Keeping Up: Chronicling the Rapid Pace of Change Online

Rumors of a Google Super Bowl commercial? http://searchengineland.com/a-google-super-bowl-ad-schmidt-hints-at-it-35349

Search-Werks.com redesign is live

I am happy to report that www.search-werks.com has been redesigned and updated! The site has been somewhat neglected while we prioritized making clients happy as #1. I am pleased to have the site better reflect the brand finally. Feel free to make any improvement suggestions!

 

"Keeping Up" with Search-Werks

Since its been a while since my last post, I thought I would share a few pieces of good news Search-Werks related...

First, we have added several new clients to the mix at Search-Werks.  Although I won't name them individually, I am pleased to have their trust. Thank you to each of you. Clearly, the high quality interaction that we strive hard to differentiate on meets a need in the market and word of mouth continues to be shared amongst 

To make sure we make good on our commitments to clients, I am happy to share that we added Carissa Vivirito as Director of Client Services to the team.  She brings an infectious spirit, smarts, and development/design experience from her time at the AZ Humane Society and agency work in the Phoenix area.

Lastly, although very late in mentioning, this past fall Search-Werks became an authorized Netconcepts' Gravitystream partner. Gravitystream is an organic search optimization platform that allows clients the ability to boost their website search optimization capabilities without major platform work or re-coding. This week I will be attending the Covario InflectionPoint conference in San Diego and meeting the team at Covario who recently acquired Netconcepts.  I have worked with Brian K./Stephen S. and team at Netconcepts for nearly a decade now (hard to believe!!).  Congrats to the team at Netconcepts on building a business that Covario found attractive enough to buy!

All of the above is good stuff going on at Search-Werks and I look forward to sharing more good news throughout 2010.

Twitter Talking Licensing Feeds to Google & Bing

With Twitter on its way to licensing their data to Google and Bing, this is sure to trigger a giant avalanche of new search/traffic optimization strategies as well as an avalanche of the inevitable twitter spam....looks like our job at Search-Werks just got even more complex.

Twitter in Google, Microsoft licensing talks: report

Hitwise asking if we are Twittered Out?

This is an interesting headline given the recent stories about how Twitter being valued in the billions....Hitwise data is showing visits to Twitter are flattening out.  The irony though is that I heard about this via a Hitwise Tweet! 

Another Great Use of Twitter: Lance Armstrong Finds Cycling Friends - LOTS OF EM

A good story worth sharing and posted for my old cycling friend at Virginia Tech who wasn't sure about the practicality of Twitter.  It seems that Lance was in Glasgow, Scotland and was looking for some riding partners. One Tweet and bam, 200+ people show up.  A great example of how technology/Twitter can enhance everyday life, especially when you are Lance Armstrong and EVERYONE wants to ride with you.  I don't think my friend at Va Tech and I share that trait with Lance!

Lance finds riding friends on Twitter: Scotland Herald

Domain Name Chaos Coming in 2010 - Guess Who Really Wins?

The internet domain name administrative body ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) is planning what I consider to be one of the bigger events on the web in quite some time.  Based on the premise that the world is running out of available names for websites, in 2010, they are planning to open up domain names extensions to just about anything under the sun.  Next year, you could very well see the beginning of websites being named such oddities as Coca.Cola or DonaldTrump.Toupee.  This may be a little bit of an exaggeration but not by much. I think Robert Mitchell at PCWorld describes it creatively saying "Top level domains could soon be as common as vanity license plates."  With these coming changes to domain names, fat fingering may take on a whole new meaning.  Watch out what you type into your browser bar!  You name it, it will be an extension at some point. I am sure some some hair-brained "entrepreneur" with dreams of riches will start buying every conceivable domain name like with the word Obama in it (that may be pretty smart actually).  The famous whitehouse.com (my advice - DO NOT type whitehouse.com into your browser) versus whitehouse.gov website confusion will become ancient history.

It doesn't seem hard to figure out who really benefits from this. Search, search, search. Google, Google, Google.  Search (and by extension and its sheer dominance, Google) is a behavior heavily engrained in our web pysche in 2009.  It seems impossible to think that this could be entrenched even further than it already is.  With the creature comfort of using ".com" gone and the heightened fear of punching something very very wrong in your browser address bar, search engines are sure to become the absolute first place to start any session on the web.  Web navigation through search emerged as somewhat of an unexpected browsing behavior in the early days of Google.  The question was often asked for instance, "Why would someone go to Google to type in "CNN.com?"  With their lightning fast response times, Google made it very easy to use them as a proxy for actually typing an address out. If the user's mind then becomes overwhelmed with uncertainty and the question then becomes "is it CNN.com or is it CNN.News or CNN.Headlines....", search becomes anchored permanently as the first step in any web session and this makes the folks in Mountain View, CA smile.

Sad or Ironic Genius: Bing runs Google Adwords ads

 During a regular searching session today, I noticed something quite odd.  Much to my surprise, I saw a Bing ad running on Google Adwords.

I can't figure out who is smarter here...Bing or Google?  Bing could be thinking "If we can't beat them, join them." Maybe they are so confident in their product that they think that its going to be easy to show how much better Bing is by redirecting a Google visitor.

My opinion is that Google is laughing all the way to the bank.  We all know Google could have put the kaibash on these ads but instead let them go up on some pretty sizeable high volume search terms.  This gives Google the ultimate PR to quietly show who owns search.  I think we all want a viable competitor to emerge but advertising with that competitor doesn't seem to be the way to do it.  Your thoughts?

Wolfram Alpha Tweets look positive

  In today's world, if you want instant feedback on anything from TV shows like "24" and movie releases like Star Trek (no, I have absolutely not one shred of a Trekkie bone in my body), Twitter is the first place you go.  Its a great way to get intel if you are a marketeer releasing a new product or maybe a reporter trying to gauge public sentiment. Thus, Twitter is a great place to go check out what the world thinks of WolframAlpah which I have previously posted about. It looks like for the most part, WolframAlpha is well received and will be here to stay for a while.

Wolfram Alpha Tweet Stream looks good...

Heard of WolframAlpha yet?

If not, you probably will soon as it supposedly goes live this weekend.  Its being dubbed as an "answer engine" rather than a search engine.  The key points that I find most interesting about WolframAlpha are:

- WolframAlpha answers questions rather than display a list of matching results. This is its strength and its limitation. It doesn't have thousands of terrabytes of data powering it as does Google.

- WolframAlpha may be the most visible foray to date into the world of the "semantic web" or Web 3.0.  The semantic web is still a fuzzy concept and this may bring it into more focus.

- Google co-founder Sergey Brin once spent a summer interning for Wolfram, the creator of WolframAlpha, prompting speculation that the two could team up one day boosting Google's capability as a search and answer engine.

As with most new search engines. many enjoy a lot of launch hype and are called the "Google Killer". This one is no exception.  Clearly this type of technology has its place in the search world and with WolframAlpha, I see the industry (along with Twitter Search) evolving still and putting ever more pressure on big G. A good summary article describing WolframAlpha is on MediaPost by Laurie Sullivan - "A Wolf in Google's Killer Clothing"