HP Computers to be Distributed with Live Search Toolbar

Here’s a note for all those people who think Google is unbeatable in the search engine “wars”, Microsoft has signed a deal to distribute a customizable Live search toolbar on every HP computer starting in January 2009. The default search will also be set to Live, much like Firefox’s default search is set to Google.

“This agreement with HP is a strategic indicator of our increased focus on securing broad-scale distribution for Live Search,” said Kevin Johnson, president of the Platforms & Services Division at Microsoft. “This is the most significant distribution deal for Live Search that Microsoft has ever done, and we are very pleased to be partnering with HP to help bring Live Search to millions of consumers across North America.”

Microsoft is building a custom, Live Search-enabled toolbar for HP customers that take advantage of the exceptional user experience capabilities of Microsoft Silverlight. The toolbar will provide HP with customization capabilities within the buttons on the toolbar, providing quick and easy access to a variety of online services and tools, such as Snapfish by HP, the company’s online photo service, and HP customer support.

“This agreement provides HP customers with an outstanding search product in Live Search, as well as a user-friendly, fully customizable way to access their favorite online services,” said Ulf Claesson, vice president of Worldwide Attach at HP. “Microsoft shares HP’s passion for delivering world-class technology to consumers in meaningful ways, and today’s announcement will help to provide an even more personal computing experience for HP customers.” Source: Microsoft Live Search Toolbar to Be Distributed on 2009 HP Consumer PCs

With HP commanding about 20% of computer sales, this is one huge deal for Microsoft, if they can knock down deals with the other four top computer manufacturers, they could make a HUGE dent in Google’s dominance, Dell may be a hard one to get, but surely they can land a deal with Acer, Lenovo and Toshiba, especially if they are offering them 4 bucks an install like they are currently in their affiliate program, check it out here. May as well combine it with Windows Live Onecare and get virus and spyware scanning, firewalls, tune-ups, file backups as well as better protection against phishing scams and viruses adding the toolbar.

Add this to the little cash back experiment they are doing and they could lure some new visitors with new pc purchases and keep them there with the cash back offering. Why not, if you can save more money by purchasing your HP computer from the same place but get extra back because you are using Live search, you’ll definitely end up with some new users.

Check out the HP computers listing on one of our other sites and are always updated listing of great computer deals.

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: Google, HP Computers, Search Engines, Windows Live No Comments » June 2008

Track Santa Claus on Christmas Eve

Where is Santa? Here’s something really cool that I did last year and my kids, well, my little kids loved it. If you have the Google Earth program from Google, you can load a file, called a kmz file, that will open up Google Earth and you can track Santa Claus around the globe delivering presents from town to town, and last year there were also presents hidden around the globe.

So, here’s what you need to do to get it too work.

Bookmark this webpage so you can easily get back here on Christmas Eve; name it Track Santa Claus or something obvious.

Download Google Earth by clicking this banner from Google,

Google Earth is part of the Google Pack, you can download all of it, or just Google Earth, you just have to click what you want, but it’s all free, free anti virus, picture organizers, screensaver, and lots more free software, pick and choose what you want.

Once you have installed Google Earth, click this kmz file that will open up in Google Earth to help you track Santa around the globe. You will be able to watch Santa Claus fly around the world almost all day long! You can track Santa Live as he makes his historical journey around the world! I think this is great as they won’t wait until midnight to post the file, I can let my kids track Santa Claus before they go to bed, and not have them staying up late to track Santa, thanks Google and Norad!

Here is a screenshot I just took at 7:15 AM Eastern time, Santa is currently in Austrailia.

Here is a little video from last years tracking of Santa Claus.

This guy, here, has found a spot in Google Earth he thinks looks like Rudolph, click here to get the kmz file, which will open up Google Earth is you already have it installed, then check his blog post here and see if you think it looks like Rudolph.

So, get Google Earth now by clicking the image below or the one above, if you don’t you know you’ll be downloading it at the last minute like every one else, lol.

Here is a link to another site where I posted about tracking Santa Claus on Christmas Eve.
More info on Google Earth.
More info on the Google Pack.
More info on Google Desktop.
More info on Picasa their photo organizer software.
More info on the Google Pack Screensaver.

While you are here, check out what else you can get your kids from Santa, a customized letter from Santa Claus, or Wow! A Phone Call Fom Santa!

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: Christmas, Google 7 Comments » December 2007

Must Read For Google Fans

Just read this article by Cory Doctorow, Scroogled, that is indeed some interesting “fiction”. “Google controls your e-mail, your videos, your calendar, your searches… What if it controlled your life?”

