Despite indications that online advertising expenditure, including search engine advertising is either down or flattening, AdGooroo reports that first page advertising activity on all three major search engines was up sharply during the first two months of the fourth quarter of 2008.

Not only was first page spending up during this period, but the growth in first-page advertisers was substantially higher than that in the fourth quarter of 2007. Here are the growth percentages:

AdGooroo points out that while advertiser counts are higher on all three search engines, Google’s 55 percent increase is beyond what can be expected from seasonality alone. It attributes the remaining increase to Google expanding its ad coverage.

Meanwhile, AdGooroo estimates that Microsoft has increased its advertiser share from 11.5 percent in Q3 to about 15.8 percent in Q4 (a 37 percent increase). This brings Microsoft much closer to Yahoo in terms of being the preferred search engine channel for search engine marketers. Currently, Yahoo has a 22.1 percent share, while Google has an 80.3 percent share.

Source: AdGooroo, “AdGooroo Mid-Quarter Search Engine Update - Q408″, AdGooroo, December 4, 2008

Google will begin indexing scanned documents in its search results.

Since Google’s spiders can’t index text data, Google will be using optical character recognition (OCR) technology to convert photos of words into digital text files, necessitating a huge amount of processing power.

Source: Jason Kincaid, “Google Now Indexes Scanned Documents”, TechCrunch, October 30, 2008

Google has begun testing video ads aimed at specific YouTube searches.

Much like how Google AdWords serves up ads based on search phrases, Google wants to serve up video ads that match the search phrases typed into YouTube’s search box.

The idea is that when someone types in a phrase, up will come a video ad, along with the search results. The ad will, for example, link to the advertiser’s YouTube channel.

YouTube spokesman Aaron Zamost says Google is currently testing “a wide range of options to find the right advertising format, for the right content.”

Source: Miguel Helft, “Search Ads Come to YouTube”, The New York Times, October 13, 2008

Undoubtedly in response to numerous questions from concerned and confused Google Adwords advertisers, Google has posted an explanation of its Quality Score changes on its Adwords blog.

In short, here are Google’s responses to the main three issues on advertisers’ minds:

1. How will Quality Score be calculated?

Google will STILL consider (a) the historic performance of you account, evaluating the clickthrough rate (CTR) of all the ads and keywords in that account; and (b) your landing page quality. However, although Google will evaluate your overall Quality Score at the time of each search query, it will evaluate landing page quality less frequently.

2. What’s the impact of the removal of ‘Inactive for Search Status’?

Google believes that by making all keywords active it will better be able to evaluate keywords for any query where they may be relevant. The company has acknowledged that keywords previously marked as ‘inactive for search’ would otherwise never show ads on Google.com, even where they might have been a high quality match for certain queries. Now it’s giving such keywords a chance.

3. What’s the difference between ‘first page bid estimates’ and the old ‘minimum bids’?

Google says that for queries that don’t have much advertiser competition, the first page bid estimate should be relatively close to your existing minimum bid. However, queries with lots of advertiser competition may have much higher first page bid estimates. This is because you’ll probably need to bid above the old minimum bid to rank higher than the competition and show on the first page of paid search results.

Source: Trevor Claiborne, “Quality Score improvements to go live in coming days”, Inside Adwords, September 15, 2008

For all the hoopla about Chrome… Mozilla Firefox (ideally version 3 and over) is the browser of choice for many Internet marketers.

Why? Simply because there are tons of powerful free extensions and plugins for Firefox that can give you invaluable information on the fly.

Aaron Wall’s plugin, ‘SEO For Firefox‘ is one such tool. In fact, it’s one of my favorite search engine optimization (SEO) extensions. (I’ll cover some of the others in future articles.)

What does SEO For Firefox do? Well, when you perform a search using Google or Yahoo, it yields a host of other data about each of the search results.

Specifically, the tool pulls market research data into each of the search results, including the following:

• PR: Google PageRank - an estimate of global link authority.
• Age: age pulled from Archive.org - the first time a page was indexed by Archive.org’s spider (and theoretically the search engines).
• Links: Yahoo linkdomain - a rough estimate of the total number of links pointing at a domain.
• .edu Link: Yahoo .edu linkdomain - a rough estimate of the number of .edu links pointing at a domain.
• .edu Page Link: Yahoo .edu link - a rough estimate of the number of .edu links pointing at a specific page.
• .gov Link: Yahoo .gov linkdomain - a rough estimate of the number of .gov links pointing at a domain.
• Page Links: Yahoo link - a rough estimate of the number of links pointing at a page.
• del.icio.us: number of times a URL has been bookmarked on Del.icio.us.
• Technorati: an estimate of the number of links to a site from blogs.
• Alexa: rank based on website traffic (heavily biased toward Internet marketing and webmaster sites).
• Cached: Google site - how many pages from a site are indexed in Google.
• dmoz: based on the number of pages from a site listed in DMOZ, and the total number of pages listed in DMOZ that reference that URL.
• Bloglines: an estimate of how many people are subscribed to a particular blog via Bloglines.
• dir.yahoo.com: indicates whether a site is listed in the Yahoo Directory or not.
• WhoIs: a link to the whois data for a site.

SEO For Firefox also provides links to the given data sources to enable you to verify and further analyze the data. You can also choose which data points and links you want activated at a given time.

SEO For Firefox is a handy, free extension that can save you a LOT of time when conducting keyword, SEO and competitive research.

Just one tip - and this applies to similar such extensions - turn SEO For Firefox OFF when you are casually browsing.

