In today's Search Ads column, "Can Google Analytics Be Evil?," Tony Wright is looking for feedback on Google Analytics. Like many search marketers, he has recommended that clients stay away from Google Analytics because of concerns about data privacy and some of the ways Google has used AdWords data in the past.

Is he right to be wary, or are the benefits of a free and easy to use analytics application worth any potential risks? Share your thoughts in the SEW Forums.

Looking for a recycling center? Try TheRecyclingCenter.info, a useful mashup of Google Ajax Search and Google Maps.

Mike has the scoop...... (Go to Searchblog Main)

A recent eye tracking research from Enquiro looked into Chinese user behavior regarding search results in Baidu and Google. Gord Hotchkiss wrote about this on Search Engine Land.

According to this interesting study there are considerable differences between how users interact with the results. (The research has also looked at the difference between user interaction on Google.com an Google.cn. I’ll focus here more on the differences between Google.cn and Baidu.com). I have one “small but” in regard to this research which I’ll get into at the end.

The main conclusion of the research is that the success level for a search on Google seems to be higher than on Baidu. Users on Google needed half the time (30 seconds vs. 50 second on Baidu) to find what they were looking for. Most of them also didn’t look beyond the fourth result. In Baidu they scanned the whole page, clicked on more results (results pop-out) and as a result took more time.

One of the differences in the way Chinese users interact with search results is contributed by Enquiro to the fact that the Baidu results page lacks transparency between sponsored and organic listings.

It’s true that there are no background color differences like you have in Google for sponsored results on top of the organic results. Baidu does show these days whether a result is sponsored or not. In how far a user will notice this small tag, I don’t know.

Gord also goes into the question why Chinese users prefer Baidu, while at the same time it seems the results on Baidu are less useful than on Google. He mentions that Chinese users may favor Baidu because it’s a home grown, Chinese search engine.

To a point this may indeed still be a factor although I don’t think that will hold true in the future as the quality of the results will become a more important distinctive factor.

He also regards MP3 search as a significant factor for Baidu’s popularity. This last one is definitely contributing to Baidu’s market share as for a big part Chinese users are still young and like downloading whatever is free.

Another reason that isn’t mentioned here but plays a part I think is the fact that the Google website tends to be slower and at times stalls because of censorship which negatively affects the user experience.

Last time I wrote about research showing that Chinese internet users favored Google results over Baidu results. This study shows that users seem to find faster what they want on Google than on Baidu and that may support the favorism of Google results.

There is one “small but” though which I mentioned in the introduction. I haven’t seen the final Enquiro report and this is just an assumption on my side. If I understand correctly Google’s default setting is that search results are opened in the same window. Baidu search results open (in my experience) by default in a new browser window.

I haven’t seen the final report and as such I don’t know what the default settings of the search engines (especially Google.cn) were in this test. I would love to know this as opening results in a new window versus in the same window could have affected the experience and the way their eyes were tracked.

What else happened in China

Google Servers, Content License and Cache

According to an article from ChinaTechTews Google will move more servers to China and will launch more local products. ChinaTechNews rightly remarks that there may be consequences for moving servers to China, for example having to provide user data to local authorities which may be used to prosecute netizens that have a different opinion. This happened to Yahoo before.

Although I’m not sure whether there is a relation with the fact they will be moving servers, Google is saidto have received their own ICP (Internet Content Provider) license.

Websites that are hosted in China are obliged by law to have this license. In case they don’t have the license, the visitor of a Chinese hosted website is shown a lovely cartoon. The current license Google is using has been borrowed from a Beijing classified website and on my last check the license number hasn’t changed yet.

Google.cn has lost a feature that is part of its search elsewhere. The cache feature has been removed reports Google Blogoscoped, and this happened in the end of April.

The “Cache” feature hasn’t been very useful as long as I can remember as it was blocked by the censors here. The fact that they have disabled it , and I agree with Google Blogoscoped, is a form of self-censorship. It isn’t going to cause much uproar though as the average user won’t use this feature.

What I did notice was that the cache feature has also been disabled for Chinese search results on Google.com, at least when I search from within China. Maybe someone searching from abroad can check whether this also applies there.

Baidu and Online Payments

China Tech Stories picked up the news that Baidu is planning its own online payment system, based on statements from Baidu’s CFO, Shawn Wang. I haven’t read about this elsewhere but it definitely could be an interesting move for Baidu to venture in this field. Currently the online payment market is still very fragmented with the current leader being Alipay from Alibaba.

Technorati and The Chinese Firewall

Recently photo-sharing website Flickr was blocked in China. Normally a block by the censors doesn’t stir many waves in the mainland but this time some Chinese internet users are pissed off. Having no access to all your own uploaded pictures makes things personal I guess.

