Hope everyone had a fantastic Thanksgiving! (I know I did!!) December is here, the Christmas season is upon us, and search marketing professionals certainly know it. Here’s what you might have missed:
Google Updates this week: too many
At least I’m not the only one who was overwhelmed by the many changes Google made this week. Search engine Watch counts 17 updates, and put them together in a nice single post. No need for me to repeat them, just follow the link and see for yourself.
Google adds new ad format
Last week (since we missed the wrap-up due to the holidays) Google announced a new search ad format that will sometimes include graphics, videos and maps. Previously, Adwords on Google limited advertisers to text, but now, certain advertisers will be given the opportunity to test the new format with images.
Bing goes Down…
For 30 minutes this week Microsoft search engine Bing.com was unavailable. Apparently due to a configuration change error, the site was back live (no pun intended) in under a half hour. Microsoft released this statement about the mishap:
“Bing .com was down between about 6:30 and 7:00 PM Pacific Time on Dec 3, 2009. During this time, users were either unable to get to the site, or their queries were returning incomplete results page.
The cause of the outage was a configuration change during some internal testing that had unfortunate and unintended consequences.
As soon as the issue was detected, the change was rolled back, which caused the site to return to normal behavior. Unfortunately the detection and rollback took about half an hour, and during that time users were unable to use bing.com.
We strive to maintain a high standard of operational excellence at Bing. We are running a post mortem to find out how our software and processes need to be improved to prevent anything like this from happening again.”
Twitter unveils new mobile service
Mashable reports that twitter made an update (or a preview of an update) to it’s mobile service. Previously, m.twitter.com was the subdomain of choice for mobile twitter users, though as twitter themselves say “It doesn’t feel much like Twitter.com”. Now you can preview a different version at mobile.twitter.com that features a more full twitter experience. The preview is reportedly to eventually replace m.twitter.com in the near future.
CNN predicts the Future of the web
Mashable CEO and founder, Pete Cashmore, Wrote an article for CNN predicting web trends for 2010. Among the predictions are: the future of real-time search, GEO location sharing, Internet TV and more… An interesting and fun read.
Microsoft offers to pay News Corp to De-index in Google
Continuing with the recent debate on whether news sources (particularly News Corp’s Wall Street Journal) should restrict google from indexing their paid content, Microsoft reportedly fanned the flames by offering them money to do so. You can see how Microsoft would use this to try and gain a competitive advantage over Google in search. Google maintains that it wouldn’t hurt their business model as ““Economically [news content] is not a big part of how we generate revenue” says Google’s UK director Matt Brittin.
The Lighter side of Social Media
- True geek humor: Funny Network Names
- Google Suggest tells the REAL story of why India has such a large population.
- Here’s a great video of a grandma freaking out over her grandson’s facebook account.
- Here’s 8 people who’s lives have been ruined by Facebook. Perhaps Grandma is right!
