A new wrinkle in the search landscape emerged this morning with the announcement that Ask.com is now offering Compete traffic stats inline for the sites on results pages. (Disclosure: Compete is an RWW advertiser.) This move itself may not shake up search but it does beg the question, how much room for meaningful innovation is there in search and to what degree is Google vulnerable in the market it so dominates?

People spend too much damn time trying to tweak, manipulate and trick search engine systems when it is clearly not needed. These same people also spend too much time spreading their propaganda throughout the Internet, which then leads other bloggers into doing the same stupid and shady things on their blog.

Wanting, Found Wanting



We begin using the words, "I want" around age 5. It's not hard to spot a child who has found them. Stand near a discount store checkout line on a Sunday afternoon, you'll soon see a child reaching and hear the "but I want it" whine.

Are you in that "wanting" stage with your business and your life?

I have been looking closely at the relation between new blog posts along side my primary targeted keywords, even if they are not directly related. It's safe to say that if you right about a subject i.e. "Page Rank" then for a week or two you might see some temporary search engine position increase for that keyword.

When someone talks about Web 2.0, they are usually referring to the current interactive phase of internet development, defined by blogging, social networking and "wiki" sites built with user-generated content.

But what is the next evolution? What is web 3.0? In an article in the Financial Times Dawn Bebe, managing director of the UK's first social shopping site for women, Osoyou.com, ventures a guess that "The next evolution for the web is social networks that have a purpose - vertical social networks"

On their blog today, web site monitoring service Pingdom took a look at web hosting services ten years ago and compared them to today's hosting services to see what has changed. The answer -- prices have gone down while included storage space and bandwidth have increased. Or, in other words, hosting hasn't changed much, but it has become a commodity service. Did many hosts miss a golden opportunity?

After all these years, I'm still amazed at how few small business owners understand how to use their website. Sure, bloggers are getting it - at least the probloggers are.

Yet, still the great majority of business owners miss the opportunities a website can afford them. Often, the work with a designer to get the visual look they want for their site and the neat little gadgets that make the site seem interesting. The design process often looks something like this:

A few weeks ago I discussed the steps you should take to increase your exposure on Google Local (you can read the entire post by clicking here). Apparently a Melbourne based mechanic business didn't get the memo.

Ignoring any sort of judgement or coherent thought process, they decided it would be a good idea to post 700 listings of their mechanic business to the new Google Local service. This resulted in 9 out of 10 search results for relevant keywords and page upon page of duplicate listings.

I didn't write any articles in the last few days on Dosh Dosh because I didn't feel that I had anything interesting to say. It's not entirely self-censorship: I just don't like to write when there's no way to inject a new perspective on any topic.

Many will publish content regularly because they feel a necessity to generate pageviews and maintain site freshness. Some fear that their subscribers will go away if they don't update their site.

I know, it has been a while since my last post, but I was crazy busy. I have something else that I plan to write about in my queue, but it is not finished yet. But I have something else ready that is also fairly useful in my humble opinion.

Here is a long and pretty detailed list of questions that a website owner should asked himself about his own website. If the answer to every question that follows below was answered with yes, you can be very pleased with yourself and consider yourself the top of the crop, because most websites have flaws for a number of different reasons, mostly related to the limitation of resources and sacrifices that must be made as a direct result of the shortage.