2005

You can find Google’s new musicsearch at www.google.com/musicsearch. They are indexing CD-shops, lyrics, notes and informations on the artists and songs. Online-music-shops like iTunes are also included....

According to an announcement on the official Yahoo!-Blog, there has been an update to the index. It’s a shame that Yahoo just does not have that much traffic....

Alexa is offering developers a possibility to access the Alexa-database named websearch. The applications are run directly on Alexa’s servers and does not need APIs (like which are used at Google and Yahoo). The prices are calculated by the ammount that the service is used. This is an interesting approach […]...

flickr has some pictures from inside the Googleplex....

After some very interesting purchases (for example Flickr), Yahoo! has now also purchased the social-bookmarking-service del.icio.us. There are about 200.000 users worldwide using del.icio.us to share their bookmarks with others....

With Google Transit, Google is introducing a searchengine for public transportation. At the moment, the search is still in its beta-phase and only usable in the larger Portland area....

There have been speculations for a while now that Google will expand their already started experiments in the newspaper- and magazine-sector. Now, Businessweek.com has published an interesting article on this subject, which shines some light on the different possibilities and risks of such a step....

heisereports that MSN is planning its own online-classifieds-market to go up against Google Base. The interesting part is the planned integration of this service into Windows Live and MSN Search....

Google’s classifieds-marketplace Google Base now has its own blog over at googlebase.blogspot.com. There, the Base developers are planning to announce new functions. There is also a list of other Google-blogs to the right of the page....

What could Google be planning with the freshly installed calendar.google.com subdomain? At the moment at least there is nothing to be seen there....

It seems that the Googlebot is indexing Google’s new classifieds-marketplace (Base). Maybe they should rename it to produktsuche.google.de (productsearch) …...

After CNET’s article on how the freshly started Google Base was being flooded with pornographic materials, it seems that Google is now starting to react and is cleaning up their database. It will be interesting to see how they plan on differentiating trash from actual content in the future. In […]...

Now, Google is also planning a pay-per-call-billing for advertising. New in this version is that the searcher gets called by Google first before they are connected to the advertiser. yardley.ca has interesting screenshots. Update: Spiegel Online article on this subject...

The Seekport searchengine is now also sporting a blogsearch. In Germany they are supposed to crawl through 300.000 blogs. Personally, I rather doubt that there are more than 10.000 well-tended blogs with useful content that are worth being crawled....

Due to recent events, here the note, that domains that are deleted through Google’s Urlconsole are completely and irreversibly removed from the index for 180 Days....

Google just unlocked their personalized search. If you have a Google- or GMail-Account, you can use this feature at www.google.com/psearch. The results should be improved because the personalized search records all of your search activities....

My personal experience (uncommented, just click to enlarge):...

After presenting their quarterly figures on Thursday, Google’s stock price rose by a good margin, which led the searchengine’s stock-price overcome the 100-billion-dollar threshold for a short time on Friday (via intern.de). No wonder that the Google-representative was in such a good mood at the extremely well done SEO-Regulars-Table in […]...

Yahoo! is reporting that German Publishing Houses are planning to start a competitor to the just recently started Google Print....

A posting on seo-news.de made me aware that MSN seems to manually check the SERPs, too. I went through my logs, looking for the referrer and found the first mentions around the beginning of April and nearly every day since then. Seeing how MSN also returns the e-mail address of […]...

After being able to see some changes in the index for a few days, now we also get the new PageRank as well as the new backlinks. Enjoy....

You can now buy a editoral-account for a PageRank 5 category on eBayeBay. Quickly go and make some money before it is all over....

Google Print just started in Germany. Though it seems that in Germany, Google is not automatically indexing large bookcollections, which helps them to stay clear of a confrontation with the Bookindustry. At the moment, the index only has a very slim selection of German language books....

The Spiegel.de is reporting, that there are already negotiations on the way between Google, Comcast and AOL. The investors are hoping to gain a wider reach in the internetportal-market. This can also be seen behind the backdrop of MSNs announcement that they are planning on acquiring portals....

You are now able to search for podcasts on Yahoo! Personally, I think this silliness is just a hype....

After the recent cleaning- and polishing-actions in the Googleindex, the quality of the SERPs is rising and spam is getting less. Those of you who are mournfully wanting to take a trip down memory lane should check out SpamGoogle.com. Just the noise....

