The Seattle-Search.com Blog

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. “

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>

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.

Microsoft fired the shot heard round the Search world last Friday when it bid $44.6 billion for the search assets, index and eyeballs of Yahoo, Inc.

The outrageous price tag to acquire the search industry’s beleaguered #2 search engine has been both lambasted and lauded while inviting potential White Knight potentates into the search engine arena such as Apple and NewsCorp.

Given Yahoo’s stagnant PPC system (formerly known as Panama) and Microsoft’s sophisticated challenger (formidably known as adCenter), the purchase comes down to brand, traffic and audience CPM. Yet Microsoft’s history as a brand-builder beyond Windows (an Apple/Xerox clone) has been dubious (most recently the name recognition of MSN Search was shelved for Live Search! (and we won’t go into Sidewalk, Bob, or Zune!)).

Google’s Chief Legal Officer David Drummond weighed in promptly on the marriage proposal: “Could Microsoft now attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the internet that it did with the PC? While the Internet rewards competitive innovation, Microsoft has frequently sought to establish proprietary monopolies - and then leverage its dominance into new, adjacent markets,” he wrote.

“This is a lot like the replay of the marriage of Compaq and Hewlett-Packard, where the idea seemed good but took years to play out,”  wrote DeanTakahashi in the SJ Mercury News.

And yet, who among us would deny that Google’s dominance in online Search has reached hegemonic proportions or that only the magnitude of a Yahoo-Microsoft alliance provides the necessary counter-balance to Google’s runaway expansion?

One thing is for sure. This deal is going to take a lot of time to come together, Merging the various teams, each fiercely protective of their patches,  will be a long, traumatic affair.

Seattle social networking startup Blue Dot is scrapping its name and repositioning the service — now dubbed Faves.com.Users of the new site can create a personalized Web page populated with their favorite news topics. For example, a Seattle Mariners’ fan who also enjoys surfing and cooking could sign up to receive information about those specific topics from other users who have bookmarked related content. That puts Faves.com in direct competition with sites such as Topix.net, Digg and Stumble Upon. The concept also is similar to what Seattle’s SportsUltra is trying with its customized sports news service.

<http://faves.com/home>

Microsoft Corp. and the SEMPO Institute have announced an education alliance in which personnel from 20,000 affiliates of the MSN search engine will have access to SEMPO Institute’s online learning program designed to provide in-depth knowledge of best-practices in search engine marketing.As part of the new alliance, personnel from the MSN affiliates will be able to take SEMPO Institute’s Fundamentals of Search Marketing class. SEMPO Institute also offers online classes in Advanced Search Engine Optimization and Advanced Search Advertising. Fundamentals consists of 14 lessons intended to give the student a high level understanding of the essentials of search engine marketing.

Since SEMPO Institute launched in early 2007, the student feedback has been very positive – 80% say they would recommend the Fundamentals course. “All companies need the fundamentals of search marketing in order to implement an e-marketing strategy,” says SEMPO President Jeffrey Pruitt. [24x7]

In the trend to keep up with a wired clientele, Seattle’s Hotel 1000 is leading the pack, at least on the West coast, according to the LA Times’ Travel editors. It’s more than the 1000’s ability to deliver high-definition movies from the Internet to a giant flat screen in your room.

A variety of the hotel’s services are connected to a single fiber-optic backbone, including the Internet-based TV system, electronic do-not-disturb buttons and room phones that offer free Internet-based calling to anywhere in the U.S. — doing away with the traditional practice of jacking up in-room calling rates in search of profits.The avant garde leadership is not without a few bug fixes. French press coffee makers with six-step instructions could perplex operators, crtiicsd opined and the TV remotes, must be pointed at an infrared sensor instead of the television screen. In spite of the vagries, Hotel 1000 can still fulfill at least one ultimate geek-on-the-road fantasy. A recent guest’s call to complain about a broken remote was met with a peculiar response from the front desk clerk: “I’ll send an engineer right up.”