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>

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.

At last week’s Search Engine Strategies conference in New York City, Seattle-based Widemile Inc. announced the launch of a new Optimization platform that can reduce the time of testing landing page success to a fraction of other systems.”

Multivariate optimization makes each advertising dollar more accountable and work harder, making it highly appropriate for the current economic environment. The Widemaile system makes it possible to test multiplke factors and testing levels in a fraction of the time, and with a percentage of the transactional data of traditional systems. The methodology is referred to as Predictive Analytics.

Randy Barney, Director of Site Optimization for Avenue A | Razorfish had this to say: “We’re excited about Widemile’s approach and toolset, which is structured to scale with our business and client needs.” [24x7]

Is Classmates.com a casualty of the Facebook revolution? In what seems to be a death knell to what looked like the first pure-play social networking IPO in U.S., United Online (NSDQ: UNTD) has canceled the proposed IPO of its Classmates.com social networking unit. The company originally announced its plan to hive off the company in August, and in late November it said it expected to raise $177.7 million via the sale. But, citing the standard “market conditions,” the company now says that such a move wouldn’t be in the interest of stockholders. In other words, the interest wasn’t there. While there had been some excitement over a social networking pure-play IPO, Classmates.com, with its subscription-driven business model and earth-bound growth rates, couldn’t fully capture the buzz. United Online said it will take a $4.5-$5.5 million charge in Q4 associated with the aborted process. Release.

A recent report from Cowen & Co. analyst Jim Friedland spells out exactly why United Online couldn’t cash in with Classmates. One line sums up his thesis: “We expect the Classmates.com subscriber base to peak in the first half of 2008, followed by a steady decline to zero by 2012.” Much of the report hones in on the fact that Classmates is no Facebook. The biggest difference is that Facebook is free and offers far more robust features. Other factors weighing on Classmates.

According to analyst Joe Weisenthal, the following were the most critical deficiencies in sizing up a prospective Classmates IPO.

– Classmates has little value for young users, since there’s no need for them to re-connect; they’re already connected through other sites. Meanwhile, Facebook is making major inroads into Classmates’ adult demographic.
– User engagement is 95 percent lower than on Facebook, suggesting that users see little value in the service they’re paying for
– The company’s auto-renewal system has come under investigation at the FTC, potentially causing churn to spike.

Whrrl is a new service that allows mobile phone users to chronicle every social activity in their lives — writing reviews of movies or restaurants or uploading photos from concerts and sporting events. It then plots that information on a map and combines it with similar content from friends, creating a personal mobile city guide. It also provides the real-time locations of people as they wander from place to place in a city, tracking chosen friends as dots on a map.

Whrrl — not to be confused with a competing service called Whirrl — is the first offering from Pelago, a Seattle startup that scored $7.4 million from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos and Trilogy Equity Partners last year.

Led by Jeff Holden and Darren Erik Vengroff, both of whom previously held high-ranking positions at Amazon.com, Pelago is one of a number of companies trying to tap the emerging arena of location-based services. The idea is that mobile phone users will want to locate friends — who may be at a nearby restaurant — or at the very least get a review of the restaurant that a friend wrote a few weeks ago. The service is also accessible on a PC.

Google also is moving into the arena with the purchase of Jaiku, a company that allows mobile-phone users to create a running Web log of events, recommendations and other information. Jaiku describes its mobile product as “a live phone book that displays the activity streams, availability, and location of your Jaiku contacts right in your phone contact list.” Twitter, which also allows people to share small tidbits of information with friends, also is a potential threat.

Whrrl is not available to all mobile phone users. Only subscribers to AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile — on about eight to 10 phone models — can download Whrrl. A portion of the service is free, though Pelago plans to charge less than $3 a month for the location-based service. Pelago, which plans to pursue more funding early next year, employs 34 people.

<http://www.whrrl.com/

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.”