Media blog Danwei writes that Keso, a well know Chinese tech blogger has cursed the firewall in one of his posts (in Chinese). Additionally Keso has added a picture of the “Torture the Net Nanny voodoo doll” in his sidebar. The picture used here, including translation is from the Danwei site. If you like, stick a pin into him.

That’s it for this week.

–
Gemme van Hasselt is an Internet Marketing Consultant, living in Shanghai

Federated Media, which organized some ads here in the past, is currently being criticized for some of their ad campaigns: one controversy surrounds Microsoft’s “People Ready” campaign, and another one is about Cisco’s “Human Network” campaign. Nick Denton of Valleywag suggests that for the “Human Network” campaign, Cisco with FM’s knowledge even created a new Wikipedia entry. For these campaigns, the bloggers were asked to write little ad statements expanding on the campaign concept, like “I knew we were a people ready business, when I left to start GigaOM Inc.”

I wasn’t offered either of these two campaigns by FM, though I was offered something similar for Hakia’s “Better Search” campaign, which I rejected earlier this year because I didn’t want to lend my voice to an advertiser. In my opinion, and opinion on this varies, it risks blurring the line between content and advertisement; it makes it harder to see the natural voice of the blogger, and natural – not paid – conversations are supposed to be what blogs are about. I also still had a bad taste from the Snap ad campaign of last year, where I was asked to write an article at Snap.com about how I think a search engine like Snap could do a successful launch... and while I fully disclosed this article as paid and wasn’t required to write about Snap, it still triggered a conversation in the forum that made me write about problems with Snap.
As with text link ads, paid reviews, or affiliate links in content, advertorial-like campaigns will likely stay controversial, and bloggers will have to make up their mind what’s true to their dream of this blogging thing... it’s nothing for me, anyway.

Update: FM’s John Battelle describes the background of the Wikipedia article creation different from what Nick Denton wrote, telling Jeff Jarvis: “[Cisco] wanted to post a wiki version of their definition, and naturally their first thought was Wikipedia. Thanks to input like yours and many others, they did it on Wikia, the commercial cousin to Wikipedia. In fact, they sought out Jimmy Wales’ advice on the matter. The entry was later put up on Wikipedia by one it its editors, independently.”

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

[Advertisement] Google books at eBay: background info on Google, AdWords, AdSense, Blogger and more...   [Advertise here]

The German government's proposal to monitor and record email usage in their country has Google threatening to stop Gmail service to the country, according to a SlashDot report today.

Gmail had to rename itself in Germany recently as Google Mail, similar to events in the UK.

Seems Europe is not the friend of the Mountain View behemoth. The German legal changes would not take effect until 2008, reports stated.

Looking for a recycling center? Try TheRecyclingCenter.info, a useful mashup of Google Ajax Search and Google Maps.

I typed in my zip code and got back one general purpose recycling center, one recycling collection service, one metal recycling center, and two electronics recycling centers. If you're looking for somewhere to recycle your computers, you might want to also check out Earth 911.

Groovy guy Philipp Lenssen has an excellent post about how to pull data from Google into Google Spreadsheets.

As he notes the syntax is =GoogleLookup with two variables; to find the population of Boston you could use this syntax:

=GoogleLookup(”boston”; “population”)

When you paste that into a Google Spreadsheet, Google will load the results (in this case with a citation year.) I couldn’t get everything to work — I tried a pounds-to-Euros automatic conversion and it would never come out right. Google has a fairly extensive docs page but I suspect they’re not covering everything.

(Google’s full slogan, if you didn’t know, is “Do no evil, do lots of easter eggs.”)

I would love to combine this with a scraper to extend the functionality a lot. I’ll have to look into the possibilities of offline spreadsheets like Excel — see what they can pull up….

Doing more things with the API

We’ve all used Google to search the web. What if we could add Ajax to the web search operation? Google Ajax Search API does just that – could this facilitate searching?…

You know, the late 90s and the bubble were a long time ago, yet whenever I see some overblown press release talking about revolutionary new paradigms or some other such nonsense I still want to go hide under something.

I suspect with this site I’ll be spending a lot of time hiding under my desk. Killer Startups, at http://www.killerstartups.com/, reviews over 2 dozen new sites a day. It looks a lot like Digg, with spaces for Diggs (only they’re called “Killers”) and reviews of each site.

You can browse the sites by date, search by keyword, or browse about a dozen categories. I looked at the Search category, of course, which has 97 listings at this writing and included sites like TheMolu and ZitGist, but also older sites like Exalead. Each site listing has an overview, a description of the site from the site itself, and a brief review from KillerStartups. KillerStartups also notes why the site in question might be a killer, but also asks some questions about the veracity of the startup (that’s the difference between the late 90s and the late 00s — there is some attempt to pop the bubble.) Each listing also has a “Killer Data” box that attempts to show contact information, traffic data, etc. — but the data boxes I looked at were mostly empty.

