2004

Reporter ohne Grenzen is reporting that the Chinese Government is seemingly blocking news.google.com....

Heise Security published the translation of a text by Tom Liston that deals with unwanted spyware. Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4...

Google has sued the Texan Firm Auctions Expert International because they are supposed to have created automatic clicks on Google-text-ads en mass and with criminal intend to fraudulently obtain advertising-profits....

heise.de is reporting that Google-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin want to sell off up to 7,2 million shares within the next 18 month. At the current stock-price, this would get them about 1,22 billion US-Dollars....

AOL is changing his partner for sponsored links in Europe. Overture is being replaced by Google, after AOL USA has already been working with Google for a while....

According to DIT.INC, Google is not showing news results in China from sources that the Chinese Government does not approve of....

All 4 new entries in Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans are there, thanks to Google’s public offering: Google Founders Sergey Brin (rank 34) and Larry E. Page (rank 34 as well), CEO Eric Schmidt (rank 165) as well as Sun-co-founder and Google-investor Andreas Bechtolsheim at rank 278....

Yahoo!’s news-search has been renovated and was upgraded by a means to show appropriate pictures....

Once again, someone is declaring war on Google. This time, Redball.info plans on searching through mailinglists and the Usenet and is starting with a 400 GB index, according to their press-release. The system is supposed to have a capacity of 6 Terabye and a 2 x 9.6 Gbit/s connection. Seeing […]...

An interesting article on prweaver.com announces that, with the new version of the Google-Toolbar, Google will change the way the checksum, which is needed to be shown the PageRank of a site, is computed....

Google turns 6 and celebrates with a fitting logo...

Bill Gates voices his viewpoint on Google, in an interview with ZDnet Australia : Some things here are cases where there is a clear competitor. If you take our guys who are competing with Google, they understand exactly what they’re measured against and how everybody thinks Google walks on water, […]...

heise.de is reporting, that Appke is planning to introduce an affiliate program for their online-musicstore iTunes. Affiliates are to be reimbursed with 5% of the profits. iTunes Affiliate-Pages iTunes Homepage...

AdSense now allows the incorporation of up to three advertisement-blocks per page. There are also some additional new features added. Full Text....

Blogger, Google’s free Webblog-service is now offering the possibility of showing AdSense-Advertisements, so that you able to make some additional money with your blog. [More on this at Blogger.com]...

n-tv.de is reporting that Google and their investmentbanks have agreed on a initial offering price of 85 US-Dollars. This puts the issuing-price at the lower end of the already downward adjusted price-range. Google will make a total of 1,66 Billion US-Dollars with this IPO....

Right on the heels of Google, Yahoo! has started its own blog. The first entry is a review of the Yahoo!-Searchenginetechnology that started six month ago. The Yahoo!-Blog...

The price-range for Google-stocks has been lowered to between 85 and 95 US-Dollars. Initially, they had planned on a price of 108 to 135 US-Dollars a share. Aditionally, they will only release 5.5 million and not 11.6 million shares....

An article in Die Zeit is asking whether the Investment-banks that are barred from Google’s IPO are spreading rumors to thwart Google’s public offering. The background here is that Google is determining the price of the shares through a kind of auction, which keeps the investment-banks from doing business with […]...

The US-Exchange Supervisory Authority has started an investigation into Google due to the recent series of mishaps. More at heise.de...

It might sound rather weird to ask this at a time of the year where ACs are doing overtime, but right now is exactly the right time to start preparing for the Christmas holiday shopping. Andy Beal is offering a good introduction in his article over at seochat.com....

In a PDF (574 Kb), Microsoft introducing what might be the new foundation for the upcoming MSN-Search. Overall, it is about the advancement of PageRank- and HITS-Technologies. The authors want to let the connection of pages to each other as well as their subject matters flow into the ranking to […]...

On a special site, Yahoo! is putting together interesting informations about the upcoming Google-IPO....

Google has changed it’s Logo for the Summer Olympics in Athens. A summary of the Google Olympia Logos can be found directly at Google....

Due to vacation time at the evil capitalist, there will be nothing new here until 08.13.2004. I wish everyone a nice summer....

With Picasa, Google is acquiring a lot of management and maintenance know-how for digital-images. Picasa has already been working together with blogger.com, which also belongs to Google, since May....

According to a Financial Times article, Google is already planning their IPO for this month. They are expecting 2.7 Billion Dollars in revenues....

