19 posts categorized "Search"

My Report into the FIR podcast - November 29, 2010

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Sent in my regular weekly 5-minute report this morning for today's "For Immediate Release" podcast episode. In today's report I discussed:

The episode will be available for your listening pleasure from the FIR web site later today.


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Will Everyone Seeking a Job Now Use Adwords? (re: The Google Experiment)

You have to admit, this was a very clever way to use Google Adwords to rise above any other potential job candidates and get a message across:

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Kudos to Alec Brownstein for his creativity. Setting ads on 5 people's names... getting interviews with 4 of them... job offers from 2... and now working for one of them at Young & Rubicam (Y&R) New York. All for $6 in Google AdWords spending.

Will this now create a new boom in Google Adwords spending for job seekers? :-)

Alec Brownstein even created a video about it...

P.S. And with this example, what is next? Marriage proposals via AdWords? (Or has that already been done?)


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Outstanding list of the "Best Internet Marketing Posts of 2009" from Tamar Weinberg

tamarweinberg.jpgOver on her "techipedia" blog, Tamar Weinberg has pulled together an outstanding list of "The Best Internet Marketing Posts of 2009". It's a LONG list... but Tamar has done an excellent job curating a list of what's been worthwhile to read this year in the social media / marketing space. There's a few I might add... but I can't quibble with any she's listed there.

If you're looking for good info on marketing, PR, social media, search/SEO, and many other topics... you definitely need to read through the list and start following links.

Thanks, Tamar, for compiling this list... it's a great resource for all of us.


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Twitory, Twithority and the quest to rank Twitter search results by authority

Do we need a tool that ranks Twitter search results by number of followers?

That's been one of the big debates circulating through the Twittersphere / blogosphere since Loic LeMeur kicked off the conversation over the weekend. I haven't had the time to weigh in, but Neville Hobson put up a good post about two search sites: Twitority and Twithority. (And yes, there are two web sites that do almost exactly the same thing that have a one-letter difference in their domain names!)

In my own brief testing, I rather liked how TwitHority provided a two-column view of results by ranking and results by time. Nice to see. On the other hand, I liked how Twitority (no H) provides a Technorati-like way to search by degree of authority (although I have to wonder what they set a "lot" at, as it never turned up results for me).

Personally, I do like the option of being able to rank search results by number of followers. Yes, I understand that the number of followers is meaningless in so many ways... and that it can also be gamed by someone who, for instance, sets up tons of bogus twitter accounts. I realize that it's a very imperfect measurement. Still, it is a measurement that's out there. And the fact remains that if someone tweets something about you or your product/brand/service out to 10,000 people, odds are pretty good that it will potentially be read by more people than if someone tweets it out to, say, 20 people.

We'll have to see how these sites work out... but in my mind I'm glad to see someone trying to help us make sense out of all the data out there.


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A web page you should NEVER see...

UPDATE - May 7, 2008: A bit of an apology to Fast Company is in order here. Shortly after I posted this piece back on April 30th, Paul Maiorana, who works with the Fast Company web site, contacted me asking for the original URL I used that got me to the screen I include below. After I provided the URL, Paul very quickly said it was the wrong format for the Fast Company site (even before the site re-org) and the blog where I found the link was using the wrong link. He also provided me with the correct link.

Oops.

So of course if I am following a link to a page that never existed on a web site I will naturally get an error message like the one I show. As to my inability to find the article through the search box, all I can say is that whatever search terms I used at the time (I have no clue now what they were) didn't find the article for me. It was, though, there on their site.

So my apologies to Fast Company for criticizing aspects of their website redesign. Clearly in this case such criticism was not warranted.

I'd note that the point I was making about web site redesigns still stands - if you have a valid URL from before a redesign, it should still work after a redesign. Obviously, if you have an invalid URL, it still won't work.

P.S. For the record, the post I was trying to find was "The Ultimate Calling Card" about books and self-publishing.


