Google, Yahoo Sued by Xerox Over Search Query Patents Bloomberg reports Xerox has sued Google and Yahoo over search patents Xerox holds.

Xerox says one patent automatically generate a query based on keyword searches, where Google’s AdWords & AdSense and Yahoo’s Search Marketing, YPN and other products allegedly infringe on. Another patent Xerox is suing the companies over is based on updating pages based on user reviews.

Xerox sued Google and Yahoo on February 19th in federal court in Wilmington, Delaware. Xerox wants both compensation and to prevent Google and Yahoo from using the technology.

Read the full article

Exclusive: How Google’s Algorithm Rules the Web from Wired has an excellent and detailed look at the evolution Google’s search algorithm over the years. It is a pretty long write up, so I wanted to highlight those key points in bullet format for you all.

Key Advances:

• Backrub in September 1997
• New Algorithm in August 2001
• Local Connectivity Analysis in February 2003
• Fritz in Summer 2003
• Personalized Results in June 2005
• Bigdaddy Update in December 2005
• Universal Search in May 2007
• Real Time Search in December 2009

Amazing Discoveries called “The Genesis Conflict” Series, in which Professor Walter Veith takes you through the commonly held evolution viewpoints and reveals what they are not telling you. With a doctorate in zoology, Veith clearly teaches how you can defend creationism as a scientifically sound viewpoint. Walter Veith has taught university students for many years and once again presents this relevant information in an easy to understand way with PowerPoint slides and pictures. .

The 8 DVD set can be yours for only $96 at http://amazingdiscoveries.org/webstore/us/creation-general/creation-dvds/the-genesis-conflict/100-the-genesis-conflict-series-8-dvd-set.html

Yesterday, I mentioned that I’m speaking on the morning roundtable at SES San Diego 2010. Later in the afternoon, I’m also speaking at the “YouTube & Video Optimization” session.

Image by SESConferenceSeries via Flickr

Once you decide that you need to include YouTube in your search engine optimization and social media marketing strategy, then you need to learn:

1. How to optimize videos for YouTube so they get discovered,
2. How to create videos for YouTube that get watched, and
3. How to promote videos on YouTube so they get shared.

I’ve looked at a few tools allowing you to research on-page links like this post on extracting links from a page based on their placement and exporting links from a page to Excel. Today I am reviewing one more tool to analyze on-page links (both external and internal).

FireLinkReport is a Firebug extension that allows to see and analyze all links on the currently open page.

First, you will need to install Firebug (if you haven’t already). Once you are done, install the addon and activate it by right-clicking on the Firebug icon in the status bar and choosing “Enable all panels”.

There’s hardly a person I know who is not using Gmail today. Finding an available Gmail username is no easier than finding a new .com domain.

No matter how popular Gmail is, not everyone is still aware of what he can do with it. Search option is one of the most awesome features of the service which (together with some external utilities) is a great fun to use:

1. Advanced search tricks

Gmail advanced search is pretty well outlined on this table, here I am listing my favorite tricks:

If “Content is King” and “Links are Queen” when it comes to SEO, ecommerce sites must be like America – no king and no queen (but there is opportunity)! To put it another way, the typical  medium or large e-commerce website faces substantial challenges to SEO – both from a content and a link perspective. Allow me to explain…

The Inherent Challenges Of SEO For Ecommerce Sites

Content Challenges

From an SEO standpoint, most of the pages on a typical ecommerce website can be considered to be one of two types:

Greg Jarboe, SEO-PR, interviews SES London 2010 keynote speaker, Bryan Eisenberg, about his presentation on 21 secrets of top converting websites. Bryan emphasizes the most important secret to increasing your website conversions: execution. Bryan says digital marketing encompasses many facets such as the launching of YouTube videos, social media campaigns, PPC campaigns, SEO, fixing your websites, etc. Bryan says the companies that are most successful at website conversions are able to execute a campaign immediately. Bryan gives the example of Amazon, where right after it was announced that Michael Jackson had passed away, the company, within two hours, revamped their entire mp3 site to reflect the news creating a huge advantage over their competitors. Bryan also describes his experience working with Dell computers and their website. Dell previously listed on their website the phrase learn more. But it was not generating any conversions. Learn more was changed to help me choose. It caused a near immediate impact at boosting website conversions and has continued to do so ever since. Bryan will also be speaking at SES New York in March, 2010.

