Google announced today that they have been working on a faster search engine. Never a company to stand pat, this latest effort is hoping to improve results for developers and power searchers. You can try the new search engine here. The project is called “Caffeine” and is hoping to improve speed, accuracy, and comprehensiveness. It may also be an effort to search parts of the Web that have not normally been accessed. As with many things Google, stay tuned…
It now seems that Google will have a bigger beast to battle, because Yahoo and Microsoft have officially signed a partnership deal. This is something that has been going on for a while now, but now has become official. This new deal will also create some more potential for Microsoft’s new search engine – Bing, amongst other benefits. The AP is reporting that, “Under the agreement, Yahoo will have limited access to the data on users’ searches — which yield insights that can be used to pick out ads more likely to pique a person’s interest. The value of that information is why Microsoft wants to process more search requests.” 
It does not seem that this signed deal will produce any immediate changes that we will all see, however Leadpile and all other lead generation companies that deal with search engines, will see some sort of changes in the near future. There is going to be lots to come with the battle over the market share for Google and Microsoft/Yahoo, and who can come up with what next? Hopefully, we are all going to be the ones that benefit from this battle to be on top! Let’s sit back and watch it ALL unfold.
Google has rolled out some recent videos to help improve your landing pages and conversions. The video discusses aspects that would be helpful for converting visitors, versus driving them away. The 7 deadly sins of landing page design is a little lengthy, but certainly a video that you can take something away from. Leadpile publishers might want to take a look!
Lately it seems to be a dog-eat-dog world with all our search engines trying to get the biggest piece of the search engine “puzzle”. Yesterday I spoke about search engines and the need to bring new things to the table in order to stay competitive with other search engines. Ask.com is one of those search engines that is offering a unique service that other search engines are not offering. For instance, Ask.com is great for longer questions you want answered versus entering them in a standard Google search, and having to filter through all the results. Comscore reports that Ask.com’s ranking rose from 10th place to now 6th place, compared to other properties such as eBay and Facebook (in May based on unique users). This explains why a lot of Leadpile publishers are using this search engine to generate traffic to their payday loan, debt, auto finance, online education and other websites. Just like search engines trying to do something different to attract users, affiliate marketing and lead generators have to think of unique ways to generate traffic to their properties. Ask.com seems to be a good option to consider. It appears that others think so too, and that’s why their rankings seem to be headed in the right direction. Another GREAT alternative to the Google BEAST! 
In the days of companies trying to be the best of the best, companies are trying to always come up with fresh new ideas. Yahoo has rolled out it’s new search tool called “search pad”. This new Yahoo tool will allow those that are trying to do a lot of research on a prticular subject matter, to keep all their results in one common place to reference (a notepad per say). This new tool will allow you to really sort through all the various search results you obtained from a particular subject matter. This is not something that can be organized with search engines such as Google and Bing, so there could be some interest in this new notepad. The unfortunate thing about this new tool is it really is not beneficial for those that are just doing a quick search for simple subjects such as stores in the area.
The idea of this could be really good for students or workers that are doing an indepth report, and need to have a lot of material to complete the report. Unfortunately, the use of libraries has pretty much dwindled, where people now use the internet to research reports for school and work. 
Leadpile and other internet companies have to have this same sort of initiative to stay around. The future of your company relies on knowing your competition will always be trying to come up with new/fresh ideas. If you want to stay around and remain competitive you have to come up with ideas to capture a new audience that some other company is not doing. This appears to be that attempt by Yahoo, and it certainly has a uniqueness that other search engines are not yet offering. So maybe it will be received with open arms like Microsoft’s Bing search engine. The key is to not capture of the attention of users, but to keep their attention.
Google was not happy with dominating the internet search world, so now they are looking at getting a piece of the pie with computer operating systems. NPR is reporting, “The research and development for the browser will feed directly into Chrome OS, which will be a free, open-source project designed to get people onto the Web quickly. Open source means any programmer can make changes to it.” Initially this is going to be more of a focus on netbooks, but I am sure if there is any success with this new operating system they will be rolling it out on an even larger scale. The new operating system will be called Google Chrome OS. So, it looks like Windows and Mac OS are going to potentially see some competition, however Leadpile is still devoted to Apple!
