SEO Blog

A recent statement by MSN’s Ken Moss (General Manager, MSN Web Search) defends Microsoft’s decision to hand over search records to the US Department of Justice. On the MSN Search Blog, Moss states that even though records were submitted to the feds, user privacy was not compromised.

According to Moss, “privacy of our customers is non-negotiable and something worth fighting to protect.”

More from the blog:

Over the summer we were subpoenaed by the DOJ regarding a lawsuit. The subpoena requested that we produce data from our search service. We worked hard to scope the request to something that would be consistent with this principle. The applicable parties to the case received this data, and the parties agreed that the information specific to this case would remain confidential. Specifically, we produced a random sample of pages from our index and some aggregated query logs that listed queries and how often they occurred. Absolutely no personal data was involved.

CAN see how frequently some query terms occurred.
CANNOT look up an IP and see what they queried
CANNOT look for users who queried for both “TERM A” and “TERM B”

Google slapped up its new toolbar today. The version 4 beta has quite a few new features.

“Now we’re putting the tools of innovation in the hands of our users. We’ve opened up the Google Toolbar to enable them to create their own features and customize their search experience,” said Marissa Mayer, VP of search products and user experience at Google.

The new features include:

• Enhanced Search Box — as you enter words into the search slot, the toolbar offers spelling corrections, and tries to figure out what you’re looking for by displaying a dynamic list of popular searches as you type.
• Custom Buttons — you can now add your own custom buttons. Buttons can be selected from the Google Button Gallery, or you can create your own buttons from scratch.
• Bookmarks —you can now store your toolbar bookmarks online, and access them from any computer that has the toolbar installed. This requires a Google account.
• Send To — lets you share web site addies, text messages or blogs with other users.
• Google Account Sign In — you can now sign into your Google Account right off the toolbar.

A new study conducted by WebSideStory (WSSI) shows that search engine sites yield higher conversion rates over other sites. Conversion refers to the percentage of customers that carry through with an online transaction.

The poll states that search engine adverts and marketing campaigns offer more than twice the conversion rates of sites using similar campaigns, yielding 2.3 percent over .96 percent. Lower priced items make up for the bulk of online purchases.

Thanks to SearchEngineWatch and Myway.com for the information.

Multimedia search is the current hot topic in the search engine industry. For example:

• Google recently opened its own online video store.
• Ask Jeeves launched its own image search database.
• AOL purchased the video search engine Truveo, in a multi million dollar deal.
• Intel recently inked a deal with Google to provide Intel Viv users with Google Video.
• The upcoming European multimedia search engine Quaero has been talked about heavily. Not a heckuva lot is known about this up and comer, except that it will use voice recognition to index audio-visual information into text.

Gary Price from SearchEngineWatch recently spoke about TVEyes, a multimedia search engine that indexes radio and television content. TVEyes uses voice recognition technology to add audio/visual news material to its ever growing database, from a wide variety of news sources. The pay-for subscription service is very popular within the industry— content is continually indexed up to the minute, providing the original video segments as well as a full text transcript.

Now, TVEyes is offering a free search service. With the free service, users can search for any word(s) spoken within an indexed news cast, by entering the word(s) in the search bar. TVEyes will find and return the exact segment where the word(s) were spoken. The free service does not provide a full transcript.