Random Culture

Google Trends Launches!

Google has launched a pretty cool new product called "Google Trends." The service allows you to compare multiple search terms against one another in terms of search volume.

Check out this sample trend search. In your face television advertising!

Link via TechCrunch.

Google TV Search!

Google has launched their "video" search, but are taking a different approach than most search engines have. The new Google "video" search actually searches through programming guides and TV transcripts. The results show users snippets from the transcripts and screen shots from the video. This is much different than most video searches out there.

Google sees a long term goal in this effort. They're trying to fill a niche that doesn't exist right now. It's clear that at this point the technology is VERY preliminary.  While there are some great features like sorting TV search results by zip code, to see only local programming... YOU CAN'T ACTUALLY WATCH THE VIDEO on most of these results. Is Google waiting for TV to be on-demand before this will happen?

It will be interesting to see how this develops, but the fact that video is not available to view is going to be an ENORMOUS problem for most users. Yahoo! is capitalizing on that very fact, and has moved their video search to the homepage...

Right now, this is not a Google "video" search... it's more like a historical "TV Guide" search.

Huge PPC Announcement

Looks like Google has announced that they will be making their Adwords API available to advertisers. This is a big announcement for search engine marketers, as a chief complaint among many people managing PPC search engine advertising campaigns has been the inability to use 3rd party management tools effectively with Google.

New Pew Report: Search

The Pew Internet & American Life Project has just released a new report on search engine users, with some interesting results. One interesting finding from the report:

"Only 38% of users are aware of the distinction between paid or “sponsored” results and unpaid results. And only one in six say they can always tell which results are paid or sponsored and which are not."

More PPC Mayhem

If someone is searching for anything at all on Google, the chances are good that advertisers like eBay, Amazon and Overstock have it to sell.  These advertisers consider everything a product, and this means that on almost every search... they want some ads to show up.

In order to cover all these searches, advertisers and affiliates have dynamic creative generated for these search terms (excluding most adult terms and other unsavory words).  This practice can create some pretty awful and irrelevant ads... 

This can be a huge problem for some advertisers in terms of effectiveness and waste, and should be explored further. But right now we'd rather focus on how it can create some hilarious ads.

Find any? Post them in the comments...

MSN PPC Coming Soon

Search Engine Lowdown points out that MSN is staffing up in what looks like the beginning of moves to launch their own PPC search engine advertising program. When this happens, it'll mean some serious revenue for MSN. Keep an eye out...

Yahoo! Video Search

Another Beta...

Yahoo! debuts their video search beta. Looks like it's pretty well done and there are some interesting features, like submitting videos to the beta through Media RSS.

Updated: The Yahoo! Search Blog has the full story behind the new video search beta.

Google Testing Animated Ads

After allowing image ads on their AdSense network, Google is now testing out animated images.

There are a couple interesting items to note:

• AdSense is a very automated ad serving system. Google relies heavily on users and publishers policing content and reporting it, with no editorial approvals before the image ads are launched.
  
  
• They're allowing a whopping 50kb file size limit. This is much more substantial than many sites allow.

For some additional commentary, you can check out John Battelle's two cents, as well as the DMNews article.

Google Hacked

Cr4p! Google Hacked? This type of stuff from Google never gets old.

The Next Big Search Thing?

Looks like the next big search "thing" will be multimedia search, particularly video. CNET has posted an article examining the plans of all the major players. With Yahoo! rolling out a new multimedia search in the first quarter of 2005, this could get interesting.

Introducing Google Scholar

What is Google Scholar? Well, once again, it's the fruit of a Google Engineer's labor. Here's more:

" Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. "

The Future of Search

Via SearchEngineWatch: New Search Related Patents

As Gary Price points out in his latest post on SearchEngineWatch, if you want to spot emerging trends in search, you need to look at search patents.  The personalization stuff from AskJeeves is interesting, and personalization is definitely a hot topic in the search industry right now. Another curious observation... it looks like IBM is on a patent FRENZY!

MSN Search is Live... Sort Of

Microsoft said they would launch their search engine before the end of the year, and they have. Well, they kinda have... The beta of their search engine seems to be off and on. I personally have received several error messages that say "service is temporarily unavailable," and for the search "college football" got only 1 result. But every once and a while I saw a bunch of them.

Needless to say, this doesn't seem to be the way to launch it. In fact, there are some reports surfacing that MSN may have been crawling Google to beef up the index. There's some speculation that the technical problems may be related to that issue.

Oh, and they launched a search blog.