Seven months after Google began testing a service called Knol, a Wikipedia competitor, the company on Wednesday finally rolled it out. Knol is described as “Like Wikipedia, With Moderation.” Articles on various topics are penned by individuals, and in many cases, experts — not collectively by the anonymous masses. Knol authors can choose to benefit from the “wisdom of the crowds” by letting others edit or supplement their articles. But those changes make it into Knol entries only with the author’s permission.

Knol, which, by the way, is short for knowledge, is making some people uneasy because it further transforms Google from a search engine that helps people find content into a site that helps people create and publish content.

Even though it will make money on many Knol pages with its AdSense program, Google promises that the objectivity of its search engine will not be compromised.

“We will treat Knol pages as we treat other Web pages,” said Cedric Dupont, a Google product manager. “If there is a Knol that is the first place in search results, it deserves that place.”

Of course, on many searches, it is Wikipedia’s ad-free pages that show up at the top of search results.

Mr. Dupont dismissed speculation that Knol was designed as a Wikipedia killer: “Google is very happy with Wikipedia being so successful. Anyone who tries to kill them would hurt us.”

There is a striking similarity between one aspect of the two sites. The text of Knol articles uses the same font as Wikipedia. Mr. Dupont said that is simply coincidence, as it is a commonly used font.

For now, Knol has only a few hundred articles, compared to the nearly 2.5 million in Wikipedia’s English language version. And for now, the best place to follow the debate on whether or not Knol is a Wikipedia killer is on the Knol entry on, where else, Wikipedia.

Source: NYTimes

Google says, search marketing does increase brand awareness no matter where it appears on a results page, and they have released the results of a recent study to bolster their case.In a recent study called “Brand Value of Search”, Google attempts to answer the age-old question of whether search marketing increases brand awareness, reports MediaPost.

Over 2,400 people took a brand survey using consumer-packaged goods brands and Google concluded that, when a brand did not appear in search results, awareness was decreased. This, says the search firm, shows the importance of search marketing in ensuring the brand is represented within search results.

While building a brand with search marketing would be hard, bringing brands to front of mind at a time when a consumer is intending to make a purchase could only be beneficial. Several previous studies have shown that search marketing goes along way towards generating brand awareness. iProspect’s 2006 survey found that “36% of search engine users believe that the companies whose websites are returned at the top of the search results are the top brands in their field”.

However, with social networking, blogs and review/comparison sites becoming increasingly popular decision-making destinations, it’s often the power of the crowd that dictates unaided search results, and it’s increasingly hard for marketers to ensure that search results reflect a positive brand image when two opposing representations might appear on the same search results page.

Across the globe Google remains the dominant search engine. In two countries, the U.K. and Australia, Google’s market share is huge at almost 90%, found Hitwise. In the U.K. the search engine has increased market share by 10% year on year. Meanwhile, in the U.S., Google’s market share showed a less dramatic rise from June 2007’s 64% creeping up to 69% this year. Other big search engines lost overall market share. Yahoo dropped to 4% from 7.7% a year ago and MSN dropped from 5.7% to 3.7% in the same period. The remaining 42 search engines cited could only muster up a 1.5% market share between them.

Search engines are probably the single most effective way to generate traffic to your web page. Because of this, web owners will inevitably complete with each other in order to get a higher ranking. But how would then do this? Well, a lot of e-books, blogs, websites, podcasts, and other kinds of content are dedicated to this topic. But there will always be web masters who complain that they are not getting visitors from search engines. This can be due to different factors but some of the most common reasons I know of include:

New Website – when your site is new, you should expect that it will not perform that well with search engines. Take note that there are over 30 billion pages on the internet and a lot of these can be categorized as “spam”. Before search engines start to give your site a good ranking, they need to achieve a certain level of trust with you and this will grow over time as you build your content, traffic, and one way links.

Black Hat SEO Techniques – very few people want to be called a black hat marketer; or in layman’s term, a spammer. But no one can deny that being a black hat marketer does have its own appeal because of its immediate results. If you decide to take this route, you should realize that you can be hit by a penalty or in some cases, banned altogether.

Useless Content – even if you invest a lot in creating your website, it would not matter if you don’t have good content. Searchers are exactly that, they search for information that is relevant to their needs over the internet. In addition, good content will generate a lot of links which are “votes” for your website.

Duplicate Content – some people debate on the impact of using duplicate content on their websites. But as far as I’m concerned, search engines love fresh content and it will reward websites and blogs that frequently posts new and original articles.

Twitter and Summize (a twitter search engine) maybe merged. The two companies have been in discussion around a merger over the last couple of weeks. Twitter still lacks a search feature and Summize is offering that capability. Summize is the only one partner who has access to Twitter’s XMPP stream.

Source: Techcrunch.com

Most smaller businesses know by now that search engine optimization is an effective way to get their sites noticed by the almighty search engines. But a recent survey indicates that SEO is the best way to generate online leads. Is your site optimized for search? Paul Bruemmer writes on SearchEngineLand about a recent study done in the UK by eConsultancy on online marketing.

The study demonstrates that “natural search is the best tactic for generating online leads, concluding it is greatly underused despite the fact that it outperforms nearly all other types of online marketing.”

The stats:

Natural search (79%) is the most frequently used online marketing tactic for lead generation, followed by email marketing in-house lists (75%) and paid search (71%). Over half (52%) of company respondents said natural search was “very effective.” Just under half (48%) said paid search was very effective.

Bruemmer writes: ” While online lead generation is becoming more important for many businesses, only a little over half of the company respondents in this survey felt their company wasn’t exploiting this type of marketing as effectively as it could be, illustrating that online lead generation delivers results but could be utilized better.”

