Search Engine Optimization News Blog

Google CEO Eric Schmidt turned down a position in Obama’s organization last year, but the search engine guru seems to be stepping up to the plate now. Scmidt and Microsoft’s Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie have been included in the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). This council is made up of scientists and engineers who will advise President and Vice President on policy involving science, technology, and innovation.

“This council represents leaders from many scientific disciplines who will bring a diversity of experience and views,” President Obama stated. “I will charge PCAST with advising me about national strategies to nurture and sustain a culture of scientific innovation.”

Schmidt and Mundie join John Holdren (Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy), Eric Lander (Director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and Professor of Biology at MIT, Professor of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School and member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research ) and Harold Varmus, (President and CEO of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center) , all co chairs for the new PCAST. Other members include:

Rosina Bierbaum, Dean of the School of Natural Resources and Environment at the University of Michigan
Christine Cassel, President and CEO of the American Board of Internal Medicine
Christopher Chyba, Professor of Astrophysical Sciences and International Affairs at Princeton University and a member of the Committee on International Security and Arms Control of the National Academy of Sciences
S. James Gates Jr., John S. Toll Professor of Physics and Director of the Center for String and Particle Theory at the University of Maryland
Shirley Ann Jackson, President of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and former Chair of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (1995-1999)
Richard Levin, President of Yale University
Chad Mirkin, Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, Chemistry, and Medicine at Northwestern University, and Director of Northwestern’s International Institute of Nanotechnology
Mario Molina, Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of California, San Diego and the Center for Atmospheric Sciences at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, as well as Director of the Mario Molina Center for Energy and Environment in Mexico City
Ernest J. Moniz, Professor of Physics and Engineering Systems, Director of the Energy Initiative, and Director of the Laboratory for Energy and the Environment at MIT
William Press, Professor of Computer Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin
Maxine Savitz, vice-president of the National Academy of Engineering, retired general manager of Technology Partnerships at Honeywell, and former Deputy Assistant Secretary for Conservation in the US Department of Energy
Barbara Schaal is Professor of Biology at Washington University in St Louis and Vice President of the National Academy of Sciences
Daniel Schrag, Sturgis Hooper Professor of Geology in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University and Professor of Environmental Science and Engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
David E. Shaw, chief scientist of D. E. Shaw Research, LLC, fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and serves on the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Academies
Ahmed Zewail, Professor of Chemistry and Physics at Caltech and Director of the Physical Biology Center

I love Google’s new toy.

The new iGoogle gadget called “What’s Popular” is a social news pagesimilar to Digg or Reddit, with up and down vote arrows. The types are split up into stories, videos and images, and you can expand and personalize it just like a Google Homepage.

Google says that this gadget “helps you discover interesting items from all over the Internet” – in other words, it’s yet another app that uses information about your browsing history and matches it against others to deliver targeted results.

What’s Popular “uses algorithms to bring interesting content from a combination of your submissions and trends in aggregated user activity across a variety of Google services, like YouTube and Google Reader.”

When you submit a URL, Google takes the title and description from the target page,and overall the gadget iseasy to use and straight-forward. those who already use the voting feature in Google’s results will be familiar with the icons.

« Back to gallery What’s Popular By  The What’s Popular gadget by Google helps you discover interesting items from all over the Internet. 4,391 users |   12 ratings Added

A Tweet popped up yesterday that was a bit of a shocker. Live Search cashback hasn’t been publicly sharing that many numbers lately, so the report was pretty visible.

A Microsoft Careers post, advertising for an SDET in “Subscription and Commerce” spilled the beans about the rapidly increasing numbers:

Cashback is changing the way online shopping works – it is the future of online shopping: users search for a product, buy it, receive CashBack from Microsoft subsidized by the merchants, creating a win-win cycle where merchants are encouraged to increase the CashBack to attract more users, benefiting both parties. We have launched version 1.0 of CashBack and we get more than 5,000,000 views a day and 10,000 purchases every day – and we’re exponentially growing!
We’re part of the CSAT (Commerce Search Advertising Transactions) which in addition to the Product Search owns the transactions platform for several online services across the company (such as Xbox Live, Zune, AdCenter, Office Live, MSN, OneCare, CRM Live and Windows Live), providing the payments infrastructure used by all these services.

It’s surprising that we haven’t heard more about this program – there was a smattering of information about it right before the holidays, but snce then it seems to have faded off the radar. Good to know it’s still alove and kicking, but one wonders wehy MSN isn’t promoting it more – with Google, Amazon, eBay and youTube firing up consumers about online shopping, you’d think the chance to save would be a big plus.

IBM is planning to launch new cloud computing services before the end of this year. Resources say the service offered would allow developers to write web-based applications without any difficulty. Another service of this type that would be offered would be to help company owners to run the developed applications over the web with ease. IBM is also planning to offer PC virtualization via cloud computing. All these services are planned to be launched keeping in mind the user’s requirements and practical difficulties.

International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) has planned for the launch of cloud computing using many leading companies. The companies include Amazon.com Inc. Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp. Speaking about the launch to the media, Ms. Kelly Sims, the spokesperson of IBM Corp. said that the first of the services that are planned to be launched would allow developers to develop software that would work using all the latest technologies and would be platform independent. This would really be something wonderful a developer would just love it as they would not be required to worry about any technology related issues and can concentrate more on the developmental part of the software.

Cloud computing are nothing but centralized systems that would run the software and store all the related information and data in a remote center that would be accessed by the users and the programmers from a remote location using the internet. This would be a great system to handle and to work with, as the system would be able to store large-scale data in the same location.

Ms. Kelly Sims also added saying that IBM is also planning to launch service for businesses to run the applications that are developed by the developers without any issues and not having to follow any major technical specifications. She said that the service would also allow the business entrepreneurs to virtualize their personal computer networks without anyone else’s assistance.

She said that much of the technology was developed based on the cloud services developed for academic computing that was developed and launched as a result of the partnership that IBM Corp had with Google Inc. She added saying, “IBM is applying those skills for the commercial offerings that will be launched in 2009,”

However, it should be mentioned that IBM had this idea after it launched the internet based data backup and recovery service last year. In a way it is good, IBM had had a chance to realize the importance for this service in the industry and the demand for it. The services that are planned to launched are going to be sure hit, as the user would be comfortable with every aspect of the service right from the brand name of the company that has launched the service and the efficiency of the service that would be launched. After the announcement, everyone is genuinely expecting the service to be launched at the earliest.

Recent changes to the way Google does things can be a hindrance or a help, depending on your willingness to take advantage of these changes!

Google has increased the snippet length for queries that contain three or more keywords, as multi-word queries are more targeted and complex. If you are in control of your snippets then this can be a good thing, allowing you to provide a more compelling reason to visit your site.

However, this again decreases the attention the meta tag gets, so if you depend on that you need to re-evaluate your approach. Some have suggested that fewer users may click through to a website because they get the answer to their question in the search results, and that the addition space the snippets use may force lower results down below the fold – this is only a problem if you depend on high numbers of clicks.

If you concentrate on conversion over click-throughs like you should, this is actually a positive move. If users are becoming more selective with multi- keywords searches, the advantages of optimizing for the long tail are hugely increased!

Google is also showing more related searches at the bottom of each page. This also can be a benefit to you if you look at it the right way – You can research this and find more keywords to optimize for, and this can also eliminate confused searchers from hitting your site and bouncing.

IP addresses are also playing a part in local results shown on Google – some think this is a violation of privacy, but they can turn off this feature if they choose. You can take advantage by optimizing for local search! Submit your site to Google Maps and rake in some local traffic.