State of Local

Google is close to claiming 60 percent of all Web searches conducted in the U.S., according to the latest figures from Nielsen Online.

In November, Google accounted for a dominant 57.7 percent of all searches, or over 4.2 billion searches in total. Roughly a year ago, Google’s search share fell just below the 50 percent threshold, though Nielsen said that it has recently tweaked its reporting methodology, which makes it difficult to make accurate year-over-year comparisions.

But regardless of the precise percentage, Google remains the way that at least half of the people who visit your site through a search engine will find you.

But there’s also another side to that stat. If you’re trying to build any sort of local search capability, or online classified ads, you are competing with Google. Many people are conditioned to find things in Google. Not just news, but local car dealers, real estate and other local services.

There seems to be this theory in the business world that everyone should blog.

But, as anyone who has ever read business blogs can tell you, the quality of information and entertainment varies wildly from person to person.

This NY Times article highlights both sides of that quality spectrum, and the piece does make the good point that in the right hands, a blog can be a great marketing tool.

For companies in the technology sector, having a blog is pretty much expected. Still, Tony Stubblebine, the founder and chief executive of CrowdVine, a company that builds social networks for conferences, said that one of his main reasons for blogging is to show that his business model is different from the typical technology start-up.
Read More… »

If there was ever a doubt in your mind about the folks at Ask.com and their desire to become the search engine of choice, they just got better. On Monday Ask.com added a very cool new element to its site: AskEraser.

AskEraser enables you to have greater control over your search data. More specifically, AskEraser allows you to keep your search activity from being tracked — and with a simple click — it erases Ask.com cookies and stops recording your search history.

In this day and age where online privacy is so vitally important, this is a pretty neat little application for Ask.com’s battle with its better-know brethren, Google and Yahoo. Despite the fact that today’s web is increasingly more personalized, this is still a smart move. With the brouhaha surrounding the Facebook Beacon debacle, and subsequent Clinton-like public apology by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, this looks like a move made specifically with the user experience as the driving force. Ask.com is in effect saying, “you’ve asked for it, and we’ve delivered.”

From a monetization standpoint, Ask.com is clearly leaving the potential for targeted advertising dollars on the table and instead looks like the uber responsible party, concerned about its users. And that’s pretty refreshing.
It will be interesting to see how or if some of the other search engines respond, or if some of the social networks try to do likewise.

SearchEngineLand.com posted today that Google News has updated its algorithm.

The two key enhancements:
1) Updates to its “news cluster” when a source adds updated or new information to a breaking story. The site doesn’t simply show the most recent publisher to post a story, but rather rewards the sources that first broke the story. Implications: more exposure for sites that stay with story; opportunity for editors to abuse this by making frequent, meaningless updates.

2) A “signal” that gives weight to a quality publisher who is geographically close the story. While a marquee news brand might dominate coverage of a big story, Google News isn’t forgetting about the little guys with deep roots at the center of the action. Implications: worthy rewards for original reporting with local context.

Google News, in a recent blog post recognizing the struggle to balance quantity and quality, asserts it’s not “just about including every story; it’s about helping you find the stories that matter most to you.” (Hear that, Topix?) Rewarding quality local publishers and the consumer all in one fell algorithmic swoop? One more reason to put stock in news aggregators.

Before I wade into this, let me throw out a couple of caveats.

Yes, I do work for Internet Broadcasting, but I’m not in sales. I don’t have any direct contact with client sales departments, and in fact, most of my experience here (and at my previous jobs), is on the journalism side.

But I do have experience working at news startups, and also run a small news site of my own in what passes for my free time. I know first hand what it’s like to be a scrappy web dog, wrangling for traffic and ad numbers and attention.

So take what I say not as some IB pontification, but as a guy who knows what it’s like to have few resources, little time and lots of financial pressures.

Everyone wants some magic bullet for online ad revenue. You’ll hear a lot of talk about how to sell your inventory, ways to package it and aggregate your traffic for national advertisers. All of these are legitimate and worthwhile discussions.

But if I’ve learned anything, it’s that at the end of the day, what’s actually on your site will drive your ad sales. Great content opens up sales opportunities and insures that you’ll not only make that initial sale, but end up with a happy advertiser who will return for another round. Read More… »

Whether you’re a television station, newspaper or radio station, you are probably obsessed with “branding.” Which makes sense, if you’re dealing with traditional media.

If your TV station is branded “News 13,” well, then you want everything you’re associated with to be branded the same way. You want your website to be News13.com and you are going to focus all of your station resources towards that co-branded site.

But that “branding is everything” philosophy doesn’t necessarily translate to the Web. Online users are less impressed with a brand, and more likely to be drawn to sites that are useful to them, no matter who they are affiliated with. It’s all about the connection to users, and to the social fabric of the web.

That point is illustrated by this Washington Post piece on AOL’s current trend of launching websites which often have no direct connection to AOL.com itself. Read More… »