Mozilla Firefox now has a plug-in in ‘pagerankstatus‘ that gives reliable Google PageRank information on this alternative browser....

Googles.com, an American site for kids, is challenging Google’s Trademark with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Source and more: Intern.de...

Yahoo! has managed to set a record-result of 112,5 Million US-Dollars for the second quarter, this is an increase of 50 Million Dollars from the previous year. This is due to the increasing advertisement-revenues as well as other fees....

PPC-fraud happens when affiliates click on ad-banners that they get paid for themselves. They need to constantly change their IP-addresses to not get caught, which seemingly happens through open Internet-proxies. To see if this is already happening, we put up an open proxy at an unsused IP-Address for a few […]...

The Pay-for Performance-Providers Espotting (Europe) and FindWhat.com (USA) announced their merger today. Press Release....

In a change to their general terms and conditions on Monday, Google explicitly banned the sale of GMail-Accounts/Invitations. It seems that Google is trying to put a check on exactly that on eBay....

Microsoft treated its MSN-Search to a facelift. Now, sponsored-listings are more visually emphasized and in addition, MSN will now also searching through news-sources as well as the online-encyclopedia Encarta....

If this page, which can be accessed through techpreview.search.msn.de, is really the current state of development for the MSN-search, then they have a lot to catch up on....

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Google set the minimum amount of shares to be purchased for their imminent IPO to five. Presumably, Google wants to strengthen its democratic image with this gesture....

It seems that the checksum that is needed to get the PageRank of a site has been cracked: http://meese.ath.cx/google/ alternative link: blog.aouter-court.com...

After Yahoo! increased their Email storage from 4 MB to 100MB a few days ago, Hotmail followed suit and is now offering 250MB, instead of the former 2 Megabytes, of storage for mails and spam....

AOL bought Advertising.com for 435 Million Dollars in cash. AOL plans on strengthening their online-advertisement-market position with this move....

Overture Deutschland is introducing a minimum turnover of 25 EUR from July on. The minimum turnover will be offset with any clicks that are made. Should an account have a turnover of less than 25 EUR, they will have to pay additional fees in the future....

Through WebSearch, Google is offering AdSense-Users a way to search their own site with Google and show appropriate advertising on the results. The color can be adapted closely to the color-scheme of your site, as is customary for AdSense....

According to an article on webmasterworld.com, you are now able to limit the MSNBot: where20 is the amount of seconds that the MSNBot is supposed to wait between two pageviews....

At least that is what Hitwise, which uses userprofiles from several ISPs for their statistical data, is claiming. Google’s share comes in at 2.7%, while Yahoo! and MSN can show 1.7 and 1.1 percent, respectively....

After Yahoo! has already switched from their former index-supplier Google to their own technology in many different countries, they have now also made this move in Japan. Yahoo!-Japan is hoping to increase their advertisement-profits through this....

It is time for another backlink- and PageRankupdate over at Google. The new values seem to be visible over at http://216.239.41.104/....

Verisign is purchasing the wireless-content-provider Jamba for 273 million US-Dollars. 65% of the purchasing price will be paid in cash, the rest will be stocks....

The New York Times is reporting that Google is working on a software that that will be able to search through the contents of your local hard-drive....

Online-marketeer Doubleclick is purchasing the searchengine-marketeer Performics for 64 Million USD. With this, Doubleclick is entering into the pay-for-performance market....

Who would have thought that people would pay so much money for giving up their privacy? Update: It seems that the demand for GMail-accounts for money is nearly saturated; thus the prices at eBay went down noticeably....

It seems that Google can now read Flash-files and enter the text into the Google-index. (Example)...

Web.de will market their sponsored links through Overture in the future. This cooperation only pertains to the search on Web.de. Web.de-press-release...

Google commissioned Credit Suisse, First Boston and Morgan Stanley to prepare their IPO. They are planning on releasing more information on this throughout the week. Google’s market-worth is estimated to be around 25 Billion USD....

You can take a look at Google’s newest backlink-update at http://64.233.161.98/, which also holds an updated PageRank index....

Steve Neiderhauser has a writeup on his blog on the advantages of the Google-File-System as a product-platform....

The first quarter of 2004 was the most successful quarter in eBays history. They exeeded all expectations with revenues of 756,2 millon USD and a profit of 200,1 million USD. Full press-release (pdf)...