I'm sorry, but I find pages like this utterly inexcusable:
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Okay, so you went and "re-organized" your web site and in the process completely screwed up all the URLs that used to be there. But, c'mon, man, haven't you heard of Apache redirects (and their equivalents for other web servers)? In my opinion, part of any website reorganization/redesign/whatever really MUST include some plan to redirect the old URLs. Why? Simple:

Once posted, URLs live "forever".

Those URLs are linked to by other web sites. They are incorporated into blog posts. They are sent along in email and IM messages. They wind up in search engine databases.

Once used out on the Internet, in my opinion, URLs should never be deleted. Redirected, yes... but not deleted. Unless, of course, the content is actually being removed from the web server in which case, sure, the URL will no longer work. But if the content is just being moved to a new location... to a new URL... because of a redesign then I shouldn't get a 404 for following a link to your site for the older URL.

Sure, with a large site setting up the redirection will take a good bit of work, but the benefit is people will still be able to easily get to your content, nevermind all the SEO advantages. Unless, of course, you don't really want them to find your content anymore.

P.S. I did search Fast Company's site for the article I was looking for and couldn't find it. Fast Company's loss... it sounded like an interesting article to read that I probably would have passed along to the 1,200 people following me on Twitter.

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VOTE here for your favorite Social Search site in the Open Web Awards

Voting is now open for the "Social Search" category of the Open Web Awards (described here).  Please vote for your favorite site!  The 10 nominees are listed below and you will be able to vote up until 11:59pm PST on Sunday, December 16th. At that point, the top 3 choices will be selected and we’ll move into the final round of voting.

For more information, see the post on Mashable.com kicking off the voting in this category.

Mashable Open Web Awards
Category: Social Search
Sponsors:
Cohn & Wolfe PR & Mashable
Web Poll by Vizu

Open Web Awards - What sites would you nominate for "Social Search"?

200711281322What sites would you nominate for "Social Search" for the Open Web Awards? As I described earlier, this site is one of the places you can nominate candidate sites. Please do so by leaving a comment with the word "NOMINATE" at the beginning followed by a dash and the site name. For instance "NOMINATE - Facebook.com".

As noted in the Mashable.com post on this category:

Despite the never-ending barrage of Google news and the dominant market share of the top four search engines, dozens of startups think they can do a better job at helping you query the Web. In fact, we rounded up a list of more than 40 of them a few months ago, and I personally test drove six so-called “people search engines” back in July. After checking out our prior coverage and maybe giving a few social search sites a try of your own, pick your favorite and make a nomination!

What sites and services do you like best? Please feel free to make multiple nominations - and if someone else has already nominated your site, please feel free to leave another comment with the same nomination. (Mashable.com has asked us to pass along the number of nominations we receive for each site.

Let the nominating begin! (Nominations will be closed at 11:59PM Pacific time on Tuesday, December 4th)

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Google's "Shared Stuff" lets you share web sites/URLs publicly, or with Facebook, del.icio.us and others (review with screenshots)

Google yesterday quietly rolled out their "Shared Stuff" social bookmarking/sharing service and predictably there were a slew of postings in the blogosphere. Here's my little quick tour for you. First, you add a link on your bookmark bar:

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Now you just click on the bookmark whenever you are on a page you want to share, very much like you do with del.icio.us, Facebook, digg or any of a zillion other services. The result is a popup page that looks like this:

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Once you do any of the optional things like add a comment, change the picture or add tags, you simply hit "Share" and you get a page telling you of your success and giving you the link to your Shared Stuff page:

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Clicking on the link brings me to my own private version of the "Shared Stuff" page (because I'm logged in with my Google account):
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which looks sort of like the public page you all will see (which I get by clicking the "As everyone sees it") link:
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You'll immediately note that the page everyone sees only has one of my two items on it. I can't explain why... and I've forced a browser refresh multiple times to try to see if it was a browser issue but that seemed to do nothing.

Now I could not for the life of me figure out any way to edit the listing I had on the page, but by simply sharing the same URL again, it seems to have corrected the issue (and I also could change the picture associated with it).

