Yahoo Local vs Google Maps Beatdown

Many regions are known for different food specialties. I was curious to see where Yahoo Local and Google Maps would send me to try out some of these regional delicacies. This is a purely unscientific look at recommendations from those local searches. Round One – New York Pizza I’ve been told by many New Yorkers … Read more

Letting Advertisers Decide Upon Values of Ads: Impressions, Click-Throughs, and Pay-Per-Action

Google’s Inside Adwords blog announced a limited test of a new advertising system on Tuesday, which would allow advertisers determine the value of certain actions (pay-per-action, or ppc). The AdWords Help Center has an even more extensively detailed explanation of what Pay-Per-Action is, and how it might work. in their Pay-Per-Action FAQ. In both, there’s … Read more

Yahoo Research Looks at Templates and Search Engine Indexing

There has been a tremendous amount of growth, over the past few years, of web sites that use content management systems, such as blogs, eCommerce shopping sites, wikis, and others. How might that affect how search engines index the pages of those sites? A new Yahoo Research paper, Page-level Template Detection via Isotonic Smoothing (pdf), … Read more