Orange County Internet Marketing Advice by Darby Works, Inc.

Social Networking Versus Google The Gorilla

Can social networking and social search sites generate better search results than the reigning King Google? I guess we shall see. I personally don't think so - at least not in the near future. Here's a teaser...

Can Social Search Take Down Google?
Jimmy Wales' Wikia Search will open to the public next week with an eye toward improving search by letting users tweak search results in a fashion similar to how users edit entries on Wikipedia.

Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, announced that the project would enter public beta on January 7. The goal, he said, is to reduce the "bottleneck of two or three firms really controlling the flow of search traffic..."

Internet Marketing News

Outlook 2008: Online Marketing
Brandweek Magazine - New York,NY,USA
Search engine marketing (aka buying keywords) continues to be the dominant force in online advertising. A full 40% of online ad budgets are expected to be ...

It's clicking
Business Line - Chennai,India
Multiple conversion tracking tools are available - such as Webtrends, Hitwise, Click tracks, Core Metrics and, of course, Google Analytics - that track the ...

Google's Paid Links Double Standard: An Analogy
Traffick - USA
Matt Cutts is never going to be able to say: "you know what Ted? what the hell. we'll treat you the same as Techcrunch." This is for a whole lot of reasons. ...

Online Videos – How Old Media, New Technology Is Driving Search!
4Hoteliers - Wanchai,Hong Kong
No Cost Per Click/Action: Unlike PPC/ Paid Search, currently there is no cost per click charge for video views on Video Search Engines. ...

Pew/Internet Study Finds Most Americans Get Their Answers From the ...
Search Engine Land - Redding,CT,USA
Jupiter Research rearched similar conclusions, finding that 71% of online consumers use search engines to find health-related information. ...

Celebrities and gadgets lead Web searches
Buffalo News - NY, United States
That’s based on new data from the largest Internet search engines showing what their users looked for when they went online this year. ...

It is the sales stupid!
MediaShift Idea Lab - San Francisco,CA,USA
Now, at least for the time being, I'm declining Google (adsense) and any pay per click routine. Why? Many reasons but one of them is that Google's publisher ...

Do You Know What "Social Search" Is?

A new search company called iRazoo, hopes to make search even more relevant by integrating "social search" elements.

“The real question here is, can a small band of guys uproot a big gorilla? The answer is yes. It’s already been done. Yahoo used to be king and now Google is. Relevancy won in the end of that race and we can be even more relevant using human intelligence and collaboration. Our goal is to have 99.9 relevancy within the first three search results.” That’s from Neal Verma, one of the Houston-based founders of a new search engine called iRazoo, talking to startuphouston.com about their latest venture, billed as world’s first people powered, points driven, search engine.

The great thing about the Internet is that it is constantly evolving. Even as social networking (Facebook, Orkut) has become a major fad, there is a relatively new trend on the block. It is called social search. If you want a single line definition, it’s a trend that is introducing a human element into Internet searches. If search engines are technology’s gift to knowledge seeking and sifting, using spiders and bots which retrieve information in a split second, they are now turning populist, literally, using people to rate sites and thereby influence their ranking. Verma calls it the second revolution of search. “We’re taking computer-driven algorithmic results and mixing that in with human intelligence.”

Read the full story on Social Search And iRazoo here.

Will Facebook's New Paid Ads Be Welcomed Or Cause A Rebellion?

Facebook, the hugely popular social networking site, has launched their equivalent of Google Adwords. Only time will tell whether the Facebook community accepts or rejects them. Read a nice Facebook Ads Review here.

Mr. Wong vs. Del.icio.us

Mister Wong goes online with an international version in a bid to challenge Del.icio.us for its share of the massive social bookmarketing world.

http://www.pr.com/press-release/50424

Adwords Advertisers Don't Like Reporting Changes

Google made some changes this past week to its Adwords Report Center, and it looks for like Google Analytics (formerly Urchin.) The upgrade is getting mixed reviews. Some advertisers are saying they really don't like it while others like the improved graphics. See more details about the Adwords report changes here.

Google Beats Yahoo! To The Punch For CNN.

CNN awarded their pay-per-click text ad service to Google over Yahoo! Read Google beats Yahoo! here.

Mark Cuban Bashes Internet

  Great post by web guru, Mark Cuban, who says the Internet is just plain boring. Here is a really funny snippet from another one of his posts over at his blog. He makes some great points....

"I've been inundated with spam on Myspace. Used flicker. Used Digg for sourcing news and laughed at the unending ridiculousness of its posters. Used and posted to Youtube, Google Video, DailyMotion, Veoh, Flickr, Slideshare, used every bittorrent client, got bored with twitter after 7 minutes, signed up for other findme, find you, this is where I am, this is where you are, type app I could find, and the lists go on and on. I read techmeme, techcrunch, extremetech, and tons of other tech sites and I make a point to try every and any new site that seems the least bit plausible or interesting. I spend far far too much time on the net just to make sure I keep up and know whats going on."

Read the original post Mark Cuban post here.

No Office, Headquarters in Cyberspace?

Not sure I agree with this. I guess for some businesses - sure they can operate virtually. But people still need the human connection. Read the full article from ABC News virtual offices here.