Microsoft, Google more trusted than Facebook, Twitter: Poll

Americans trust technology heavyweights such as Apple, Google and Microsoft more than social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, according to a new poll.

Nearly half of 2,100 adults questioned in a Zogby Interactive survey said they trusted the big three technology firms “completely” or “a lot,” compared to eight percent for Twitter and 13 percent for Facebook.

But all of the companies rated higher than traditional media.

John Zogby, the president and CEO of Zogby International, said big companies have had the time to build brand equity, while Facebook and Twitter do not have the corporate identity.

“They dont have the brand equity,” he added in a telephone interview.

Young adults aged 18 to 29 had slightly higher trust levels in Facebook with 20 percent and Twitter with 15 percent compared to the levels of adults of all ages which were seven percent lower for both companies.

When asked how important online privacy was to consumers, Zogby said it was huge.

“I think to a great degree, its all about privacy,” he explained.

Google has been criticized by some privacy regulators for its Street View cars which collected some private information from unencrypted WiFi networks while roving the streets taking photographs for its online mapping software.

Facebook recently changed its privacy policies to give users more control over how much information from users profiles is public following protests from some users and privacy watchdogs.

The traditional media received little sympathy from the public with only eight percent of all adults and six percent of young adults saying they trusted the media.

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Holiday e-Commerce Showed Signs of Stability

By Kenneth Corbin
February 11, 2010

While the sluggish economy continues to sap the Internet retail sector, the late stages of the holiday shopping season offered hopeful signs of recovery, according to data released today by online metrics firm comScore.

In 2009, overall e-commerce spending of $130 billion, excluding travel, was flat compared to the previous year, but sales in the final two months of the year saw a 4 percent increase.

“I’m interpreting that as being at the bottom of the troublesome times,” comScore Chairman Gian Fulgoni said today in a presentation detailing the findings. “We can say that coming out of the fourth quarter we were seeing some modest growth.”

Fulgoni’s firm is predicting modest growth to continue in 2010, though he warned that several factors continue to dampen spending, such as the high unemployment rate, lower access to credit and an increase in the rate of consumer saving.

ComScore pulls its data from a global panel of about 2 million Internet users, split roughly evenly between U.S. and foreign participants. Each quarter the firm recaps the effects of the economy on the e-commerce sector, compiling data that is generally in line with the official quarterly figures that are later released by the Department of Commerce.

In the fourth quarter, the firm found that e-commerce accounted for 7.7 percent of overall spending in comparable categories, excluding goods like gas or groceries that aren’t generally bought online. That figure was a marked increase from the fourth quarter of 2008, when online spending accounted for just 4.6 percent of overall sales.

This holiday season saw 10 percent more consumers shopping online than last year, though individuals on average spent 5 percent less, with the per-consumer spending tally dropping from $261 in 2008 to $250 last year.

“The continued growth in online buyers I think augurs well for e-commerce,” Fulgoni said. Will online sales hit a billion dollars in a single day?

In addition to a rise in overall customers, the 2009 holidays put up some other impressive numbers, including the first day in history to see more than $900 million in online sales. That day, Dec. 15, a Tuesday, represented a 21 percent increase in spending over the same day in 2008, and invites the possibility that 2010 could see the first billion-dollar sales day.

But the modest signs of economic improvement weren’t enjoyed equally across the online retail sector. The top 25 online retailers saw sales increase 11 percent over the holidays, while the rest of the pack saw an overall sales drop of 7 percent.

“The big are getting bigger,” Fulgoni said. “I suspect that the smaller retailers just were not able to match the resources of their larger brethren.”

Fulgoni noted that special offers played a substantial role in online shopping this year, with retailers offering considerably more deals than last year, though the discounts generally were of far lower percentages than in 2008 when the economy began its plunge and merchants were scrambling to unload excess inventory.

“No question in 2008 I think everyone was caught flat-footed,” he said.

The largest of the large, Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) and Walmart.com (NYSE: WMT), together accounted for 13 percent of online holiday spending, up from 10 percent the previous year. Between those two, it’s an uneven split, with Amazon hosting 85.7 million visitors in December, compared to the 54.2 million shoppers who visited Walmart’s Web site.

ComScore’s findings emphasized the increasing role social media sites like Facebook and Twitter are playing in shaping people’s shopping habits. Twenty-eight percent of comScore’s panel participants said that a social site had influenced their purchase decisions, with 7 percent saying they had become a fan of a business on Facebook, and 5 percent saying they follow a business on Twitter, many in the hopes of receiving coupons or learning of other promotions.