There are RSS feeds, of course. Feeds cover all startups, today’s, and the top ten. Sadly I could not figure out a way to get a feed by category (I want to see what this site finds in the way of search; I’m less interested in ecommerce, marketing, etc.) Still, it’s frequently updated and the site reviews aren’t breathlessly excited. Worth a look.

Jerry Yang now Yahoo CEO. Wubba?

Yes, EVERYTHING. Camera Shutter Life Expectancy Database.

Ask dissects the 3D. In a good way.

OH BOY! More battery recalls!

A Yahoo Pipe for translating RSS feeds. Verrrry nice.

Ultimate RSS Toolbox. Whee!

Wow, Arkansas has the electronic government news going ON.

Gnome Chomsky?

Paying your taxes makes your brain feel good? Also giving to your food bank.

Michigan: Online directories for Farmer Markets and Ag Tourism.

Matt writes "Google is threatening to shut down the German version of its Gmail service if the German Bundestag passes it's new Internet surveillance law. Peter Fleischer, Google's German privacy representative says the new law would be a severe blow against privacy and would go against Google's practice of also offering anonymous e-mail accounts. If the law is passed then starting 2008, any connection data concerning the internet, phone calls (With position data when cell phones are used), SMS etc. of any German citizen will be saved for 6 months, anonymizing services like Tor will be made illegal."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Vermont Community Foundation has published the latest version of the Vermont Directory of Foundations in three different ways — printed book, free PDF download, and a free searchable database, now available at http://fdovermont.foundationcenter.org/ .

The actual search form is here; you can search by a variety of factors including grantmaker name, city, field of interest, and type of support. (You can also do a simple keyword search if you like.) Several sorting options are available as well (alphabetical, total giving, and total assets.)

I searched the company name for Foundation and got 278 results. Results are presented in a table showing the name of the grantmaker, city/state, total assets, and total giving. Click on the name of the grantmaker and you’ll get a page of information in a popup window. The page for the Ben & Jerry’s Foundation included notes on the application process, who and what is supported, geographical emphasis (in their case none), examples of causes supported, and so on. There’s a separate tab for links to the latest IRS filings for the organization.

Very speedy. However if you want something to browse, you can go to http://www.vermontcf.org/download-order-vdf and either download the directory for free or order a printed copy for $10.

Matt posts on the role of humans in Google search, prodded by a NYT story on the topic: If you ask an average techie about Google, you’ll hear that we use lots of computers and algorithms. Indeed, the title of the New York Times article is “The Human Touch... (Go to Searchblog Main)

Fauxto*, released in late 2006, is a Photoshop-like online image editor that’s constantly growing its list of features. Once you edited a photo with brushes, layers, fill tools, eraser and so on, you can save it online – no need to go back to your hard disk (though you can do that, too).

This tool works incredibly well, though I’m not sure if there’s any business plan behind it (registration is free). Perhaps the makers are hoping to get acquired. And Google Inc. seems to be one likely candidate: the Google office already has online Word, online Excel, online FrontPage, online email, online calendar, perhaps soon online PowerPoint, and more (all of these with less features than their desktop counterparts, but better sharing & multi-user editing capabilities), so online Photoshop would make sense too**.

Ongoing comments

*If you pronounce this the French way, faux - to, it supposedly sounds a bit like “photo.”

**Unless Google’s already working on this in-house, of course.

[Thanks Search-Engines-Web.com!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post]

[Advertisement] 55 Ways to Have Fun with Google (Book)   [Advertise here]

EBay was angry lately when Google attacked their PayPal system by trying to lure people away to use Google Checkout, and as result they stopped their ad spending for Google AdWords around 10 days ago. According to Reuters, they now resume the ads, but less so than before. An eBay spokesperson is quoted:

<<I will tell you it will be in a much more limited way than it was before ... What we found is that we were not as dependent on AdWords as some people thought.>>

According to the report, eBay now plans to rely more on “competing advertising systems from Yahoo, Microsoft’s MSN, Time Warner’s AOL, and IAC/InterActiveCorp’s Ask.com.”

EBay made their statement loud and clear, but despite all recent bluffing they still need Google for their business. Nick Denton of Valleywag compares the partnership of the two companies to a non-aggression pact between countries, which he says “never holds.” Google has been focusing on finding partners the last years, but the more they’ll expand their business, the more likely they’re to end up on rival grounds.

