Industry News

It’s time for our second test of how well Google Shopping and other shopping search engines find the best prices on products. For this installment, what’s the lowest price from a major retailer for a copy of “Red 2″ in the Blu-ray, DVD and digital download combo pack? Is The Featured Price The Lowest Price?

In this test, as with our last one, we’re trying to see if the “featured price” is better than the low price that can be found on each service, plus who finds the lowest price overall....

Yesterday, at Search Engine Land, I covered how the search for the term [pearl necklace] on Google would return an inappropriate and mostly irrelevant search result in the top positions...

Finally, I have a legitimate excuse for my obsession with sci-fi and post-apocalyptic literature. Apparently it’s going to make me a better designer. I’ll take it! Rebecca J. Rosen explains Why Today’s Inventors Need to Read More Science Fiction:

Once any sort of technology has users, it becomes extremely difficult to change it — even if you know it should or must be changed. [...] How is that affecting our social structure and values? How is that changing the way we view ourselves and...

As you know, Google's Matt Cutts publicly outed that Google went after Anglo Rank's link network and that the penalties and notifications will go out in a few days...

Yahoo has revealed in a US Securities & Exchange Commission filing that nearly one-third of its revenue last quarter — 31% — came from its search deal with Microsoft, according to a Bloomberg report. That’s far higher than the “more than 10%” figure Yahoo previously acknowledged, making it seem even more difficult for the company to potentially walk away the deal.

From the Bloomberg report: The company outlined the portion of revenue it gets from a search agreement with Microsoft Corp....

David Streitfeld takes an interesting look at the complicated relationship between digital and physical books in Out of Print, Maybe, but Not Out of Mind. This part jumped out at me, because it points to a mistake companies often make:

“A lot of these solutions were born out of a programmer’s ability to do something rather than the reader’s enthusiasm for things they need,” said Peter Meyers, author of “Breaking the Page,” a forthcoming look at the digital transformation of books. “We...

Lisa Maria Martin gives some advice on What To Do With Those Dreaded FAQs:

These all underscore FAQs’ fatal flaw: they are content without context, delivered without regard for the larger experience of the website. You can hear the absurdity in the name itself: if users are asking the same questions so frequently, then there is an obvious gulf between their needs and the site content. (And if not, then we have a labeling problem.) Instead of sending users to a jumble of...

Friday afternoon, I broke the news at Search Engine Land that Matt Cutts, Google's head of search spam, announced they just targeted yet another link network. This one is named Anglo Rank...