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: Google No Comments » September 2007

Webmaster Stuff

Best SES Session - Are Paid Links Evil? We’re only half-way through SES San Jose but I think we’ve already seen the best panel discussion of the event.

“Are Paid Links Evil” saw Matt Cutts go head to head with Greg Boser, Michael Gray, Todd Malicoat, Todd Friesen and Andy Baio.

The room was packed with marketers all hoping the session would live up to the hype of its carefully crafted title - “session bait” anyone?

Google announces a simple new way to embed Google Maps Starting today, Google Maps users can add a map to their website or blog just by copying & pasting a snippet of HTML. This new functionality enables Google Maps users to share and disseminate geographic information in the same way that YouTube users share videos. Bloggers and webmasters no longer need an API key or knowledge of Java Script to put a Google Map on their website or blog.

Announcing the U.S. release of Microsoft Content Ads Beta We are delighted to make Content Ads Beta available to all U.S. customers! On Wednesday, August 29, we will upgrade adCenter to include Microsoft Content Ads.

Microsoft Content Ads allows you to place content-targeted ads on the Microsoft network—connecting you to the right people at the right time for the right price. We’re excited about this release and the choices we are providing advertisers.

Our New Webmaster Portal and an Invitation to the Private Beta Shortly after that day in March when we had to take the “link:” operator offline, a small team was formed in Redmond. Its singular focus: to build the next-generation set of tools, content and resources for SEO professionals and webmasters (and get “link:” back in your hands). Creatively named Webmaster Portal (we’re really good at marketing), it will be a single, friendly place to find all tools and information relating to Live Search SEO.

And Google is probably going to cost us more money, Improved top ad placement formula now in effect Two weeks ago, we posted about an upcoming improvement to the formula used to determine which ads are placed in the top spots above Google search results. The change offers advertisers more control over when their ads achieve top placement, while also increasing the quality of our ad results for users. Today, we wanted to let you know that the improved formula is now in effect.

Ya, but improved for who?

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: Affiliate Marketing, Contextual Advertising, Google, Linking Strategies, MSN, Online Marketing, Search Engines, Webmasters No Comments » August 2007

More (Mostly) Bad News for/from Google

Google Proxy Hacking: How A Third Party Can Remove Your Site From Google SERPs This looks like some bad stuff.

In June of 2006, while working to resolve some indexing issues for a client, I discovered a bug in Google’s algorithm that allowed 3rd parties to literally hack a web page out of Google’s index and search results. I notified a contact at Google soon after, once I managed to confirm that what we thought we were seeing was really happening.

The problem still exists today, so I am making this public in the hope that it will spur some action.

American Airlines Sues Google Over Keyword Ads “American Airlines does not bring this lawsuit lightly.” (para. 6)

Well, this is interesting. It’s not unusual for a trademark owner to sue Google for keyword-triggered ads–been there, done that. However, the fact that American Airlines pulled the trigger catches my attention. Many trademark owners who have sued Google had relatively obscure brands. Rescuecom? JTH Tax? Check-n-Go? Even American Blinds is hardly a household name. In contrast, American Airlines is an extremely well-known trademark owner with a big portfolio of trademarks. Further, American Airlines apparently decided it was worth going to war over this issue–and is prepared to pay the big bucks to litigate this case accordingly. If this lawsuit runs its course, I expect this to be a hard-fought and expensive lawsuit.

Download the complaint here.

SF Chronicle’s Stages Of Google Grief Lead To Suggestion For Google To Just Buy Newspapers First off, before someone brings it up in the comments, I’ll point out that the following post refers to the views of various columnists at the SF Chronicle, rather than any sort of discussion among those who have any real impact on the SF Chronicle’s strategy. However, it is quite amusing to see the “stages of Google grief” showing up on the editorial pages of the struggling San Francisco newspaper who has had to rid itself of hundreds of reporters lately.

Google Increases Stake in China Seeking to become the top search company in China, Google is planning to buy more Chinese companies and increase its investment in a few others.

Microsoft Taps Lobbyist on Google Buyout Microsoft Corp. hired Patton Boggs LLP to lobby the federal government on Google Inc.’s $3.1 billion buyout of online advertising company DoubleClick Inc., according to a disclosure form.

Microsoft’s anti-Google lobbyists, revealed If it wasn’t official before, we have it in writing now: Microsoft is directing at least a small fraction of its massive (by tech industry standards) lobbying shop toward Google’s proposed purchase of DoubleClick.

