I’m sure you’re familiar with search suggestions. All the major search engines have them. You start typing and it gives you a list of possible queries.

"The list of suggestions refreshes as you continue typing or when you change the query," says a post on the Live Search Blog. "You can click the suggestion that best matches what you were searching for to speed you to your results."

The add-on, based on the Open Search standard, can be downloaded here. It uses the JSON interface supported by Firefox to get its autosuggestions. It is available in the US, Canada, the UK, Ireland,  Australia, New Zealand, India, the Philippines, and South Africa.

Yahoo Gives Search Suggest A Promotion

Yahoo Search’s Kevin Lee announced the update on the Yahoo Search blog. Typing a query into the search box on Yahoo.com triggers the Search Suggest feature.

As you type, Search Suggest tries to finish the query. Lee offered searching for the Governor of California as an example. Typing ‘Arnold S’ brings up options to look for Arnold Schwarzenegger, without having to type his whole last name.

Search Suggest proves useful for the spelling-challenged. Lee gave the example of searching for Mavic Ksyrium bicycle tires. Instead of hoping to nail the spelling, Search Suggest brings up the correct one as an option for that search.

Yahoo.com searchers can turn the Search Suggest feature off or on as they wish. Also, Yahoo’s promotion of Search Suggest has not moved it into query boxes on the search.yahoo.com subdomain yet. If one is looking for the Governator from Yahoo Search pages, Search Suggest won’t be there to atone for one’s spelling mistakes.

The company, best known for helping evaluate consumer credit-worthiness and reducing credit card fraud, is contemplating the development of a new solution for click fraud. Ahead of any decision, Fair Isaac will present the preliminary findings of its own investigation at a conference today.

After reviewing a handful of Web sites since last August, Fair Isaac believes 10 to 15 percent of the advertising traffic is “pathological,” indicating a likelihood of click fraud, said Joseph Milana, the company’s chief scientist of research and development. “It’s still an early result,” Milana said. “The question remains about how broad the problem is in the entire marketplace.”

Here are some things to get you thinking…

1. What does Fair Isaac know about click fraud monitoring? Do they know what they’re looking at?
2. Are they building up hype, in advance of the launch of their new click fraud monitoring solution?
3. On the flip-side, why would they want to inflate their own numbers? Launching the new service would be dependent on there being enough click fraud to justify the service. You have no incentive to inflate the numbers – you’d just be kidding yourself.
4. Also, while Fair Isaac may not know click fraud, they do know “fraud”, so their data is probably about as trust-worthy as you can get, without actually being Google or Yahoo.

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Philipp Lenssen from Germany, author of 55 Ways to Have Fun With Google, shares his views & news on the search industry in the daily Google Blogoscoped.

People ask others for recommendations all the time, because the best way to assess how well skilled trades workers do their jobs is to find out how they have done them for people you trust. The auto mechanic I’ve been taking cars to for ten years came my way as a recommendation, and I’ve suggested his garage to other people.

LinkedIn wants to help its business types find and make these recommendations. The site recently add a Services tab, where members can recommend service providers.

Those providers can be recommended even if they are not LinkedIn members. This gives LinkedIn the opportunity to expand its reach to those people, who may be more disposed to joining LinkedIn based on positive recommendations of their work through the network.

“No one should be picking a lawyer from the yellow pages,” said Konstantin Guericke, vice president of marketing for LinkedIn, said in a Reuters article

The site will not try to take the place of a yellow pages service. Instead, the recommendations they can manage and provide to members will help complement such yellow pages listings.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

The Google Suggest tool proposes search queries as searchers type the first letters of the queries. The suggestions it makes are generated by popular searches as gathered by Google’s index. WebProNews has reported on apparent racial and ethnic slurs completed by the tool in the past.

When a user enters the keyword, [serverscheck], says the company, Google suggests ways to find pirated versions of the company’s software. Philipp Lensen has a screenshot here.

“That is comparable to a person calling enquiries to ask where a well-known brand of handbag is for sale and being suggested to look for illegal counterfeit handbags,” said the company in a statement.

