21 March 2003
A blog from Baghdad "Where is Raed" offers a unique and intimate voice on the daily effects of the war: "Meat is not safe to buy because you wouldn’t know from where and how it got to the shops. Anyway we bought fresh tomatoes and zucchini for 1000 dinar a kilo which would normally be 250. and most amazingly the garbage car came around."
Ben Elgin from BusinessWeek looks at the pros and cons of Google's Froogle (shopping) and Google News, in comparison to the experiences provided by portals such as Yahoo and Amazon. The analysis here is a quick read and again trumpets the value of making things easy, accessible, and fun for your users (in addition to relevant)- such that they return for repeat experiences.
Laura Thieme discusses how she uncovered and corrected some poor SEO practices for a client leading to an ultimate boon for her client (in following best practices): "Our client tripled his daily sales compared with Christmas 2001."
18 March 2003
"Contrary to earlier utopian theories of the Internet, it takes very little effort for governments to cause certain information simply to vanish for a huge number of people." Seth Finkelstein looks at how some search results on Google are suppressed from public viewing. This link was found via Peter Da Vanzo's excellent SearchEngineBlog.
BusinessWeek looks at search advertising and likes the numbers: it's "cheap... [search-related ads] give people what they're looking for". (It also doesn't hurt that it's good for profits.)
I'm laughing and learning from Business 2.0's "The 101 Dumbest Moments in Business".
10 March 2003
Why is Dave Winer of Radio Userland weaning himself off Google?
Along the same lines, Bernie Goldbach talks about the reach of web intelligence- including the Total Information Awareness Program which tracks individuals to monitor terrorist activity, information retrieval agents such as Googlert (not affiliated with Google but uses Google), and the scarcity of Google-free zones.
Also, Brett Tabke of WebmasterWorld provides a summary of the 2003 SES Conference in Boston.
4 March 2003
I'm enjoying the new look and features of FAST (AlltheWeb.com); especially being able to use Boolean operators again (e.g. "ANDNOT") and the URL Investigator (helpful to site analysis in the search marketing world). SearchDay (Issue #477) summarizes the positive changes at the best challenger to Google.
Your comments are invited: comments@searchethos.com