According to Greg Linden, AOL Research has been shutdown after the massive search data leak and the user privacy concern that it presented.
After only a month of existence, the AOL Research website has been closed.
The site had a nice list of publications and was aimed to allow researchers to share their ideas with others and help people understand search engines better. Too bad it didn’t last long…
If you have children and ever tried to use a search engine with them in order to find help for their homework, you probably realized that it wasn’t always easy to find relevant results.
AOL recently released StudyBuddy.com a search engine that helps schoolchildren find useful resources and information.
Note that the domain is actually homework-help.aol.com: AOL’s trying to avoid the sandbox by using a subdomain and also keywords in the url 🙂
In this article from Seattle PI, you can read:
June Herold, AOL’s vice president for education and consumer services, said StudyBuddy was a response to complaints that because regular search engines have to cater to so many needs, results aren’t as useful for homework.
Because the results are pre-screened by teachers and librarians, Study Buddy provides only useful videos, articles, links to websites, or even games.
It’s a really nice move from AOL, I believe this is the only search engine of that kind on the web.
Via blog.v7n.com
A Webmasterworld member reported that he has noticed something that may look like a backlink update on the following Google Datacenters: 64.233.187.104 and 64.233.187.99.
For example, this is what I see when I search for the number of links for www.techcrunch.com:
“Big Daddy DC“: 66.249.93.104: 10,600 linking to http://www.techcrunch.com/
64.233.187.104: 19,100 linking to http://www.techcrunch.com/
64.233.187.99: 19,100 linking to http://www.techcrunch.com/
A PR update is probably on its way, Matt Cutts will eventually comment about that pretty soon.
For some people, it takes 2 years to get their site listed in DMOZ, the Open Directory Project. For others, it only takes $350.
WebProWorld member strum4life reported that he has received an email from a DMOZ editor who explained him how he could get his site listed faster in his category by “throwing an editor a few bucks”.
Here’s a quote from the email sent by DMOZ editor dankotarksi:
REMEMBER: THIS IS A ONE-TIME OFFER!!!
Although it is not something the ODP (dmoz) does on an open basis, it’s
editors do. You won’t read about it anywhere and you can talk to dmoz’s
“meta” editors about it – they will only tell you that they “dont condone
such activity and that the culprit will be stripped of his dmoz editorship
rights.” (Of course, that’s not what really happens). There are no prices
set in stone, it’s just whatever you feel it’s worth. The more you offer,
the sooner it gets listed. I listed a chart below to give you a general idea
about how much will get you what.[…]
Everyone who has suggested a site to dmoz knows that you may wait a VERY
long time to get listed.[…]
The work-around is getting in touch with a dmoz editor (me) and suggesting
that they review your site…and making it worth while. Typically, in the
past, people have paid:To get reviewed:
Within a year: $50.00
Within 6 Months: $75.00
Within 3 Months: $90.00
Within 1 Month: $125.00
Within 2 Weeks: $180.00
Within 1 Week: $225.00
Within 3 Days: $275.00
Within 24 hours: $300.00
ASAP: $350.00
You gotta love the price list….
Member Webnauts eventually reported the crooked editor to DMOZ and then received this email:
We received your abuse report at the Open Directory Project, http://dmoz.org.
As you’ll see if you look at the category page http://dmoz.org/Sports/Fantasy/Football/Commissioner_Tools/ dankotarski is no longer an editor. (It would show his name on the page bottom if he were still an editor.)
We appreciate your report and please do feel free to use the reporting system if you ever come across similar issues…which I hope won’t happen! We take editor abuse very seriously and appreciate it when the general public helps uncover any ‘bad guys’.
Let’s hope more people report such cases to DMOZ…
Donna from SEO Scoop just announced that she created a Rollyo Search Engine to search trough a list of 25 SEO/M blogs such as SEOMoz, SEO Book or SERoundtable. I agree with her, it’s sometimes very annoying when you can’t remember where you’ve read that interesting post a while ago. Thanks Donna!
After its $900 million ad link-up with Google, MySpace announced that they now want to convince big clients using free pages to promote their products and services to start paying:
Now, advertisers say the company is stepping up its efforts to convince big clients using MySpace’s free Web pages, known as profiles, to become paying customers as well.
MySpace has started to reach out to companies that are setting up commercial pages on the site, encouraging them to reach some kind of financial agreement and forgo the free ride,” says Jeff Lanctot of aQuantive’s Avenue A|Razorfish online advertising agency. “While this could include paying to have the page up, I think buying an ad package to support the commercial page is also a reasonable solution.”
For companies that target young people, MySpace represents certainly the most profitable mean to promote their services – providing the fact that they create something engaging.
I don’t think it will be easy for companies to suddenly accept paying for having a MySpace page. For example, Unilever hooked up with Christine Dolce to promote the Axe deodorant. The gorgeous girl who goes by the alias ForBiddeN has 999368 friends on MySpace…
Hat tip to Scott Karp at Publishing2.
Stephan Spencer announced on his blog that his company, Netconcepts recently released a white paper entitled “Chasing The Long Tail of Natural Search.” The research was aimed to show E-Commerce managers why chasing the long tail of natural search was necessary to maximize traffic and conversions.
In “Chasing the Long Tail of Natural Search: How to Capture the Unbranded Keyword,” Netconcepts
attempts to provide insight to E-Commerce managers to quantify and capture their sites’ full natural
search potential. It’s a big opportunity for big sites. But how big is it?
The analysis was based on 1.2 unbranded natural search visits to 5 million pages across 25 merchant sites.
Here’s what an average “merchant’s long-tail profile” looks like:
- Only 14% of indexed pages yield search traffic, generating 4.6 visitors per month from non-brand searches.
- 189,000 brand searches are conducted every month.
- Retailers generate 80% of search traffic from brand keywords and 20% from non-brand terms.
- Total market potential for unbranded keyword traffic exceeds 7,000,000 searches per month — roughly 100 searches for every unique page, 38 times greater than total brand searches.
I’ve already downloaded the 17 page report and I must say that the research is really impressive and provides excellent conclusions. The pdf file is available here.