Social Patterns Michael Nguyen on Search Engine Marketing

Google is offering CPM advertising and Site-Specific advertising. Yahoo is testing Images in their ads.

Ever wondered what Anchor Text your competitors are targetting?

Check out the Yahoo Backlink Anchor Text Analyzer.

Using this tool you can see what backlinks your competitors have and more importantly the anchor text.

Ask Jeeves plans to expand further into the European Search Market.

“International expansion is an important component to our corporate growth strategy,” said Steve Berkowitz, CEO of Ask Jeeves Inc. “We believe the Ask Jeeves brand has a tremendous opportunity to succeed in Europe because it offers the only differentiated world-class search experience to consumers.”

(via Yahoo)

Will be interesting to see if Ask can deliver a “differentiated world-class search experience”. Google has a huge foothold in Europe already.

In an effort to prepare for Video search – Google announced that it will soon begin hosting video uploading for users.

Like Google’s recent library project scanning volumes of books, the company’s video ambitions highlight its broad plans to digitize the world’s content and make it searchable. It also foreshadows a heated race with rivals Yahoo and Microsoft to be the de facto service for finding information wherever it resides: television, the Internet, cell phones or other convergence devices.

(via News.com)

Danny Sullivan linked to some articles covering Google’s new patent.

Randfish breaks down the google patent paper and highlights all the “need to know” information. Awesome.

Matt responds to the WordPress issue.

I am acutely aware that this is far from an ideal system and could be a lot better, and we’re working on that. I strongly believe that WordPress can and will be independent in a way that doesn’t involve begging for money, annoying users, or selling out.

This is what everyone wanted from the get go. I can already feel the flames dieing down.

Still bugging me – the default link to wordpress.org. Obviously this is my choice to keep it. Previously there would be no reason to be wary of leaving the link.

Still, it does nothing to reassure me the that default links that ship with WordPress are benign. Before this happend, I had idea that keeping the attribution to WordPress.org on the footer of the blog could actually be used deceptively. Now I know it can, and am much queasier about the default linking in WordPress. Naturally, I see how it’s to your benefit, and a very cool marketing idea, but more disclosure would help alay our worries…

Elliot feels the same.