Search Engine News

Yahoo and Adobe are bringing pay-per-click ads to Adobe’s Portable Document Format so that publishers can serve up ads inside PDFs distributed on Web sites and over e-mail that are contextually relevant to the content.

The text advertisements appear in a panel to the right of the content in the PDF and are subject matter matched using keywords and analysis of associated concepts. The ads are dynamic, meaning different ads can pop up at different times and clicking on an ad takes you to the advertiser Web site.

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Google Experimental is testing the ability to actually change the ranking of results or delete sites listed in personalized search results, in a Digg style setting (similar to some tests they were running at Google’s SearchMash). If you like the page listed in a search result, you can bump it up to the top where it will stay for your future personalized results by hitting this button : If you don’t like the site, just delete it from your personalized results using the X button :

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A trusted source told me a Federal Trade Commission decision on Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick could come by the middle of December. Wow, now that could make for some serious holiday celebration and/or lumps of coal depending on whose side you’re on.

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Facebook has faced a steady stream of complaints, negative PR and other criticism after rolling out the “Beacon” component of its new suite of advertiser tools and programs. For those who aren’t up on it, Beacon captures actions and transactions Facebook users conduct on third-party sites and essentially broadcasts those through newsfeeds to their networks. It offers an opt-out feature and doesn’t work when people aren’t signed in to Facebook. But people haven’t been happy that users have to opt-out. Most recently MoveOn.org upped the ante by launching a very public petition drive against Beacon.

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After a year of discussions, ACAP — Automated Content Access Protocol — was released today as a sort of robots.txt 2.0 system for telling search engines what they can or can’t include in their listings. However, none of the major search engines support ACAP, and its future remains firmly one of “watch and see.” Below, more about the how and why of ACAP.

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There are some exciting new innovations in search coming up on the horizon, and one of those is a project currently being worked on by a Canadian computer science grad student, who is mapping the way the human brain works and applying it to technology that will eventually power a search engine dedicated to visual images. Kris Woodbeck, a University of Ottawa Master’s degree student, has been working with the Canadian government’s Technology Transfer and Business Enterprise (TTBE) office to secure a patent for his project. The patent will form the intellectual property for a startup devoted to image search, which is expected to be launched some time next year.

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Following up on yesterday’s story about a massive malware attack on the “big three” search engines, which saw the manipulation of the search engines to rank malicious malware sites high in the results pages, it seems that Google has at least taken steps to remove the offending sites from their indexes. However, when questioned about the attacks, Google failed to acknowledge that there was a problem or that they had rectified it. Researchers from Sunbelt Software who first exposed the spammy SERP attacks said today, “They appear to be zapped.” Sunbelt also said, “Google did confirm yesterday with us that they were working on the case, and they are good about nailing this stuff.”

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We’d like to welcome Thai as the newest language to join the AdSense for search family. If you manage a site primarily in Thai, you can now offer Google search results directly on your pages and monetize the results pages. Don’t have an account yet? Feel free to submit an application today.Here are some fun facts about Thailand to celebrate this launch:

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The Official Gmail Blog just announced the addition of group chat and rich emoticons into Gmail’s chat facility. The Gmail Group Chat allows multiple chat with Gmail contacts at once. Any participant can invite another participant. Starting a chat is pretty simple, once you start a chat session with a friend, you can easily pull down the Group Chat options and add whoever you want to invite in the current chat session. If you’ve been using Yahoo IM before, you’d remember this as similar to the Conference feature in Yahoo IM session. I’m just wondering why Google took this long to introduce this feature into Gmail’s Chat facility. And while we’re at it, why is the chat function embedded in Gmail and not in GTalk anyway?Â

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Yahoo!’s set to take on two big conferences next week. Taking a divide and conquer approach, Yahoo! will split up to attend SES in Chicago and WebmasterWorld’s PubCon in Las Vegas to participate in a total of 13 panels focusing on topics such as traffic quality, brand management and local/video search, to name a few. Here’s where we’ll be spending our time (in addition to manning our booth at WebmasterWorld): SES CHICAGO December 3 – 6, 2007 Tuesday, December 4 3:30 – 4:30 p.m. Online Maps: Plotting the Direction of Local Search Jeremy Kreitler, Director of Product Management, Yahoo! Maps

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