On October 22nd at 3 PM the fourth SEO Regulars-Table will be held in Munich. There will be representatives from Google, Yahoo and MSN in attendance. This sounds quite interesting and I will be there, too....

With the Google Reader, Google introduced a onlineapplication for reading RSS-feeds. Those who want to use this service need to have a Google-account. Looks nice but i think i will stay with Bloglines....

Now, after Google had quite a bit of trouble with their plan to digitize whole libraries, the Open Content Alliance (OCA), which is made up of Yahoo! and the Internet Archive, is planning to make books available online as PDF files. Though the OCA is only planning on digitizing free […]...

Google’s first non-beta version of their toolbar for the Firefox browser can now be downloaded. Besides the PageRank view, the toolbar also offers translation- and spell-checking-functions....

Yahoo! got a new searchindex and therefore a completely new set of SERPs. It is also interesting that they are now showing five (!) sponsored links before the actual results. If this is helping Yahoo!s small marketshare?...

Google got in trouble again thanks to Google Print. With Google Print the searchengine is digitizing the libraries of large American universities without the authors consent. This led the Authors Guild in the USA to bring a class action lawsuit against Google, in which they are are accusing Google of […]...

Google’s free picture-editing-software Picasa is now available in German. The 4MB software can be downloaded at picasa.google.de....

Just as the rumors that have been around for a few days now rumored, MSN is now offering an API (Application Programming Interface) for many of its online-services. Developers can use the APIs for MSN Search, MSN Messenger, MSN Virtual Earth as well as the MSN Search Toolbar for free....

The MIT’s simplicity blog compared the homepages of Yahoo! and Google. It is quite interesting to see how the one design has changed over the years while the other stayed the same....

Gpuzzle.com crawls Google Images for fitting pictures for sentences and shows a graphical interpretation of that sentence. Nice gimmick....

The accusations that Yahoo was complicit in the arrest of a journalist by passing on data is growing into a public-relations-disaster. A wave of outrage is sweeping over Yahoo!, who are unable to come back with anything suitable. [here is the whole article at Spiegel Online]...

Google’s official birthday was 09.07.1998. Happy 7th birthday....

AnandTech switched the search on their site to the Google-Mini-Box and has already put up a small test....

Google started Google Local forChina, which is supposed to hold informations on more than 100 cities, 77 of which also have their city maps online....

Heise.de is reporting that Google Print is about to start in Europe, too. Jens Redmer, the Google-Manager in charge, told the dpa on Thursday that they are very pleased with the way that the negotiations with the leading German publishing houses are going. The financing is to come from thematically […]...

Dr. Bahr is reporting that the LG Leipzig decided that using a term as a keyword for Google AdWords is neither a trademark infringement nor unfair competition. More on their website....

explido WebMarketing‘s monthly pricelist for searchengine advertisement prices, SPIXX, shows that the prices for terms of the wellness, travel and electronics sectors declined up to 17%, while the prices for computer or real-estate keywords rose by up to 15%....

After Phil Ringnalda posted in his Blog that on some pages of the O’Reilly-network there are some links that were set only to flow PageRank and linkpopularity, Matt Cutts declared, that Google was aware of this and was already disregarding parts of the perl.com, xml.com, etc. sites as far as […]...

David Wolski, editor for sueddeutsche.de, wrote up a short article on how German users can get an e-mail address on the gmail.com-domain. Because of a trademark lawsuit, German users are only able to get googlemail.com addresses at the moment. Via Webhostingblog...

Google Southpark-style...

Google just opened its e-mail service GMail up for everyone in the USA. Until now, you needed an invitation of a GMail-user to get your hands on an account. To sign up you will now need to enter a cell-phone number where the confirmation SMS will be send. This is […]...

There had been speculations but not its official, Google just started a messaging-service. Google Talk allows GMail-users to communicate with each other through client-software. The communication can be either written or spoken (VoIP). At the moment there is only a Windows version available but both Linux- and Mac-clients are planned […]...

Google announced, that they wish to sell an additional 14,16 million shares. At the current price of around 275 US-Dollar, this deal would be worth about four billion US-Dollars. Since Googles IPO, the price of Google shares has nearly tripled from their initial price of 85 US-Dollars....

Google AdSense now has their own official blog. Google-employees should blog tips and informations there two to three times a week....

