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. “

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]

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/

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>

Google’s stock will top $900 next year. Online voting won’t happen in our lifetime. And Microsoft Corp. will make a big push into virtualization, possibly buying Citrix.

Those were among the forecasts Tuesday night at the WSA annual predictions dinner as five panelists from the Pacific Northwest technology industry — Matt McIlwain of Madrona Venture Group; Kelly Smith of Curious Office Partners; Jonathan Sposato of Picnik; Enrique Godreau of Voyager Capital; and Steve Lidberg of Pacific Crest Securities — fielded a variety of questions about the future of the industry.

Moderator and P-I columnist, John Cook, has the story.

Yahoo is staking its claim to an expanded role in the Puget Sound thanks to former Microsoft Windows GM David Sobeski, a Yahoo senior VP, who is playing a formative role in formation of the new Yahoo office.

Sobeski disclosed to the Seattle P-I’s Todd Bishop the basics of the new office — 115,000 square feet at Bellevue’s One Twelfth @ Twelfth, enough space for 500 to 600 people — but declined to talk in detail about hiring plans or the work that will take place there.

Sobeski’s remarks on the region were particularly trenchant: “”You’ve got Microsoft, you’ve got Amazon, you’ve got Google, you’ve got Adobe. You’ve got all these guys up here. Now you have us, and you have a pretty good talent pool. You’ve got the University of Washington. … The Pacific Northwest actually has a huge concentration of engineers, of technical people. And it’s not the old COBOL kind of guys. It’s the guys who can go figure out these hard algorithms, be it search, be it contextual advertising, be it data mining, be it any of these things. Because what you really want are just smart algorithmic people. That’s what you’re going for. Is there any difference between writing Windows kernel and writing a great data algorithm? Well, yeah, I get that there’s a difference, but you know what? It’s those smart guys who can build those algorithms, who can do it efficiently, that you want.”

Making the first acquisition in its 11-year history, MSNBC.com, a joint venture between Microsoft and the NBC Universal division of GE, is diving into citizen journalism and social media by acquiring Newsvine.com, a six-employee startup that has helped pave the way in what is known as “participatory journalism.”

Newsvine CEO Mike Davidson will report to Charlie Tillinghast, president of MSNBC Interactive News and publisher of msnbc.com, but otherwise, Newsvine will continue to operate independently.

Tillinghast said msnbc.com was racing to foster a community among its readers and to exploit the power of unmoderated user commentary and ranking of the news. Ideally, he said in an interview, the site would design and build its own tools, but Newsvine, headquartered in downtown Seattle a few minutes from msnbc.com’s newsroom, “is just a great fit.”