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: Google, Rambling 1 Comment » August 2007

Google News and Findings

Lots of press about Google lately, as always, a few interesting stories to watch though, the most important will be this one.

Google Spoof’s? Google Hacked? Heather Paulson has mad some interesting discoveries running some new software, Syntryx, I’ll let you read about it yourself and make your own assumptions.

Forwarded? Parked? DNS Switching? Hacked? Why Whois showing Google as owner? Was this a registrar issue? I do not have definitive answers concerning why or how this is happening, other “big boys” in the industry have contacted me and let’s just say these guys really know what they are doing and will be figuring this out. I’m sure they will Heather….

The Great Advertising Share Shift: Google Sucks Life Out Of Old Media Everyone talks about advertising dollars shifting online, but when you’re fighting all day in the trenches it’s tough to get a handle on what this really means. Here’s what it means:

US advertising revenue at 4 big online media companies–Google (GOOG), Yahoo (YHOO), AOL (TWX), and MSN (MSFT)–grew by $1.3 billion in Q2, or 42%.

New robots.txt feature and REP Meta Tags We’ve improved Webmaster Central’s robots.txt analysis tool to recognize sitemap declarations and relative urls. Earlier versions weren’t aware of sitemaps at all, and understood only absolute URLs; anything else was reported as Syntax not understood. The improved version now tells you whether your sitemap’s URL and scope are valid. You can also test against relative URLs with a lot less typing.

Google Removes Blog Showing Leaked Facebook Code FacebookSecrets, the blog that posted the accidentally released source code for the Facebook main index page, has been taken down. The blog was hosted on the Google-owned Blogger blog network and was removed pursuant to a DMCA take down notice from Facebook.

Yahoo Edges Out Google In Satisfaction Survey It’s a safe bet that Google’s employees aren’t too happy; Yahoo has, for the first time ever, beaten them in the University of Michigan’s American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) survey.

The Google backlash begins The Internet search giant is having a rough week — and not just because it missed Wall Street’s profit forecast. Here are four steps the company should take now to stem the fallout.

The Next President: Sponsored By Google Google with ties to the government? Say it isn’t so. WHAT BUSINESS IS GOOGLE IN? That question has been debated as much in the past two years as war strategies and national budgets. We stand just over 15 months from the election of the next U.S. president, and one thing is clear. Regardless of the debate around Google’s business, it is clear that Google is in the political business right now.

Big Corps Losing High Executives To Google… …and Startups. Fitzpatrick declared his boredom with Six Apart, and after weighing offers from Google and Facebook, has chosen…Google.

Google’s disappointing 2Q reminds Wall Street who’s in charge Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page have always told Wall Street that positioning the Internet search leader to realize long-term ambitions is more important than hitting the short-term financial targets of investors.
Just in case anyone forgot, the company punctuated the point with its second-quarter results.

Google, Viacom lawsuit takes a hilarious turn Google Inc. wants to question under oath two Comedy Central stars, Stephen Colbert, host of The Colbert Report and comedian Jon Stewart of The Daily Show, in connection with the $1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit brought against the company and YouTube Inc. by Viacom International Inc.

Why newspapers are screwed by Google Perhaps the situation is even worse than Blodget thinks. Newspapers are responding to the decline of print and finding new markets by going online: The Guardian has done that very successfully. But as Jakob Nielsen pointed out in my interview last week, Google “takes a big percentage of the money. The web is a web, and that is good, but companies invest a lot of money in creating content, and the money goes to Google for indexing it.”

Google Hacks: Please Do Not Use This Program For Illegal Uses I don’t know what Google was thinking when they released Google Hacks, but it’s a sure bet most people won’t abide by the “Please do not use this program for illegal uses” disclaimer you’ll find on their download site.

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: Google No Comments » August 2007

Google Adwords Experiment with Driveby Downloads

A security researcher named Didier Stevens posted a Google ad that actually said “Is your PC virus free? Get infected here!” with a title of Driveby Download and it was clicked on 409 times out of 259,723 impressions. I remember seeing this ad on Google one day, I was going to investigate it, but something happened and I forgot all about it. This is amazing. It’s not amazing that many people clicked on the ad, it is amazing to me that Google let it go through. They had to approve the ad and he had no problems at all getting it listed.

I bought the drive-by-download.info domain. .info domains are notorious for malware hosting.

I setup a web server to display a simple page saying “Thank you for your visit!” and to log each request. That’s all. I want to be absolutely clear about this: no malware or other scripts/code was ever hosted on this server. No PCs were harmed in this experiment.

