My, does Google stay alert. The Gadsen Times reports that Google noticed that “a lot of ailing Americans enter phrases like ‘flu symptoms’ into Google and other search engines before they call their doctors.” So Google has collected those searches into a new early warning system for flu, called Google Flu Trends. 
“Tests of the new Web tool from Google.org, the company’s philanthropic unit,” says the paper, “suggest that it may be able to detect regional outbreaks of the flu a week to 10 days before they are reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”
This is remarkable, and a…
Google apparently is still considering the usefulness of PageRank in its Toolbar. Search Engine Roundtable notes, in fact, that “No longer is Google showing the PageRank score in the marketing image used on the Toolbar page. Plus, it seems like Google is making it harder for users to turn on the PageRank indicator within the toolbar itself.”
There’s been a lot of Web chatter on PageRank, which is based on links to a page and is considered slow to respond to a page’s current “pull.” It’s not popular among Web designers and folks who feel it doesn’t reflect their earnest SEO…
Sometimes I wish my life had a site map. Imagine how easy it would be to explain your history and experiences to other people. Unlike a resume, people could learn everything and anything without restriction and it would all be organized and categorized neatly in one place. Since life is not an Orbits commercial where we have floating icons to choose from, it seems we are out of luck… but more importantly, what about your site?
When it comes to development, Meta data, content, titles and links are very important, but a lot of designers seem to forget about the site…
The top 50 online advertisers (measured by media value, via ClickZ) in April of this year included 21 financial institutions (A full 42% of the biggest spenders). The top spender 
among those was Countrywide Home Loans, which has been at the center of the mortgage crunch. I wonder what share financial institutions — especially mortgage related ones — had in previous years?
Compare: 7 out of the 50 online advertising giants are tech companies, 6 are media and entertainment, and 4 are retail. The rest have smaller shares.
Oddities: University of Phoenix makes it onto the list twice at 4 and 24 (online…
Ah, the Google Content Network…maligned and often rightly so. This piece (Search Engine Land) goes into a lot of detail about why it can be very ineffective for advertisers — which catch you up on why it ends up as #1 on lists like this one (Apogee Marketing). The Search Engine Land article, however, also gives an excellent walkthrough of how to do a content-matching campaign that works.
With this approach you will be significantly closer to targeting your content match campaign. Better still, since many people simply turn this feature off, and most others use their search keywords, you will have a…