[Thanks Colin Colehour!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

[Advertisement] Google books at eBay: background info on Google, AdWords, AdSense, Blogger and more...   [Advertise here]

It looks like Google is preparing for the worst case scenario — shutting down Gmail due to German laws standing in the way. Philipp Lenssen has the scoop on a ruling that prevents Google, in an attempt to combat terrorism, from storing user data unless there is sufficient personal information associated with the account. [...]

Randy Stross wrote an interesting article for the New York Times about search with a human touch, and I wanted to talk about the role of people in Google search.

On this post, you get not one but *two* disclaimers. It’s all part of my read-one-disclaimer, get-a-free-disclaimer program! My disclaimers are:
- This particular post is entirely my own opinion.
- I’m really, really low on sleep. I’m up at Foo Camp 2007 this weekend. This is my first time at Foo Camp, so I stayed up until ~4 a.m. last night talking to people and discovering the crack-like addiction that is the Werewolf game. Okay, let’s begin with a question.

What is the future of search?
I see some obvious answers. For example, Google will continue to work very hard on international search so that we do just as well on a query in Japanese, German, Arabic, or Norwegian as we do in English. But what about longer-term? Will the future of search be

- personalization?
- a completely new user interface?
- semantic understanding of queries or documents?
- social search (which I’ll define as improving search by unlocking the power of people)?
- universal search, which brings in documents from non-html sources (images, videos, patents, etc.)?
- a combination of all of the above, or something entirely different?

Suffice it to say that we spend a lot of time thinking about the future of search at Google, and of course other people think about it too. Let’s take one area, social search, and delve deeper into the subject.

Social Search: the power of people

If you ask an average techie about Google, you’ll hear that we use lots of computers and algorithms. Indeed, the title of the New York Times article is “The Human Touch That May Loosen Google’s Grip.” But (in my opinion), it would be a mistake to think “Google is nothing but cold algorithms and computers; there’s no room for humans at all.” I’ll give you a few examples of the role of people over the years at Google:

- PageRank is fundamentally about the hyperlinks that people on the web create. All those people creating links help Google formulate an opinion of how important a page is.
- Google News looks at a wide variety of news sources; the decisions of human editors at thousands of news sites help Google estimate whether a particular story is significant.
- Google introduced voting buttons on the toolbar back in 2001. They look like happy/frowny faces and they let regular people send thumbs-up or thumbs-down votes to Google.
- Google has allowed users to remove results that they don’t like from Google.
- For more than five years, we’ve allowed users to report spam to Google. We’ve said for years that we reserve the right to take manual action on spam (e.g. if someone types in their name and gets off-topic porn as a result).

And of course, it’s not as if Google’s search engineers drive into the Googleplex in the morning and then spend the whole day sitting around doing nothing while the computers do all the work. Instead, Google researchers and engineers spend our days looking for deeper insights that will let us create the next generation of search. I believe Google’s approach to search has always been pragmatic: if an approach will improve the quality of our search, we’re open to it.

“But Matt,” I hear you say, “aren’t you just saying this now because of the recent coverage of human-powered search companies such as Sproose, Mahalo, iRazoo, Bessed, etc.?” Actually, no. I think I’ve been saying similar things for a long time. I did an interview with John Battelle last year, for example. Read the full interview for my (very long) thoughts on the role of people in search, but here’s some of what I said:

I think that Google should be open to almost any signal that improves search quality. Let’s hop up to the 50,000 foot view. When savvy people think about Google, they think about algorithms, and algorithms are an important part of Google. But algorithms aren’t magic; they don’t leap fully-formed from computers like Athena bursting from the head of Zeus. Algorithms are written by people. People have to decide the starting points and inputs to algorithms. And quite often, those inputs are based on human contributions in some way. ….

So I think too many people get hung up on “Google having algorithms.” They miss the larger picture, which (to me) is to pursue approaches that are scalable and robust, even if that implies a human side. There’s nothing inherently wrong with using contributions from people–you just have to bear in mind the limitations of that data.

I believe that Google has thought about how to unlock the power of people in various ways since PageRank was invented. I’m allowed to make that claim, because more than five years ago I cared enough about leveraging social feedback that I helped write some of the Windows code for the voting buttons in the Google Toolbar.

According to spiegel.de (german), Google is threatening to close down the german version of it’s popular gmail service if the german Bundestag passes it’s new internet surveillance law. According to googles german privacy representative, Peter Fleischer, the new law would be a severe blow against privacy and would go against Googles practice.