I started a Google Adwords campaign with several combinations of the words “drive by download” and the aforementioned ad, linking to drive-by-download.info

I was patient for 6 months Source: “Is your PC virus-free? Get it infected here!”

He notes on the latest post in his blog that someone at Google must read /. because his ad is no longer approved. This is totally amazing to me that Google would allow an ad like that to get through, even if it wasn’t hosting anything malicious, it says their is no limit to what you can post on Google as long as no one is making a fuss over it. So, they are starting to kill some of the made for adsense sites, but they will allow ads like this, I wonder who or what is deciding a site is MFA or not? As a company adds more and more people, some of the quality can go down and get lost in the shuffle, but after all of the advertiser complaints, all of the negative sentiment that is being built up about Google, cross scripting holes, etc, you would think that the quality control people would be picking it up a notch, not just let everything in.

Here is a video he created for the experiment, just basically him showing the ad, etc.

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: Google No Comments » May 2007

Google’s CPA, or PPA, Network

Lots and lots of talk about Google’s entry into the CPA realm with their Pay per action beta test, it’s big news for affiliates, advertising agencies, merchants but especially, affiliate networks like CJ, Linkshare and Shareasale.

Pay-per-action advertising is a new pricing model that allows you to pay only for completed actions that you define, such as a lead, a sale, or a pageview, after a user has clicked on your ad on a publisher’s site. You’ll define an action, set up conversion tracking, and create ads that publishers in the Google content network can then choose to place in new ad units on their site. Source: Pay-per-action beta test

Lots of coverage by many well respected people:
Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim says,

To me, it sounds like a clear threat to the likes of Commission Junction or LinkShare – or any other affiliate marketing network. Google, for all intents and purposes, has just entered the affiliate marketing arena, with the battle cry that they can do affiliate marketing better than the affiliate networks can.

Now, I feel obliged to inform you that when I posed this suggestion to Rob Kniaz, product manager for Google’s advertising products, he was very quick to deny any intention to compete in the affiliate network space. “We think this is different from the traditional affiliate marketing industry”, said Kniaz. “[It’s an] extension of the current AdWords product”. Oh really? Kind of like how Google doesn’t see itself competing with Microsoft’s office suite. Source: Google Launches Pay-Per-Action; a Threat to Affiliate Networks?

Google never sees itself competing with anything as they always feel their products are better, a spokesman said they will offer more automation, more options, more control than affiliate networks. You believe that right? Google will offer us more control? They are adding text links, something I have been asking for for a long time, but it is still going to be JavaScript, so you won’t be able to change the anchor text to something that fits in good with your website, so unless they offer text links with just the product names, this will still not be much of a help. I just hope they do the same with the Google Pack referrals.

Michael Arrington of Techcrunch says,

Affiliate marketing networks like Commission Junction and LinkShare are screwed. These networks also operate on a cost-per-action basis, mostly with online retailers. Even though some of them have scale, they will not have the ability to compete with Google on sheer size of network. Advertisers flock to volume, which drives average pricing up. When prices increase, publishers flock to the new platform because they’ll earn more. Look for serious publisher leakage from the big affiliate networks over time as this new product scales up. If you want to argue this point, note what happened to the stock price of Commission Junction’s parent company, ValueClick, today. And that’s even though the market has largely adjusted for this news already - this move to add PPA ads has been rumored for some time. Source: Digesting Google’s New PPA Advertising Product

I don’t think Michael could be more wrong on this point, while advertisers do want the numbers, and Google certainly has the numbers, they also need more support than adsense publishers or adwords cpc campaigns do. Lots of merchants operate with the seasons, so there will be lots of ads being created and used by them, through in coupons and you have some more complexity, the affiliate networks like CJ, et al, are already setup and cranking out the creatives and coupons, and offer much more support than Google ever will. There won’t be serious publisher leakage, but many of the same affiliates will sign up for the Google network, as all affiliates look for the highest paying offers, but you won’t see a mass exodus of affiliates. You probably won’t see a mass exodus of merchants either, although the most movement will be from the smaller merchants, and those merchants who can adapt quickly.

The thing that will make or break Google are the creatives, CJ, Shareasale, Linkshare all allow you to change the anchor text on the creatives to fit your “spin”, Google only uses JavaScript, something that slows down the page, especially as more and more are added, and it doesn’t allow you to change the text, which is huge. I guarantee anyone at Google I could double our profits on the Google referrals if I only had straight text links for the products, JavaScript is great because you don’t have to change anything, but it hampers your flexibility and it slows down your page, something none of us want.

