Archive: February, 2006

Mona Elesseily at Page Zero Media just released the Yahoo Search Marketing handbook. I’ve known Mona for a while now, and look forward to picking up a copy and reading her book. Based on my discussions with Mona, it should quickly become a must read for anyone interested in Yahoo campaigns.

I’ll post more about it, once I’ve picked one up. Hopefully, that will be while I’m in NYC at the Search Engines Strategies Conference this week.

Just a quick note regarding Technorati. Dave Sifry mentions the new favorites feature and some other interesting items. Check it out.

Google may be making a lot of enemies lately, but they are not short on making friends. Then again, how does the old saying go? The one about keeping your enemies close? Ok ignore that statement.

Google is back making WiFi deals, this time with Earthlink, according to an article at Cnet News. The two companies have teamed up on a bid to provide San Francisco with free WiFi services, as well as a premium fee service.

This is in response to a Request For Proposal (RFP) sent out by the city, which wants to provide affordable, broadband WiFi services for everyone in the vicinity, including low income, underprivileged families.

“Affordable internet that is accessible to all San Francicscans regardless of geography or income is simply essential – we must recognize that access to information is a fundamental government service akin to libraries or public schools,” said Mayor Newsom in a press release.

A total of six bids were handed to the city by the deadline of Tuesday, February 21. The other five bids came from Bridge Global, MetroFi, NextWLAN, Razortooth Communications and SF Metro Connect.

A couple of weeks back I blogged about search engine loyalty trends according to a study by Forrester Research. The gist of it was that competition between the search engines is high, and only 40 percent of users claimed loyalty to one engine.

Another recent survey, this time conducted by Compete in December 2005, breaks down the loyalty percentage of each search engine as follows:

• Google — 71.0%
• Yahoo — 48.1%
• MSN — 27.8%
• Excite — 23.4%
• AOL — 23.2%
• Ask — 21.6%
• AltaVista — 16.6%
• Clusty — 10.3%
• A9 — 6.4%
• Lycos — 5.8%

Thanks to Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Watch for the information.