Okay so it’s 2010 and I think I’m finally officially allowed to be pissed at the future. I don’t care so much about flying cars (I live in Montreal, the drivers here would make anybody fear the age of flying cars), but the...
Author - Naoise Osborne
The Evolving Google Results Page & How It May Affect Our Perception of Search
This month those of us who work in the search industry, and I suspect more than a few investors, were passing around a cookie string that altered the way Google’s results pages were displayed: As ugly as it may be to some traditionalists, the...
Web Morons and Those Who Pander to Them, Please Stop, You’re Ruining the Internet
A Rant, by Naoise Osborne I have a friend who runs a website for a product that hasn’t been invented yet. Seriously. He’s a smart guy who’s half domainer and half lazy SEO (god blesss’im), and a while back he decided that...
3 Easy Ways to Gain Clearer Insight with Google Analytics and Improve your PPC Campaigns
I consider the use of a solid modern analytics solution a basic necessity when running any type of search campaign, paid or otherwise, and require it of all the websites I work closely with. In the past it was much harder to gain actionable insight...
Blog Newsletter
Forward and Backward; Musings on Librarianship and the Future of Search
Naoise’s Note: This is a guest post by Cathy Camper, a librarian for the Multnomah County Library, in Portland, OR. Cathy’s work has appeared in places such as Wired, Cricket, Cicada, Primavera, Women’s Review of Books, Lambda Book...
The Old, Ignorant Politician’s Guide to Search Marketing for Your Election Campaign
Most politicians are old; it’s basically a job requirement. It makes sense. The accruement of knowledge takes time and learning what to do with it takes practice. Not many politicians would be classed as outright “ignorant”, but...
Bad Decision, Engine: The Problems with Marketing Search (and why Bing needs the tech vote to survive)
There was a time when I was a Linux fanboy – dual booting with LILO to a plethora of software options in Windowz, and a plethora of … ummm, different ways to maintain my computer, in Linux. By virtue of my attempts (failed later in life...
A Conversation with a Non-Search-Marketer
In researching (ha, if you can call it that, and I juuuuust did) my latest post, The Problems with Marketing Search, I had a conversation with an old friend of mine who happens to match up pretty well with the profile I consider important to...
Nothing Personal: Why Personalized Search Never Really Arrived (and maybe shouldn’t)
With Google’s personalized search feature bringing a lawsuit to the Plex earlier this month, it begs the question, ummm what Google personalized search? It’s like the old ABC commercials, I can’t see the difference… Back in...
The Not So Great Search Engine Market Reach Survey
UPDATE – When I woke up this morning, after having published this post … ummm, really early this morning, Webmasterworld had to say this, quoting somebody else: Yahoo! and Microsoft announced an agreement that will improve the Web search...
Multi-Variate Landing Page Testing for Beginners
That title is a trick, I’m mostly a beginner myself when it comes to multivariate – it was basically beyond my reach before Google decided to eviscerate the proletariat and release Google Website Optimizer tool (GWO) – killing...
A Round-Up of PPC CTR and Ad Optimization Tips
CTR optimization is all about testing. The synergy between the keyphrase someone looks for and the ad that you present them is vital (not forgetting the keyword that triggers the ad in your account, and the space between the search term and searcher...