It's been tit for tat for some time; eBay bans Google payments, Google tries to throw a party mocking eBay, in response to which the service pulls all of its ads, fun corporate shenanigans. It seems as though, for the moment, the two companies have made up. News.com is reporting that eBay ads will once again be serviced via Google's adwords service, but that they will also be using alternative methods to a greater extent in the future. "Hani Durzy, a spokesman for San Jose, California-based eBay, said his company later on Friday would begin advertising on Google, but at reduced levels than previously. eBay had been buying tens of millions of keyword ads on Google each year. 'I will tell you it will be in a much more limited way than it was before,' Durzy told Reuters. 'What we found is that we were not as dependent on AdWords as some people thought.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google Calendar has recently launched a mobile version that lets you add events and see your agenda, but if you already use your phone's built-in calendar, you want a way to keep the offline and the online calendars in sync.

GooSync is a free option that works without installing any application (over-the-air). You just set up an account, give GooSync access to your Google Calendar and configure your phone to work with GooSync.

GooSync works with mobile devices that support SyncML, and these include Blackberries, most Nokia phones, many Sony Ericsson phones and others. You can also install SyncML clients for Palm or Windows Mobile phones.

Besides synchronizing the events, GooSync tries to keep the reminders in sync. Because Google Calendar has some predefined intervals for reminders, this will not work if you define custom reminders for your phone's events.

The service's main limitations are that "you are only able to synchronize your primary Google Calendar and you are limited to a sync window of 7 days past and 30 days future of the current date," but if you pay a subscription these limitations are removed.

If you’ve used Google Maps to find businesses, you’ll know that it’s had reviews available for businesses for a long time — content that was pulled from other places like CitySearch and Insiderpages. Google has recently announced that you’ll now be able to see user-created reviews at the Web site as well. There’s also a nifty way to see user-created content, but one thing at a time.

First thing: head over to maps.google.com and run a search. I decided I wanted to find a Super 8 near Walla Walla, Washington, therefore “super 8″ walla walla wa Google Maps gave me 129 results (most of them NOT Super 8 motels, but whatever.) Click on the “more info” link beside a listing and you’ll get a map pointer with several tabs providing general information, reviews, Web pages, and photos (there were four photos; three were the same shot and one of them looked like an ivy covered window.) From that window you can click “Write a Review” and provide your own impressions along with a star rating.

At the bottom of the search results you’ll see a “See user-created content” link. Click that and you’ll get links to other Google Maps that incorporate points from your search results, which is kind of cool. For the Walla Walla example I found hotel maps, tourism maps, winery pointers, and a couple of “My Town” type maps. I also found that if you put in a noun or a preference of some sort and then a location you could get very interesting maps. Vegan Chicago was fun. Most of the Google Maps worked, though occasionally the map would be too large to view, formatted incorrectly, or once (in the case of a SmugMug map) couldn’t be found.

I didn’t see too many reviews generated by Google Maps users — Google needs to push that feature I bit. I did enjoy seeing how different locations fit into all kinds of different maps, though!

Workplace productivity blog Web Worker Daily has written up a list of their picks for the top ten streamlined alternatives to Microsoft Word - and they're all free.

There are a lot of really great picks on this list - Google Docs, Zoho, AbiWord, and more. When all you need is something that will help you write content without a lot of extra unnecessary features, this is definitely a good place to look. What's your favorite alternative to MS Word? Let's hear it in the comments.

According to information from Heise, Google warned that they might disable Gmail in Germany as last fallback should the German government maintain its position in regards to a newly passed law on record-keeping and supervision of internet traffic. According to this law, email services here will be forced to maintain personally identifiable records attached to email accounts. What exactly this might mean for Google I don’t know, but perhaps it would result in Gmail having to start requiring full addresses (and perhaps even having to verify an address by sending a snail mail to the user).

As usual in these circumstances, the law is pushed through in the name of fighting “terrorists.” But Heise quotes Google’s Peter Fleischer to have said that this law goes against Google’s policy to offer anonymous email accounts (actually, you need to give your first and last name upon Gmail sign-up, but then again you can fake that). Peter says, “Many users around the globe make use of this anonymity to defend themselves from spam, or government repression of free speech ... If the web community won’t trust us with handling their data with great care, we’ll go down in no time.” Peter added that a German-only solution for tighter control of email data isn’t useful in the first place, because people might simply escape to foreign email service providers.

Google standing up for the rights of their users to save less data than the local government asks is a brave move. And while there are other email providers in Germany, Google is the de-facto default search engine here, and that might give them some leverage – if only to escalate the situation and put the spotlight on this new law. On the other hand, as Jens Minor from the German Google Watch Blog remarks, “If Google will indeed stop their email service in the sense that no one will be able to access their mails anymore, they might as well close all local subsidiaries, and Mountain View can go ahead and forget this market – because they’d destroy all user trust from one day to another.”

[Thanks Patrick Kempf!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

[Advertisement] Google books at eBay: background info on Google, AdWords, AdSense, Blogger and more...   [Advertise here]

Some facts about Google, from the Press Day event that took place in Paris this week, captured by Tony Ruscoe.

