Newsletter January 2008
Dear readers,
I would like to take the opportunity to share some of the great feedback we got from the speeches Relevant Traffic made at the Search Engine Strategies in Paris earlier this month, click the link to take part of our colleagues interviews’. http://www.neteco.com/91840-reportage-video-search-engine-strategies-2008.html
Leif Eliasson, CEO, Relevant Traffic
NEWS
Microsoft Offers $1.2 Billion For Norwegian Search Company
They may not have Google's market share but Microsoft does not seem to be stopping its acquisition of more properties in the search space, having offered $1.2 billion for Norwegian company, Fast Search and Transfer. The Oslo-based company "is a specialist in search technology used inside companies and government agencies to cull for information in documents, databases and software applications. Its software helps teams of workers quickly search the corporate storehouse of information for answers about procurement, marketing, manufacturing and product design," the NYTimes.com reported.
Google may lose ad spend to Facebook
Google and its rival search engines may lose advertising pounds to sites such as Facebook and Bebo this year, as businesses shift their marketing focus to cash in on the social networking phenomena. A new report, The Impact of Social Networking in the UK, claims that 2008 will see social networks improve their functionality, and in particular their 'search' facilities. Social networks know far more about their users than search engines and traditional portals. They could, for example, choose to show an advertisement only to men who live in Leeds, aged between 34 and 55, who enjoy Italian food. This information could command much higher advertising rates than the straight forward 'sponsored links' that are shown on Google.
Twingly: The Eurocentric Blog Search Engine
Sweden-based Twingly is a soon-to-be-launched Eurocentric blog search engine. While Google has stepped up its blog indexing service, often visiting the same blog multiple times as new content gets produced, the engine casts such a wide net that the quality of the results varies greatly. The same goes for Technocrati, which is by far the most popular blog search engine in terms of unique visitors, according to comScore. But Twingly aims to be more selective, and deliver high quality, non-spam blog content as a result. Twingly will do this by indexing a small set of known, legitimate blogs and then following the links they post to other blogs. While it may take a bit longer for such an exclusive network to grow, the idea is that good blogs will not link out to spam blogs--so the results will be more relevant and valuable, thus enticing searchers to keep coming back.
More News
Google Still Has Uphill Climb in Growing Chinese Market