A UIUC study is casting doubts on Yahoo!s reported number of 19,2 billion websites in their index. In this study, they tested the number of found websites with the English Ispell-wordlist. The Yahoo! average should be more than twice that of Google (8,1 billion websites). Seeing how both searchengines will […]...

IP2Nation is a free database that puts countries to IPs. This can be interesting for the delivery of ad-banners. Via: Webhosting Blog...

In his blog, Rand Fishkin recollects a conversation with Google-employees at the Search Engine Strategies, in which Google unofficially confirmed that they have a sandbox for new sites. This filter for new sites is supposed to raise the index quality considerably....

In their own blog, Yahoo! Disclosed that they now have 20 billion documents (19,2 billion websites, 1,6 billion pictures and more than 50 million audio- and video-files) in their index. Lets see how long it takes Google to baffle us with a 20,1 billion-document-index....

Mario Dolzer, CEO of Universal Boards GmbH & Co KG seems to want to circumvent the mandatory blockings that Whois-server put on hammering IP-addresses in an unconventional way. heise Security is reporting that sites belonging to Dolzer are giving out software that checks a list of domains at whois-services. A […]...

In its own pressrelease, Google announced that they are looking to fill 2 head chef positions. To make things more interesting, they are inviting qualified applicants to Mountain View for a cooking test. The Googleblog gives a taste of all the different dishes that are requested....

Today, Yahoo started the beta for their Yahoo! Publisher Network (YPN). 2000 betatesters should put the Ads on their sites until the end of the year, after which this form of advertisement should become open to all webmasters. Similar to Googles AdSense, YPN shows relevant textlinks in special ad-brackets and […]...

The Google Cheat Sheet offers a clean list of Google searchoperators. Perfect for printing out and placing besides the keyboard....

Today, Microsoft started their betaversion of Virtual Earth as a competitor to Google Maps. Just like Google, MSN offers the choice of displaying satelite- or vector-maps and it is also possible to combine the two....

At the moment, Google will give out a 25 EUR gift-card to all new customers....

In the fight for the searching public, Yahoo! is now also offering a toolbar for the free Firefox browser. The toolbar has versions for Windows, Linux and Mac and brings nothing new or remarkable to the table....

Google will hold a webseminar at 11:30 pm MEZ on the subject of Google AdSense Reports. This will be a 30 minute seminar and only 750 participatns are allowed, all of which have to register up front....

Google Moon lets you take a look at the surface of the moon. Sadly the resolution is not good enough to make out little green men....

Yahoo! now also blogs in German at http://ysearchblog.com/de/...

The time is upon us once again: Google started an update for the PageRanks that are shown in the toolbar. Those of you who want to get an overview of you sites PageRank on the different Google datacenters, can use SEO Chats Future PageRank Tool. At the moment, you can […]...

Amazon, the Internetshop and affiliate-program pioneer is turning 10. Happy Birthday. A click on the picture will produce a screenshot of Amazon’s first homepage in 1995 and aditionally here we have an Amazon-timeline....

After both Google and Yahoo! have already made the Wikipedia-database part of their results, Web.de is not offering an extensive searchfunction for Wikipedia, in which they will also show pictures besides the more than 250.000 articles....

Google is dominating the Internet-searchenginemarket. But now, both Microsoft and Yahoo want to catch up. This is about the rearranging of a billion-dollar-market. More at spiegel.de...

google.blognewschannel.com is reporting that many copyrighted movies have shown up at Google Video. Interesting how this will progress....

The manufacturer of the canned meatpaste is trying to assure their customers that Spam is healthy ever since 1937. Cannadian Scientists have now found out, that this is at least true for the meatpastes namesake: spam-mails, which they claim are good for your health. The whole article on Spiegel.de...

Reuters is reporting, that Click Defense is suing Google because Google is unable to effectively prevent click-fraud. Click Defense is alleging that up to 38% of all PPC-clicks are fraudulent. It is pretty hard to dismiss accusations that Click Defense is just eager to get some free advertisement for their […]...

At chillingeffects.org you can get a list of all the cases in which Google changed the SERPs due to alleged Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) violations. Maybe a new type of optimization …...

Google’s purchase of sateliteimage-provider Keyhole is yielding the first fruits: Google released the first version of Google Earth. With this performance– and bandwidth-hungry 3D-navigator, you are able to interactively fly through 3D-pictures. At the moment you can view the USA, Canada and Great Britain. [Download (10,0 MB)] Update: Christopher Kunz […]...