When ServersCheck complained to Google, the search company said that illegal websites should be reported so they can be taken out of the index. As for the Google Suggest feature, though, Google refused to alter the suggestions.

Because Google has engineered the suggestions to omit sexually explicit keywords, credit card numbers and trace numbers from courier companies, ServersCheck says it had no choice but to file suit.

“We regret that Google cannot comply with the simple request of ServersCheck and that we are forced as a result to request the cessation of these dishonest practices via the courts,” says Maarten Van Laere, CEO of ServersCheck.

“The damage suffered by us will only grow as a result of the increasing popularity of such search bars. As an innovative Belgian SMB it is already difficult to compete at world level. It becomes even more difficult when respected and leading companies like Google destroy this innovation by suggesting software piracy.”

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Now, if you go to news.google.com/news?complete=1, the search box will suggest queries as you type.

It appears that the suggestions are based on news searches, and not something else, which means they can clue you in to what is happening in the news. For example, typing in “Google” reveals suggestions for “google sketchup” and “google calendar”, both hot items.

My only wish: that you could turn this on in the preferences, so you wouldn’t have to bookmark it or remember that unfriendly URL. Otherwise, enjoy!

(via the Google blog)

Aside: It appears not to work in Opera, I think.

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Nathan Weinberg writes the popular InsideGoogle blog, offering the latest news and insights about Google and search engines.

Visit the InsideGoogle blog.

Google Suggest is a feature that provides automatic suggestions based on the first few letters or first word of a search query. Suggestions are populated by recent popular news searches. For example, type in "net" and suggestions like "Netherlands" and "net neutrality appear beneath the search box. The original Google Suggest feature is plagued by inappropriate suggestions because of the surprising number of searches for certain word groups that reinforce preconceived prejudices. Hopefully news seekers will be a little more culturally knowledgeable so a search that begins with "American" doesn’t end with "fat," "ignorant," or "terrorist." McAlister writes on the Google Blog: I’ve always been a big fan of both Google News and Google Suggest. So in my 20% time, I’ve worked on a way to bring them together, and I’m now happy to report the launch of Google Suggest on Google News, which provides you with search suggestions specific to news in your country, in real time, while you type. If you’re already a Suggest user, you’ll see this right away, but it’s not on by default. Although Suggest + News is currently English-only, the suggestions will reflect the English-language regional edition you’re viewing. I find that this helps me save time while doing frequent searches (e.g. [google]. And seeing the Suggest list gives me a sense of the most common news queries. I wonder when the "English-language regional edition" will include Kentucky, completing "pert-" with "pert near," "burg-" with "burgoo," and "mint-" with "mint julep." Tag: |

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In fact, there are a tremendous number of business blogs that are not realizing much of their potential visibilty on the web. Why? Because they’re not optimized.

This is very much the same scenario that occurred with web sites in the late nineties. Back then I worked with a company that sold web sites – lots of them. But after getting the site up and running, the traffic didn’t come by itself. So we figured out optimizing for search engines and that was the start of my SEO career. Blogs can generate traffic without search engines, but WITH search engines it can be even better.

With blogs, there exist as many or more optimization opportunities to optimize as with a web site. While most blog software is more search engine friendly out of the box than many web sites, the opportunities for blog optimization are readily available. For our SEO and blog marketing consulting service, we have a very long list blog optimization tactics to employ. For this post, I’ll focus on a short list that can make a difference for any blog.

Why optimize your blog?

• Increase rankings of the blog on BOTH regular search engines as well as blog/RSS search engines
• Increase traffic to the blog from multiple sources such as social search (Yahoo MyWeb, Google Personalized Search) and social bookmarking sites (del.icio.us, Digg, Furl or Blogmarks)

A blog is just a website that uses a content management system, so most standard SEO tactics apply. There are also optimization tactics specific to blogs.

Consider keywords when writing your blog post titles. Some blog software allows plugins that can suggest keywords. Otherwise, you can use ” class=”bluelink”>Google Suggest or one of these free keyword suggestion tools: Digital Point, SEO Book or Google AdWords Keyword Tool. Keywords should NOT determine your content (unless it’s an AdSense blog).

