Category Archives: Websites

Yahoo! Search Marketing Launches Sponsored Results

Advertising, Internet, Search, Websites

Yahoo! have been in the search engine and search marketing game for a long time. Recently, Yahoo! Search Marketing increased their offering to match those of Google by allowing sponsored search results.

Using Yahoo! Search Marketing, you’re now able to have your advertisements listed along side the normal Yahoo! search results. In a similar fashion to that of Google, you have two general positions where your advertisements can be placed:

  • Directly above to search results in a wide banner style
  • On the right hand side of the search results, stacked in a tall skyscraper shape

Yahoo! have also included one more advertising position:

  • Directly below the search results in a wide banner style

Its interesting that Yahoo! have included the advertising space below the main results. Typically, the lower section of a web site is under developed. There is significant amounts of research which describes the benefits you can receive by optimising the lower section of your web site. If the price of that advertising space is right, I think it might turn out to be a fantastic value proposition for advertisers.

Without signing up for Yahoo! Search Marketing, it seems reasonable that you’ll be paying more for the advertising space directly above the search results; as they are more visually prominent and look similar to natural search listings. Second will probably be the sponsored search results on the right and the cheapest will probably be the advertising at the bottom.

There are a couple of things I don’t like about Yahoo! search results:

  • There sponsored advertising isn’t always clearly marked. As an example, the right hand side advertising is quite clearly marked, however the above and below is not.
  • Yahoo! seem to always present a lot of other stuff in search results. For example, you are likely to see alternative search suggestions, the top advertising block, some Yahoo! shortcut links and finally the actual natural search results.
  • As a derivative of point #2, the search results page feels cluttered and busy

To the defense of Yahoo!, they do place little icons beside each block in an attempt to separate them. For a savvy internet user, they will probably notice and associate the icons and realise there is something different about those results. Unfortunately, I expect that an average user probably won’t; at which point they are clicking on advertising without knowing it.

Mezzoblue Redesigned

Websites

After two and a half years, Dave Shea has redesigned Mezzoblue and launched his site back into the lime light.

A few quick points of interest of the redesign:

  • Its sporting a 1024px based design, up from the more traditional 800px design
  • The familiar blue colour of Mezzoblue is gone
  • Posts are organised into collections, where a collection is just a bunch of posts revolving around some arbitrary period of time.
  • The designs colours are adaptive and change based on a photo which represents the time period. As an example, Dave has assigned a photo of the Madrid Airport to the time period between 1 July and 30 September. All posts during that time period will carry that photo as their imagery and the theme of the site will reflect the colours within the photo.

I really like the new design, its good to see that Dave has changed it up. The familiar blue which has adorned Mezzoblue for so long was nice but it was about time to move onto something a little different to freshen it up. The navigation around the site is simple and the typeface is easy to read. I would personally prefer a slightly larger sized font but the size that it currently uses certainly achieves a particular look and feel.

Google, Yahoo! & Microsoft Collaborate For The Greater Good

Internet, Search, Websites

Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft have collaborated for the greater good and are all going to support a standardised XML sitemap protocol.

Google was the first to implement the XML sitemaps in June 2005 as a beta product. After a few months of public testing, the beta tag was removed and the service was ready for general consumption. Since that time, Google Sitemaps gained a significant amount of momentum.

Its wonderful to see that Yahoo! and Microsoft didn’t implement another format specific to their own search engines and have collaborated with Google. With the standardised XML format, its now possible for content publishers to feed Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft search engines off the same physical file. That point alone is a huge bonus for the publishing community though I think even more significant is that the standardised format will have the same semantic meaning to all search engines as well.

Wordie: Like Flickr But Without The Photos

Websites

Stumbled onto a new social networking site, this one is named Wordie. The Wordie site touts it as being like Flickr but without the photos. That might seem like a strange concept, since Flickr is all about the photos; however once you realise that Wordie is all about the words and language, it makes a whole lot more sense.

After creating an account on Wordie, you can start adding words into your profile. You might add in words that you like, dislike or new words you heard used that day at work. Once you’ve added the words into your profile, you can see how many other people consider those words significant enough to have them linked into their profile. Of course, being a social networking site – you have the ability to browse the sites content by various mechanisms such as user, most popular word and so on.

What I think might be a pretty sweet idea for the site going forward it to offer it in a multilingual version. That way you could end up with a huge mass of words on the site, where you could theoretically allow the users of the site to link various word together that are the same or similar in different languages.

The idea behind Wordie is different, quirky, strange, useless and cool all at the same time. I don’t think I’ll be using it for anything but as the author said, it was just a strange idea that popped into his head that he decided to whip up for some fun!

Google Malware Warning

Internet, Photos, Websites

Google intergrate malware blocking services into their search servicesI was recently searching for information using Google and was suprised to see that they have integrated a malware blocking service into their search results.

As Google are indexing the internet, they are always taking into consideration what content is on your site. They are now using that information to warn their users of a web site which might contain suspect or malicious content.

Personally, I think that it is an excellent service to provide the Google user base. A lot of people who simply ‘use’ computers aren’t aware how easy it is for their computer to become infected with all sorts of nasty stuff. At least if they are confronted with an intermediary page as listed above, it will make the users think twice about viewing the site or using any of the content/services which they may provide.