First off, my title may have unintentionally tricked you; this article revolves around what the Brits call “football,” but what we Americans identify as “soccer.” Sorry, NFL fans. But followers of the English Premier League have come to the right place, and it’s actually their search activity that has caused all the buzz.
Product Information? Search Comes First
Visitors to one’s online retail website have a great likelihood of starting from a page of search results, as shown by last holiday season’s activity.
Search Marketing, Not Metrics
Most of you know that I do a lot of teaching and speaking on the subject of search marketing, and that my approach is not what people expect. Yes, I know all the dials to turn and levers to pull. I can talk about robots.txt and Max CPC and latent semantic indexing and blah blah blah. But, honestly, it’s not what most people need to know. The problem I sometimes find is that when you tell people what they need to know, they think it’s not what they need.
U.S. Endorses Music Search Project
We all know that Google can help us find MP3 files, but the leading search engine just works off of words and phrases. Another engine would actually listen to and analyze music, and it just received a small amount of funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation.
AOL Seeks Redemption Through Mobile Search
Make way – AOL’s getting into mobile search. And unlike many of the company’s older products, the logically named AOL Mobile Search service has been getting some positive (initial) reviews.
Microsoft’s Search: Up, Up, And Kaboom?
When I think of the word “trajectory,” I think of an object arching through the air. More specifically, I think of some sort of grenade or missile that explodes on impact. So I had to raise an eyebrow when Microsoft’s Kevin Johnson said the company’s search business is “on a positive trajectory.”
Search in 2010
Over at SearchEngineLand, Gord Hotchkiss has written a very detailed post on what a search engine results page could look like by the year 2010. For this ‘Future of Search’ post, Gord got insight from the top Search/Usability Experts in the field:
Search, Mickey D’s, Or Coke, Branding Is Powerful
Here’s a challenge for you: raise a child unexposed to branding. Good luck with it. This article isn’t about parenting, though, it’s about the power of the brand. A recent study revealed preschoolers think even milk and carrots wrapped up with McDonald’s golden arches tastes better.
Consumers Happy With Search And Supermarkets
Supermarkets and search engines tops Harris Interactive’s consumer poll this year, which sought out what industries best served the needs of their customers. Tobacco and oil companies scored the worst, joining airlines, pharmaceutical companies, health insurance, and HMO’s as the biggest overall losers in the past 10 years.
Over the past ten years, just three of the 21 industries measured have seen a positive increase in customer satisfaction, and in the past year, just six did, according to Harris. Fourteen industries went down this year.
Scholars Push For Search Engine Regulation
Here’s an idea sure to start some fires: Is it necessary to consider government regulation of search engines? Please hold your throwing-stones until the end of the presentation.