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SearchWrite SearchNews
Caching Better Results in Search Marketing
Vol V, Issue 041 11.17.05
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CACHING THE LATEST RESULTS IN SEARCH MARKETING....

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Google Base Goes Live
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Google Base, a universal data hosting space and searchable data store is now officially live. Google Base is actually quite rudimentary, a place where you can simply submit all types of online and offline content that Google will publish and make searchable online.

If you have information you want to share with others, but aren't sure how to go about gaining an audience, Google Base awaits. At no charge, Google Base can be used to post all types of online and offline information and images.  And the items you submit to Google Base may also appear on Google properties like Google, Froogle and Google Local. 

Probably the most unique feature of Google Base is that it enables you to add attributes or "tags" that describe your content so that users can easily locate it. The more popular a tag, the more likely it will be shared and win high visibility.

It's worth mentioning that every item posted to Google Base has a "quality control" link to report it as a "bad item" (if it violates copyright, is mislabeled or misleading, is spam, adult-content oriented or is labeled incorrectly).

Google Base will likely succeed on a number of fronts, and mostly by helping to expose more of the "Invisible Web," information that has gone unseen and unused in proprietary databases.  For the time being, however, sites like eBay, Craig's List, Monster.com and classified advertisers at large have little to worry about in this relatively free-form search endeavor.  That's the short term prognosis, of course. The potential of Google Base will not truly be manifest for years to come.

http://base.google.com/


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Yahoo Debuts the Shoposphere
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Traditionally, shopping search has revolved around providing product information and expert reviews, occasionally supplemented by reviews from customers that are often of dubious value. 

Yahoo has now extended shopping search by adding a number of new community-oriented tools that allow users to search for other user's product recommendations, as well as comment on them and rate them, adding a new layer of information to the mix. It's an interesting approach, and one that's likely to be quite popular in the shopping search arena. 

A new feature called "pick lists" (as in recommended picks or Amazon's lists) allows users to create and assign a theme to lists, then add product results from Yahoo Shopping search to the lists. With their social networking aspect, Pick lists are now a prominent feature of shopping search results, with both new lists and those most highly rated by other users included in addition to traditional product information. Yahoo Shopping now features more than 75 million product offers, and will likely have more than 100 million by the end of the year. 

http://shopping.yahoo.com/


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eBay adds RSS to stores, introduces research tool
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eBay Inc. has rolled out RSS-based content syndication capabilities to all eBay Stores, letting buyers subscribe to feeds from specific stores and that way receive new information about items for sale, the San Jose, California, company announced this week.

The RSS (Real Simple Syndication) button will appear on the lower left hand corner of the store, where buyers can click on it and add the feed to the RSS reader of their choice, according to the announcement, penned by Arturo Zacarias, eBay's senior product manager, platform and new technologies, and posted Thursday in the general announcement section of the company's Web site.

Also featured in that announcements section is a new service called eBay Marketplace Research, designed to help buyers and sellers track transaction trends on eBay, so that they can make more informed decisions.


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Etsy - P2P Commerce with Tagging
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A relatively new company called Etsy has recently captured my attention. Etsy is a P2P ecommerce company (like ebay) that currently limits sales to handmade items. It’s smart to focus on a niche to iron things out…and Etsy could easily expand into other categories as well.

Etsy does lots of things like eBay - They charge sellers a listing fee and final sale percentage (although at $.10 and 3.5% they are way below what ebay charges), there is an ebay-like feedback system (side note: there is a huge market waiting out there if someone would create an independent third party feedback system with open data and APIs), and they have integrated paypal as a payment option.

Unlike eBay, Etsy has architected the buyer experience from the ground up using Web 2.0 priciples.

http://www.etsy.com/


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Searchable Database of Published Opinions by Judge Alito
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Database company askSam continues to provide useful and free (always nice) searchable databases of books and other interesting documents. With the hearings for Supreme Court nominee, Judge Samuel Alito, coming in January, askSam has put together a searchable and/or browseable database (available online or offline via a download) with more than 350 of Judge Alito's published opinions and decisions. How topical!


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SEO Tip of the Week: Google SiteMaps
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Search engines such as Google discover information about your site by employing software known as "spiders" to crawl the web. Once the spiders find a site, they follow links within the site to gather information about all the pages. The spiders periodically revisit sites to find new or changed content.

Google Sitemaps is an experiment in web crawling. By using Sitemaps to inform and direct our crawlers, we hope to expand our coverage of the web and speed up the discovery and addition of pages to our index.

If your site has dynamic content or pages that aren't easily discovered by following links, you can use a Sitemap file to provide information about the pages on your site. This helps the spiders know what URLs are available on your site and about how often they change.

A Sitemap provides an additional view into your site (just as your home page and HTML site map do). This program does not replace Google's normal methods of crawling the web. Google still searches and indexes your sites the same way it has done in the past whether or not you use this program. A Sitemap simply gives Google additional information that it may not otherwise discover. Sites are never penalized for using this service. In fact Google Sitemaps is a beta program, so Google cannot make any predictions or guarantees about when or if your URLs will be crawled or added to our index. 

Also, you can submit updated Sitemaps to Google as your URLs change, but you don't have to, as the spiders will periodically revisit your site (and will use the frequency information you provide in your Sitemap as one of the factors in how often they revisit) and look for new pages.

Find more info on Google Sitemaps, visit https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login

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