Archive: January, 2008

Google maintains country-specific search results for almost all major nation states. Google France, Google UK and Google Canada, for instance, each have separate domains (google.fr, google.co.uk and google.ca) and each gives specialized placements to web documents directly relating to each nation. That’s why a search on “Tax Forms” performed in Toronto will reference Revenue Canada while the same search conducted 150km south in Buffalo will reference the IRS.

The reasons for producing country-specific results are obvious. They make search simpler for the users. For webmasters however, country-specific results can sometimes be disappointing as those with .com TLD’s (top level domains – ie: .com, .net, .ca) doing business in France, England, Canada and other places outside the United States can attest. While one might have great products or services to offer, consumers located nearby may very well never find them while performing a search on a country-specific engine. Their counterparts with TLDs corresponding to their nation of origin often get a slight bump up in the rankings based solely on their TLD.

Google is rumored to be ending the monetization of controversial but lucrative practice known as domain tasting by ceasing to provide AdWords inventory to domains that are less than five days old. The move would place severe restrictions on the ability of a growing number of publishers to take advantage of the five-day grace period registrars grant domain buyers before registration fees are billed. Publishers use this time test the traffic-drawing potential of new domain names. Google cutting the flow of funds to the millions of burn and churn “made-for-AdSense” sites will ripple through the search marketing sector producing (mostly) positive change.  Change always comes at a price.

Here’s how the practice works. A domainer is a person who acquires a portfolio of domain names. The value of properties in the portfolio is determined by the traffic each draws. Domain registrars give a five-day grace period during registration domain name so buyers can test the marketability of the domains before purchase. Most use the grace period to determine traffic numbers but an increasing number of publishers use those five-days to post throw-away pages laden with AdWords advertising. This way, they monetize their research, keep the domains that convert and delete those that don’t.

The last CEO standing from the days before the 2000 dot-com crash is leaving her post at the end of March. Long-time eBay CEO Meg Whitman is stepping away from the executive office she has occupied for nearly ten years. She will be replaced by John Donahoe, president of eBay’s marketplace division.

Whitman is credited with running one of the tightest ships in the Silicon Valley. Under her tenure, eBay has become synonymous with self-serve web merchandising, growing so large that it even frightened Google away from facilitating a similar marketplace through Google Base. At this time, the company’s only direct natural competitor is Amazon.com.

Though eBay is a solid company, its growth has fallen slightly behind the overall growth of the e-commerce sector, suggesting the firm is slowly losing market share. According to ComScore, e-commerce rose 19% in general during Q4-2007 while eBay only saw 12% growth in its gross merchandising volume. This perceived drop in market share makes the investment community slightly nervous. Over the past three months, eBay lost about 1/3 of its share value.

“Don’t Break the Web” is a rule that the Internet Explorer development team has been applied to six major versions of IE over the past decade, with each of these versions seeing the application of this rule in a different way. It is a rule may appear ironic for some, given that IE has been the source of many problems for web developers since the wide-spread adoption of CSS, and with the more recent popularization of standards compliant web pages. It is also a rule that represents the balance that the IE development team attempts to find between backwards-compatibility and interoperability (web standards), and a new post on the IE Blog this morning shows that the IE8 development team may have found the way to achieve this balance.