Fulgoni suggested that smaller retailers ramp up their presence on social sites, both as a way of connecting with a growing audience and for the inexpensive promotional mechanisms they offer.

Kenneth Corbin is an associate editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.

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Cheap Search Engine Optimization For Budget SEO Minded People

By Taylor G Reaume

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A Making Money Opportunity Only Comes Around Once or Twice in a Lifetime

By Scott Hogge

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Searching for Real-Time Search

News breaks faster on Twitter than just about anywhere else, and Google wants in on that speed. The search giant’s recent deal to include Twitter updates in its search results is a key part of the company’s strategy for improving its core product. In a visit to Cambridge, MA, last week, Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt said that the biggest changes coming to its algorithms have to do with efforts, like the Twitter deal, to integrate real-time search.

Credit: Google

Basic search has improved drastically in recent years, and this has intensified the competition to find key information as close as possible to the moment it appears on the Internet. For example, Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, announced it was integrating Twitter on the same day as the Google announcement.

Real-time search presents plenty of technical challenges, however. The power of Google’s search engine lies in its ability to rank the relative importance of different Web pages. But Schmidt asked, “How do you rank the tweets against themselves and against all the other content? That’s an example of work that we have done and are continuing to do.”

Compounding the problem is the growing quantity of information being posted each day, Schmidt noted. “There were five exabytes of information generated from the dawn of mankind to the year 2003,” he said. “That amount of information is now generated every two days. There’s been an explosion even in the last six or seven years, and it’s just mathematically overwhelming.” So overwhelming, he added, that “we know we don’t have it all.”

While much of that information is relevant to only a small number of people, it’s worth capturing and indexing as much as possible, he said: “We measured this, and an awful lot of queries are pretty specialized. It is a fact that there’s enough there that it’s not just a waste of capital. It actually makes sense.”

Of course, Google has many irons in the fire besides search. It’s making strong pushes in mobile, with its Android operating system, and in productivity software, where its Google Apps suite has poked at Microsoft’s dominance. Its Chrome browser and forthcoming operating system are yet another area of development.

But none of these are likely to provide comparable revenue to search and advertising in the foreseeable future, Schmidt said. “The advertising business is so big and is growing so quickly for us that I think it’ll be a very long time,” he said, for anything else to overtake search. “You’d obviously like to have revenue-source diversity, but within advertising we’re so well diversified that we managed to get through a recession that’s hit advertising pretty hard.”

Source:  http://www.technologyreview.com/web/23910/

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Distributing a search engine’s index around the world could make it faster and more efficient, researchers say.

Searching the Web could become faster for users and much more efficient for search companies if search engines were split up and distributed around the world, according to researchers at Yahoo.

Credit: Technology Review

Currently, search engines are based on a centralized model, explains Ricardo Baeza-Yates, a researcher at Yahoo’s Labs in Barcelona, Spain. This means that a search engine’s index–the core database that lists the location and relative importance of information stored across the Web–as well as additional data, such as cached copies of content, are replicated within several data centers at different locations. The tendency among search companies, says Baeza-Yates, has been to operate a relatively small number of very large data centers across the globe.

Baeza-Yates and his colleagues devised another way: a “distributed” approach, with both the search index and the additional data spread out over a larger number of smaller data centers. With this approach, smaller data centers would contain locally relevant information and a small proportion of globally replicated data. Many search queries common to a particular area could be answered using the content stored in a local data center, while other queries would be passed on to different data centers.

“Many people have talked about this in the past,” says Baeza-Yates. But there was resistance, he says, because many assumed that such an approach would be too slow or expensive. It was also unclear how to ensure that each query got the best global result and not just the best that the local center had to offer. A few start-up companies have even launched peer-to-peer search engines that harness the power of users’ own machines. But this approach hasn’t proven very scalable.

To achieve a workable distributed system, Baeza-Yates and colleagues designed it so that statistical information about page rankings could be shared between the different data centers. This would allow each data center to run an algorithm that compares its results with those of others. If another data center gave a statistically better result, the query would be forwarded to it.

The group put the distributed approach to the test in a feasibility study, using real search data. They present their findings this week at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Conference on Information and Knowledge Management in Hong Kong, where they will receive the award for the best paper.

