Hitwise reports search engine traffic breakdown… Google is Killin’ it!

Google - 67.9%; Yahoo - 20.3%; Microsoft - 6.3%; Ask - 4.2%; Other - 1.4%

Michael Arrington of Techcrunch has reported that Google will launch Friend Connect on Monday. Like Myspace’s Data Availability and Facebook Connect this will allow users to bring their social profiles, friend lists, and away messages with them as they visit different sites. The “walled gardens” of social networks are breaking down.  Social networks will become ubiquitous with launching your internet browser.  Who will be the first to provide the service that is most conducive to allowing this social internet to thrive? My money is on Google? What do you think?

Here is a direct quote from the Adwords support pages:

“Google’s Gmail service, which is part of the content network, also displays AdWords ads. Gmail ads are placed by Google computers using the same automated process that matches relevant AdWords ads to web pages and newsletters. If our automatic filters detect that the topic of the email is sensitive, no ads are shown.”

What does that last line mean?  How does Google define “sensitive”?  Our ads show up on x-rated sites, but somehow Google knows if your email too sensitive to have ads show up.  I would love to know how this filter works?  Any ideas?

I’m currently listing to the founder of the human edited search engine, Mahalo.com, at SES NY.  He started off by saying he thinks “white hat seo” is important, and his comment 3 years ago at SES San Jose about seo being bogus was actually only referring to “black hat seo”

Mahalo currently has 400 people working from home submitting pages to the Mahalo for money per page submitted.

He’s now talking about a pretty cool service on Mahalo that allows you to submit links (descriptions, tags, etcs…) to 12 different social sharing sites all at once.

Mahalo has a rather robust social network that allows users to build friends, and discover their likes and dislikes.

“The New PageRank” Calacanis believes, is an algorithm based on human trust…This appears to be built based on the human review process.

Good Reads…social networking for books.  You can import your reviews of books on Good Reads to the Mahalo search results…

Flickster…social networking for movies

One more thing…Mahalo content will be syndicated into Google search results… the future SERP is part engine & part human….

SEO people “stuck in short term think”…”more into the gaming of the system than the long term value”…”black hats are poluting the web” leads to consumers not trusting the internet…”create less pages, but make ones that are really a lot better.”

Before attending my first marketing conference I decided to consult an industry veteran, well known social media blogger, and fellow Ogilvy PR / 360 DI colleague, Rohit Bhargava. Rohit has spoken on and moderated several Search Engine Strategies panels, so he’s definitely a qualified teacher for a novice like myself. Here are some of his pointers for making the most of a day at SES:

1. Have a back-up plan for which speakers/panels you want to attend each day in case you don’t like your first choice.
2. Sit near the back so you can slip out to another session if you don’t like it or got what you need out of it.
3. Choose a presenter or two to introduce yourself to.
4. Hit up the expo hall to get some cool gear
5. Look for vendors who offer something innovative and different
6. Don’t try to write everything down. Just make note of the big ideas

As a favor for providing his expertise, I’ll be passing out some flyers created for Rohit’s book coming out soon, Personality Not Included: Why Brands Lose Their Authenticity - And How Great Companies Get it Back.  Hopefully tommorrows Search Engine Strategies Expo will be a success and I will be able to develope my own list of tips for making the most out of such a day of learning.  Here are some of the sessions I’m most excited about:

Social Search Track
Social Media Marketing - What is it and What is it Good For?
Marketing to and through social networks means humans are hot again. Not as directory editors; it’s Web 2.0 and your customers are in control. The old-fashioned media buy has gone bye-bye. Social Media marketing is fast emerging as a must-have in search strategies. Learn about the social search revolution, and hear case studies of how marketers have successfully promoted brands and products with it.

Vertical & Retail Track
Big Brand Search Strategies: Build Connections and Fuel Online Promotions
If 80% of web browsing starts with Search—and consumers are spending up to 50% of their media time online—then why are many major Brand companies spending on average only 2.5% of their media budgets online?

As consumers search, they are expressing their interest in specific categories, brands and interest areas. How can Brand companies better connect with these hand-raisers and how can they better leverage their offline media investments? And how can SEM dramatically improve those connections, conversion, brand health and volume rates?

Carol Kruse, VP of Global Interactive Marketing at The Coca-Cola Company will address what it takes for big brand companies to shift their marketing mix to align with new customer behaviors, putting more ad budget to Search and digital advertising.

Presentation topics include:

• Tips for how to win budget increases for digital advertising within Brand companies
• How Search acts as a bridge between offline advertising campaigns and online interactive experiences leading a customer to action
• How to increase brand connections and fuel online promotions by enticing customers with relevant, affinity and community based offers such as the Olympics, and Nascar
• Tips on how Search can amplify the effectiveness of online campaigns such as Display and Social Media to fully realize the opportunity for customer engagement
• How Search can drive direct marketing goals for customer loyalty programs such as My Coke Rewards

Social Search Track
Social Media Research: Informing Search Strategies
If search engines are tapping into human knowledge more widely through tagging, click through tracking, search history features and other methods, so can search marketers. Social networks, blogs, feeds, tagging, social bookmarking and immersive game environments provide 24/7 real-time focus groups. Learn how Buzzmetrics, Cymfony and others help quantify and reveal critical insights.

Stay tuned to find out what I actually learn…

I will be heading to Search Engine Engine Strategies in New York for one day this Wednesday, March 19th.  I will be representing Ogilvy’s 360 Digital Influence team, and plan to do a live blog post on the DI group blog.  I am excited to hear Jason Calacanis speak, the Founder & CEO of the Mahalo human edited search engine.  The sessions I will be attending will mostly be on the social track in hopes that what I learn will be able to benefit Ogilvy’s word-of-mouth discipline.  Stay tuned for more…

I’m only a few pages into The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture, by John Battelle, and already my world has been turned upside down. Read the following two sentences and tell me your not just a little disappointed:

“It’s seductive to think of crawlers as tiny little robots wandering the vast halls of cyperspace, but the truth is a bit more mundane. Crawlers are in fact homebodies, siting on their own servers and sending out vast numbers of requests to pages on the Internet, much as your browser does.”

On some level I think I always new this, but to not think of search engine spiders as actually crawling from link to link, well…that’s just no fun. Ultimately its important to understand how pages are actually indexed, but I think I’ll always envision Googlebots with 8 little legs, and explain to my clients that search engine spiders crawl the Web drinking link juice and eating good content… How do you explain the inter workings of search engines to the novice client?