Where is the line between editorial independence and the advertisers who make a media publication viable? Forbes, DMNews reports (thanks Online Journalism.com), has started included ’embedded ads’ in its news stories via Vibrant Media, a specialist in contextual advertising. These ads are links matching related words — car, house, music, that sort of thing. With nearly… Read More »
The whole WhenU story gets weirder and weirder. Last week Ben Edelman, the privacy hound, pointed out that the besieged pop-up provider WhenU was ‘cloaking’ itself. This means, in Ben’s words, ”using prohibited ‘cloaking’ methods to make search engines think certain WhenU servers offer content of interest to readers seeking certain search terms, when in fact… Read More »
Interesting piece from MediaBistro about how journalists use Google searches as a fast and loose way to prove a point. The article doesn’t pull its punches. “What’s a simpler, or faster, way of quantifying a trend,” writes Lionel Beehner, “than typing a key word or phrase into Google? Type in almost any person, place, or… Read More »
Here’s another whacky trick that Google have quietly introduced, adding to the impression they are fast cementing their role as one-stop portal: Book searching. According to SearchEngineWatch (via the excellent TechDirt), Google Print is an experimental service that “indexes excerpts of popular books, blending the content from these works into regular Google search results”. These… Read More »
Search seems to be this week’s Thang. eWeek reports that Groxis is about to launch a new version of its desktop software that can retrieve results from multiple search engines and instantly categorize them. Rather than returning a simple list of results, Grokker 2 groups them into various categories that are displayed in a visual… Read More »