Search

* When Google started we indexed 25,000 web pages - today we index billions. Each time we index the web it's grown by 10 to 25%.

* As the web grows, search becomes more important. It's like a library - the bigger the library, the more important the index.

* 20 to 25% of Google queries have never been searched before.

* Google's PageRank algorithm uses more than 200 signals to determine the rank of a website.

* iGoogle was our fastest growing product last year (2006). People have personalized their iGoogle homepages with over 10,000 free gadgets.


Languages

* The Google Book Search index includes books in over 90 languages.

* Google's machine translation service is available in 12 languages.

* Google operates in 112 languages including Breton, Reto-Romanic, Catalan, Kurdish, Frisian and Gaelic.

* Universities in Rwanda, Kenya, Japan, Egypt, Ireland, the Ukraine, Michigan and Arizona are all using Google Apps for Education.


Corporate culture

* In 2007 Google gave free bicycles to all its employees in Europe.

* Google's San Francisco shuttle bus service is the biggest of any company in the area. One shared car provides as much transportation as 20 privately owned cars.

* Google has the largest corporate solar panel installation in the US.


Revenue

* Of the $10.6bn Google generated in revenue last year, $3bn was handed back to our publishing partners through AdSense.

* In the first quarter of this year Google generated over $1bn in revenues from our partners.

Although all external Wikipedia links are using the nofollow attribute since January of this year, links from the encyclopedia are still important because of other reasons than ranking in search engines.

Next to generating human traffic from people who read Wikipedia articles, external links from Wikipedia also reinforce the authority of a site for the subject of the article at Wikipedia.

Both of these can be very significant and should not be underestimated. For competitive intelligence reasons is it also interesting to know, if your competitor has links to his website within the main article name space at Wikipedia. Of special importance are those links that are references for industry specific subjects and not just a link from the article about the website or company.

There are several methods and tools available to find out about links in Wikipedia in addition to other useful information. Most methods and tools I am introducing here are for a more tech savvy audience (= developers), but a few of them don’t require programming abilities to use them.

1. Wikipedia External Link Search
The Wikipedia External Link Search feature is build into Wikipedia. The good thing about it is the fact that it searches the current Wikipedia database and makes it the most up to date link search tool available.

The problem is that the search pattern is case sensitive and increases the chance that you miss URLs, because of capitalization. Most domain names in URLs are spelled in lower-case though and the search will do a good job for basic domain searches in most cases.

2. Wikipedia Search by DomainTools.com
DomainTools.com is known for their free WhoIs lookup among other great tools for domainers.

One great feature is the ability to search from the WhoIs results and others for references to the domain within Wikipedia. It also has a search that returns all external links for a specific Wikipedia article.

I have not found a “search form” or something like that, only specific links that do a search for a specified domain name or Wikipedia page (including pages outside the main articles name space).
The URL for the domain search looks like this: http://www.domaintools.com/enwikipedia/domainname.tld

For example: http://www.domaintools.com/enwikipedia/seobook.com

The URL for the look up of all external links from a specific Wikipedia article looks like this: http://www.domaintools.com/en/article_name

Note: Replace spaces in the article name with underscores

For example: http://www.domaintools.com/en/Search_engine_optimization

Nice about this tool is the inter-linking to further searches from each result pages, for example to the domain search from the article search results and to the article search from the domain search results.

The tool utilizes the data from the Wikipedia article dumps, which means that the data are not real-time.

3.Wikipedia Database Dumps
Wikipedia makes the content of ALL their wiki databases available for download to the public. Guess where the wiki clones and Search.com get their Wikipedia data from? The dump of the English language Wikipedia main space is the most interesting one for US, UK and other marketers who serve markets that speak the English language.

The name of that dump is “enwiki” and it is not being done every day. The last dump of the “enwiki” was on June 4, 2007. That is over two weeks ago. However, most links are not changing that often. Spam links do not last very long and if they do, only because they are on pages nobody cares about, and that includes us.

Here are the links that are relevant to the Wikipedia Dump.

• Primary article at Wikipedia to Wikipedia Dumps
• Download location of the English Wikipedia dumps
• List that shows the last date and time of all dumps
• Request for dumps - info page; I doubt that they will perform a special dump, if you ask them to, but who knows, you might want to try it anyway.

The dumps are more for the technical experts who can deal with the amount of raw data to work with it and use it for their purposes.
There is a program for searching the database dump available though and worth checking out.

It is free of course and was developed by a Wikipedian with the name “Bluemoose”. You can find the link to the download of the program and a description of its features on this special user page for the “DataBaseSearchTool”.

4. Wikipedia Special Export
Like the Wikipedia Dump Is this feature for the technical folks rather than the average marketer out there. You can export the text and editing history of a particular page or set of pages wrapped in some XML.