Google has implemented a way for advertisers to sell on mobile phones. Google is partnering up with mobile applications to allow the Google AdSense to be incorporated into their applications. DMNews states that mobile app usage is starting to exceed mobile web usage, therefore there is a lot of potential here with this partnership. Ads will be presented to the mobile users that match up with geographically in a text or image format, just like on the traditional AdSense ads.
This is great news for the Leadpile publishers that are looking for additional ways to generate online revenue. These potential consumers that are downloading the mobile applications are a more targeted consumer, versus those just “surfing” the net. I am sure this is just the beginning of learning new ways to monetize the mobile applications.
Effective June 3rd, Microsoft’s Live Search will be replaced by Bing.
Microsoft describes Bing as the new “decision engine”. Being that Google dominates about 3/4 of the search engine world, Microsoft is hoping to get a bigger piece of the pie with Bing. Bing will emphasize categorization and depth in search results in an attempt to compete with Google for market share in addition to ad dollars. Looking at Bing it looks a lot like Google, but when searching it tends to bring up a little more in depth information. Will the Leadpile publishers and affiliate marketers utilize this new search engine to generate traffic/leads?
In recent news, Google announced some changes with it’s Adwords trademark policy. The new policy will now allow advertisers to utilize trademarked names in their text ads, even if the trademark does belong to someone else. Previously, advertisers could only use generic terms, however with this change advertisers can utilize brand names. There seems to still be some restrictions that Google outlines in their trademark policy. With these changes, Google is now in line with Yahoo and Microsoft, who had already made these changes. This loosened trademark policy is now more in line with standard practices in the offline world.
These new changes to Adwords certainly is something our Leadpile publishers will want to pay attention to.
It seems Google is trying to make life a little easier for those utilizing their search engine. According to BizReport.com, “New search technology was showcased by Google at the latest Searchology event. One of the products, Rich Snippets, aims to prevent searchers clicking through multiple sites before finding exactly what they want. Google has researched the product with consumers and concluded that it would be useful.” Website owns might think that this is going to affect their visitor count, however Google explains that this new technology will allow the website owners to provide a brief summary in their “snippet” listing that will be more informative at a quick glance. This will then potentially provide even a more targeted customer to their website, because they have already read the detailed listing while doing their search. A more targeted customer to the website will potentially = more conversions/sales.
Once again, Google managing to strive to do better AND better! Heck if you dominate the world like they do, there is nothing else to do but to continue to try and improve your current product(s). I look forward to seeing this roll out, to then see how helpful it makes searching for my favorite topic. Great work!
Apple and Twitter marriage?
Who is next?
First it was Facebook, then it was Google, and now the latest rumor is Apple is interested in purchasing Twitter. Could this be true? ”Twapple” news was all over the net yesterday and today that there could be a deal brewing for $700 million. A lot of money for an “entity” that does not necessarily make any money. The question you always hear is, How does Twitter make money? We all know Facebook used to have no advertising on it, and in recent months there are now advertisements. However, Twitter has not yet ventured into any advertisements, yet everyone wants to buy the unprofitable site. Appscout points out, “A deal could be done by June 8, the date of Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference.”
Leadpile, once again will be keeping an eye on this potential marriage made in cyber heaven.
I am not sure if this is something new, or maybe just a White House position I have never really paid attention till now, however President Obama has named 2 high profile company executives to his tech council. Tech Council? Yes, there is such a thing and I think this is a sign of the times. America has gone internet “crazy” and it is only right to have a President working closely with individuals from Google and Microsoft. Google’s Eric Schmidt and Microsoft’s Craig Mundie have joined a team (PCAST) of 20 advisers to the President.
“PCAST is designed to give the White House a pipeline to some of the leading voices in science, engineering and technology as the administration crafts policies in those areas,” according to Internet News. Leadpile Lead Exchange, and other internet companies, like the idea of the potential of more advacements and assistance for this growing internet world we are all a part of. Maybe in the next presidential term there will be representatives from social networking sites and maybe affiliate marketing companies? Now that is a great idea!