The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘search’

This morning Google announced a new Blue Dot feature on the mobile version of Google Product Search that shows whether a product is in-stock at nearby stores. This seems to pose a threat to startup Milo, which highlights local inventory in product search results both on the web and mobile devices. Milo’s co-founder Ted Dziuba subsequently responded to our post with a Tweet that read “Google Product Search has availability for 5 retailers vs. Milo’s 49. Super cool web service, bro.” At launch Google only has partnerships with Best Buy, Sears, Williams-Sonoma, Pottery Barn, and West Elm. Milo’s list of merchants includes a range of retailers, from BestBuy and Nordstrom to Midwestern regional department store Blain’s Farm and Fleet.

When we asked for an additional response, Milo sent us this amazing set of pictures below. Milo’s Palo Alto office’s are located at 165 University Avenue, in the same space as Google’s first office back in 1999. Look closely at the picture and you may even see a few of the famous faces from Google’s original team. The building itself is legendary in Silicon Valley and has also housed PayPal. Here’s a 2007 New York Times article detailing the building’s history and apparent lucky karma. The picture of the Google employees was given to Milo by one of its investors.

Milo CEO and co-founder Jack Abraham was quick to respond that they are not implying that Milo is the next Google, but just meant to inject some light-hearted humor into the situation. In all seriousness, Abraham said that Milo has a tremendous amount of respect for Google and its Product Search but aren’t scared of the search giant entering the market and actually welcomes the competition. Abraham and his team have been working for the past two years to scale their product and feel that their offering is more comprehensive than Google’s Blue Dot specials. While Milo is steadily expanding its merchants both regionally and nationally, the startup is also looking to partner with mom and pop shops in cities. Currently, Milo indexes 2 million products.

And Forrester reports that the “online research, offline buying” consumer market represents $917 billion in consumer spending, which is 30 percent of all U.S. retail sales. Online, e-commerce spending accounts for less than 5 percent of U.S. sales. With those numbers, it comes of no surprise that Google wants a piece of the pie. But perhaps there’s enough room for a number of players to monetize from this space.

Most people in the world hear Hewlett-Packard and think “printers.” And who can blame them? Since the relatively recent emphasis on the “HP” instead of “Hewlett-Packard,” and the general consumer move away from printers, HP hasn’t really done anything noteworthy — well, other than thrive despite the decline of the business in which they made their fortune. It’s like the old joke about the bricklayer and the sheep — but instead of drowning their sorrows in gin, HP is drowning them in money in an effort to rebrand the company. To that end, they’ve created a series of ads with the questionable tagline “Let’s Do Amazing.”

It’s not much of a time investment: a few 30-second spots with Flight of the Conchords‘ Rhys Darby bumbling around some professionals who appreciate what HP does. Won’t you join me for a look?

Read the rest of this story at CrunchGear…

One of the three points I laid out as TiVo’s keys to survival was to partner with more content providers. And just like that, Virigin Media announced it will be offering TiVo set-top boxes to its 3.8 million subscribers sometime this year. This move, along with the Conax partnership , makes TiVo a major player in the European DVR market.

The rest is here: 
TiVo will be offered by Virgin Media in UK later this year

We featured a so-called leaked video showing MW2 ’s upcoming map pack last week but had no idea when players will get access to the new maps. Activision finally came clean, though, and announced that the DLC will hit PCs first on March 30, with consoles getting it sometime afterwards. Oh, and yeah, it will be named Stimulus Package just like the rumor stated, which is a kind of appropriate name, actually.

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Modern Warfare 2 DLC map pack coming to PC March 30, Xbox and PS3 shortly after

It’s not a huge deal – $7 off – but if you’re in the market for a new DS, maybe to rock some Pokemon (now with Pokewalkers! ™ ) eCost has a rectified DS Lite (not the DSi) for $88. Obviously this thing is refurbished so don’t expect it to have that new Mario smell – an admixture of garlic and patchoulli, judging by Mario’s dreams in Super Mario World 2 – but it’s black and it’s fun for the whole family

Originally posted here:
CrunchDeals: $88 Nintendo DS Lite

Amazon is selling Futurama: The Complete Collection on DVD for $85, today only.

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CrunchDeals: Futurama: The Complete Collection on DVD for $85

Editor’s note: In the following guest post, Fliqz CEO Benjamin Wayne reveals some of the secrets of using video to help boost the search results rankings of your website. Fliqz is an online video platform.

As most search engine optimization (SEO) experts are aware, getting a first-page Google result is harder than ever. Not only do Google’s search and indexing algorithms continue to evolve in complexity, but Google has given over more and more of its search results real estate to “blended” search results, displaying videos and images towards the top of the first page, and pushing down—and sometimes off the page—traditional web results that would have otherwise competed for top rankings.

