The Seattle-Search.com Blog

Microsoft has a built-in incentive program that some pundits — including former MS super-blogger Robert Scoble — believe could be a secret weapon in the battle for search market share against Google, Yahoo and ASK.

The concept of Achievement Points and a Gamerscore has become more popular than Microsoft ever imagined. Building on the time-honored, incentive marketing redemption power of cumulative awatd poin programs like the classic S&H Green Stamps (circa 1896) and frequent-flier miles, the Microsoft Xbox 360 thought it had a brainstorm when it borrowed a page from the past.

The “Achievement Points” were so successful that Microsoft decided to productize the idea. MS mandated that every developer of Xbox 360 games “hide” 1,000 achievement points in every retail game and 200 in every casual game. Players would earn points for certain successes in the game. The more challenging the task, the more points are added to the player’s profile — or Gamerscore — which is visible to anyone who cares to look.

Now imagine if you could earn an achievement for “doing 100 Windows Live searches, or doing a search that has no results for it, or doing a search that’ll return a Microsoft.com page in the #1 spot,” posits Scoble.

Frequent surfer programs have yet to catch any kind of wave.  Will a Frequent searcher program make a bigger splash?

The 2006 holiday season was Amazon.com’s “best ever,” peaking with more than four million orders placed on Dec. 11, the Web retailer said.

During its 12th holiday season, Amazon said that it had shipped more than 99 percent of orders in time to meet holiday deadlines around the world. At its peak, the retailer sent out more than 3.4 million units in a single day. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Your trusty editor got a special mention from Search industry czar Danny Sullivan on the latest edition of the global Daily SearchCast podcast. Correspondent Barry Schwartz, aka Rusty Brick, also cited our coverage of Google’s Webmaster Central, writing in the industry-leading Search Engine Watch blog:

“An excellent conversation with Vanessa Fox and Amanda Camp of Google on Google Webmaster Central and working at Google. Both Google women began working at Google in April of 2005 in Seattle. They discuss the conception of Google Webmaster Central (also known as Google Sitemaps). The discussion also goes into the 20% time and recruiting Google women. You can see a picture of the “Seattle’s Sisters of Search” also.

Today Microsoft announced the official launch of three Windows Live services, Live.com, Windows Live Search, and Windows Live Mobile. Windows Live Search, will by Thursday become the search engine for MSN.

Here’s the scoop according to LiveSide.net

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Big Fish Games has announced the launch of My Big Fish Games (TM) (http://my.bigfishgames.com), a premiere destination for casual games players to create a personal space to write reviews, share favorite games with friends, and earn cash rewards.

“Our rewards program is a first for the casual games industry and a win-win for both players and Big Fish Games,” said Paul Thelen, CEO, Big Fish Games. Read the rest of this entry »

Set these coordinates on your time machine in case you want to revisit the point where Web video distribution officially came into its own.

This is the window - the summer, the month, the week - that the Web has become the locus of consumption for uploaded and downloaded video content. For video viewing and sharing, there is YouTube along with Google Video and Yahoo! Video. Add a cavalcade of other vid-aggregators, and it is clear online video has reach its cruising altitude in consumer adoption. You are now free to move about the videosphere.

This week, Amazon and Apple have touched down to fulfill the download stream for video content. For the Web, this new video inflection point represents an important new opportunity. For the consumer, it offers a new dimension of choice.

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In the category of Contextual Search, Google’s AdSense was the first to offer publishers a revenue sharing incentive for running network ads on their high-traffic, subject-relevant sites. Then came the Yahoo! Publishing Network (or YPN for short) still in its beta phase.

Now there’s ContentAds from MSN. Starting on “primarily” MSN owned sites, Microsoft says that ContentAds will place advertisements using not just keywords but also demographic targeting, geo-targeting and incremental bidding tools on contextually-relevant affinity sites.

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