RealNetworks announced that the Google-Toolbar will be able to be loaded with the new RealPlayer 10. With this, RealNetworks is able to add such features as a popup-blocker as well asl autofill to their Player, while Google is profiting from a wider distribution of its toolbar....

After Yahoo! is already, similar to Google, showcasing new features as well as gimmicks on a special page, MSN is now following suit and is presenting new technologies in the MSN Sandbox...

Newsmap by marumushi.com is offering a somewhat different preparation of the Google News....

Google is planning to start its own E-Mail service with GMail. They plan on setting it apart from other offers with its 1GB space as well as an easy search option for the E-Mail inbox. Privacy groups are already criticizing the planned contextual advertisements. In addition: Logo-proposal with charme...

After Alltheweb went over to using the Yahoo!-index, Altavista followed suit. Thanks to this, one of the first searchengines on the Internet has been degraded to a Yahoo!-frontend....

Yahoo! has bought Kelkoo for 475 million Euros and thereby want to strengthen their European presence. It begs the question, if this works out with a platform that rather catches the eye as getting more visitors from the Google-index than through useful content....

After having been tested for a long time, Google has finally changed to a new design. It is somewhat less colorful and the distinction between advertisements and content is not that pronounced as with the old design anymore....

Just as Google has Google_Guy who answers questions on webmasterworld.com, it seems Yahoo! felt it necessary to send Yahoo_Mike into the race....

intern.de is reporting that Google was being blackmailed by a programmer, that threatened to distribute a software that automatically clicks on Google-advertisements....

During the PC Forum conference, Google-CEO Eric Schmidt announced that Orkut will become integrated within Google, so that those who search can access the knowledge that is available through the Orkut-members....

At Rankpulse.com you can see a visualization of the changes within the Google-Index. For this, they take the first 10 results for 1000 Keywords and graphically compare them to those of the day before....

A nice overview of data-distributors and data-receivers in searchengines can be found at the Search Engine Decoder....

It has become known, that AskJeeves is taking over the Internet Search Holding (Excite.com & iWon). They are paying 343 Million US-Dollars of which 9,5 million are cash and the rest is in stock options. AskJeeves is expecting an additional 700 million searchqueries per quarter thanks to this purchase....

Contrary to the way the market is developing, AskJeeves stopped asking for an entry-fee. They are justifying this by saying that without an entry-fee, the quality of the searchresults will improve....

After Yahoo!-USA started to use its own search-technology (Inktomi), you can take a look at the differences with the tool by Christian Langreiter....

Sophos analyzed eMail-Spam for two days and arranged them by the countries of origin. The results show that more than 56 percent of spam-mails came from the USA. Germany comes in at position 7 with 1.83 percent....

Just now we managed to get our hands on the first screenshot of the MSN-Crawler!...

According to the ODP-Blog, they have finished their switch to Unicode. This should lead to some URLs becoming invalid and keeping them from having Google-PageRank at the moment....

Froogle, Google’s online price-comparison service is now offering a WML-Interface. Thanks to this, users can now compare prices while they are in brick-and-mortar shops as to see if they can get a certain product cheaper online or if they can use the online-price as a basis of bargaining in-store....

Paul Ryan, former CTO of Overture has left Microsoft after only 4 month. Of course there are no reasons stated for his decision. [souce: de.internet.com]...

Searchqueries on search.yahoo.com show that Yahoo! USA has already switched their index to Inktomi. This means it should only be a matter of time before Yahoo! Germany will follow suit....

The Seattle Times is reporting that the University of Washington Information School is offering a seminar on Google. The goal is to decide whether Google is positive or if a dependency on Google is bad for search-quality....

According to the washingtonpost.com, VeriSign is planning to already reactivate the controversial SiteFinder service in April....

rssads.com is offering feed-hosters a way to market their feeds. I find RSS-feeds interesting, especially because of the absence of advertisements and will therefore not incorporate them here, I promise....

AlwayOn is speculating on a possible delay of Google’s IPO by Microsoft-founder Bill Gates. This way, Gates would be able to purchase a major amount of Google stock before the actual IPO....

Chio Maisrimi has some tips on how you can become a real pro in Searchengineoptimization on his site site-check.cc. Worth a read....

The last few days had us expecting this, but Google seems to not plan on hosting their IPO in 2004. Seeing how Googles coffers are well filled, Google is waiting for a more opportune moment at the recommendation of their investment bankers. All this according to futurezone....

