The final Jericho Brainy Breakfast for 2004 is your opportunity to ask a panel of New Zealand’s leading online experts the tough questions on what makes a website and online strategy successful.

WHEN: Tuesday 30 November 2004
WHERE: Hyatt Regency, Cnr of Waterloo Quadrant & Princes Street, Auckland
TIME: 7.00am registration & breakfast for a prompt 7.30am start

So what are the hallmarks of great content and how do you know you’re achieving conversion success? Think of your most difficult online marketing challenges and put them to the experts:

• On Design & Usability
  CHE TAMAHORI, co-founder and creative director of Shift, a company that solely focuses on all the elements of website design.
• On Site Business Strategy & Conversion Metrics
  JON OSTLER, founder and technical director of online marketing and search optimisation firm First Rate plus architect of the media centric website measurement system MediaTracker.
• On Copy That Inspires
  KEN GRACE, creative director, Grace Marketing
• On Understanding Market Opportunities
  MARK OTTAWAY, Managing Director, Nielsen//NetRatings

Sourced from Search DayAfter just two months in testing, Yahoo has pushed its local search out of beta and is giving the service prominent exposure on the Yahoo home page.

The company has taken several steps to improve relevance to get more precise local results, according to Paul Levine, General Manager, Yahoo Local.

Yahoo Local now uses two relevance algorithms to provide different results depending on whether the user is searching for a category or a specific business. Based on query analysis, results are weighted differently based on the user’s intent.

Levine said that the newly launched service is also more comprehensive than the beta version, with more than two million new listings.

The user interface has been streamlined, both on the Yahoo Local home page and search result pages. Results now look very similar to web search results. The most notable change has been to the search refinement tools, which have been throughly exposed on the left side of the page. In the beta version, refinement tools such as the ability to limit results by distance, category, rating, price and so on were available through drop-down menus. These menus have been replaced with explicit links that show the total number of results that will be displayed for each type of refinement.

Yahoo has also added “Also try” links to the top of result pages, similar to the refinement option recently introduced for web search results.

The “view results on map” feature is more prominent, with a map icon enhancing the previously generic button used to access this feature. Driving directions from Yahoo maps have also been added.

The details page for each individual business is cleaner, with more of a business card feel for each listing. The ratings and review area is also more prominent, separated from the business listing with a blue background. Radio buttons used to rate a business have been replaced with star icons. Mousing over the stars indicates the rating – from one star (hated it) to five stars (loved it). Simply click a star to cast your own vote. Users have created ratings and reviews for a broad spectrum of businesses, including things like auto dealers and dry cleaners.

Although Local search is replacing yellow pages on the Yahoo home page, Levine said the company still plans to maintain its yellow pages listings, in what he calls “the trough” on the left-hand side of the Yahoo.com home page.

Sourced from Search Engine WatchYahoo has enhanced its My Yahoo service with personalisation features including search history, the ability to save pages to a “personal web” and block URLs from appearing in search results.

Reached at My Yahoo Search, the new features available to registered users of My Yahoo are similar to those recently introduced by a9.com and Ask Jeeves, although Yahoo plans to differentiate the service in future enhancements.

Search results with My Yahoo Search resemble standard web search results, with additional options added to each individual listing. These options are “Save,” “Save with Note,” “Share” and “Block Site.” Clicking “save” saves the search result to your personal collection of web pages.

“Save with note” allows you to add an annotation to the saved listing. “Share” sends the search result via Yahoo email to any recipient, and “Block Site” blocks all pages from a site in any future search results.

Also new at the top of search result pages are links to “Visited Results” and “My Web.” Visited results is a list of pages that you clicked through to read from search results. You can easily toggle this feature on or off depending on whether you want a record kept of your browsing behavior.

“My Web” is the list of all pages you have saved. Both visited results and my web lists can be sorted by title, date, URL, or “how I found it,” a cool feature that organizes results based on the query terms you used to generate them.

Once you’ve saved search results, you can organize them into categories. These categories can be added to your My Yahoo home page by clicking a small blue plus sign icon appearing next to a category.

Once you’ve created your own collection of saved web results, you can search for saved entries. While this sounds like a great idea, it’s a weak feature in this implementation of My Yahoo personal search, because the search only matches keywords in the limited information in saved search results rather than the full text of the underlying pages.

Unless you use very specific keywords when you’re searching your saved results, you may not get any matches, even for pages you are certain you’ve saved.

This limitation will go away when Yahoo begins indexing the full text of saved pages sometime in the future. But for the moment, searching saved pages isn’t much more sophisticated (or useful) than searching bookmarks.

Yahoo has also limited the number of saved results to 1000. Contrast these limitations with Looksmarts newly acquired Furl service, which indexes the full text of pages and offers a virtually limitless 5 gigabytes of storage.

In all, the new My Yahoo Search is well implemented and easy to use, but doesn’t offer compelling reasons to use it unless you’re looking for what amounts to an enhanced bookmark utility that’s tied to Yahoo search results. It’s great to see companies like Yahoo and Ask Jeeves taking baby steps toward true personalisation of search results.

Sourced from Search Engine Watch

Opportunities for effective, inexpensive search marketing are abundant when you “think outside the (Big Search) box” and look to vertical or specialised content sites.

How do you attract your target users to your site using search tactics that do not rely on Big Search — Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL and Ask Jeeves? Scottie Claiborne, of Right Click Web Consulting and Harrison Magun, managing director of eonMedia, presented a wide range of tactics that would work for companies large and small.

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Sourced from Search Engine Watch

Vivisimo has launched Clusty, a meta search engine with an impressive array of tools that helps you quickly find relevant results from a variety of information sources.

Clusty is an elegant new search tool that takes underground favourite Vivisimo to a new level. In addition to presenting both standard web search results and Vivisimo’s dynamic clusters that automatically categorize results, Clusty draws on several new sources of information.

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