Marketing Pilgrim

It’s a Saturday, so I know you’re not going to work hard today anyway.

For those in the US, I hope you enjoy your hot dogs and fireworks!

In addition to some minor changes with the blog search interface, Google has been busy updating both the Google Ad Planner and Adwords interfaces.

The AdWords updates are in response to feedback Google has received since it introduced a new look last month. About the only thing that appears to be truly an "update" is a new search feature for finding your keywords.

Searching for keywords

We heard many of you are looking for quick ways to search for keywords, ad text, or campaign names within your account. In previous posts, we talked about how you can use filtering to focus on the data that matters to you.

While text filters allow you to search and act directly on the data you see, they also take a few clicks to set up for the first time. To help you work more quickly, we’ve added a new shortcut that lets you quickly search by text under the ‘Filter and views’ menu on any tab.

The other changes are really just things that Google should have done in the first place. It now loads faster, has less horizontal scrolling, and is now compatible with Safari 4 and Firefox 3.5.

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Google has updated the homepage to Google Blog Search, but it seems more like a knee jerk reaction to other web sites, than true innovation.

Take for example the new “Hot queries” section. It highlights the search terms currently most active on Google Blog Search. It sounds like a good idea, but ends up looking like nothing but a rip-off of Twitter’s “Trending Topics.” Google couldn’t even be bothered to match those hot queries to the topic you’re viewing. Switch to technology news, and you still see “tour de france” and English soccer star “michael owen” in the list.

The new “Latest Posts” section doesn’t fare much better. In fact, you could argue it’s worse. While you might discover something of interest in the untargeted hot queries, the chances of you finding a post of interest, among those just published, is unlikely. The section does exactly what it says on the tin–displays the latest posts from everyone. Again, some targeting would have been nice.

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Earlier in June we talked about how the Google book settlement reached with Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers was drawing the attention of the Department of Justice. The settlement between these two parties was reached in October 2008. There isn’t even final approval on the agreement and the fairness hearing to determine that approval is still months away. Under the settlement, Google’s plan to make available millions of titles copied from various public sources can move forward.

Google would have the right to display the books online and to profit from them by selling access to individual titles and by selling subscriptions to its entire collection to libraries and other institutions. Revenue would be shared among Google, authors and publishers.

The key phrase is the sharing of revenue that until the advent of this service was literally non-existent for many of these titles. Google’s blog post from last October says it pretty plainly

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An important element (read: selling point) of Internet marketing is the ability to know more about consumers and their behaviors. Everything can be tracked on the Internet, for the most part, and there is obvious value to marketers and their efforts. The flip side of this ability to track people is the privacy issue and lately the US government has been raising it’s regulatory eyebrows at the online world. In the past this may not have been such big news but with the current administration’s bend toward a ‘name it and claim it’ government style, web advertisers are looking to self police before they draw any more attention from the feds.

Yahoo Tech reports on the efforts of a group of advertising associations that have come together to build a set of rules and regulations that the industry can use to give the consumer the privacy they expect and let marketers keep the freedoms that government intervention would likely hinder.

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Twitter is attempting to gain some kind of control of the use of "Twitter" and "Tweet" in a way that reminds me of Google’s attempt back in 2006.

TechCrunch got its hand on an email that was sent out to one Twitter app developer:

Hi,

Twitter, Inc is uncomfortable with the use of the word Tweet (our trademark) and the similarity in your UI and our own. How can we go about having you change your UI to better differentiate your offering from our own?

Thanks,

That prompted an official response from Twitter’s chief of damage control Biz Stone. The use of "Twitter" appears to be pretty much off limits, but his comments about using "Tweet" have me puzzled:

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All of us that have called for more “real-time” search results or better Twitter integration, should have done a better job of spelling out our needs.

Apparently Bing misread the memo.

In a move that appears to have more bark than bite, Bing has announced the integration of Twitter with its search results. Before you leap for joy, the announcement is a non-starter.