Scott Jangro agrees with me, or I agree with him, however you want to look at it, and probably puts it better than I do when he says,

Affiliate marketing involves traditional advertising methods like banner ads and text link ads but most of the really successful affiliates are not merely ad-pushing publishers. While there are plenty of affiliates who use affiliate marketing to show ads, the majority of top affiliate marketers form close partnerships and integrate with the merchants they promote. They use tools like promotions, coupons, and product data that get tightly integrated into the affiliate’s offering. They communicate with the merchants on IM, email and even the telephone. An example is a niche price comparison shopping engine. A single page on that site may have 20 different products from 15 different merchants, each with a “buy” link going through an affiliate network.

Will this cut into some of the publishers that currently operate in affiliate networks? Definitely, but one could argue that Adsense already did that damage. There’s a 95-5 rule that’s talked about in Affiliate Marketing. 95% of the revenues are driven by 5% of the affiliates. This 5% of affiliates cannot be serviced by an “advertising” model. Source: Will Google CPA Eat CJ and Linkshare Alive?

And Scott should know, he worked for Befree for years and is now a successful affiliate himself. Another super affiliate, Vinny Langham aggrees,

I’m not going to rehash my previous post on this topic (still highly applicable - I highly recommend reading it before continuing with this post), but Google has finally launched Pay Per Action across their Adwords Network for US advertisers onto Adsense (not Search Network yet). I still believe that there are severe problems with the model, and Google will discover that it is not sustainable. Source: Google Launches Pay Per Action (CPA)

We shall see what happens when it is finally released, but me, I’m predicting another Froogle, which was never really any competition for anyone.

Added: Wayne Porter, as always, weighs in with his own thoughts, where he talks about the Attention engine and how attention = revenue.

Some of these services are fossil fuels that will burn out and be replaced, some are windmills, solar collectors, fusion engines…it is all about sustainable fuel for the Attention Engine. The engine’s byproducts are not waste either- the byproduct is revenue. Revenue generated by selling what advertiser’s have never really had- not only a highly efficient targeting system that ensures the right placement no matter the medium, but what is coming down the pipe, what decision is a good one or a bad one. The Attention Engine will know. Source: Attention- What Google CPA Really Means…

If Google has anything, it is loads of user data, search habits, browsing habits, purchasing habits, you name it, they can tie it back to people, even if they have changed their privacy habits recently, I guarantee you they still have the means to tie it back to each and every user. I agree with some of the thoughts of others, whatever they do, it will feed them more data, and help them pull in more money and users, for now.

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: Advertising, Google 1 Comment » March 2007

More Google Adwords Videos

For all of the people looking for some more Google Adwords tips, I just posted a bunch of new Google Adwords videos, including market research, the Google fridge someone received after 1 million visits, MSN Adcenter videos, some blogging howto’s and more. Most videos looked professional, if not, please let me know.

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: Adwords, Google, MSN, Pay Per Click No Comments » March 2007

Robots.txt Info from Google

Do you have some webpages on your site that you don’t want indexed? Do you want more control of what parts of your site the search engines, like Google, index? Google has published two parts of a three part series on the robots.txt file.

However, you may have a few pages on your site you don’t want in Google’s index. For example, you might have a directory that contains internal logs, or you may have news articles that require payment to access. You can exclude pages from Google’s crawler by creating a text file called robots.txt and placing it in the root directory. The robots.txt file contains a list of the pages that search engines shouldn’t access. Creating a robots.txt is straightforward and it allows you a sophisticated level of control over how search engines can access your web site.

In addition to the robots.txt file — which allows you to concisely specify instructions for a large number of files on your web site — you can use the robots META tag for fine-grain control over individual pages on your site. To implement this, simply add specific META tags to HTML pages to control how each individual page is indexed. Together, robots.txt and META tags give you the flexibility to express complex access policies relatively easily. Source: Controlling how search engines access and index your website

Most of the articles talk about using the meta tags on your site, like using the noindex, noarchive, nofollow and nosnippet, so I really don’t know why it says it is about the robots.txt file. For example, say you have a page that changes very often, you may want Google to not have the cache copy of your website.

Usually you want Google to display both the snippet and the cached link. However, there are some cases where you might want to disable one or both of these. For example, say you were a newspaper publisher, and you have a page whose content changes several times a day. It may take longer than a day for us to reindex a page, so users may have access to a cached copy of the page that is not the same as the one currently on your site. In this case, you probably don’t want the cached link appearing in our results. Source:

The next article is supposed to cover the Robots Exclusion Protocol.

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: Google, Search Engines No Comments » February 2007

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