i-level Search News - November 2007
Advertising on social media sites
MySpace, Facebook and Nielsen's Buzzlogic announced their own advertising platforms this month. They all offer advertisers a highly targeted approach to serving online ads. In the case of Facebook and MySpace, the plethora of personal information that is voluntarily handed over is every marketer's dream. Such granular detail is seldom available on a scale like this and everyone is watching to see what the impact of this targeting is going to be.
Search engines expand into mobile
Google announced the arrival of Android, the development of an operating system (OS) for mobiles. Whilst this OS is being backed and built by Google, an open handset alliance was announced to work on the development of the software (much the same as with the Mozilla Firefox application) The open handset alliance is made up of a group of 34 companies (including the likes of Intel, Motorola, LG and eBay) that are committed to development of interfaces to work with the system. The OS is being described as a toolbox for mobile carriers in that they can apply and edit the software to create their own unique user experiences.
Search Engine of the Month - Hakia.com
This month we feature Hakia.com as our smaller search engine. Hakia is based on semantic search and their focus is to produce results on a meaning match (similar to the brain's cognitive function) rather than by the indexation or associative factors that most other search engines use. Whilst semantic search is not new, it is considered the holy grail of search, as assigning results based on meaning would deliver a user experience richer than anything else that is being experienced presently.
November Search stats
4% - the number of sites according to an SEOmoz survey that experienced a drop in Google PageRank positioning after the algorithm shift this month (Google targeted sites which it felt were using paid links in order to gain higher visibility)
Sticky stuff - chewing gum
This month's funny story that did the rounds occurred on Google. If you typed in a search for "chewing gum", you were shown a picture of a naked woman in the image results. Google have removed this since then, but the kind folks at Search Engine Land took a screen grab for posterity.