What we get is a few thousand Twitter profiles added to the Bing index. Search for “Andy Beal Twitter” or “@andybeal” and you’ll get a box at the top of your results that looks like this:

What you don’t get is Bing tapping into those tweets for its actual search results. Let’s take the text from the second tweet listed above and “Bing” it:

Meh.

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What do you do if you no longer need your Chief Technology Officer, but don’t want your rivals to get their grubby mitts on him either? Well, if you’re Google you quietly move him out of that role, give him some other projects to work on, and hope that no one notices.

Unfortunately, All Things Digital noticed:

[YouTube co-founder Steve] Chen left his spot as chief technology officer last fall, though he remains employed at Google, which bought his company for $1.65 billion in 2006. “Steve shifted his focus to help with some Google engineering projects. He’s still involved with YouTube and invested in its success,” says YouTube spokesman Ricardo Reyes via email.

Still involved with YouTube–except his role of CTO doesn’t actually exist anymore!

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It appears Google is getting smaller in size–the logo, that is.

Philipp Lenssen spotted YAGT (Yet Another Google Test), this time it appears to involve a slightly smaller logo:

Have you seen this? I’m a little skeptic about its authenticity. Notice how the "Results 1- 10 of…." text is closer to the left in the second screengrab? Same with the login info. That often happens when you reduce your browser window size or screen resolution. That might account for the small looking logo–then again, it could be that Google will show a smaller logo only to those that have smaller screen resolutions.

Who knows? I just wanted to write a post title that included the words "Google" and "shrinking" — when does that ever happen?

Google’s not unused to being sued. Whether it’s because of trademark infringements, AdWords, or simply being kicked out its natural search engine, Google has seen it all.

Now it’s seeing it all in one law suit–and there’s an added twist!

Ascentive is claiming–among other things–that "Google’s refusal to list Ascentive’s website in its natural search result listings violates the Lanham Act." I have no idea what that means, but fortunately Eric Goldman does:

The complaint doesn’t explain this allegation thoroughly, but the theory seems to be that consumers expect to see the trademark owner in organic search results for the trademark and therefore consumers will be actionably confused if the trademark owner doesn’t appear there.

How’s that for grasping at straws? It seems as though this complaint is a non-starter, but that may not stop some naive judge from agreeing with the plaintiff–at least in the lower courts.

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When Microsoft acquired aQuantive in 2007, it wanted to bolster its ad network. Unfortunately, it also ended-up with a conflict of interest, as aQuantive came with Avenue A | Razorfish–an ad agency.

Since then, you could argue that about the only good thing to come out of that particular acquisition was the re-branding from the awkward "Avenue A | Razorfish" to the more practical Razorfish. Really, what did Microsoft want with an ad agency anyway?

Well, the FT has yet another rumor–in a long line of rumors–that Microsoft plans to sell off Razorfish.

Microsoft has appointed Morgan Stanley to find a potential buyer for Razorfish, its digital agency…In August, two years after the aQuantive deal, more favourable tax implications will provide an opportunity for Microsoft to sell an asset some view as a conflict of interest with Microsoft Advertising, which sells technology to rival agencies.

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It seems that Microsoft’s taking three steps forward and one step back, with its hiring of other companies’ employees. It just lost Hugh Williams to eBay.

He left Microsoft to become vice president of development for search for the auction site and, judging by Williams’ LinkedIn profile, eBay gains the guy that helped created Bing:

I was a Partner at Microsoft, and a development manager in the Bing team. I’m proud to say that many of the features of the first Bing release were created by my team.

I managed the development of all user-facing web search relevance features, including the left-rail explore pane (with its "table of contents"), navigational query treatments, query-biased summaries, "deeplinks", related searches, and whole page results relevance. Additionally, I managed the Powerset team in San Francisco.

He also played a key role in Microsoft’s development of Internet Explorer 8.

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