The page where you initiate special exports is available at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Export

5. Wikipedia API (alpha)
An API is in development to access information at Wikipedia. The project is currently in alpha stage, but the API is accessible to the public.

The API is located at: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php

For documentation and examples, check out the API homepage at the Mediawiki website at: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API

There is a limitation build in. The API returns a maximum of 500 results for any request. The limit increases to up to 5000 results, if you spend the time to become a sysop or get your bot authorized. The alternative would be to ask an existing sysop for access to the API through him.

6. Wikipedia Query
The Wikipedia Query feature will probably eventually replaced by the Wikipedia API. The Query is available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/query.php

The documentation is provided on the page itself. Calls are being made by the simple addition of URL parameters. The Query is able to return results in multiple machine-readable formats for programmatically access, such as xml, json, php, yaml and wddx, and also in human readable format.

The Query does not provide the option to search for external links. You can find internal linking and category structures and more. To find external links, is it unfortunately necessary to request an articles full content and parse the external links out manually.

This example query returns the content of the article to search engine optimization:

The source code for the query tool is available for download and suggestions to features can be made to the authors. They might be willing to implement an external link feature if they will be motivated enough to do so :).

7. Search Engine Queries
For example a Yahoo! search with linkdomain:yourdomain.com and site:en.wikipedia.org parameters, such as this query for links to SearchEngineJournal.com.

For more Wikipedia resources, check out my Wiki Resources user page at Wikipedia itself. It provides references to a bunch of other tools and resources to Wikipedia, which you might find useful as well.

Carsten Cumbrowski
Internet marketing and web development resources at Cumbrowski.com, such as Web APIs and resources for Web Services development

Raver32 sends in word of a PC World article reporting that EU officials are looking beyond Google in their examination of the impact search engines have on privacy. Quoting: "A panel of European data protection officials called the Article 29 Working Group decided Wednesday to request information from Google's rivals amid concerns that search engines are holding onto information about the people who use them for too long, Hustinx said. Hustinx... declined to name the companies. However, they are believed to include Yahoo Inc., Lycos Inc. and Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Live.com."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"EBay ended its ad boycott against Google yesterday but said it would scale back spending on the search engine going forward."

For the last few days, Microsoft has been distributing Unbuntu Desktop Linux from the Windows Marketplace Website. The page is gone now, but can still — as of this morning — be seen using Google cache.

Suffering from Lifehacker information overload? Get a digest of our best posts delivered to your newsreader once a week using our Highlights feed. If that's not enough for you, instead grab our daily top stories feed.

This week's best posts include:

• Turn your Windows Mobile phone into an iPhone
  "If your clunky old Windows Mobile phone is just sitting around collecting iPhone jealousy dust, you can either scrounge together 500 leafy Sacagaweas, or you can customize your Windows Mobile phone to emulate several of the iPhone's more interesting features."
• Edit your digital photos with Picasa
  "If you don't have the cash or patience to get a copy of Photoshop and learn what to do with it, the free Windows photo manager software, Picasa, may have everything you need to adjust your photos to your liking."
• 13 book hacks for the library crowd
  "Today, in the interest of lifehacking your bookshelf, I'm rounding up my favorite 13 'book hacks' for getting the most from your bound literature."
• The art of the doable to-do list
  "Your to-do list can be a tool that guides you through your work, or it can be a big fat pillar of undone time bombs taunting you and your unproductive inadequacy."
• Show Us Your iGoogle
  "Last week we asked readers to send us screenshots of their iGoogles, and you didn't disappoint."
• Stephen Colbert, email assassin
  "Stephen Colbert sits down with email etiquette author Will Schwalbe and dives face first into email."
• Monitor your Mac with iStat menus
  "iStat menus integrates system statistics like CPU, RAM, HD, and Network usage into your Mac's menubar."
• Keep track of your browsing habits with MeeTimer
  "The MeeTimer Firefox extension tracks how much time you spend on different web sites and helps categorize the time spent to give you an idea of where your browsing time has gone."
• Insert prompts and delays with Texter 0.4
  "Just released the latest version of our text snippet application, Texter, with bug fixes and a few cool new features."
• Get the fullscreen (read: iPhone) browsing experience with Opera Mini 4 beta
  "The new Opera Mini beta 4 offers the fullscreen browsing experience on the comfort of your mobile device."
• Use a silent ringtone for low priority contacts
  "I just created a 1 second long recording of "nothing" using my computer, transferred it to my phone, and I can now select it as a custom ringtone for numbers that, while I don't want to block, I just don't want to hear."
• Reformat your Gmail address with dots
  "Because Gmail doesn't recognize dots as characters within usernames, adding or removing dots from a Gmail address won't change the actual destination address."
• Better Gmail version 0.8 now available
  "This version adds 3 new user scripts: a Mac Mail-like skin, bottom posting when replying to email, and split screen Google Reader integration, as well as fixes for a few niggly annoyances in the current version."

