ChaCha Launches Three APIs

ChaCha Launches Three APIs

Developers get access to substantial database of answers and search content.

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New Real-time Search Engine Provides Facts, Not Links

New Real-time Search Engine Provides Facts, Not Links
Launched this week is a new search engine that performs a task the developers call ‘fact extraction’ – that is, it gets the facts for you, instead of you having to hunt through the links provided in traditional search results. It’s called Factery Labs and it’s been generating a lot of talk this week.

5 New Year Resolutions for Search Marketers in 2010

5 New Year Resolutions for Search Marketers in 2010

New year’s resolutions is usually about going back to basics, but it should not be reserved just for your personal life. Here’s some search marketing ones to consider.

1. Be a Nice Link Builder
Stop bulk emailing people. Instead, commit to contacting them directly with genuine points of interest. Offer sites you’d like to be getting links from, something genuinely useful for their sites. Think pimp. Other webmasters want bling websites, so offer simple but impressive enhancements in return for a link. For example, make a widget with a newsfeed. A salary checker, mortgage calculator or a countdown timer are all useful gadgets. Whatever you do, always be driving value in your discussions with other webmasters. Freely offer useful information and insight in your correspondence with other webmasters - help them with their own stuff.

2. Invest in the communities that support you
Do real ‘link bait’ by making something cool. A marketer might fund some research, or just do it themselves, and publish the findings. Or commission a blogger or journalist to conduct an investigative report about something that matters to the communities you are in. A business owner could encourage their developers to contribute back to the development community - and create an awesome firefox plugin for example. Lots can happen for a company when it broadens it’s work ethic. For example, Google’s 90/10 policy of encouraging employees to allocate 10% of their time to ‘blue sky’ and innovation projects - led to their latest collaboration product, Google Wave.

3. Get others to make sense of analytics data for you
To achieve this, you’ll need to stop wasting your colleagues time with data they are not interested in understanding. If you can perfectly match the data to their needs, you might have some amazing discoveries as they start to bring their own insight and experience to web analytics conundrums. So, aim to give them only the choicest golden nuggets sifted from web analytics data, rather than taking them to the river and just giving them a pan. Meet with them immediately and find out exactly what they’d like to know. Go and find out a bit about their role in the company. Talk to them about their job, but with the explicit aim to REDUCE the amount of data you send them again. Below are the type of questions you might ask every stakeholder in the project.

• (Director) Do you care about offline sales? If yes, would the online sales metric be useful to you?
• (Marketing) Do you need to know why people buy your products? If so, would keyword analytics or paid search campaign metrics be useful to you?
• (Sales) Do you need to know how people find your products? If so, would website referrer report be useful to you?
• (Web Development) Do you need to know how people are consume the site? If so, would a browser/operating/screen resolution report be useful to you?

4. Promise yourself a fun year ahead
Be content, create great content. Start posting regularly, or at least schedule some “creating great content” opportunities on a calendar. Build an audience through regular updates, whether it’s daily, weekly, monthly or just a special event of the year that you always engage with, such as Valentine’s day, Easter or Advent. Failing all other ideas, blog that new year’s detox you promised yourself!

More clues as to how you might schedule your content is to look at the seasonal traffic patterns of your website. Divide the year up into 4 quarters of 3 months each and see whether site usage peaks in summer or winter. Do any days stick out? Think laterally and creatively about what days could be an opportunity to “create something great” for your website that features just for a single day- for example, mother’s day? Birthdays? Word of the day? Thought for a day? Even something simple like planning ahead and scheduling a daily thought for the day from writers you love, could do great things for your twitter account, let alone your blog!

You could also reflect on the year by making your own website performance audit. Think about how much was achieved in a single year, both ‘on stage’, namely from what events and changes occurred on the website, and ‘behind the scenes’, namely the internal operations of your company, and see what insights emerge as to how project time could best be spent and which people are the best people to deal with in 2010. Get them involved in your idea now.

5. Give free training to your clients
Having empowered team mates in your search marketing campaign plans is the difference between success and massive success. Teaching someone to do your job as well as you is not talking yourself out if your role in the company or your clients’ business. It’s actually expanding your own role AND finding them the talent to meet the next generation of challenges ahead. It shows enthusiasm and passion for your work and is what “being indispensable” is all about. Unshackle yourself from the chains of command!

Here’s something quick you can do right now, to free the knowledge and expertise in the team:

Make an email mailing list or Google Groups thread dedicated to a topics and resources that are useful to the project at hand (or the company as a whole). E.g If your business sells virus software, then have a ‘virus update’ mailing list for any news on the subject relevant to your business or your customer.

Such a mailing list keeps conversation alive in the company and makes it easy for team mates to have a safe place to send stuff that is not directly relevant to the project at hand, but might only be vaguely useful or maybe really useful one day. A mailing list saves everyone in the team from worrying about interrupting other people’s workflows by bothering them with off topic and related content.

How website developers, and you, can contribute to findability?

How website developers, and you, can contribute to findability?
Search Engine Optimization, also known as SEO, can help people find that brilliant website you’ve created. Although you can certainly manipulate your code and your content to increase your chances of …

Google Chrome Now With Extensions Support And A Mac Version

Google Chrome Now With Extensions Support And A Mac Version
During an event at Mountain View’s Googleplex, Google officially unveiled the new browser add-ons, which are already proving quite popular among both users and developers mainly because of how easily they can be produced. Meanwhile, the search giant also unveiled a first beta version of the much-anticipated Chrome for Mac which, despite lacking support for a number of features (including extensions) seems a reasonably steady product with outstanding JavaScript performance.

FacteryLabs Launch FactRank Engine

FacteryLabs Launch FactRank Engine

The search industry has seen a lot of new engines developed moving towards a diversity of specific needs. Recently, “real time” search has been a hot topic with the use of social media in search.

