A Spot of News

The week is off to a busy start in the office (luckily I have some brand new notebooks to help keep track of everything and everyone), but there’s still a lot of chatter going on in the SEO world already this week.

First up, Microsoft’s Live Search is testing (employee’s only) a new way of searching at Kumo.com.  Their aim is to help searchers accomplish tasks, not just find information.  Danny Sullivan and others saw the internal memos and screenshots that went out, explaining the new goals of Kumo and how Microsoft’s employees would help them ready the service for a launch later this year.

Microsoft has had a lot of trouble with their search brand – it was MSN, now it’s Live.  Although it seems a search appropriate name (it’s Japanese for “cloud” and “spider”), might it be possible that another rebrand won’t do anything other than cause more confusion about Microsoft’s search brand?  They also face the uphill battle to gain market share when Kumo does go public .  They’ll have to convince searchers using Yahoo and Google that Kumo is better/prettier/more relevant/will help get tasks accomplished better than their current search engine.  Webmasterworld has an interesting discussion post on this.

Another search engine facing uphill battles: Cuil announced some changes to their interface.  They’re presenting more of a news magazine layout, deviating both from their launch layout (with the grid) and traditional SERPs.  They say it’s easier to scan the page for information, but a lot of the information they provide is still irrelevant.  Take a simple search for ‘tigers’ for example, there’s only one relating to the animal (the rest are sports teams), and that result is accompanied not by a picture of the tiger, but a University of Missouri banner.  Related categories on the side contain nothing relating to the animal.  There are also some helpful links to German Ice Hockey league teams, even.  Searches for ‘string theory‘ and ‘geneva motor show‘, however, turned up better results.  Their Very Large Index still seems to have trouble distinguishing all the noise surrounding very broad search queries.

If you use Google Analytics, or need that final push to finally become more familiar with it, Google is now offering an Analtyics Certification, much like they do already with AdWords.  $50 and a passing grade on the test will get you registered as being Analytics qualified.  Check it out at ConversionUniversity.

Google’s Eric Schmidt also created a stir late yesterday, when he compared Twitter to a ‘poor man’s email.’  Eric doesn’t seem to know a lot about Twitter, but maybe he should give a little more thought the the crowd searching possibilities the service is offering.  Danny Sullivan is interested to hear how you use Twitter to search and how it affects your use of other search engines.

And one last news brief: eMarketer released their latest figures for the growth of internet advertising and SEO for the coming years.  By 2013 they expect that total search marketing spend in the US will be about $23 billion, with the majority of spending on SEO.

Also, you can now follow Ecreativeworks on Twitter!