The Seattle-Search.com Blog

Seattle-based online real estate broker Redfin today released a major new version of Redfin.com that allows consumers to evaluate neighborhood inventory and pricing trends, using data previously accessible only to real estate agents. For each neighborhood, city or postal code covered by Redfin, consumers can view new listings, price reductions, open houses and trends on how many homes are selling, how long they are taking to sell and at what price. Read the rest of this entry »

Two illustrious Internet audiences, the Web’s leading authorities on online security and the leading practitioners of advanced search engine marketing, descended on Seattle last week. What the two groups had in common was a bright line between White Hat “best practices” and stealthy Black Hat maneuvers, although which tactics were being censured and which advocated was sometimes in question.

The AOTA Summit 2008 attracted the chief security advocates for Microsoft, Avenue A | Razorfish, eBay, PayPal,. the Interactive Advertising Bureau, the FBI and the White House, along with Wash.-state attorney general Rob McKenna and Craig’sList founder Craig Newmark. The theme, “”Reaching the Tipping Point: The Future of Online Trust” was based on instilling consumer confidence.

Craig Spiezle, director of the Authentication and Online Trust Alliance which organized the event explained that spam is a tactic of choice for many criminals working online.

“There’s a big proportion of mail today that is spam,” he said. “Just by opening up a mail, there’s a potential your unprotected user or unprotected PC could have malware loaded on their machine.”

“There’s another whole area of corrupting and comprising ad servers today …You see an ad, you click on a link and you actually are taken to site that tries to get malware on you,” he said.

That illicit tactic overlaps with a concept analyzed at SMX Advanced and known in the search engine world as “cloaking,” where a link you clicked on to reach a particular goal did not lead to the destination you had in mind. In the search example, the content of the destination site was withheld or misdirected by the search engine spider. Advanced search marketers are conflicted about the relative degree of risk that a search engine like Google will allow or find acceptable. Some to try and eke out an extra advantage for their Website’s visbility.

In a lively discussion post about the relative value of “dark side” tactics at a search conference, organizer Danny Sullivan was apologetic, “The conference had content that was far more blackhat that I would have liked to have seen. It had content I was embarrassed to see presented, because it is not about the type of SEO I’d like people to learn or know about.”

Having said that, many conference goers appreciated learning more about the black arts of search. They learned what to look out for from competitors, while being amused by the pure entertainment value of the aggressive, and sometimes brutally effective, “overnight sensation” power of the black hat tactics being discussed.

SEO pundit Michael Gray was outspoken, “If Google were Hostess Twinkies, they would take up 90% of the shelf space in your local super market. Sure you could always stop by the bakery and pick up yestedays day old Yahoo bagels or the produce department and pick up that crazy [MSN] fruit that they keep changing the name of, but you’d still be tripping over pop up displays of Twinkies in every aisle.

“Corporations shouldn’t make the rules in any industry, but in our world they do, and it’s even worse that it’s not even multiple companies but just one. It’s not about right or wrong, it’s about Google’s way or everything else. “

Marchex has consolidated its broad range of assets into a single PPC ad platform and network to provide a coherent single point of entry for advertisers seeking to reach the local market at scale.  Say hello to “AdHere,” a network including OpenList, local-vertical domain sites, plus a range of third party sites, including:

– IDG - Publishers of PC World, CIO Magazine, and Macworld
– Ziff Davis Enterprise - Publishers of eWeek, CIO/Insight, and Publish
– Banks.com - Timely advice and first-class tools for building personal wealth - covering banking, loans, investing, insurance, taxes, real estate, and autos
– RealtyTrac - the leading online marketplace for foreclosure properties, providing all the resources that home seekers, investors, and real estate agents need to locate, evaluate, and buy properties below market value
– AmericanTowns.com - a national network of community-based websites where people can find & share the best local information for every town in America
– YourStreet.com - Indexes and maps thousands of articles, blogs, and conversations down to the street level
– Lat49 - an online ad network providing local and brand advertisers with delivery of geo-targeted and contextual ads across a network of online maps
– HelloMetro - city level information on local history, attractions, real estate, jobs, Yellow Pages, White Pages, and local resources

Marchex is touting exclusive placements on 200 “premium publisher sites.” The network allows targeting and ad buying by site, category, and/or keyword.

Microsoft decided to muck its high stakes poker hand and the wager that it could induce Yahoo’s board to accept a $33 a share takeover offer and abruptly “left the table” last Saturday.

Apparently spooked by the prospect of a widening ad share arrangement between Yahoo and Google, and the unfavorable possibility of other defensive maneuvers that would further diminish Yahoo’s  value, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer turned on his heels.  Only afterwords, did Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, tail between his legs, try to explain he was open to the deal all along. Yeah, Right!

Defending his company against allegations that they didn’t try hard enough to deal with Yahoo, Bill Gates spoke out in Tokyo yesterday, “A lot of effort” was put into trying to work out a deal and that the pair should pursue “independent paths”.  Gates continued, “Now at this point Microsoft is focused on its independent strategy.”