If you always have it switched on, then each time you perform a search, you will effectively be running hundreds of search engine queries… to the point where the search engines may view you as a robot and ban you for a certain period of time. (This has happened to me, so I speak from experience!)

==> Click here to get SEO For Firefox

The Association of National Advertisers (ANA) - the peak body representing corporate advertisers - has formally opposed Yahoo’s plan to outsource some of its search ads to Google.

The ANA, which represents the interests of approximately 400 major advertisers, believes, “The partnership will likely diminish competition, increase concentration of market power, limit choices currently available and potentially raise prices to advertisers for high quality, affordable search advertising.”

The ANA has voiced its opposition in a letter to Thomas Barnett, assistant attorney general of the U.S. Department of Justice.

Meanwhile, indications are that Yahoo and Google believe the deal will raise prices for advertisers. Writing in The ClickZ Network, Zachary Rodgers points out that Yahoo President Sue Decker’s statement that the deal will help Yahoo “deliver financial value to stockholders from search monetization” can only be based on an expectation that better monetization means more expensive keywords.

Regardless of the ANA’s concerns, it’s not clear that the Department of Justice will prevent the deal from going ahead. As Mr Rodgers points out, given Yahoo’s poor financial health, “the matter may boil down to whether regulators decide Yahoo’s continued health is more important than keeping costs low for Internet advertisers.”

Source: Zachary Rodgers, “Marketers Formally Object to Yahoo-Google Pact”, The ClickZ Network, September 8, 2008

Google has started scanning microfilm from various newspapers’ historic archives to make them searchable online.

Currently, Google News users can search the archives of major newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times, The Washington Post and Time, that were already available in digital form. Now readers will also be able to search much older editions and view articles as they originally appeared in print form.

Source: Miguel Helft, “Google to Digitize Newspaper Archives”, The New York Times, September 8, 2008

Finnish blogger Timo Paloheimo, has launched a nifty little service “Google Minus Google” that allows you to search Google without getting results from Google owned websites (e.g. YouTube, Knol, Blogger, etc).

You can try it out here: Google Minus Google

What’s even more interesting to me is how simple, yet effective Timo’s initiative has been in generating publicity for himself. Apparently he attracted 3,000 visitors on introducing the service.

Smart marketing. Now can he make it pay?

Source: Nathania Johnson, “Introducing Google Without All the Google”, Search Engine Watch, August 19, 2008, Google Minus Google

Last Thursday, Google announced improvements to its Quality Score, which it introduced in July 2005 to vary minimum bids for keywords based on relevance.

Google is making three key changes to Quality Score:

1. Quality Score will now be calculated at the time of each search query. On that basis, Google will evaluate an ad’s quality each time it matches a search query. Consequently, Quality Score will vary according to such factors as where an ad displays (Google, search partner, content site) and where the searcher is located (country, state).

2. Keywords will no longer be marked ‘inactive for search’. Rather than be deemed inactive for search due to low relevance and/or searches, all keywords will be able to have ads shown on Google and the content network (unless you’ve paused or deleted them).

3. “First page bid” will replace the “minimum bid”. First page bids are an estimate of the bid it would take for your ad to reach the first page of search results in Google, based on the ‘exact match’ version of the keyword, the ad’s Quality Score, and current advertiser competition on that keyword.

So what do these changes mean?

Well, as far as a more dynamic Quality Score goes, it probably just confirms the need to keep keywords relevant. The good news is that, theoretically, YOUR ideas over what is relevant can be borne out by the behavior of your target market, rather than be deemed by Google. Provided, of course, that you get it right.

The lifting of the ‘inactive for search’ restraint is, I think, good news. Again, provided that you know more about your market than Google’s algorithm.

As for the replacement of the “minimum bid” with the “first page bid”… this sounds suspiciously like an excuse to make Google Adwords advertisers pay more. Hopefully not, but we won’t know until Google rolls out these “improvements” over the next few weeks.

Source: Trevor Claiborne, “Quality Score Improvements”, August 21, 2005

Monday July 28 saw the release of Cuil (pronounced “cool”), a new search engine launched by a group of ex-Google employees including Anna Patterson and her husband Tim Costello.

According to Cuil’s founders, Cuil is more comprehensive - with an index of 120 billion web pages, more than any other search engine - and delivers more relevant search results than Google’s search engine.

Despite the pedigree of Cuil’s founders and team, many commentators - myself included - were rather unimpressed when giving Cuil a spin. I found it slow, the layout confusing (no clear order and a strange use of images alongside unrelated webpages) and the results to be less relevant than those generated by Google.

It also lacks any kind of unique selling point. As an up and coming search engine it has nothing like the “wow” factor of, say, SearchMe and isn’t based on any markedly different technology as is Powerset (which uses semantic or “natural language” technology).

Rather it’s main selling proposition seems to hinge on being better than Google i.e “we’re bigger and more relevant, therefore we’re better”. Yet, as Google has indicated, bigger is not necessarily better (given all the crap on the Internet!) and Cuil has a way to go before it delivers more relevant search results.

Of course, it’s early days and Cuil may still become cool. Who knows, Microsoft might buy it.

Sources: Miguel Helft, “Former Employees of Google Prepare Rival Search Engine”, The New York Times, July 28, 2008, Frederic Lardinois, “Cuil: Good, But Not Great”, Read Write Web, July 28, 2008, Michael Arrington, “Google Beats Cuil Hands Down In Size And Relevance, But That Isn’t The Whole Story”, July 27, 2008