I Bet They Win...

the search engine gaming ad lawsuit continues...

major search engine websites lost their motion to strike core allegations in plaintiffs' complaint in the case of Cisneros et al v. Yahoo! et al (San Francisco County Superior Court). These allegations ask the Court to provide a remedy against the search engine's alleged illegal advertisement of Internet gambling. The Court made a ruling that allows the case to move forward.

If you are interested in buying an on topic online casino ad on this page please send me an email.

Lost Clicks Click Fraud Site Launched

So the people suing the major search engines for click fraud issues created a website.

With the money that is going to be needed in that sort of a case you would have thought they could have made an attractive professional looking site, but you would be wrong. They even have (not so) flashy "click here" banners.

From their press release:

"What we'd like is for http://www.LostClicks.com to become an electronic meeting place for advertisers and individuals who are concerned about pay-per- click (PPC) fraud," says attorney Joel Fineberg of Dallas, who represents online advertisers in the class action lawsuit. "It's very important that all of us share information because we're dealing with a new technology and a new challenge. The more people who visit the site, the more knowledge we can all gain."

Sending what visitors I can. They are surely in for an expensive battle. Wonder why don't they have a blog, forum, or anything that would encourage community activity? They probably could have put a bit more effort in on that front.

Overture VS FindWhat - Mistrial

Huge news for the beaten down FWHT stock, which was recently down to 4.07 from it's 52 week high of 23.94, gained about 10% on the day.

A judge declared a mistrial in a patent infringement lawsuit between Yahoo Inc. and FindWhat.com Inc. after a jury failed to reach a decision on all of the issues in the case, FindWhat.com said on Thursday.

In a note to clients on Wednesday, RBC Capital Markets analyst Jordan Rohan said the most likely outcome of the case would be a modest out-of-court settlement. He estimated that FindWhat could settle the case for around $7 million to $8 million.

Rohan said some investors had worried that a ruling against FindWhat in the case could wipe out the majority of the company's $50 million cash balance.

Most of the second tier search stocks are fading into irrelevance. Maybe this will help FWHT hang on a little longer. Also noted eariler today:

FindWhat.com noted the judge has yet to rule on the issue of whether the patent is unenforceable because of inequitable conduct committed by Overture. A hearing on the inequitable conduct issue and other motions that could impact the ultimate outcome of the case is currently scheduled for June 24, 2005.

Writing Tips, How to be a Consultant, IR Books, Ask Buys Bloglines

Writing:
Everything You Need to Know About Writing Successfully: in Ten Minutes

How to Be a Consultant:
Create The Warm Fuzzy Feelingâ„¢. Reading it certainly takes much longer than 10 minutes, but it is well worth it if you are considering becoming a consultant.

The list is great, but on the web / marketing front I would also add create affiliate and content sites to help build a stable income stream when down periods occur.

Even when you have few clients you help shore up your technical understand by creating things. If you create great sites then they will make money and you will be able to better filter what work you are willing to take on. If you create lousy sites then they will make for great research and will help you identify symptoms of a lousy site when prospective customers contact you.

As stated in that article, it can't be overly stressed

  • how important it is to be easily available; &

  • how amazingly well syndicated articles act as sophisticated salesmen

found on SearchEngineBlog

Information Retrieval Books:
A while ago I read A Theory of Indexing
by Gerard Salton. I also have heard good things about Information Retreival by C. J. "Keith" van Rijsbergen, and Modern Information Retrieval by Ricardo Baeza-Yates & Berthier Ribeiro-Neto. What information retrieval technology books have you read and liked? Wonder if guys like GoogleGuy have a favorite IR book :)

Ask Jeeves Buys Bloglines?
it is what people are saying...

Trademark Laws:
Deregulating Relevancy in Internet Trademark Law

Would You Name Your PPC?
RipUsOff.com...just randomly came across it and after seeing so many articles about click fraud it would appear as though that name could be took the wrong way.

My Favorite Muppet:
Flying Gonzo, though the Cookie Monster is also cool.

ThreadWatch SEO Conference, Google Trademark Case in France, RubberStamped Listed in DMOZ, WikiPedia adopts NoFollow Tags, AdWor

Another SEO Conference:
Lots of good stuff at Threadwatch, including the announcement that ThreadWatch to have a free SEO conference end of May.

Google Loses Trademark Case in France:
A French court has ruled that Google must refrain from using the trademarks of European resort chain Le Meridian Hotels and Resorts to trigger keyword ads.

DMOZ Lists Directories: Rubber Stamped & WebAtlas...
Were both recently listed in DMOZ.

Peter D gets help from "the man" himself, and quickly finds that you can't be a successful person in the SEO space without having at least 1 hate thread from the fine folks at IHU.

In spite of Doug's whining to DMOZ Rubberstamped is still listed.

Stop the Spread of Viral Linkage Data:
Link Condom...the WikiPedia is one of the first sites to adopt the new policy :(

AdWords Changes to Come:
Google to Give AdWords API to Advertisers
Google is about to unveil a completely revamped Adwords/Adsense program to counter inroads from competitors such as Kanoodle

Google Hilltop Algorithm

Why Page Theme is Usually More Important than PageRank:
In the Hilltop white paper they talk about how they can use expert documents to help compute relevancy. An expert document is a non affiliated page which links to many related resources. If page A is related to page B and page B is related to page C then a connection between A & C are assumed.

Additionally Hilltop states that it strongly considers page title and page headings in relevancy scores (in fact these elements can be considered more important than link text).

The benefit of Hilltop over raw PageRank (Google) is that it is topic sensitive - and is thus generally harder to manipulate than buying some random high power off topic link would be. The benefits of Hilltop over topic distillation (Teoma) are that Hilltop is quicker & cheaper to calculate, and that it tends to have more broad coverage.

When Hilltop does not have enough expert sites the feature can be turned off. It is believed that Google is using Hilltop to help sort the relevancy for some of their search results today.

Google Beats Geico in Court, Google Spam Filters, MSN Desktop, Google Library

Google vs Geico:
Huge news for many marketers, Google won.

U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema ruled that there was not enough evidence of trademark violation to bar Google from displaying rival insurers when computer users search the word "GEICO."

Search Engine Filiters:
Three was a good thread on SEW forums about search engine filters. A couple people defaced the original thread with useless garbage, but ThreadWatch's coverage is a great read.

Search Engine Strategies:
I was going to attend, but decided not to at the last minute...anyhow, if you want coverage RustyBrick is posting about many of the sessions here...he may not be blogging the event though ;)

Funny:
GoogleGuy reviews a non-profit site: (really funny)

I'd recommend that he remove all links to these aggressive sites, and then send an email to us requesting reinclusion.

(found on ThreadWatch)

Google Suggest:
DaveN has opened up his scraper for public use.

MSN Desktop Search:
launched, & integrated into the MSN toolbar.

Search Stats:
ClickZ writes about a recent ComScore search survey

Of those consumers who converted on a trademark keyword, 91 percent did so after starting with a different term type. A full 80 percent started with a generic search term. Trademark searches, meanwhile, accounted for 20 percent of all online searches.

As for conversions, an estimated 92 percent of all computing and consumer electronics purchases occur offline. Meanwhile, 7 percent of conversions occur in the form of latent conversions. Only 1 percent of conversions occur in the same session online.

Google Library:
Google to digitize lots and lots of books...

Late to the Party:
Ask Jeeves desktop search

Brits Behind the Curve on Spam?
Nearly a quarter of all online UK consumers (23%) have purchased some form of goods or services from a spam email, according to new research. I wonder if thats why many of the UK SEOs are so good at what they do ;)

DMCA Being Used Against Google

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