google interview process alive, and is back to tell us how he managed to do that. [Via Digg.]

Also see Google employee Niniane Wang’s guide to preparing for a software interview.

Also see this site’s Googlers who blog page (’cause not all who do get fired). [Advertisement] Mojo Helpdesk 100% Hosted Ticket Tracking with customer satisfaction ratings. Free trial too.

Here’s what you need to do to make Google go crazy (this supposedly works for other websites too, though I only got it to work with Google):

Go to Google.com

Remove everything from the address bar, then copy & paste the following into it:

javascript:R=0; x1=.1; y1=.05; x2=.25; y2=.24; x3=1.6; y3=.24; x4=300; y4=200; x5=300; y5=200; DI=document.images; DIL=DI.length; function A(){for(i=0; i-DIL; i++){DIS=DI[ i ].style; DIS.position=’absolute’; DIS.left=Math.sin(R*x1+i*x2+x3)*x4+x5; DIS.top=Math.cos(R*y1+i*y2+y3)*y4+y5}R++}setInterval(’A()’,5); void(0);

Hit enter

Oh, I love subtle interface idiocy – this one is from an online Turkish translator (they adapted this from a multi-language dialog, where the approach makes sense):

English
Turkish

to

Turkish
English

[Advertisement] Want to advertise here? Please contact me (Philipp). Your ad rotates on all blog (graphic + text) and feed pages (text).

Google has just released their Q4 numbers and it looks like they’ve blown away estimations.
Fourth quarter net income surged to $1.03 billion from $372 million during the same period in 2004!!
Sales (excluding payments to ad partners) grew 70%+ to $2.23 billion.
Wall Street had been expecting $2.92 per share and got $3.29.
TheStreet.com adds…
Google-owned sites generated 62% of total revenue and posted a gross revenue increase of 80% from a year ago

Google begins its earnings call for the fourth quarter of 2006 in about 10
minutes, but the earnings are out now. You’ll find them

here from the US Security & Exchange Commission and
here from Google
itself. From the release:
Click to continue reading…

Google’s fourth-quarter revenue rose 67 percent on continued strength in its cash-cow paid search business, beating analyst estimates.

Net earnings for the quarter ended December …

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on
Search Engine Land and from other
places across the web:
From Search Engine Land:

How Many Words Should My Articles Be To Rank Well?Aaron Wall has an excellent write up named Optimal Word Count & Web Page Copy Length. In short, Aaron explains that there is “no universal correct or incorrect answer to how much content is right.” Aaron then goes through tips on how to write good content, that is easy to…

Google Can’t Use “Gmail” Name In EuropeGoogle loses European GMail trademark battle by The Register reports that Google is not allowed to use the trademarked term “GMail” in Europe

Google had announced that it would be flying over parts of Australia on Australia Day, last week Friday, in order to take photos for Google Earth and Google Maps (Microsoft was doing it, too). Australians were excites, with people planning to build giant signs and write words on the ground, or just wave at the sky, in order to live on for a while in Google’s maps of the country

While Del-Boy and Rodders may have had their “Beano to Margate“, I’m looking forward to my trip to England on Friday.
I’ll get the chance to visit my family in Brighton over the weekend, then meet with a client in London, on Monday.
Posting will be a little erratic next Monday and Tuesday, as I’ll be on a different time zone and obviously busy with a client.
If anyone wants to grab a beer near Victoria Station on Monday night, leave a comment or drop me an email.
This time on Saturday, we could be millionaires I’ll be eating fish and chips!
[For all US readers, there’s probably at least a couple of references that will be lost on you

While last year people complained that Google lacks stickiness or Yahoo has more popular services, a lot of recent reports from companies that measure Internet audiences show that Google gains more users than ever, and not only for web search.Comscore reports that Google is the number two site worldwide in 2006, but grew 9 percent, unlike Microsoft and Yahoo, that only grew 5 percent in 2006 and occupy the first and the third position.”Google’s popularity has been driven in part by its international appeal as well as the rapid uptake of some of Google’s applications beyond traditional Web search,” said Bob Ivins, managing director of comScore Europe

Until recently, we’ve stated that sellers must charge their buyers within 72 hours of a successful authorization to be guaranteed funds. However, some sellers have mentioned that 72 hours often isn’t enough time, especially during holidays or long weekends.
In response to this feedback, we’ve extended the authorization period to seven calendar days for guaranteed funds. Now you can step away from the office without having to worry about charg

Wordtracker has launched a free keyword suggestion tool. The tool gives webmasters up to 100 keywords in each session.

According to Google Trends, Google searches for global warming have overtaken searches for terrorism. (As the lower part of the illustration shows, news mentions of “terorrism” are still higher than news mentions of “global warming,” though.) [Advertisement] Want to advertise here? Please contact me (Philipp). Your ad rotates on all blog (graphic + text) and feed pages (text).