An article on neilturner.me.uk is assuming that soon, Google will be able to work without the directory that is based on ODP-data. This assumption is based on screenshots of the new Google-layout....

At bestdealsdiscounts.com/agar you can find a script that lets you create Amazon Webservices ads that look like Google-AdSense ads....

The NZZ is reporting that Google is planing on opening a research-center in Zurich in the Spring. With this, Google plans on tap the market of software engineers and researchers that prefer to rather live in Europe and not in the USA....

heise.de is reporting that Amazon made a recordprofit of more than 73 million Dollars in the Q4 2003 with nearly 2 billion Dollars in sales. Amazon’s partner-net should have quite a large impact on this....

According to the New York Times, Google has passed the necessary accounting check that is needed before an IPO....

eBay is buying mobile.de for roughly 121 million Euro. This purchase still has to pass scrutiny by the cartel office....

MSN has also introduced their own Toolbar for the Internet Explorer. The MSN-Toolbar is supposed to make it easier to access sites on the MSN-Network, similar to how the Google- and Yahoo!-Toolbars work. We can assume that this self-updating toolbar will also become part of the announced MSN-searchengine....

Google has now also updated the PageRank and the backlinks, after the large ranking-update of the weekend....

The testticker.de is writing that the Google employee Orkut Buyukkokten is developing the online-community Orkut.com Orkut.com. The concept is to be closely related to Friendster.com, though it is supposed to more performant due to Google’s experience in handling large masses of data. Buyukkokten developed the service on his free workday […]...

When you search for an artist on musicplasma, they will try to find other artists that have a similar style in music. When I tried it out, I was surprised at how well this worked....

This is the heading under which the Tagesspiegel is reporting on the relationship between the law firm Gravenreuth and dialerwebpages. As expected, this article is being hotly discussed on the heise.de-forums. Update [9:28pm]: onlinekosten.de has also boarded this train....

heise.de is reporting that the online-auctionhouse eBay exceeded their profitexpectations for Q4 2003 with 648,4 million Dollars in sales and 142,5 million Dollars in profits. The comments in the heise-forum for this article are more about eBay and spam than about the successful quarter…...

Google put up a German beta-version of News Alerts. If there are new stories about subjects that you selected beforehand, you will be notified by email....

At www.adsensecharts.com you can create useful graphics from your Google Adsense-statistics. Source: ABAKUS SEO Blog...

Just like Google is doing for a while now with Google Labs, Yahoo will now also demonstrate newly developed features and gimmicks at Yahoo! Research Lab. Update [01.21.2004]: Newsarticle at heise.de on the subject...

heise.de is reporting that Google plans on expanding their Google AdSense program to emails. The necessary technology has already been purchased with last year’s acquisition of Sprinks....

Seeing how you are unable to neglect Inktomi in 2004, there is an article on SEOChat about Inktomi optimization....

It is clear now that Yahoo will let their contracts with Google expire at Q1 2004. Yahoo announced that they will start using their own searchengine that is based on Inktomi at that time. Unlike with WEB.DE, this should noticeably lessen Google’s market-shares....

Yahoo plans on starting an online-auction-platform in China in cooperation with the Chinese websiteoperator Sina in mid-2004....

An Indian Judge has banned a commercial spam-distributer from sending unsolicited emails to the users of the state provider Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited, in the first case of its kind in India. Let’s hope that Germany will also take steps to battle spam, even though right now my mailbox is […]...

Today, Google updated both the backlinks as well as the PageRank. The changes can also be seen on www-cw.google.com....

After yesterdays announcement that Lycos is taking over the united-domains AG, which means they are getting further into the hosting-sector, it became known today that they are looking to purchase BuyCentral.com . BuyCentral.com is operating shopping-sites in France and Italy....

de.internet.com is reporting that WEB.DE does not want to search with Google anymore. The specific contract was not renewed. The reason for their switch to Inktomi is supposed to be the bad quality of Google results. Update [17:38]: Newsreport on the subject now also on heise.de...

Bloomberg is reporting that Google will use about 1/3rd of its shares in the amount of 4 billion US-Dollar for its IPO in April....

The provider for .de-Domains is expecting to give out the seven millionth domain this January. At the momen, there are 6 951 926 registered .de-domains....

We wish you all a merry and successful 2004....