This week a new engine was launched by FacteryLabs - an search technology company founded by Paul Pedersen and Sean Gaddis who have worked at Google, Powerset, eBay, and Skype.

The company has developed a FactFinder API that can be used to combine data from Twitter and Yahoo BOSS. The results I found for various searches may need some fine tuning but the product offers some interesting insights.

Doing a search from their onsite engine gives facts garnered from Twitter conversations and Yahoo search. Essentially you get current discussions and ranked facts about the search topic.

The results are geared towards adoption by mobile search where large amounts of information are generally not being searched for. As Cnet summarizes:

“In a nutshell it goes like this: FactRank goes through each Web page or source (in whatever index it’s searching from) finding semantic tip-offs like declarative sentences. It then cross references each of those against one another, surfacing some of the most relevant ones to the top, as well as factoring in the order of how they appeared. What the user then gets is a tidy list of statements, each of which is sourced and given a level of relevancy based on their appearances in all of the indexed source pages combined.”

The company offers developers the ability to tailor results, so iterations should be populating the web soon. As the site states, “FactEngine will cut through the noise, spam, and porn that convolutes the real-time web to bring you the most relevant facts fast.”

Google Launches Closure Tools: A Javascript Candy Store

Google Launches Closure Tools: A Javascript Candy Store

The Google Code blog announced the launch of a compiler, library, inspector and templates for sites to use to improve their javascript usage. The tools were “all started as 20% projects and hundreds of Googlers have contributed thousands of patches.”

This central open source of all things javascript should prove very handy to web site owners and developers, as many of them are already being used by Google apps and widgets.

“Today, each Closure Tool has grown to be a key part of the JavaScript infrastructure behind web apps at Google. That’s why we’re particularly excited (and humbled) to open source them to encourage and support web development outside Google.”

If the tools become widely adopted it could also help create a uniformity in code use that would help the search engine - but also the wbe community in general.

Yahoo! to Serve Up Sponsored Ads on BOSS

Yahoo! to Serve Up Sponsored Ads on BOSS

Web developers who use Yahoo!’s BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) have requested the incorporation of Sponsored Ads as a way of generating revenue on their sites. Yahoo! has obliged the requests, but has arranged for a third party to manage everything.

Developers will need to apply through Domain Development Corp (DDC) in order to be selected to have Sponsored Ads on their BOSS search sites. DDC will provide support and payment for the program, not Yahoo!

Yahoo! did take the opportunity of the announcement to reiterate that it still does not know how the impending Microsoft search deal will affect BOSS. In the meantime, it looks like there are revenues to be had for BOSS developers.

Google to Send Out 100,000 Wave Invites

Google to Send Out 100,000 Wave Invites

Beginning tomorrow (September 30), Google will send out 100,000 invites to Google Wave. The product has received a lot of buzz, both for being innovative and not quite ready. Actually, Google admits it’s not ready for prime time, which is one of the reasons why the invites are limited.

If you’re not familiar, Google Wave is a collaborative tool that features real-time features. They’re still working on features, including group definitions, draft mode and permissions.

Those who can expect an invite are developers who participated in an earlier preview, the first people to sign up for invites and select Google Apps customers.

Smart Move: Yahoo Acquires Major Arabic Portal Maktoob

Smart Move: Yahoo Acquires Major Arabic Portal Maktoob

Yahoo’s announcement of their acquisition of major Arabic portal Maktoob may be the smartest move the company has made in some time. Maktoob gives them deep penetration in to the Middle Eastern market - a rapidly growing and desired market.

“This acquisition will accelerate Yahoo!’s strategy of expanding in high-growth emerging markets where we believe Yahoo! has unparalleled opportunity to become the destination of choice for consumers,” said Yahoo! chief executive officer Carol Bartz. “Access to information and communications tools can positively impact people’s lives in many ways, and with the acquisition of Maktoob.com and our investment in the region, the Arab world will soon get a Yahoo! experience in Arabic with relevant local language content, programming and services.”

Maktoob reaches 16.5 million unique users in a space where global marketers are looking for more quality access. Yahoo’s purchase of Maktoob makes access to this wanted population easier for marketers looking to push their reach into the Middle East market.

The Yahoo press release noted:

“While Internet usage in the Middle East has grown more than tenfold since 2000, most markets are still in the early stages of adoption. According to the World Bank, there are more than 320 million Arabic speakers worldwide, while less than one per cent of all online content is in Arabic.

With Yahoo! and Maktoob.com’s combined audience and platform, advertisers will have access to the reach and sophisticated targeting capabilities they need to effectively engage with the region’s online consumers. Spending on online advertising is expected to grow by 35 - 40 percent this year in the region, according to Madar Research.:

Maktoob.com was founded in 2000 by Samih Toukan and Hussam Khoury as the world’s first free Arabic/English Web-based email service, and since then has grown to be the leading Arab online community in the region.

“Yahoo is acquiring Maktoob.com for the strong brand and audience it has built over the last nine years and the passionate team they have assembled, which we believe is the strongest in the region,” said Keith Nilsson, senior vice president, Emerging Markets, Yahoo! “We see great growth potential in both audience and advertising in the Arab world and combining with Maktoob.com will allow us to quickly build our presence there with high quality products. This is a big win for publishers, advertisers, and consumers in the region.”

This acquisition is part of Yahoo!’s larger strategy to grow its business throughout the world’s emerging markets by connecting consumers with the content and services that matter most to them in their local language. The company’s Emerging Markets business group, headquartered in Singapore, is responsible for Yahoo!’s fastest growing markets such as South East Asia, India, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East. Yahoo! has a strong track record of delivering great Internet experiences and helping fuel Internet adoption through partnerships with local developers and content providers.

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