For the first time, Google stocks have overcome the 300 US-Dollar-mark at the New York Technology-exchange NASDAQ. This is a market capitalization of of 84,5 billion US-Dollars....

Mediapost.com is reporting that, at the moment, MSN is looking for bloggers on five different topics. They will have to write 5-10 entries a day, evaluate submissions and sort comments....

According to an article in ADWEEK, 53% of searchengine-users do not know the difference between organic results and the advertisements. Google’s trial of modified result-pages, in which advertisements are not separated as well from the results as before, fit into the same pattern....

The rumors about a Google payment-system were now confirmed by CEO Eric Schmidt. He mentioned though, that Google’s payment-system would not want to compete with eBays Paypal. More details were not mentioned....

Vericlix is offering a free tool against click-fraud for PPC-campaigns. For this, all a webmaster has to do, is add a JavaScript-Code into the advertised site and they will be notified if there are any indications of a click-fraud....

MSN introduced a localized-search for America. After entering your own address, the search offers everything that you can expect from a localized search-function. The address can be shown either on a map or, alternatively, on satellite-images with a multitude of zoom-options. At the moment, you can reach the MSN localized-search […]...

Today, Google started the German version of their Googlesearch for cell-phones. If a cell-phone goes to www.google.de, they will get an interface that is customized for mobile devices. With a normal browser this interface can also be reached at www.google.de/xhtml. Searchresults are returned through a proxy and are therefore conform […]...

heise.de is reporting that Yahoo! also bought DialPad, an Internet-telephone provider. DialPad is mostly offering services for calls from Voice-over-IP devices into the normal telephone-network....

Jim Winstead is writing that Yahoo! just bought the blog-ping-service blo.gs. The service, containing 8,785,909 active blogs, will be kept free of charge. Financial details of the deal are not known....

After the announcement, that, in the future, Espotting and the FindWhat Group will appear in public under the consolidated company-name MIVA, they relaunched their website today. New are both the Toolbar (individual Toolbar with Pay-per-click back-end) as well as the Pay-per-click-banner (a click on the banner makes a layer show […]...

After the rumors that Google is planning on developing their own browser to bind users closer to their searchengine, it seems that the same is going on at Yahoo!. On this matter, Yahoo! CEO Terry Semel said that the development of their own browser could make sense in the future....

Two interesting articles, one in the Guardian, the other in the Times, are dealing with the question of how far Google’s stocks can rise....

As announced, Mirago is starting an AdSense-alternative. The first advertisements were now observed and it is amazing, how similar they are to the Google AdSense format. This form of advertisement is especially interesting for webmasters who are unable to show Google advertisements due to the strict AdSense guidelines....

cnet is reporting that the .xxx-domains, which are designed for erotic-websites, are close to be approved by ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers). The domains are to cost about $75....

An article on Searchbistro depicts how Google is working together with editors to improve their searchengineresults. They also provide a Flash-video with the user-interface on eval.google.com...

The Google Toolbar once again shows your PageRank. It seems that the outage was due to a technical problem....

Since this morning, the Google Toolbar stopped displaying the PageRank. Until now, Google has not commented on the reasons for this and there are speculations that Google is planning on abolishing this feature. A technical defect could be another possibility. Update: Nothing has changed; Google is not commenting. Here some […]...

The German Book-Trade is planning an online full-text-search for German Books, according to a report on heise.de. This is supposed to compete against Google (Google Print) and Amazon (Look inside the Book)....

Ask Jeeves is buying the Excite Italia B.V, which means Excite Europe, from Tiscali. According to Tiscali, the price was 6,1 million Euros. The new owner is planning on consolidating Excite Europe with the US-branch of Excite, which they bought back in March of 2004....

Google’s AdWords Team now also has its own Blog: Google AdWords Blog...

Grokker uses a Java-applet to visualize the Yahoo!-searchresults. Nice to look at but not really something new....

Google is updating the PageRank once again. For those of you who are curious, you can use this tool to check it already....

The American Internet-company Yahoo managed to double their profits in the first quarter of 2005. More at heise.de...

problogger.net is reporting that Google AdSense is experimenting with new ad-formats at the time that are also available to those without a premium account. Supposedly, you will be able to freely choose the size as well as the number of URLs for each ad-block....

The Google-Toolbar 3 has now also been released as a German version in beta-phase. The most important changes are a spell-checker and a word-wise translator....

