Google Suspends Local Listing Ads — For Now
Today Google announced that the company was suspending Local Listing Ads, for the time being:
“Starting today, we will no longer accept new sign-ups for Local Listing Ads in the Local Business Center, and in mid-December, existing Local Listing Ads will stop running. This limited free trial was one of many beta tests that we develop [...]
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Google Writes On Mobile Site SEO Concerns & Techniques
The Google Webmaster Central blog has two excellent write ups on mobile seo concerns and techniques. One is named Help Google index your mobile site and the other is named Running desktop and mobile versions of your site.
The reason for the two different articles is that often webmasters consider smart phone enabled sites as [...]
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Microsoft to Google in Less Than Two Weeks
In an admittedly slow news day it is noteworthy to tell you that earlier in the week Google made a strategic hire if for no other reason than the hire was just at Microsoft less than two weeks ago.
Don Dodge was Microsoft’s “Ambassador to Start Ups” according to Michael Arrington at TechCrunch. We say ‘was’ because Dodge was laid off by Microsoft earlier this month. Check out Arrington’s interview with Dodge here. I honestly didn’t think that people at this level or with this title got ‘laid off’. I thought that was reserved for the rank and file folks and the sales team. Guess you learn something new every day, right?
Back to the story. Dodge didn’t need to spend much time figuring out what to do next because Google saw the opportunity and swooped in. You gotta figure that there was no real ‘job opening’ available but when you sit on a pile of cash and you see a ‘name brand’ available why not make a spot for them?
TechCrunch continues
He’ll be working for another ex-Microsofter, Vic Gundotra. Gundotra worked 15 years at Microsoft as General Manager of Microsoft’s developer outreach efforts. He joined Google in 2007 as VP Engineering, responsible for mobile applications and developer evangelism.
Well, for you young folks out there here’s a lesson in making sure you are building a strong reputation and personal brand. In this world, those who can do that won’t be unemployed for long. At least, it’s a nice theory.
Anyway, hope you don’t have to figure out what’s next today!
Twitter Rolling Out Retweets, Rolling Over Trends Spam
Remember Twitter’s plans to make “retweeting” an official function?
Sure you do, the mock-ups looked like this:
Well, Twitter just announced the following:
We’ve just activated a feature called retweet on a very small percentage of accounts in order to see how it works in the wild. Retweet is a button that makes forwarding a particularly interesting tweet to all your followers very easy. In turn, we hope interesting, newsworthy, or even just plain funny information will spread quickly through the network making its way efficiently to the people who want or need to know.
So keep your eyes peeled, because you might be one of the lucky ones!
PS. If you’re not seeing the retweet option, Twitter has a consolation prize for you. It’s cleaning up the spam in trending topics.
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Google Hits a High Note with New Music Onebox
What’s the name of that song?
You know the one. They play it a lot at NC State football games?
C’mon, you know it. “Boom, here comes the boom….”
No?
Forget it! I’ll Google it instead!
Yes, that’s it!
And, pretty soon, you’ll never have problems finding a song, artist, or album again–thanks to a new “Discover Music” onebox from Google.
Maybe you remember only the chorus — or maybe you remember who sang it, but you forgot the exact name of the song. If you’ve ever heard a catchy song in a car or cafe, but just can’t figure out the name of the song, you’ll know what I’m talking about. This search feature also helps you find many of those songs by entering a search containing a line or two of lyrics.
Cool, huh? Google has partnered with MySpace and Lala to source the results and Pandora, imeem, and Rhapsody are standing by to help you discover music related to your query. Not only does the Onebox show the result, but you can click the play button to activate the pop-up–and play the song!
**Time out! Google is allowing pop-ups now? That’s the topic for a another blog post!**
If you’re not seeing the results yet, Google has launched a music search site you can try out.
The only thing missing? Maybe a partnership with Shazam, so I can play music to Google and have it recognize it–without me knowing anything about the song. That would be cool!
What Can Brown Do for Social Media?
While this UPS sponsored video at Mashable is slick, I’m scratching my head over it.
Aside from the fact that it’s extremely basic–which is probably UPS’s intent–I’m just not making the connection between a courier service and social media.
Can anyone help me out? Why is UPS sponsoring this?
Moving Ads Closer To “Free” Listing Ups Google’s Earnings
In early August, Google quietly shifted the ads closer to the free listings. We assumed then, Google did this to drive more attention to the ads, and now we can say that we were right.
