inter:digital strategies

The standard way I tend to view the search world is that Google offers free products, other people expect you to pay for them. This is, of course, a vast over-generalization. After all, Yahoo! does in fact offer any number of free services, from Yahoo! Groups to Yahoo! Answers, and Google offers (or has offered) any number of paid services – such as Google Answers (now deceased) and Enterprise Search.

So, the fact that IBM and Yahoo! are teaming up on a free enterprise search product suggests that they want to put a bit of pressure on Google. And why wouldn’t they? Google’s stock prices just keep going up despite relatively modest increases in their earnings (and certainly not comparable to their total stock value), so why not try and force them out of one of their key corporate markets?

Granted, it’s debatable exactly how much impact this might have. Google’s revenue is largely focused on their search advertising, after all!

This seems like a clear attempt to budge Google out of one of their markets, however – and may be the kind of thing that Yahoo! needs to be doing in order to continue to compete.

The IBM and Yahoo! product, Omnifind, is available for free. You can also read more about it at SEO Principle or Search Engine Land (linked above.)

A new service using data from Alexa, Competitious provides an interface for managing your information resources about the competition. It sounds like a pretty exciting possibility for search marketing: organize your resources and keep a close tab on the services, popularity, traffic rank, and buzz surrounding your fiercest competition.

Although it is, essentially, a fairly simple interface for tracking competitive information which is easily available, the ability to push all that information together is certainly a worthwhile service. From a consultant’s perspective, it’s worthwhile because you can create multiple projects to track: keep your eyes on each client’s area at a glance.

Naturally, my first thought is about adding more features: for example, tracking ranking reports using your selected keyword list and checking against your competitors’ ranking. I know, I know…ranking reports are practically worthless. However, knowing how your own search performance holds up against your competitors’ is still valuable: and this would be a relatively easily automated tracking tool.

It’s interesting: I know perfectly well that Alexa data is practically worthless by itself. However, between a set of sites all in the same market (say…competitors), the relative performance data may still convey some usable information. It’s not the numbers you need to look at: it’s the relationships.

Not particularly on the subject of search marketing, but interesting nonetheless!

DailyLit is a very simple service which allows individuals to sign up and receive serialized versions of literary classics in their email. (Literary classics in the public domain, at any rate.)

It sounds intriguing – the thought of receiving Dickens in serialized format makes me feel like I’m jumping backwards in time to read Bentley’s Miscellany or some such vehicle for serialized literature.

It seems like creating immediacy in media is the most common use of modern technology – it’s refreshing to see a site which is using technology to stretch an experience out, instead. For myself, it’s easy to sit down and read for hours on end – so I don’t do it frequently. I’d lose myself in a good book and fail to get a tiny bit of work done. DailyLit suggests the possibility of controlling those habits!