October 19, 2006 Archives

Remember when you booted up your computer and that friendly browser quietly appeared, ready to take you anywhere with no fuss?

Not anymore. Now, Microsoft is going to sneak in an upgrade to your IE 6.0 browser. If you don't want it, (and what developer isn't cautious about environments?), read the instructions first.

1.Use the IE7 Readiness Toolkit to prepare for the release of IE7

2.Test and resolve any issues with their Web sites and applications using the Microsoft Application Compatibility Toolkit 5.0 (ACT 5.0).

3.Determine if their organization is ready for IE7 or needs to delay deployment. Find information on deploying the nonexpiring IE7 Blocker Toolkit on our Web site.

Some programmers and web developers are having a blast testing it. You may want to stop by and take the training, or just watch the daring ones, like John.

Ah, and of course: No, it's not just a browser update. It also forces me to install some tool to avoid bad software. Isn't my system slow enough already? Software firewall, anti-virus, anti-spam, etc. Now I am also forced to use some tool which I have no idea about - no idea what it really does, if it's running now as I type or what it will do.

Forum discussion:
Cre8asiteforums

Google released its third quarter results today, showing financial strength across the board. Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google stated in the official press release:

Our third quarter results are a testament to the strength of our network of advertisers and partners, as well as our continuing focus on users. We were particularly pleased with the contributions of our international business in a seasonally weaker quarter. In addition, we continued to forge significant partnerships with companies such as eBay, Fox Interactive
Media, and Intuit that will be of great value to all involved.

The amount of advertising spend now pushed in Google's direction is mind-boggling, with revenues rising 70% from a year ago to $2.7bn. The BBC Reported:

During the three months until the end of September, its net income was $733m ($390m), a 92% increase on the $381m it made in the same time last year.

This is a kick in the teeth for rivals Yahoo, who on Tuesday posted a 37 percent drop in quarterly profit as a result of higher stock option costs and an apparently weaker corporate advertising market.

Google surpassed market expectations and the GOOG share price continues to rise as traders sit eagerly awaiting further advertising initiatives after the company's acquisition of YouTube.

Forum Discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Microsoft's new browser, Internet Explorer 7 (IE7), is now available for download here. I installed it on my MacBook Pro running Parallels and it works just fine. Danny Sullivan has THE article on the search side of things, i.e. the default search engine war for the toolbar search feature. The article is named Searching Via Internet Explorer 7 & The Battle To Be The Default Search Engine a must read.

One comment somewhat related to search at WebmasterWorld is this funny remark;

The biggest disappointment is that there is no animated paperclip to utter profanities such as 'It looks like you are writing an email, do you want to see help with writing emails?', 'It looks like you you are trying to search with Google, do you want to change to Microsoft Live search' or even 'You searched for uninstall this *$#!, do you want me to *#!#$ off?'.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread has a poll asking members to inform us if they are Google (GOOG) shareholders.

Currently the poll has 23 responses with the following break down:

• Not Shareholders: 14 (60.87%)
  
• Yes Shareholders: 6 (26.09%)
  
• May Become Shareholders: 3 (13.04%)
  

I would love to see greater participation in this thread amongst the search forum community.

So go to the DigitalPoint Forums thread and vote please.

Shandy King posted a thread at Search Engine Roundtable Forums letting us know that you can now use Yahoo! TV to program your TiVo to record shows for you. FYI - I do not own a TV, so I am not addicted to TiVo's but a lot of people are.

To schedule programming, visit http://tv.yahoo.com/onlinesch/tivo/introscreen.

What do you need to make this happen?

• A valid Yahoo! account with a yahoo.com e-mail address
  
• A valid TiVo user account
  
• A TiVo Series2 DVR
  

So now what is the benefit of using Yahoo! TV over TiVo's interface?

(1) Yahoo! gets to associate your TV watching preferences and history with your Yahoo! profile
(2) If you are a Yahoo! user, you have one place to manage this stuff

But number one is a biggy for bridging online ads and TV ads.

This was a long time coming, Yahoo! partnered with TiVo back on Nov. 7, 2005.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

AdWords advertisers are rejoicing over the release of a new tool released by Google yesterday named Google Website Optimizer. The tool allows you to test different landing pages against each other and reports back to you which pages and content is working best for your campaign.

The Website Optimizer allows you to test changes in the website content of your pages in order to determine what will be most effective in getting conversions. You choose what parts of a page you'd like to test -- headline, image, promo text – and we'll run an experiment on a portion of your site traffic to determine which content on your site users respond to best. When we've collected enough data, we'll provide you with reliable reports and a suggested course of action in order to optimize your site for maximum business results.

There is a demo here and this is a sample report:

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums, WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

The Google Webmaster Central blog announced the release of several new tools added to the Webmaster Central toolbox. The new features are pretty neat and include;

1. Googlebot activity reports that shows the "number of pages Googlebot's crawled from your site per day, the number of kilobytes of data Googlebot's downloaded per day, and the average time it took Googlebot to download pages."
2. Crawl rate control tells Google how fast or slow you want Googlebot to crawl you.
3. Enhanced image search allows you to be included in Google Image Labeler
4. Number of URLs submitted

Don't you just love transparency?

Here is the number of pages crawled per day by Googlebot for last 90 days for the Search Engine Roundtable:

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.