“We wanted to prove that we could achieve the same performance [as the centralized model] without it costing too much,” says Baeza-Yates. In fact, they found that their approach could reduce the overall costs of operating a search engine by as much as 15 percent without compromising the quality of the answers.

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A real-time search engine bases its results on users’ browsing habits.

Later this week, a new “real-time” and “social” search engine called Wowd will open a beta version of its service to the public. The company says that its search results include only pages that have actually been visited by its users, and that its ranking algorithms offer information based on its freshness and popularity.

Real-time search: Wowd indexes pages visited by its users and ranks them based on either their popularity or their freshness. Credit: Wowd

According to CEO Mark Drummond, Wowd is trying to strike a balance between the up-to-date but chaotic results produced by a site like Twitter and the slower-to-change results that come from traditional search engines such as Google. He expects Wowd to be particularly valuable to users who want to know what content is currently popular, and who see search as an additional feature.

“If what you’re interested in is reference search, Google is great, and we don’t imagine that we or anyone else is going to displace that,” Drummond says. “If, instead, you want to find out what the planet is talking about, that’s where we think Wowd can win.”

Anyone will be able to visit Wowd’s website and perform basic searches, but the company hopes that many users will agree to install Wowd’s software on their machines and have their browsing tracked anonymously. This is how the company hopes to build its search index. Unlike traditional search engines, which use crawlers to build up a database of pages on the Web and store that information in vast data centers, Wowd’s users will be both the crawler and the storage.

Drummond says users have an incentive to install the code because it also unlocks additional features, including a recommendation engine and advanced search features such as the option to search through one’s own Web history.

Users who agree to install the software will feed back to Wowd a list of the sites they visit. Drummond says the company views a visit to a Web page as evidence that the page contains some interesting content. The idea is similar to that used by recommendation sites such as Digg or StumbleUpon, only Wowd offers users a more passive way to participate. “Voting for something [on these sites] requires an order of magnitude more emotional commitment than just looking at something,” Drummond says.

Wowd’s system will also store bits of its search index on each user’s computer. The company uses an algorithm called Kademlia, which is more commonly employed in peer-to-peer file-sharing systems, to keep its index available even when some users shut their computers down. This is done by storing each bit of information on several machines and by using statistical analysis to determine how to share it in order to keep it available.

Drummond stresses that the system is designed to safeguard privacy. For example, when a user visits a page–nominating it for Wowd’s index in the process–that page is actually accessed and indexed by a different user’s computer. This process protects against accidentally collecting information that is protected by passwords or cookies. The site also does not index any pages protected by encrypted Internet protocols.

Wowd doesn’t simply report on what its users are doing in real time, as some Twitter search engines do, for example. Instead it uses its own algorithms that balance a page’s freshness against its apparent popularity. When searching in Wowd, a user can choose to see results ranked by popularity or by freshness. In either case, the page will automatically update and adjust its results over time if the user leaves it up.

Wowd contains several ways for users to discover new content, including a “hot list” on its front page that simply shows the top sites being visited by users. Later, Drummond says, the site will add more ways for people to discover what’s popular in particular interest areas.

Other search companies, for example the German company Faroo, have also tried to use a distributed architecture to obtain more real-time search results. Faroo’s CEO, Wolf Garbe, says that the approach significantly reduces the costs for a search startup. He also believes that any real-time search engine will have to depend on users in some way, since even a company with resources as large as Google’s can’t crawl the Web anew every five minutes.

Petar Maymounkov, a researcher at MIT who helped design the Kademlia algorithm, says that Kademlia is suited to Wowd’s architecture. However, he notes that Kademlia isn’t well-protected against malicious users who may want to game the system. Whether any distributed architecture can be secure when there’s no central control over who participates remains an open question, he says.

Maymounkov adds that it will be interesting to see how well Kademlia works as the foundation for a search engine. In the 10 years that the algorithm has been used, he explains, it’s mainly powered file sharing. And since file sharing is most often used to obtain free movies and music, he says that users of such software tend to be willing to donate a lot of computing power and to put up with some hiccups in availability to retrieve that information. User expectations for a general search engine may be different, he says.

Wowd “is a nice idea, but they’ve got some work to do,” says Daniel Tunkelang, cofounder of a search company called Endeca, based in Cambridge, MA. The preview version of the site, in his opinion, doesn’t provide enough high-quality search results to make it stand out from other attempts at real-time search. As more users sign up after the site’s launch, this may provide better-quality data and improve the results, Tunkelang says, adding that he’s reserving judgment until then.