In the question and answer session of last week’s Google earnings report. A transcript reports Google’s Jonathan Rosenberg confirming that [...]
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Yahoo Settles Class Action Lawsuit; Attorneys Walk Away with $4.3 Million!
If there’s one solid truth about class action lawsuits, it’s this: only the attorneys win.
That truth has held out over and over again, especially when it comes to any kind of class action against a search engine. Adding to the list, Yahoo has settled a 2006 lawsuit that claimed it allowed advertisers’ ads to be displayed on a whole host of undesirable web sites:
…Yahoo! breached its contract with its customers by allowing Yahoo! ads to be displayed in spyware, domain name parking sites (also known as bulk registration sites), pop-ups, pop-unders, and typosquatting sites. Plaintiffs brought claims for breach of contract, unjust enrichment, misrepresentation, civil conspiracy, and unfair business practices.
You can argue that without this lawsuit, Yahoo would not have changed its ways–it has agreed to offer a new ad option that restricts ads to Yahoo sites and "premium" distribution partners–but, does anyone really feel like a winner here?
Yahoo simply settled because this was a PITA and it didn’t need this hanging over its head as it moves forward with assimilation by the Borg Microsoft.
What do advertisers get here? Well, you get the promise of better ad targeting on Yahoo Sponsored Search and…well, that’s about it. Unless you are already out of business, then you get $20. That’s not a misprint–you get twenty dollars.
So, who’s the real winner here? The attorneys. Buried at the bottom of the announcement, we find this:
Class Counsel will apply for attorneys’ fees of $4,170,000, plus reimbursement of expenses of approximately $100,000, and for service awards to the three Class Representatives of $10,000 each. Yahoo! has agreed to pay those fees, expenses and service awards, in the total amount of $4.3 million,
You get $20 (at best) the attorneys walk away with $4.3 million!
Don’t get me wrong, there are some great attorneys out there–heck I used to work as a paralegal back in England–but this is craziness. Something needs to be done to prevent attorneys from cashing out on such a large scale. It’s not like these class actions suits end up going to trial. They nearly always get settled–usually with the attorneys being the only real winners.
It’s a sad fact that these class action lawsuits will continue because both sides know that it’s cheaper to settle, than fight this all the way. Even sadder, the spoils tend to go to the one who passed the bar exam. 
The Search for Twitter Search Continues
While talk swirls around Twitter on subjects ranging from video to revenue to biz plans and Biz’s plans, there is one that keeps coming up because it is pretty important. How do you search Twitter and mine it for the nuggets of wisdom amongst the wasteland of wackiness?
Last week we told you about the unholy alliance talks that Twitter was supposedly having with Microsoft and Google separately regarding the tsunami of 140 character pearls of wisdom that need to be gathered, catalogued and organized so the world can be a better place because of it. It really is the piece of the puzzle that everyone seems to be most interested in so we’re just waiting for Twitter to figure out how to best monetize it.
In the meantime there will be more ‘little start-ups that could’ like this one reported by TechCrunch, Searchtastic. Now, before I move on I have to say that this is an unfortunate choice for a company name because it will not be mentioned around MP without a smirk due to the use of another word, but I digress.
Like other Twitter search sites, Searchtastic lets you search Tweets for a particular keyword or hashtag. What makes the search engine interesting is the ability to pull up Tweets from weeks or months ago, which Twitter’s own search engine doesn’t allow you to do. Twitter’s search currently lets you see Tweets from a week and a half back which varies.
So the obvious question is “What are these guys doing that Twitter can’t seem to do on its own?” The other question that arises for me after searching for my own tweets is why am I wasting people’s time with my own version of what I feel is important? I need to listen to my own advice and make sure that when I tweet it’s neat and not well …. lame. My apologies to anyone subjected to it. I promise to get better 
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As for the service, it looks interesting but needs some work. Heck, that can be said about a lot of things on the Internet, right? One recommendation to the Searchtastic crew is to at least put the total number of tweets you produce in a search result set.
So check it out along with other players like Collecta, Scoopler, One Riot and TwitterTroll and discover all of the fun you have missed on Twitter.
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Bing’s New Mobile Voice Search Available On New Samsung Phone
The Bing Search Blog has announced a new mobile voice search capability that competes with, and even one-ups the more well known mobile voice search tools from Google.
The Bing voice search tool has three capabilities:
search Bing by speaking a query
dial a contact’s phone by speaking the number
compose a text message by speaking it
As eWeek’s Google [...]
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