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In-depth analysis and expert insight into Bing, MSN, adCenter, and more.Automating the Herd Mentality
Investing social network Roboinvest now allows users to copy one another’s trades with a single click. They’ve prudently limited this to small dollar values, but it’s still a dangerous plan: market swings already tend to happen when investors overestimate the information content of others’ trades; letting them do this by default seems…
Contemporary cricitisms of Google revoles around the fact that they’re pursuing a monopoly. Google, of course, denies this—if they didn’t have to, PR departments wouldn’t be a cost center. But it’s clear that Google’s business will function better if they own as much data as possible about their users and users’ social connections. So, rather…
Why do Car Comparison Sites Have So Much Pricing Power?
Digiday notes that car comparison sites are price setters, unlike nearly everyone else in the online ad world. This seems counterintuitive, especially since it doesn’t apply to sites one level downstream (e.g. eBay Motors) or one level upstream (like auto blogs).
Turntable.fm Signs Record Deals…
Google has announced or leaked a few moves this week. And they’re uniformly shifting traffic away from organic results, and towards pay-per-click ads, cost-per-action ads, or Google properties. The major moves:
The WSJ reports that Google is moving closer to semantic search rather than merely delivering a list of relevant sites. As Business Insider notes, that’s been Bing’s line…
Google Updates Google’s new privacy policy is now in effect. Expect the sky to fall, or for all of your ads to be slightly better-targeted. Danny Sullivan points out that although Google+’s numbers don’t look good, Google is forgoing lots of revenue to promote the service. That’s telling. This Google search screenshot is making the rounds. The…
Why Office for the iPad Makes Sense
The Daily claims—with screenshots to prove it!—that Microsoft Office is coming to the iPad. Dan Frommer reasonably points out that this would be a smart way for Apple to get into enterprise, and it would not exactly be a brilliant strategic move for Microsoft to be…
Bing Hates Santorum, Too
Danny Sullivan notes that Rick Santorum’s “Google Problem” is a “Bing problem,” too. The standard argument here is that the “Spreading Santorum” site is obviously and explicitly an attempt to manipulate search engines. The whole point of such campaigns is to create links and online activity that make the manipulated…
Google Updates Google is using third-party sites for rich snippets. This is an important precedent: it’s one of the few cases where Google gives up brand-blessed real estate for non-brand sites. There are some rumblings that Google’s privacy policies may violate HIPAA, but Google appears to fall outside the purview of that law. Google released a…
When Google announced Search, plus Your World, they made a dramatic decision: they’re embracing the paradigm of a web of people, rather than a web of verbs. And it’s a dangerous move.
There are two broad strategies for improving search engines: making them more aware of intents, or making them more aware of preferences. Most…
Why Infographics Still Work
This horrible Mashable article reveals why infographics are still such a powerful marketing tool. The author of the article clearly has no idea what any of this means (for example, at one point she seems to think that the amount of money Facebook is raising from the IPO is also somehow an…
Digital Due Diligence Weekly