Optimize the template. Make sure post titles appear in the title tag and append the title tag (hard code) with the most important phrase for your blog.

Example: ” Interview with Brett Tabke – Online Marketing Blog”

Online Marketing Blog is included on every blog post title tag automatically.

Also use the blog post title as the permalink. If you’re using keywords in the blog post title, then they will occur as anchor text in the permanent post link. While you’re at it, just make the post title a permalink.

Make it easy for your blog readers to subscribe and include RSS feed subscription buttons or “chicklets” in a side bar or on a dedicated Subscription Info page. Here’s a handy RSS Feed Button creation tool.

Optimize Categories. When you create categories for your blog, be sure to consider keywords in the titles. When you post, be sure to default to a general category that is relevant no matter what the post is about. Choose multiple categories on each post when appropriate.

Social bookmarking sites can be excellent sources of traffic to your blog, so be sure to make it easy for readers to bookmark your blog posts. You can do this by adding some code to your blog template for each of the major social bookmarking sites. Here’s a tool for social bookmarking links. Here’s another tool that uses icons instead of text links.

Submit your blog to RSS and Blog directories. Also submit the blog to regular directories such as (DMOZ, JoeAnt, GoGuides, MSN Business Central, etc) that have categories for blogs.

Ping the major RSS feed and Blog search engines each time you post. This can be configured with blog software such as Movable Type or WordPress to work automatically. If you’re using Blogger.com, then you can do this manually with Pingomatic or Pingoat.

Comments and Trackbacks – Be sure your blog software is configured to send a trackback ping to blogs that you cite within your posts. Pay attention to press releases distributed by PRWeb. If you cite a release, and ping the trackback link, the press release will in turn link to your blog. This is better for driving traffic than for link popularity.

Make useful comments on other blogs. Your name will be linked to the blog url that you enter. Do NOT make comments that offer no value to the blog post. Do NOT use keywords in the field for your name, use your name or blog name.

Offer RSS to Email. Almost 30% of our blog traffic comes from readers that perfer to read blog posts via email. There are several free services available for this including: FeedBlitz (what we use), Squeet, Zookoda (this one is more for using blog posts as a weekly newsletter), RMail and Bloglet.

No matter how many optimization tactics you employ on a blog, there is no substitute for quality content. Blog optimization is only as effective as the quality and usefulness of the content you’re optimizing.

Lee Odden is President and Founder of
TopRank Online Marketing, specializing in organic SEO, blog
marketing and online public relations. He’s been cited as a search
marketing expert by publications including U.S. News & World Report and
The Economist and has implemented successful search marketing programs
with top BtoB companies of all sizes. Odden shares his marketing
expertise at Online Marketing Blog offering
daily news, interviews and best practices.

The fourth version of the search advertising company’s Google Toolbar contains, appropriately enough, four new features highlighted by Google on the download page. As with earlier versions, this one is a Windows-only install, for XP or 2000 running IE6.

Through the Toolbar, pages saved as bookmarks snuggle into a space on Google’s servers. This lets users signing in to Google on other machines with the Toolbar in place access those bookmarks.

Various navigation buttons to Google services can be added or removed from the Toolbar as the user likes. Users can drop a button for one-click access to Gmail or Google Video. Google also has some third-party buttons for sites like the New York Times available from its button gallery.

Chris Sherman at Search Engine Watch noted how customizing buttons works with the new toolbar:

Another feature lets users share a page they are visiting with others via Gmail, Blogger, or SMS. The SMS sharing could be an offshoot of Google’s deal with Opera, whose Opera Mini browser became available as a download that will work on virtually any mobile phone.

Opera shows Google as the default search in its PC and mobile browsers, courtesy of a deal with Google that allowed Opera to remove advertising from its free browser download. Opera Mini lets mobile users view web pages as they appear online, on the user’s mobile device.

The Instant Suggestions feature will look familiar to anyone who has used Google Suggest. That service has shown an ability to surprise its users with its suggestions, a trait that continues with the tool bar as Aaron Wall of Threadwatch observed:

Perhaps Google will consider SafeSearch options for a future release of the Toolbar, even with SafeSearch’s imperfections.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.