With Ride Finder, Google Labs is showcasing an interesting use of geo-data. They are, for example, showing the current taxi-positions for a select number of US cities, where the data is supposed to not be older than 5 minutes....

Georges Harik, Gmail product management director, announced today that GMail will keep upgrading the storage in the days and month to come. This is to the accommodate the GMail-users habits of sending out large attachments of high-resolution pictures. Not too long ago, Yahoo! Announced that they were upgrading the storage […]...

Google’s Desktopsearch, which searches for files on the computers hard-drive, is now also available in German. With the help of a number of plugins, you are able to search diverse file-types from C++ to Mp3-tags....

Yahoo! now offers a search especially for documents that are subject to the Creative Commons License....

The Google searchengine announced the purchasing of the statistic-service-provider Urchin. Urchin offers a web-analytics program, which Google wants to make available for website-operators and sales-experts....

According to the Wall Street Journal, Interactive Corp., an Internet-investment-company, is about ready to take over Ask Jeeves. Ask Jeeves, the number five in the searchenginemarket is supposed to be sold for 2 Billion USD. No further details are known....

Conveniently timed with the start of the CeBIT, Yahoo! Deutschland has put a videosearch online. This beta version of a searchfunction already went live for the English version in December....

According to the Wirtschaftswoche, T-Online, after Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, now wants to offer their own desktop-searchengine. They are planning on debuting their 2.5 MB software at the CeBIT. The search is based on a modified version of the Copernic software....

Google is now offering the full version of their desktop-search for download. After five month of beta-testing, they added a developer-packet and support for the Firefox- and Netscape-browser....

After being owned by Yahoo! for nearly two years, Overture is now being rebranded into Yahoo! Search Marketing Solutions....

An article at ZDNet UK looks at the relationship between Google and the Mozilla Foundation. This partnership nets the Mozilla Foundation enough money to add five more job openings. The downside is that this means that there is no way to change the startpage in localized versions of the browser....

A long long time ago, as far as Internet-dimensions are concerned, Yahoo! started out as a hand-tended catalog. It was one of the first sites that categorized the quickly growing number of Internet-pages. Spiegel Online (Deutsch) as well as Wired (English) both have interesting articles on the 10-year anniversary....

This Is the title of an interesting article on the origins of Google by John Heilemann....

With Localsearch, AOL is now also offering a localized searchfunction besides Yahoo! and Google. Once your address is saved, the search will query the databases of Mapquest, AOL City Guides as well as Moviephone....

Google just released a beta-version of their Toolbar 3. They added a spell-checker that checks input into forms. Additionally, you are now able to translate English words....

The Wikimedia-foundation announced that Google has offered to host part of the Wikipedia-project. They are appropriating a number of Dual-Xeon-Servers as well as unlimited bandwidth. This offer is explicitly not linked to an inclusion of AdSense banners on Wikipedia.org....

The Searchengineoperator Ask Jeeves has bought Bloglines, a site that specializes on new and Internet-diaries. According to their press release, Ask Jeeves wants to keep operating Bloglines as an independent brand....

In its second regular quarterly earning statement, Google shows that it took in revenues of 1,03 Billion US-Dollar. This left them with a profit of 204,1 Million US-Dollar. More on that over at heise.de...

With a beta-version of it’s API for AdWords, Google will now give advertisers the possibility to manage ad-campaigns with external programs. Rumors on a possible AdWords-API first surfaced about four days ago....

At video.google.com you are now able to search through the US-American TV-programming. While the number of stations is still limited and the archive only goes back to the end of December 2004, it still gives a good overview into the upcoming functions....

Now, heise.de also has its own price-comparison. The Site for the heise-publishing-house, publishes the three magazines c’t, iX and Technology Review, offers an online price-comparison in cooperation with the mentasys GmbH at www.heise.de/preisvergleich/. According to heise, they are comparing the prices of about 100 merchants. Thanks to a high linkpopularity […]...

According to Nielsen Media Research, online-advertisement was able to gain a plus of 21 percent in the second quarter of 2004, while the classic media was only able to make a plus of 6 percent....

According to the British Times, Google could soon start offering a free Internet-telephone service. Sadly, this article is not stating any facts which leaves Google’s entry into the telecommunications sector in the realm of speculation....

Today, Microsoft launched its new MSN-search at suche.msn.de. It seems that they are putting more emphasis on domain names than Google....