Bruemmer notes that according to the report, a larger proportion of online lead generation budgets go to paid search advertising even though “natural search is perceived as providing the best value for the money. Companies haven’t invested in natural search over and above other internet marketing tactics because it requires more effort, but don’t make that mistake in your search marketing efforts.”

Bruemmer addresses in-house search marketing managers in his emphasis on “taking advantage of all search marketing tactics,” but for many smaller businesses, their marketing managers are wearing many hats or in some cases don’t exist. SEO is crucial to a Web site’s success and eConsultancy’s survey validates the point but is it worth hiring an SEO consultant for?

In the course of profiling many small and mid size businesses, it is clear that SEO is becoming increasingly recognized as a necessary part of an online strategy. But it seems that there is no universal approach to how to implement an effective SEO strategy: Some smaller businesses are outsourcing to their Web site developers, some to SEO consultants, and some are trying to learn the art of SEO on their own. Which practice is best of course depends upon the nature of the business, it’s size, and the ability of those involved to implement effective SEO strategies.

Microsoft will announce today that they have acquired San Francisco based semantic search engine Powerset. The acquisition price is not being disclosed, but our understanding from sources close to the deal is that the previously rumored $100 million is “roughly accurate.”

The company had raised $12.5 million in venture financing, plus another $8 million or so in convertible debt as bridge financing. That means investors will get a decent return (but not a home run), and the founders and employees will also take some real money off the table.

Adobe has come up with a way for the search engines to read SWF files and index all of the information they contain. That means any text or links in a Flash application can now be indexed. This is a huge step forward for Adobe and anyone who develops in Flash/Flex. Michele Turner, Adobe’s VP of marketing for its platform business, explains:

We are releasing technology to Google and Yahoo that enables them to crawl and index SWF files. They are now searchable. This will open up millions of Flash files to search.

Adobe has created a special Flash player for the search engines that acts like a virtual user going through each application. It actually goes through the runtime of each Flash application and translates it into something the search engines can understand. So all of those fancy interactive Flash Websites and other rich Internet applications that have been invisible to search engines, can now be seen by them.

Turner acknowledges that this invisibility so far “has been a big problem for those developing rich applications.” After all, it doesn’t matter how pretty your Website is if nobody can find it. Flash applications and Websites (many ironically created by ad agencies) have not been able to take advantage of any of the search-engine juice that so many online ad campaigns depend upon. This should be seen as part of Adobe’s larger efforts to remove any remaining restrictions associated with Flash (in April, for instance, it opened up the Flash runtime as part of its the Open Screen Project).

Google is already rolling out the SWF-indexing technology, while Yahoo still “has some work to do,” says Turner. Even so, this won’t solve all the problems with Flash content showing up on search engines.

Becoming visible is one thing, actually ranking highly is another. Google currently can find about 73 million Flash files on the Web. But until Adobe makes it easy for the average Webmaster or blogger to link deeply into those Flash files, they are not likely to appear at the top of many search results.

Search engines are probably the single most effective way to generate traffic to your web page. Because of this, web owners will inevitably complete with each other in order to get a higher ranking. But how would then do this? Well, a lot of e-books, blogs, websites, podcasts, and other kinds of content are dedicated to this topic. But there will always be web masters who complain that they are not getting visitors from search engines. This can be due to different factors but some of the most common reasons I know of include:

New Website – when your site is new, you should expect that it will not perform that well with search engines. Take note that there are over 30 billion pages on the internet and a lot of these can be categorized as “spam”. Before search engines start to give your site a good ranking, they need to achieve a certain level of trust with you and this will grow over time as you build your content, traffic, and one way links.

Black Hat SEO Techniques – very few people want to be called a black hat marketer; or in layman’s term, a spammer. But no one can deny that being a black hat marketer does have its own appeal because of its immediate results. If you decide to take this route, you should realize that you can be hit by a penalty or in some cases, banned altogether.

Useless Content – even if you invest a lot in creating your website, it would not matter if you don’t have good content. Searchers are exactly that, they search for information that is relevant to their needs over the internet. In addition, good content will generate a lot of links which are “votes” for your website.

Duplicate Content – some people debate on the impact of using duplicate content on their websites. But as far as I’m concerned, search engines love fresh content and it will reward websites and blogs that frequently posts new and original articles.

Most search engine markets are dominated by Google and there seem to be no real local competitors. In Russia however, a fierce battle for the search query’s of the consumers is going on. But when we talk about Russia then, there is no place for Google. Russia’s largest search engine Yandex, is the first engine that revealed a billion pages outside the .ru domain.

The leading Russian search engine Yandex has expanded its web index outside of Russia by indexing the first billion pages outside the RU domain, says Yandex’s webmaster blog. For example, when one makes a search for an English keyword on Yandex, the search engine will return one result from the COM domain (or other domain) and the other nine results from the RU domain. The ranking of search results is according to Yandex’s general search ranking rules with no particular preference given to non-Russian results.

Yandex has a web index of more than 4 billion pages, including 3 billion pages in Russia. ComScore recently ranked Yandex as the ninth search engine globally.

According to Yandex statistics, 15% of its searches are in a language other than Russian. That would imply that 15% of Yandex revenues from search ads could come from non-Russian searches. Google is number 2 in Russia with 31% market share of referrals behind Yandex with 44% market share, according to LiveInternet.ru.

By expanding its web index outside the RU domain, Yandex will likely seek to retain those of its users who usually switch to Google for searching information outside the RU domain.

How Google will overcome Yandex? Is Yandex a serious threat for Google? The answer is YES! Google has started a $ 250K per month advertising outdoor campaign. he company is launching “”Moscow 2.0,” which includes over 5,000 outdoor advertisements across Moscow. Yandex, with nearly 50% market share, is preparing a Nasdaq IPO. Google has around 31% market share.