“Last 7 days” in Search

By Brooke Nichols

While tracking the top performing search bylines this week, these titles caught my eye. It’s a somewhat random smattering of smarketing news for your Saturday or Sunday. Enjoy!

The Fine Line Between Search And Discovery
Discovery online can take a number of forms. It’s generally offered as a counterpoint to searching. With search, users enter a query and ideally find exactly what it is they are looking for (even if the search needs to be refined), while discovery presents new information to the user at a time when there’s no explicit interest expressed. Much of the reason for the divergence of discovery and search stems from some people citing how consumers spend only 5% of their time online searching, so the rest of their time online is undervalued. Yet often searching is the best way to discover something, whether it’s a new site, new information, or new products.

Is There Room for Another Free Analytics Tool?
Get your free analytics tools here. Here... Or here.

As I've said on a number of occasions, never have search and analytics been so closely aligned. Which is probably the reason that Yahoo recently purchased IndexTools (Disclosure: My company has been a long standing partner of IndexTools). Quite a lot has been written since the announcement was made at the beginning of the month. But this is the first opportunity I've had to give it any thought.

Microsoft Sees Ad Growth, Shrugs at Yahoo
Microsoft will get along in the online ad space, with or without Yahoo under its wings. That was one message conveyed in this afternoon's earnings call with investors. The company's Q1 results pleased analysts, though its net profit fell to $4.39 billion.

"With or without a Yahoo acquisition, Microsoft is focused on the online advertising market," said SVP and CFO Chris Liddell, mirroring comments made earlier this week by Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer.

Online Advertisers’ Task List
In 2006, WebVisible hired Nielsen//NetRatings for a benchmark survey examining Internet consumers' use of search engines to find local businesses, particularly those in the service industry, such as dentists, plumbers and carpet cleaners.

Holy Mother of Linkbait
This past Tuesday night (and, eventually, Wednesday morning), Rand and I sat down and "wrote" a post that we were quite sure was rather amusing.

We had stumbled onto a linkbait idea that hadn't been done before and that people seemed to enjoy. As of right now, the post has received 2489 diggs in just over twenty-four hours. It went hot while Rand and I were flying back from Long Beach, where we'd attended SMX Social Media. When we'd boarded the plane, the post had 150 Diggs. When we checked it again after arriving back in Seattle, it had 1800.

Web 2.0 Expo - Creating a Social StrategyLee Odden's Web 2.0 Expo coverage discusses "the importance of not jumping into social technologies and applications just because the competition does, but to have specific objectives and measurement with defensible results."

0 comments:

 
Copyright © 2008 Resolution Media, Inc. All rights reserved.