It is somewhat annoying that for the "article preview", it grabs the blog subtitle instead of the first bit of the actual post text - and there seems to be no way to change that, although you can add a comment. However, I have the same problem with Facebook "Shared links" and its preview.

Speaking of Facebook, the Google Email/Share feature has a "More..." link that brings you to a second page where you can share the link on Facebook, Furl, del.icio.us, Social Poster (which I'd not heard of), Reddit and Digg:
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I clicked on "Facebook" and got the standard Facebook sharing screen:
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You also can email a link (and add it at the same time) which is naturally integrated with Gmail:
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The "Shared Stuff" feature does have some other interesting aspects, such as RSS feeds, the ability to see stuff shared by others (based on your Gmail address book) and the ability to search for stuff shared by other users based on domain or tag. However, as I discovered, there is this minor detail that tags must be separated by commas although it doesn't tell you that! Being used to del.icio.us, I put a space between my tags, with the resulting amusement:
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It is looking here for the most popular stuff tagged "pme podcastexpo podcasting socialmedia" all as one giant tag. Oops. I shared it again and inserted commas, after which it worked fine. However, I did have to change the image again as it defaulted back to the first image (my picture) instead of the one I had chosen.

Given that I am a heavy user of del.icio.us and am already all set up to use that, and that I'm also sharing stuff within the walls of Facebook, I'm not really sure how much I'll use this new Google service. However, given that it's Google and one might expect that some of this information might ultimately show up in search rankings (or at least affect search results), there's a good chance it might be worth at least continuing to experiment with it.

What do you think? Will you use this new service? Or will you stick with the others?

Some other articles:

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Technorati does a design refresh - but seems to lose the easy "tag" search in the process (and I'll miss that!)

Congrats to the Technorati team on their new site design!  Overall it's a nice "refresh" of their design.  Of particular note, I like their new simple search interface, s.technorati.com, which is very simple and clean and shown in the image on right.  (And as an old-time UNIX/Linux guy who likes short commands,  can I just say that I appreciate the shortened subdomain of "s".)

Dave Sifry's post has much more info but there's one item I'll pull out that is a mixed change for me:

First, we've eliminated search silos on Technorati. In the past, you had to know the difference between keyword search, tag search and blog directory search in order to make use of the full power of our site. No more. Starting today, we now provide you a simplified experience. Simply indicate what's of interest to you and we'll assemble the freshest, hottest, most current social media from across the Live Web - Blogs, posts, photos, videos, podcasts, events, and more.

But what if I want the search silos?

Specifically, what if I want to search for posts tagged with a given tag?  Yes, that's still available on the Advanced Search page and yes, I can create a URL like http://technorati.com/tag/voip and use that... but I guess you can count me as one who liked the aspect of the old interface where you could choose to just search on tags.

Why?

Well, searching on posts by tag represents a richer way to search for me.  Searching for a string in blog posts pulls up all sorts of things (and can be very difficult to sort through if you are searching for a generic text string), but searching for a tag gets into the author's intent.  The author did more than just write about something, they tagged it to indicate that it had some relevance to that category.

It also, quite frankly, provided a way to separate out the absolutely clueless newbie bloggers from those who have a clue about blogging and applying meta-information to their entries.  Tags are not perfect... spammers certainly tag their entries with all sorts of irrelevant tags which pollute search results... but they are one additional way to aid us in sorting through the huge volume of information posted to the blogosphere.

So I use tag searches all the time, and it was easy to just go to technorati.com, enter in text and change the option box to a tag search.  Now, that option seems to be gone and I have to either do one more click to the Advanced Search (easy to bookmark and use from my systems, but not as quick when I'm elsewhere and need some info) or construct the appropriate URLs.

Technorati team, for those of us who love tag searches, how about giving us a "tag.technorati.com" that will let us search by tag?

Other than that, the refresh looks quite nice - kudos to the team for making it happen.

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