Over the summer I told a few people about a surprising report by John Lawlor which listed large numbers of unclaimed Google AdWords keywords. Phrases like “ping golf” were completely ignored on Google AdWords,...
By Andrew Goodman and Ed Kohler With the holiday season upon us, it’s time for pay-per-click advertisers to set aside time for a fall/winter tune-up. So cancel your meetings, grab a Coke, and start...
Wednesday, October 30, 2002 Something So Wrong If you ever had a hunch that there was something so wrong about CMGI, this Salon article, “How I Destroyed the New Economy,” by a prescient laborer who...
When it comes to LookSmart, one of the top three directories on the web and still the best way to get high placement on MSN Search, the most pressing questions on webmasters’ minds seem to be:...
Contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to optimize for search engines to achieve #1 rankings. Many sites have pages which are not fully optimized (in the sense that no thought has been given...
Monday, September 30, 2002 LookSmart: Fact or Fiction, or “Should I Eat that Crispy Chicken?” When it comes to LookSmart, one of the top three directories on the web and still the best way...
While researching this feature on Infospace’s recent contributions to the metasearch space, I decided to reacquaint myself with Metacrawler’s advanced features. Not a bad idea considering how things have changed. The current media obsession...
Ever since they invented a story about 100,000 ISP subscribers to a UK Internet service that didn’t exist, we’ve suspected AltaVista weren’t straight shooters. Hey, we’re prepared to forgive and forget, but subsequent gaffes...
My recent editorial about metatags generated some helpful reader responses. My basic point still holds. Metadata as currently structured, in the context of a non-ideal world, is open to spam and deception, and most search engines...
The World Wide Web has had far-reaching and unpredictable consequences (just as its founders predicted). Perhaps most difficult to predict was the complexity facing scientists who produced tools intended to search this database. It’s a much bigger...