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Tuesday, August 08, 2006
Pinged by Rich Skrenta to look at some of the latest news search features over there, I did.
Nice!
One thing that's nice about the results is how comprehensive they are. Blog posts are denoted by a "B" for those users who don't quite feel that blogs are "real news" - but they're in the listing if you want to see them. And the one-year histogram that shows you the trend of how often your phrase got mentioned in the news. Rich is right - you can't quite get this across the street over at Google News - although the new Google Trends feature in the lab will get you some nice graphs, if you dig.
After the requisite "Topixing" of individual people's names, I decided to look at the trend on "click arbitrage." Interesting! There was virtually no mention of it until July, when a few news providers (and victims) decided all at once that it was largely click arbitrageurs that were being targeted by Google's Quality Score update which includes landing page quality in the assessment of AdWords keywords. (We thought it was important, too. We released a newsletter issue and a podcast on the topic for our subscribers.)
Speaking of arb, there is actually a session on it this a.m. at Search Engine Strategies. That was real eye-opening to see on the program. As always, Danny is on the cutting edge. I wouldn't want to miss this one.
One of the more interesting issues surrounding that is that Google is basically 1-2 generations along in filtering out the "crap ads" that really aggressively go after irrelevant keywords at a low bid. Yahoo is doing pretty well. MSN isn't, for now, so if you type in "Ming Dynasty" you may see the crazy stuff like "save on dynasty - fast shipping on dynasty" etc. - while over at the other engines there is a higher probability that the advertisers are forced into a more relevant mode.
Posted by
Andrew Goodman
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