But where problems arise, so do opportunities. Although Google’s newfound enthusiasm for video has created more competition for fewer traditional search results, it has enabled sites with video assets—even sites that would otherwise score poorly in the Google index—to successfully achieve first-page rankings. In fact, Forrester Research found that videos were 53 times more likely than traditional web pages to receive an organic first-page ranking.

Here’s what a blended search result looks like for the search query “777 built in 4 minutes“:

Those images at the top of the search results are video thumbnails, and today, there’s only two ways to get there:

1. Upload your video to YouTube.

The advantage of this is that you are 100% certain to be indexed into Google’s search engine. This does not guarantee you’ll get a first-page result, but at least it ensures that Google knows your content exists.

The drawback, of course, is that anyone who clicks on a YouTube result will be taken to YouTube, which may be fine if your goal is branding (i.e., you only care that people watch your video). If your goal is driving traffic, as is typically the case with SEO, this won’t be a successful strategy.

Your other alternative is:

2. Video SEO

Video SEO is a set of techniques designed to make sure that:

• Google finds your video content
• Google successfully indexes your video content
• Google will display your video content when specific keywords are entered as search terms

Here’s how to make it work:

You Need Video Content

Google is fairly flexible in what it considers to be video content. You can use actual video footage, but screen captures, slide shows, animated PowerPoint slides, and other content will work just as well. Google can’t actually “see” what’s inside the video content, so it relies on title and other meta-data to determine what content your video actually contains.

Submission, Not Discovery

With traditional web pages, Google utilizes crawlers to discover and index web content. Unfortunately, Google can’t read Flash very well (although it is trying), and as a result, most video content is invisible to Google’s search crawlers. Therefore, the best way to appear in Google’s blended search results is to submit your video to Google using a Video Sitemap. This is similar to an XML sitemap, but is formatted specifically for video, and only contains information about your video content. It is submitted using Google’s Webmaster Tools.

The most common error in Video SEO is to assume that because you have submitted the web page on which a video resides, that the video content itself is being indexed.

You’ll also need to make sure that you have a robots.txt file on all video pages, to ensure that Google can easily verify that the locations on the Web you’ve submitted do in fact exist, and that they contain embed codes which indicate the presence of a video.

Title and Title Tags

When ranking videos, Google primarily considers the match between search keywords and the video title. Although Google allows you to submit other meta-data such as description and keywords, these currently don’t have much influence on your search ranking. Google likes it when the title tag of the page matches the title of the video, and will give a higher weighting for results where this is the case.

Video SEO is Long Tail

Like traditional SEO, you’re much more likely to see results with Video SEO if you target more specific, or longer tail, search terms. A video titled “Dog” is unlikely to produce a first-page ranking, while a video titled “German Shepherd Police Dog” will be more likely to score well in Google’s algorithm. Since Google can’t determine the actual content of the video, you might consider submitting the same video multiple times with different titles that match potential search terms.

New and Small Don’t Matter

With traditional SEO, the age of a website is an important consideration for Google in deciding its ranking. Google also considers things like the number of pages on the site, and the number of links to the site, along with the importance of the places those links originate.

In Video SEO, none of this matters. This means that even new sites and small sites can compete on equal footing with larger and more established players. Publishers who are too small or too new to even consider traditional SEO can still be taking advantage of Video SEO opportunities.

For the Foreseeable Future, Video SEO is a Winning Strategy

As time goes by, Google’s discovery and indexing of video content will no doubt become more sophisticated, and as competition for video results increases, it will become harder for sites to achieve these first-page rankings. However, the number of web pages still massively outnumbers indexed video assets, and for as long as that continues, publishers will have an opportunity to jump to the top of Google’s search results through Video SEO.

Let me catch you up. We received a tip back on Monday indicating that the Adamo XPS had disappeared from Dell.com. This of course caught our attention as the super-thin Dell was just announced back in late October and only available for purchase since December.

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The Dell Adamo XPS really is discontinued even though it’s still available for purchase

Who would have thought that all that practice blowing on NES games would pay off? Now all I have to do is learn how to play the harmonica really well, and I can finally quit this blogging business and begin the exciting and lucrative life of the hobo! There are three harmonicas and three harmonicas only, people. Choose from Super Mario Bros 3 , a gold Legend of Zelda , or Dick Tracy .

Originally posted here: 
NES game harmonicas let you blow on your cartridges for fun and profit

Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Cox are busy funding some new, super-duper anti-BitTorrent technology called BitStalker . The difference between it and other anti-BitTorrent systems is that it’s said to be accurate . That’s a huge development, actually.

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Top BitTorrent sites are not afraid of BitStalker