Category: Archive

Football has been a common theme in the United States in search trends and traffic, as discussed recently. That has mainly been related to the National Football League and college football. However, a new league debuts tonight, and while it may not come close to achieving the amount of popularity of these other two, a fair amount of people will likely be searching for information about it tomorrow (and late tonight).

You’ve probably seen reports of big webmail phishing attacks over the week. A spokesperson for Symantec’s Message Labs tells Murdok, however, that most reports have glossed over a key point to consider. That is that the potential impact on other aspects of victims’ online lives are in jeopardy as well.

Yahoo is showing off a new advertising campaign it’s running for General Mills. A spokesperson for Yahoo tells Murdok it’s a "good example of how advertisers are turning to Yahoo for more than a typical search or display ad buy."
General Mills is targeting "boomers" with the campaign, which is themed around "vitality" and is a content-based program. It includes news content, as well as retirement, travel-related content, and games.

The number of U.S. searches grew 31 percent across all media platforms between June 2008 and June 2009 (21.9 billion searches in June 2009), according to a new study by TMP Directional Marketing.
Search engines continue to be the main source for local business information. Local search sites increased slightly in usage, from 11 percent in 2008 to 12 percent in 2009. Also Internet yellow page sites gained ground as primary sources of local business information, from 19 percent usage last year to 21 percent this year.

The flu is a hot topic right now, unfortunately. A lot of people have it, have had it recently, or will get it soon. Flu shots are all over the news – Who gets them first? How many are available? Should you even get one? These are all questions circulating through the news media.

Google has added an option to quickly view PDF documents in your browser from search results, while keeping formatting intact. This comes in the form of a simple "Quick View" link located in the search result snippet for PDF results.

Real-time search – along with Twitter’s bank account – may be about to receive a couple of big boosts.  A new report indicates that both Google and Microsoft are interested in obtaining access to all of the info Twitter can serve up. 

The FBI has charged nearly 100 people in the U.S. and Egypt as part of "Operation Phish Phry," one of the largest cyber fraud phishing investigations ever.
The people charged in Operation Phish Phry targeted U.S. banks and victimized hundreds of account holders by stealing their financial information and using it to transfer around $1.5 million to bogus accounts they controlled.

As you may recall, Google launched its "search options" feature earlier this year. This is a set of filtering options users can engage for their search results. They include things like blogs, books, images, video, forum results, timeframe, etc.

Social publishing company Scribd has launched a free version of its document reader for select media companies and blogs.
Companies involved in the initial launch include The New York Times, Los Angles Times, Chicago Tribune, The Huffington Post and Mediabistro.
The new Scribd reader includes a Scribd watermark and allows media companies to embed source materials such as court filings and memos in articles. Scribd says its reader will increase people’s time on a site and extend brands across the Internet. More than five million Scribd readers have been embedded online.