The Seattle-Search.com Blog

As the Kelsey Group’s Interactive Local Media Conference kicked off today in Philadelphia, InfoSpace announced the availability of a 60-day free trial of their enhanced mobile local search product InfoSpace Find It! for mobile customers with select handsets.

The new InfoSpace Find It! combines eyes-free spoken directions and simple-to-use GPS functionality with the convenience of local search to quickly and easily locate the nearest businesses, people and events.

Using just a few clicks, InfoSpace Find It! can automatically pinpoint a user’s location and identify nearby movie theaters, choose a film, pick a show time, find a nearby ATM or restaurant and get directions—all via a mobile phone.

As a premium Java (J2ME) application, InfoSpace Find It! distills millions of listings into six categories tailored to the on-the-go user – Dine Out, Go Out, Shop, Travel, Health and Services. This mobile version also offers the same local search power and relevancy as the online product available, at www.infospacefindit.com. With this convergence from mobile to Web, InfoSpace Find It! users now have greater access to deeper listings and more information whether they’re online or on the go.

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! are coming together in support of the SiteMaps protocol. The goal of this united effort is to standardize on a common protocol that will improve search results for customers on the major three engines. The protocol enables site owners everywhere to tell search engines about the content on their site instead of having to rely solely on crawl algorithms to find it.

Other search engines are also invited to use the system — and it has specifically been placed as open property through Creative Commons. IAC’s Ask.com was not part of the announcement.

Sitemaps.org is the official website.

The long maligned HTML meta tag is having a bit of a revival as of late. SEO guru Danny Sullivan wrote the obituary on the ill-fated meta keywords and meta description tag several years ago. But does Google use meta tag data? Does the meta description tag live on while the meta keywords tag is extinct? Out at Kirkland’s Webmaster Central, Google’s Vanessa Fox has broken the impasse by coming out in favor of using the meta description tag.

In a User Forum, Vanessa responded to a perceived indexing issue as follows:

Looking at your site in the search results, it appears that your pages would be well served by meta description tags. For most queries, the generated snippet is based on where the query terms are found on the page, and in those cases, your results are fine. But for some more generic queries, where a logical snippet isn’t found in the text, the generated snippet seems to be coming from the first bits of text from the page — in this case, boilerplate navigation that is the same for every page.

Summary: By adding a meta description tag, a unique one, for each page, Google will use that information as extra criteria to determine the uniqueness of the page. That is how I understand it. Otherwise, Google will use the top text of your page’s content, and that can potentially be your top navigation or worse. This comes in handy for conducting site: command searches with no keyword specific data given after the site command. Thanks to Barry Schwartz for help on this report.

Amazon.com was disrupted for about 15 minutes, starting at about 2 p.m. EST Thanksgiving day, as the retailer offered Microsoft’s Xbox 360 game console to the first 1,000 customers for $100, $200 below the regular retail price.The Xbox sold out in 29 seconds, Amazon also sold out of discounted Mongoose mountain bikes, Barbie dolls and Amazon Prime memberships with $100 gift certificates in about 15 minutes.

Speaking of Cyber Monday, the first Monday following Thanksgiving, a gaggle of deals and coupons can be found at CyberMonday.com 

National Scrabble Champion, Jim Kramer, Is Victorious Over Newly Launched RealArcade Version of SCRABBLE

To bring attention to its much touted role as the world’s largest publisher of casual games, RealNetworks held a SCRABBLE Man vs. Machine competition in Seattle pitting the 2006 SCRABBLE Open against the game developed by RealNetworks. The human won!

Real crowned Jim Kramer, the National SCRABBLE Open champion, the winner of its Man vs. Machine contest and awarded him $10,000. Kramer lost the first two-out-of-three games and won the second. The tension was high among the crowd, as it seemed that the computer would win the third game, but Kramer pulled ahead and won by a single point on his last play of the game!