A couple of months ago I came across and posted about Skreemr. Basically, it’s an audio search engine, which tries to dig up audio content on the web and index it for easy(ier) searching. Well, as with all things nowadays, it’s good to have an alternative to something, so someone brought my attention to another audio search engine called Woonz.

The site has been up not too long ago (maybe two months), and I probably wouldn’t have seen it, was it not for the afore mentioned “tip”. It features a simple search engine interface - type in keywords (performer, album, song, whatever) and get results sorted by relevance, with options to listen to the song, or download it form the location where the song was found. It’s important to say that the site doesn’t store actual MP3 files on its own server(s), but simply finds locations where these files can be found. Even though there is no advertisements or traffic monetization so far, judging by what they said on one of their pages, that is sure to come in the future.

I did about two dozen searches - both general and more specific, and got fairly good results (within what I expected), although in some cases I got results which were not what I wanted, although the songs offered were in fact named correctly. For example a search for “Bryan Ferry Fever” brought back “Kiss and Tell” (the correct name of the song) so that was good. Searches for house music (David Guetta, Junior Jack, Armand Van Helden…) returned plenty of relevant results, so there were no problems there. The same proved to be true for searches such as “elvis” and “beethoven”, so classics and classical are covered as well.

There is room for improvement like site performance, showing audio file quality, size, duration, improving streaming preview performance, adding a feature like personal playlist (in the popup player, with download/purge options for later), but since the service is still young, I am sure they have plans for further development.

Share This

Google announced the release of Video Sitemaps, an extension of the Sitemap Protocol. It has been developed in order to improve the way Google indexes video content publicly available on the Internet. The idea is to make video content more searchable on Google Video. Apart from the basic information about video files such as title and URL, the video sitemap allows more detailed meta tags such as video player location, thumbnail preview location, the URL of the page showing the video.

In order to use Video Sitemaps, webmasters should log in to Google Webmaster Tools and add Video Sitemap to their account.

If you’ve got some video content lying around on the server, here’s a chance to get it indexed and get some additional exposure for your website. Apart from uploading video files to services like YouTube, this is a good way to extend video visibility and use this growing promotion trend to your advantage.

Share This

Ask.com has launched AskEraser, an application that gives visitors a choice to keep their search behavior private by telling Ask to delete all search behavior from its servers. The application has two states - “on” and “off”. “On” is on by default, and choosing “off” means all search queries throughout the endurance of that state will not be recorded. AskEraser is available for US and UK users, although the change will take effect on other major sites throughout 2008.

Online advertising is ever more reliant on user behavior as the focus on the Internet has moved towards the individual user. Giving users the choice to opt-out of privacy delicate situations is a good step forward. Facebook had this setup for its Beacon, but had to change the system to opt-in after receiving a lot of negative feedback from its user community. I wonder why default states are not “off”, and the users are asked to opt-in to tracking and user behavior based content serving rather than making them/us look for a way to opt-out. Maybe because the core of the whole privacy issue, as is the case with many other situations, is money and profit.

Share This

As continuation of the video series, started with the Anatomy of a Google search result video about two weeks ago, this is the new video featuring Matt Cutts, who explains the usage of the ALT attribute in image tags. It’s a pretty basic explanation of what the attribute does, its purpose, but again, he gives numeric data (and that’s what we all want ) near the very end of the video - the number of words to be used in the ALT attribute that won’t be deemed as spam by Google. If your site features images that are good quality and theme specific, you can do something more with them. Add descriptive ALT attributes, and show up in Google Images queries. You can then try to get links from webmasters who’d like to use an image from your site on their own projects. Here’s one way to do this.

Share This

It seems Microsoft has fixed the MSNBot issue, where the bot crawled sites calling non-existent files and accessing content through bogus search queries that had nothing to do with the actual content. In their blog post, the Live Search team have explained a couple of other issues they’ve been working on resolving:

• AdSense/Overture reporting
• Distorted site statistics with unfilterable bot traffic
• Polluted HTTP logs with inappropriate terms
• Microsoft wasn’t responding to questions

See the entire post here.