Source: http://www.technologyreview.com/web/23756/page2/

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Search Engine Optimization: SEO Tips for Small Business

By James A. Martin

A few years ago, John W. Tuggle made about $19,000 annually giving private guitar lessons. He had to work another job, too, in order to bring in more money.

Today, Tuggle makes $100,000 a year “and it just keeps going up,” he said. Plus, he no longer has to offer private lessons or work a second job, which gives him much more free time.

How did Tuggle do it? He hired a professional design firm to build a Web site, Learning Guitar Now, from which he sells prerecorded blues and slide guitar lessons on DVD. Tuggle also records podcasts for iTunes and creates videos for YouTube.

And to draw traffic to his site, Tuggle researched and continually refines the keywords he uses to optimize his Web pages for Google and other search engines.

Search engine optimization (SEO) can be a powerful tool to help potential customers find your site. “If you don’t do SEO, you probably won’t be found on Google,” Tuggle said. “And if you’re not found on Google, you’re losing about 65 percent of your potential customers from the Internet.” Currently, 65 percent of all search queries are performed on Google, according to comScore.

So what exactly is SEO? What’s involved in doing SEO? And how can you tell if your SEO efforts are working?
SEO Basics

SEO is an ongoing process in which you proactively use strategic keywords, links, HTML tags, and other techniques to increase the chances a page or site will organically land at or near the top of search result pages.

Organic, i.e., unpaid, search result rankings are not the same as Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns. In a PPC campaign, you pay Google or other search engines to display a small text ad when someone performs a search using your chosen keyword or phrase. Many people who use search engines give more weight to organic results than they do to PPC ads.

SEO is important because there are billions of Web pages, and

“the majority of people don’t click past the first two pages of search results,” said Matt McGee, a Search Engine Land editor, search marketing consultant and author of the Small Business Search Marketing blog. “In fact, most people only click on the top five or six search results on the first page.”

What’s more, search engine sites, in an effort to stay ahead of competitors, are constantly refining their algorithms and features. Small businesses and enterprises alike are increasingly learning and employing SEO tactics, too. Their goal is to push their pages as far up into search results as possible—at your expense.

SEO has its detractors. Some denounce it as a “black art” designed to manipulate search engines and, by extension, those who use them. And certainly there are many who employ dubious “black hat” SEO techniques, such as keyword stuffing—the flagrant overuse of a keyword or phrase on a page in hopes of artificially enhancing the page’s position in search engine results.

That said, so-called “white hat” SEO, when incorporated into a larger Internet marketing campaign and employed both judiciously and continually, is essential to success on the Internet today, said Martin Falle, CEO of SEO Research, a search engine marketing company.

“The difference in being seen on page one and page two of search results can mean thousands, even millions, of dollars for a business in revenue,” Falle said. A high “findability” factor is especially important in an economic downturn, he added.

The Elements of SEO

There are many tactics for boosting a Web page’s presence in search engine rankings. A few basic strategies include:

• Use your keyword(s) in your title tags. Every Web page has a title, which is displayed at the top of the browser when you’re viewing that page. The title tag is also shown in search engine results. It’s the linked title on which users click to visit a Web site page they find in the results pages for a query. And it’s arguably the most important place to use your chosen keywords.

A page’s title tag is key to helping Google know what the page is about, said Adam Lasnik, Google’s search evangelist. Ideally, a title tag should not just include your business’s name, but one or more additional descriptors—things that people might actually search for.

“If you’re an Italian restaurant, an ineffective title tag would just be the name of your restaurant,” Lasnik said. “A better title might include your restaurant’s name, plus something like ‘serving late-night pasta in the greater Mountain View area.’”

In addition, it helps to use your chosen keywords in your Web page’s headline (known in HTML as an h1 tag) and/or subhead (the h2 tag). You should also use the keyword several times in the body copy of a Web page. For best results, optimize each Web page on your site around one specific keyword or phrase. The more specific your keyword, the less competition you’re likely to have for it in Google search results.

• Get relevant, high-profile Web sites to link to your site. Among the factors search engines take into account when ranking your pages for relevancy are the external sites that link to your pages. Having lots of highly-trafficked Web sites that are relevant to what you do or sell tells Google you’re a legitimate site, and that’s bound to boost your findability factor in search queries.

