Archive: January, 2006

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.

Google has taken a lot of flack for their new search engine in China. Check out what they have to say about it in their blog, here.

An official hearing has been set regarding Google’s refusal to hand over search records to the US government. District Judge James Ware set the date for February, 27th.

Last week, Google made big news by ignoring the US Department of Justice’s subpoena for search engine records. The government demanded the records under the Child Online Protection Act. Although Yahoo! and Microsoft complied with the request, Google refused to hand over the data, claiming it violated user privacy.

The hearing will take place in San Jose, California.

For more on the ongoing saga:

http://blog.metamend.com/?p=138

http://blog.metamend.com/?p=141

http://blog.metamend.com/?p=143