To this observer, Microsoft made the right move. Not to devalue what Yahoo could have meant to a Microhoo alliance, but the prospect that 1+1 would equal something other than 1 in this equation was speculative at best.

Ironically, many in the Search advertising world credit Microsoft with the more sophisticated technology when comparing the sharply innovative adCenter system with the often klugey Yahoo upgrade of a year ago, code named Panama. Microsoft’s keyword research tools, demographic targeting options, and the potential of visual search with Photosynth are, for starters, all more impressive than Yahoo’s technology. What Microsoft was seeking with Yahoo was simply popularity: the brand recognition (something it would ironically replace), and Web traffic,which can be fleeting. The joke on the street was that, for the asking price, Microsoft could buy the allegiance of Yahoo’s installed base by paying each user a handsome bounty.

What would a combined Microsoft-Yahoo alliance do for Microsoft that Microsoft could not do for itself? That question was far from easy to answer. Only now it will be up to Microsoft to find the path on its own. The results could come as quite a surprise for the stakeholders. Stay tuned!

Microsoft is preparing to take its most ambitious step yet in transforming its personal computer business into one tied more closely to software running in remote data centers.

The software giant announced on Tuesday a data storage and Web software system, called Live Mesh, that is intended to blur the distinction between software running on the Windows operating system and an elaborate array of services that will be delivered to a growing collection of electronic gadgets.

Live Mesh is Microsoft’s late entry into the rapidly growing market known as Cloud Computing. The term refers to the movement of software applications and services from PCs to centralized data centers, where they are made available via the Internet.

Companies like Amazon.com, Google, Salesforce and dozens of others are building computing centers that will effectively outsource data processing and make it a commodity that companies purchase as they would electricity.

The introduction of Live Mesh is a significant strategic shift for Microsoft, whose operating system helped popularize personal computers.

Ray Ozzie, one of the Microsoft’s two chief technology officers, set the stage:  “The Web is the hub of our social mesh and our device mesh,” he wrote. That statement is the first of a set of three “guiding principles” that Mr. Ozzie outlined.

15 components of the new Live Mesh service have been debuted, including a notification feature, a news feature and an information window displayed by the service, but only two are user-oriented applications. One synchronizes files on multiple computers. The other, Live Mesh Remote Desktop, is a free software service that will permit users to control computers and other devices over the Internet.

A private beta preview and waiting list line is forming here: <https://www.mesh.com/Welcome/Welcome.aspx>

Travel search site Farecast was rumored to be a takeover target recently and  CEO Hugh Crean has confirmed that the site has indeed been acquired by Microsoft. TechCrunch, citing John Cook at the Seattle PI, says the deal was worth something in the $100-$115 million range.Microsoft has a long history in travel, having started Expedia in the mid-1990s (it was sold to IAC’s predecessor USANetworks in 1999). Farecast’s claim to differentiation was that it could predict whether air fares or hotel prices were going up or down to help travelers know when to buy. The site has been around for about two years.

The capabilities are already present on MSN travel and we’ll likely see it affect travel-related search results on Live Search.

Microsoft makes headline news this week for a new service designed to find and display news on the Web. Using Live Search News, you can eyeball the latest news stories, categorized as “Top Stories,” “World,” “U.S.,” “Local,” “Business,” “Politics,” “Entertainment,” “Sports,” “Sci/Tech,” and “Health.” The site has several exciting features, one of which is a Local News sidebar. Although you can access Local News by clicking on the category page, the sidebar lets you keep tabs on your state’s news at a glance.Another cool feature is the “Breaking News” bar at the top. You won’t see this all the time, but when a top story is released, you’ll spot an orange bar at the top linking to the article.

Another feature that sets Live Search News apart from Google News is its “Top News Videos” section. Not only are the videos provided relevant, but Microsoft has implemented the same preview technology that Live Search uses in its video search. If you roll over any of the video images, a preview of the clip will automatically start to play.

While Microsoft is not disclosing the specific number of sources included in Live Search News, it appears to be significantly less than Google News’ 4,500. Google News also touts more customization and alert options than Live Search News.

Social networking web portal MySpace is planning to double the size of its development office in downtown Seattle.
MySpace opened its Seattle office at 1008 Western Ave. last year and currently employs 60 people there. Now the company is aiming to double that staff to 120 over the next 12 months, according to MySpace Chief Technology Officer Aber Whitcomb.MySpace is the latest internet giant to set up shop in the Puget Sound area, and particularly in the downtown area.

Google Inc. has been building a presence in Kirkland and Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood, and Yahoo Inc. launched a development office in Bellevue last year (the Yahoo office was announced prior to Microsoft’s $44.6-billion bid to buy Yahoo).

Will Russell, formerly of Microsoft,and currently MySpace Seattle director of engineering reports talking to the UW computer science department about setting up an internship program.

MySpace continues to be the top social networking website with 109.3 million unique monthly visitors worldwide in January, according to internet traffic measurement firm comScore Media Metrix.