Remember the Yahoo Wii site which built an original Wii information experience by using Yahoo Answers information, Flickr photos, user reviews and links to other Wii oriented sites which are indexed on Yahoo’s del.icio.us social bookmarking system?
Well, wii.yahoo.com can be seen as both a spotlight on the many Yahoo social media offerings or even what has been missing as a connection piece between Yahoo Social Media.
Regardless, Yahoo has found success in wii.yahoo.com and has dubbed the model Brand Universe.
Yahoo announced this week that it plans to build 100 other sites based upon Yahoo advertisers and popular brands from the film, video, music and gaming industries.
Miguel Helft of the New York Times reports:
Yahoo has already built a Brand Universe site around the Nintendo Wii, and on Tuesday it announced six more, which will be centered on Harry Potter; the video games Halo and the Sims; the television shows “The Office” and “Lost”; and Transformers, the toy line, television show, comic books and coming movie.
Other topics will be announced in the next few weeks, and all 100 sites will be introduced this year, Mr

Google reports earnings today.

Bear Sterns sent me an earnings note which declares:

Strong Paid Search Growth and International Market Share Gain Reaffirm Positive Outlook

· Paid Search Data Indicate Strength for Google. comScore released the December domestic paid search data yesterday

Steve Rubel at Micro Persuasion stumbled across Technorati WTF (currently down), which lists the most popular blog stories of the day in a Digg or Techmeme type hieracral system.

It’s nice to see more niche search engines using the Digg model for gauging popularity via user voting, and this form of social media is slowly growing outside of the realm of early adoptors and tech geeks.
Sure, bloggers still fall within that umbrella, somewhat, but as adoption of the Digg system continues to grow

I don’t get it.

Now, that doesn’t mean it’s not brilliant. I mean, in 1996, I told my fellow senior managers at Wired that the world didn’t need another search engine (we started Hotbot anyway and I’m pretty sure that’s the main reason Lycos bout HotWired).

From GigaOm’s coverage of Yahoo’s media day:

Throughout presentations from the Yahoo Media Group, a part of the new “Audience” division, the key word, uttered more times than we could count, was “promotions.” And so, in both overt and subtle fashion, Yahoo is a company transitioning itself into what’s essentially a marketing platform…..
The most obvious example of Yahoo’s increasing bent towards marketing is its new “Brand Universe” initiative, announced in November

Google lost another trademark battle against the German holder of the G-mail trademark, Daniel Giersch, The Register writes:

<<The Office for Harmonisation in the Internal Market (OHIM), the body which is responsible for European community trademarks, rejected Google’s appeal after a stiff battle with German-born venture capitalist Daniel Giersch.

Giersch, who has held his trademark for six years, has been fighting this battle since Google launched its email service in 2004.>>

Google already renamed Gmail to Google Mail for German users, though those who registered a *@gmail.com address early on didn’t need to switch to *@googlemail.com.

What’s G-mail anyway? Giersch wants to launch a “hybrid communication” solution at Gmail.de – you can register already to be informed when the service launches nationwide in Germany (right now it’s Beta-tested in the nice lil’ town of Itzehoe)

From ReadWriteWeb:

On Monday Google released a relatively minor, but useful, feature. It’s worth examining a bit more closely, because it’s yet another signal that Google is quietly pecking away at Microsoft’s lunch in office software. Now I know that Microsoft Office has a lot of advanced functionality that the online office apps don’t have, but hear me out…

I should have a regular roundup of new search startups, but for now, consider it noted: Digger. Release. More on Cnet’s investment here.

Jeremy Schoemaker was lucky enough to have Google AdSense product manager, Brian Axe, live on his Net Income show. As Shoemoney points out, getting any search exec to appear on a live show is a coup, let alone someone from Google.
There’s a lot of juicy stuff to be found in either the podcast, or Jeremy’s recap

StumbleUpon, the web surfing social network, is hands down a long term traffic builder for blogs, online businesses, and Web 2.0 services.
For a quick overview of SU:

Sites or users submit their URLs to StumbleUpon.
StumbleUpon members can find these sites via random yet targeted web surfing called “Stumbling”, clicking on the suggestions of their SU friends, or via StumbleUpon Search which matches user generated tags and search queries.
StumbleUpon users then vote on the sites or posts they find, with a thumbs up or thumbs down

Fensi seems to be the name of a new Google service, but there aren’t too many details about it. The only contexts I could find are:Who do you know?What are you looking for now? Just come on, join Fensi right now.Join Fensi, and you’ll never be bored!It may be a game, a social network or something completely different.

[Editor’s note: With this article, we’re welcoming guest contributor, Gareth Davies of GSINC, to the Marketing Pilgrim team.]
How come some ECommerce websites flourish but many just drift along or even fail altogether?
Having worked with many websites that have grown to turnovers of £1m GBP (and more) we have been able to observe common traits that apply to almost all of them

Aaron Wall has an excellent write up named Optimal Word Count & Web Page Copy Length. In short, Aaron explains that there is “no universal correct or incorrect answer to how much content is right.” Aaron then goes through tips on how to write good content, that is easy to read and “optimized for user experience.” The article is worth a read. Not only does it detail what type of content search engines may like, but it also gives examples by publishing format.

I’m with Pete Cashmore on this one. Popular video search engine, Blinkx, had launched a widget for blog owners and social networks (MySpace etc) that allows them to display relevant videos on their site.
But why?
Ok, so the videos are targeted, and the widget is not very intrusive, but where’s the benefit for me? Us? Bloggers?
I already have a number of widgets on Marketing Pilgrim - each already slowing down load times

Google loses European GMail trademark battle by The Register reports that Google is not allowed to use the trademarked term “GMail” in Europe. The Office for Harmonisation in the Internal Market (OHIM) held that Daniel Giersch’s trademark of the term was valid and that Google could not use it.