Sourced from Search Engine WatchFriendster has rolled out a new internet search service powered by Eurekster that taps into your online social network to personalise and enhance search results.

The new service takes advantages of the preferences and interests of Friendster members and their friends to filter search results to more closely match personal interests than general web search engines. The service is powered by Eurekster, which uses the Yahoo web index and also includes Overture sponsored listings.

The service automatically keeps a history of your searches, allowing you to filter results based on your previous search activity. Results can also be influenced by your personal network (“friends,” “friends of friends,” and so on) or all Friendster members.

Search results are prioritised with results viewed by anyone in your personal network appearing at the top of the list. These results are highlighted with a smiley face icon.

There are a couple of interesting search history features. “Recent Searches” displays the queries run by you and your network in the near past. “Popular Searches” displays the most popular searches within your network. The assumption is that your friends are likely to have enough similar interests that their searching might turn up interesting sites for you.

Concerned about privacy? Friendster search offers controls to make sure personally sensitive searches stay private. For starters, you can check a “private” box before running a search. This will prevent your search terms from being seen by your network, and will also keep the search terms from displaying in your recent searches list.

In both the “recent searches” and “popular searches” lists, search terms you entered are shown in bold. Clicking a red “X” icon next to bolded terms removes the query from view by you and the rest of your network.

Finally, Friendster maintains a what they call a “blind user id” to track your searches. Your identity is never revealed to other Friendster users and the information passed to Eurekster cannot be used to identify you individually.

What about the quality of search results? Although Friendster search uses the Yahoo web index, the number of search results returned for most searches is substantially less than when using Yahoo itself. Additionally, you also almost always get sponsored links with Friendster search, even when the identical query on Yahoo returns no sponsored links.

But sheer numbers aren’t really the point. Friendster search continuously learns from the search behavior of users and their social networks, in theory making results more relevant for many types of queries. In practice, relevancy may not always be improved, as noted by Danny Sullivan in his article about Eurekster when it launched earlier this year.

One problem is that unless you take the time to build up a personal network, you’re not likely to see much benefit from this type of personalised search. With small networks of two or three people, it’s also fairly easy to guess who searched for what, which raises another potential privacy concern.

So the new search service is intriguing and potentially useful for users who already have an active Friendster network, or those who are willing to spend the time to build a new one.

That said, the new service offers attractive options for search marketers. Eurekster CEO Steven E. Marder says that the new search capabilities on Friendster have begun yielding extremely high conversion rates in excess of industry norms.

Sourced from SearchDay

Google is working closely with five new content partners on a massive scanning project that will bring millions of volumes of printed books into the Google Print database.

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Sourced from SearchDay Yahoo has quietly expanded its local business listings and rolled out a service that gives businesses control over their listings in Yahoo Local through a new content inclusion program.

Just two months after its official launch, Yahoo Local now offers more than 15 million listings for U.S. based business. Yahoo has compiled these listings using several different sources of information, including web crawls, feeds from information providers and other sources.

While Yahoo has long had a generic form available for businesses to add or suggest edits to a listing, the new Yahoo! Local Listings service gives both business owners much more say regarding the content of local listings.

“It’s part of our ongoing effort to bring content into the product, both in terms of number of listings, but perhaps more importantly to expand the depth of content,” said Paul Levine, General Manager, Yahoo Local.

Yahoo! Local Listings now come in two flavors. Basic listings, which I described when Yahoo launched the beta version of the service, include name, address, phone number, and other relevant information that Yahoo has pulled together from the various sources that it scours to compile listings.

With a basic listing, a business can opt to appear in up to five categories in the Yahoo Local directory. In addition, Yahoo attempts to identify a link to the company’s web site, operating hours and descriptions of services provided or products sold. Basic listings are free to any U.S. based business.

Enhanced listings allow businesses to include additional information, which appears directly beneath basic listing information under the heading “More About [business name]” (here’s a screen shot). “Enhanced listings in our mind are equivalent to the bold inline listing in the yellow pages,” said Levine.

Enhanced listings features include a company tagline, description, promotional links to the business’ web site and allow the inclusion of up to ten photographs.

Enhanced listings cost US$9.95 per month, with no cost-per-click fees, unlike the cost-per-click fees associated with Yahoo/Overture’s Site Match paid inclusion program for web content.

Yahoo says that enhanced listings are treated exactly the same as basic listings in terms of relevance ranking in search results, and will not get an added boost because of the fee.

In addition to giving business owners more control over listings, Yahoo is encouraging users to help improve the local service. Even if you don’t own a business, if you know of one that you feel should be listed, or believe information for a currently listed business is inaccurate, Yahoo wants to hear about it. Simply use the Yahoo Local Update form to send details to Yahoo Local’s editorial staff. Your suggestion will be reviewed, and if information you provide about the business can be verified it will likely be added to the service.

Levine believes that with the enhanced content offerings available in Yahoo Local, users will increasingly become more sophisticated in their searching.

“We really do think that as more content comes in users will get more precise in what they’re searching for,” he said. Rather than simply searching for “Atlanta restaurants,” for example, Levine says he expects users to use more specific queries such as “Marietta steak and seafood casual dining.” As more additional content is added to Yahoo local, these types of narrow queries will produce increasingly better results.

Sourced from The NZ Herald

If New Zealanders were initially slow to shop online in the early days of the internet, they certainly caught up last year.

Credit card giant Visa said the number of online transactions made by its card holders jumped 95 per cent in 2004.

Online shoppers racked up $400 million in sales on their Visa cards, with anecdotal evidence showing the trend is mirrored by other credit-card vendors. And much of the spending is local, with cross-border transactions accounting for 16 per cent of all Visa’s e-commerce transactions, up slightly from 15.2 per cent in 2003.

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Written by David BerkowitzRecently icrossing, the premier US search engine marketing company, issued a series of articles looking at the role local search played in different countries, and how search engine marketing companies were utilising regional search.

Jon Ostler, the founder of First Rate, represented New Zealand’s search industry in the latest article along with search professionals from China and India.