Google launched an interesting way to search for custom search engines created using Google Co-op: a Google Base structured search that only includes the most popular search engines. The cool thing is that you can restrict the results based on the search engine's name, language, its description, the most popular queries or the number of sites that are included. "If you're interested in finding a search engine to contribute to, search specifically for search engines that allow volunteers. For instance, if you're most interested in non-profit organizations, search only for non-profit search engines," suggests the CSE Blog.


Google Base has a very powerful search interface and it would be nice to see it in other products like Blog search, Gmail or Google Calendar. When you perform a search or select an option, Google Base will only show the options that are available in the current state and that's useful to dynamically build a complex query.

Just got this email from eBay communications, announcing that eBay is using AdWords again, but read on: The test we began last week was successful. We found that we were not as dependent on Google AdWords as some may have thought. By re-allocating our marketing dollars to our other... (Go to Searchblog Main)

Yahoo Search is now powering the search results within the Bebo social network.

According to Pete Cashmore at Mashable, Bebo users can now use Yahoo Search Technology to search through Bebo profiles, music and the Internet. It appears that Yahoo Search Marketing is also appearing in Bebo results.

Is this a sign that Yahoo will be acquiring Bebo? Perhaps. But the choice of Yahoo Search over Google Search for a social networking partner makes sense even beyond sponsored search revenue.

• Yahoo Search Marketing Panama is expanding to Europe & Bebo is extremely popular in the UK.
• Yahoo’s communications arsenal in messenger and VOIP could be somehow integrated in Bebo.
• The option of internal payment systems managed by Paypal, Yahoo’s official payment system & prefered partner in eBay
• Integration of Flickr photos & other 2.0 offerings from Yahoo.
• Yahoo’s display advertising network & sales force
• The leveraging of the Yahoo Newspaper Consortium and somehow spinning Bebo into partnerships with major online newspapers

Sure, these may be a bit out there in terms of reasons for forming a partnership, but Yahoo has scored a major search partner in Bebo… and a major showcase for Yahoo Search Marketing’s new Panama interface and the expansion of Yahoo Publisher Network.

The Webware weblog highlights 5 things you didn't know about Google Docs and Spreadsheets, most notably that you can insert live lookups in Google Spreadsheets via Google search and Google Finance.

Using two special formulas, users can create cells that will update constantly with data or information gleaned from Web searches or Google's finance service. This works for things such as stock symbols, sports statistics, or any other piece of information you want to source and keep up to date automatically

For example, you can insert the current price of Google stock in a spreadsheet by entering =GoogleFinance("GOOG"; "price"), or check out the number of internet users in Paraguay with =GoogleLookup("Paraguay"; "internet users"). Very cool.

Google's got a new phrase translation tool designed to provide better results for single-word lookups. The results currently offer translations and related phrases in a limited set of languages. [via Google Blogoscoped]

"A European Union investigation set off by concerns over how long Google stores user information has widened to include all Internet search engines."

eBay says that it will resume Web advertising on a limited basis with Google, but will rely on alternative ad services to a greater degree in the future.

Yesterday you showed us your iGoogles, and boy oh boy was it hot. For next week's Show Us Yours series, we want to take a look at your browser - specifically, your Firefox.

Why? Because Lifehacker loves Firefox, and Lifehacker loves its readers. It's only natural that we'd want to see our readers' Firefoxes. Hit the jump for submission details.

If you want to submit your Firefox for next Thursday's Show Us Your Firefox screenshot tour, here's how:

1. Take a screenshot of your browser window: If you don't know how to take a screenshot of your browser, you can try one of the many great screenshot apps we've highlighted on Lifehacker. Windows users can try Window Clippings, and if you're a Mac user, our favorite is InstantShot. Make your screenshot as big as you want, but just remember, the biggest images can be in our gallery is 1280px wide, so try to use your space wisely. Also, if you've got something particularly cool going on in your Firefox, do your best to make sure we can see it in action.
2. Write up a short description of the extensions/themes that make your Firefox so great: It doesn't have to be long, but once we're all in love with what you've accomplished with your browser, we'll want to know how to do it to ours.
3. Send your screenshot and description to us: Compose an email to tips at lifehacker.com with the subject title Show Us Your Firefox, then attach your screenshot and enter your description in the body of the email.

Simple enough, right? Feel free to tweak your Firefox to your heart's content before submitting, but remember, we need a little lead time, so you should try to get your submission in by next Wednesday, 12 noon PST at the latest. Submit as many pictures of your Firefox as you want, but remember that one