Example: On the Gibson Web site, the leading guitar manufacturer has posted some of John W. Tuggle’s tutorial videos along with links to his Web site and YouTube channel.

Gibson is a respected guitar maker with a large, popular, and trusted Web site. So the search engines are likely to consider the Gibson site as highly relevant to Tuggle’s Learning Guitar Now site. These factors make the Gibson site’s links to Tuggle’s site extremely valuable, both in terms of his SEO efforts and in driving targeted visitors—people interested in guitars—to his site, Tuggle said.

• Minimize Flash. Search engines have traditionally had difficulty indexing Web content that isn’t in text, such as Flash animations, photographs, video and Javascript.

Google is continually improving its efforts to index non-text Web site content, said Lasnik. Still, in order to direct the largest amount of targeted traffic to your site, you should strive to put the majority of your most important information in text so the search engines can easily find it, he said.

Also, keep in mind that people are increasingly performing searches in mobile browsers on their iPhones, BlackBerrys, and other smart phones. Most smart phone browsers can’t display Flash animations. So while smart phone users might find your site, they won’t get its full impact.

• Start blogging. In most cases, blogs have a simple structure (meaning little if any Flash and other non-search-friendly content), are updated often and, when well written, have lots of links on other sites pointing to it.

“Blogs are literally built to attract search engine crawlers and spiders,” writes Rebecca Lieb in The Truth About Search Engine Optimization. “Their architecture and design are structured for clear navigation, with every page set up to link back to other primary pages. It is no surprise that in recent years, many successful and profitable publishers have built editorial products entirely on commercial blog platforms.”
Don’t Forget Your Readers

While there’s a great deal of science behind SEO, making your efforts completely transparent to your site visitors is essential. That’s where the art comes in.

Ultimately, the ideal is to create great Web content first, with SEO a secondary though important consideration. When you regularly create compelling Web content, you’ll soon find that other sites are linking to it. You’ll become part of the online conversation, with mentions in blogs and in the mainstream media. You’ll generate that ever-elusive thing called “buzz.”

Conversely, if you make SEO a priority over your site’s visitors, your content will seem “fishy and unnatural,” said Lasnik. And that’s a sure turn-off to potential customers.” However, he added,”if your Web content is good for your audience, it will be good for Google.”
James A. Martin is the co-author of Getting Organized in the Google Era. He writes about SEO and helps businesses optimize their sites for search engines.

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Organic Ranking (SEO) vs. Sponsored ads (PPC); How to choose?

• Speed : organic ranking can take up to 12 months; sponsored ranking only takes 24 hours;
• Range : organic ranking is only possible for 10-15 keywords; sponsored ranking is possible for thousands of keywords;
• Stability : organic rankings can drop overnight with search algorithm changes; sponsored rankings are guaranteed stable;
• Cost : organic rankings are free; sponsored rankings are paid per click, and can suffer from click fraud;
• Targeting : sponsored rankings can be shown per time of day or per geographic region; organic rankings cannot
• Media : sponsored ads can show rich media like banners and video ads, organic rankings basically only show text (though this is changing with google universal).
• Audience : organic rankings are shown to all people, sponsored ads can be targeted per website (adsense style) and audience demographics (gender, age, income group).

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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can seem like a daunting task to some

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can seem like a daunting task to some. Especially when you are starting out. Search Engine Optimization requires a lot of time and work It is an effort or technique to get traffic to a website / blog. The technique use search engines like Google, Yahoo! and MSN
to bring traffic to a site. So, SEO purpose is to rank as high as possible in search engine result with specific keyword. So that, a visitor will see it and come to the sites. SEO is for:

* A newbie that begin to make blogs / sites and he / she is not social at all.

Unless you are a famous superstar or a social person that have many friends, you will find it’s very hard to make a site and makes it popular no matter how smart, how creative your content and how good your sites are. No one will know about your sites.

* You sell something online on the net. Just imagine, it’s like you have a shop deep in the forest or in the middle of an ocean. Of course, who will come and bought your product is just your friend that you told him. SEO is just like “moving your shop to a city” or maybe if you are good enough, you can move to the boulevard. So, many and many web surfer will pass by and find your store nd of course, you will get more and more customer.

* Or maybe I can say, SEO is for everyone that have website / blog. Why? because there is nothing to loose to apply some basic SEO tips that are really easy.

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