The data classically used in search engine optimization (SEO) to benchmark sites and track performance is all but useless today. Ranking reports, still a necessary evil in SEO reporting, have been unreliable (at best) for at least 3 years. Their validity has been further marginalized over the last 24 months by way of Google’s increased use of personalization, localization and experimentation with blended results, to name just a few.

Today, the convention of using indexed page counts and backlinks to benchmark and report on site performance is facing a similar demise.

Relying largely on crowdsourcing and its MapMaker product, Google announced the addition of maps and local business search for 30 countries across Africa:

Our big announcement today is that we are launching Maps domains for 30 countries across Africa. So what’s on offer? As well as searching online Maps for towns, highways, or roads, Google Maps users can now find local businesses. This could be a burger place in Lagos, a garage in Kampala, a hairdresser in Accra or an airport shuttle in Dakar. Any business anywhere can add their own business listing for free via the Google Maps Local Business Centre. Businesses can also improve their websites and help customers locate them by installing the Maps API.

The recently approved Microsoft-Yahoo search deal, set to a song of my youth…

Here’s the story, of a lovely lady
Her name is Carol Bartz, and she runs Yahoo
It’s a search engine, and a portal
And it’s getting hard to run the two

Here’s the story, of a man named Ballmer
Who was bringing up a search engine of his own
Its name was Bing, and it was pretty good
But it was all alone

Read the full article >>>

The dust has settled from last week’s Fairness Hearing on the proposed Google Book Search, and now all parties are playing a waiting game. Judge Denny Chin began the hearing by announcing — to no one’s surprise — that he wouldn’t be announcing a decision during or immediately after the hearing. According to the Wall Street Journal, Chin cited the “voluminous materials” submitted in the case and said he’ll issue a written opinion later. “There’s too much to digest,” Chin said.

Google confirmed two different discussions taking place in the webmaster and SEO community over the past few days.

The first is that MySpace results are now included in Google’s Real Time search results feature. In addition, Google launched real-time search in Russian and Japanese.

The second is that Google has updated their site command for Google Image searches. Now, if you search for images on a site, using site:domain.com, Google will show you the images on the web pages on that domain, and ignore the host of that image. Here is how Google explained it:

This post was authored by Jessica Bowman, SMX West presenter and leader for the In-house SEM Exchange taking place March 5th.

Search Marketing Expo is pulling out all the stops when it comes to meeting the needs of in-house search marketers in Santa Clara March 2-5. Attend and you’ll leave with more than enough ideas, strategies and contacts to keep you ahead of the curve and connected with colleagues until next year.

The agenda is full of valuable SEM nuggets, so it’s difficult to say there is one “dream” agenda. It depends on the challenges you’re facing this year. I’ll preview the sessions I think most in-housers should attend and why. Check out the compete agenda here.

VentureBeat reports Twitter has increased their traffic by 9 percent from December to January. After deeper insight from ComScore and Hitwise, it appears that most, if not all, came from Google.

When Google added real-time results to their search interface in December, it had a major impact on people discovering Tweets in the search results. Google will show real time results from Twitter and other sites based on if that is a trending (hot) query.

Key Stats:

• ComScore data show the number of unique visitors to Twitter increased by 9 percent from December 2009 to January 2010

The Google Mobile Blog announced a neat new search app for Android named Google Shopper. You just point the app at books, CDs, DVDs, and video games, and barcodes and it will fetch the details of that product and give you the prices, stores, reviews and more about that product. I tested it out on my Nexus One and it worked out pretty nicely. I’ll share some images of my use below, but first, here is a video that explains how it works:

Here is me playing with Google Shopper:

The Book I Will Scan:

Yahoo and Microsoft announced they have clearance to implement their proposed search deal where Microsoft will power Yahoo Search and search ads. Today they received “unrestricted” clearance from both the U.S. Department of Justice and the European Commission to proceed. And proceed they will.

Yahoo said the implementation will begin in the next “days.” Here is the announcement:

Implementation of the deal is expected to begin in the coming days and will involve transitioning Yahoo!’s algorithmic and paid search platforms to Microsoft, with Yahoo! becoming the exclusive relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers globally. Once the transition is completed, the companies’ unified search marketplace will deliver improved innovation for consumers, better volume and efficiency for advertisers and better monetization opportunities for web publishers through a platform that contains a larger pool of search queries.