Share This

Microsoft announced the release a couple of new things yesterday - an accreditation progam called AdExcellence (similar to AdWords certification on Google), adCenter add-in for MS Excell 2007, and Webmaster Center (which has already been opened to the public a few days ago).

AdExcellence is a certification program designed to provide agencies and advertisers the opportunity of becoming certified adCenter experts and professionals. Upon successful completion candidates get a certificate and accompanying certification graphics for use on own websites.

The Excell 2007 adCenter add-in is a fully integrated tools for marketers allowing keyword research for targeting the most qualified traffic for their websites. Keyword data accessible from the add-in comes from the adCenter Keyword Services Platform (KSP), and the add-in itself will be available for download in early January 2008. The add-in basically uses web services to access information from adCenter, through KSP, although I imagine there could be far richer ways to integrate adCenter through Excell. Google has released AdWords Editor a while ago, a tool which enables marketers to control everything regarding their AdWords campaigns using a standalone desktop application. Microsoft seems to be working on such a tool for its AdCenter, but we have yet to see when such a tool will be released.

Share This

Live.com announced on their Live Search Webmaster Center Blog that Webmaster Tools is now officially open to all webmasters and professionals. Webmaster Tools was until recently in “private beta”, and only those who registered earlier could get an account and use the tools. If you haven’t registered for the private beta, now is the chance to open an account and start using Webmaster Tools. There isn’t too much to see there right now, and everything pretty much boils down to being able to check for crawling errors and submit a sitemap for faster/easier crawling. I hope we’ll be seeing a lot more on the site in the future.

Share This

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog posted this interesting video presentation featuring Matt Cutts (head of Google’s webspam team), in which he explains in detail a typical search result. At first I thought this is pretty much a basic explanation for those still not familiar with the way Google shows results, but I discovered this video is actually very useful even for those more experienced, if you know how to listen that is. I like the part about snippets and the additional info within it and how they capture that info from a web page.

Here’s the link to the post. This video is the first of more to come in the future.

Share This

Microsoft has delivered on the announcement given in late August about opening Webmaster Portal (Center) to the public. The service is now live and available for general public at this address - webmaster.live.com . The official name is Live Search Webmaster Center.

Users are asked to authenticate administration rights for the sites listed in their account by uploading a specially created XML file or by inserting a tag in the META tags portion of the page code. Uploading the XML file seems like a much better solution in my opinion - easier and you don’t have to mess with changing page code.

Additionally, this post on the Live Search Official Blog invites everyone to visit the newly started Live Search Webmaster Center Blog for information and discussions about the new portal.

Share This

There’s been a lot going on in the past days regarding PageRank changes. Google has decided to follow through on their promise to combat paid links and sites selling links. The main effect is a significant drop in PageRank, which is probably a way to reduce value for paid links (if they indeed are sold solely on the basis of high PageRank) and discourage webmasters to purchase links, although there seems to be no changes regarding anchor text. Google has done a few things to stir things up and many are suffering. It seems that not only sites with paid links have been affected. There is also speculation that Google is also hitting on sites with excessive cross-linking, although they may simply be reducing the value of certain groups of links. With every major change such as this, the innocent are bound to get burned as well. Some sites have experienced drops and other negative changes even without having bought or sold links, while others who engage in these practices have not been affected at all. Indeed, there are surprises in this Google update. Many of the sites that were affected are well known and popular authority sites in their own content category.

Google has flexed some muscle, and the effect is pulsating across the Web. Sites that depend solely on traffic sent by Google are definitely going to feel the change. Sites that did nothing wrong, but were still affected, should work on broadening their promotion efforts to include other sources of traffic such as social networks, community sites and other search engines. If a site depends solely on Google for traffic than a major change like this will definitely have a very negative effect on site and business performance. Good news is that, so far, there seems to be little change in traffic, although if changes prove to be related to overall ranking as well, changes in traffic will probably happen.

This blog was PageRank 0 until yesterday, now it’s PR 2 (at the time of writing, who knows about tomorrow). BTW, it was PR 2 a couple of weeks ago, for about two days. Was that the beginning of this PageRank update and I missed it? What I’m trying to illustrate is that pagerank obsession is a waste of time, unless you sell links based on this criterion.

Share This