If you’re one of the lucky 650,000 or so souls whose personal search data was spilled all over the web by AOL, take heart! Your private queries are being put to use in a keyword suggestion tool brought to you by Bad Neighborhood. It purports to show you how much traffic you can expect from a given term on any of the Big 3 engines. Very simply, it measures how frequently the term appears in the AOL data, then adjusts for the volume of the engine in question, whether Google, Yahoo! or MSN. Barry Schwartz points out that this actually might be a little too simple, since AOL users tend to search differently than Googlers – and there’s a lot less of them (via SEO Scoop). While various persons think up new ways to make bank off of AOL’s gaffe, why not pass the time with some linkage?
Yahoo! Cheers N’ Jeers Last month, Yahoo!’s Matt McAlister blogged about the pros and cons of working at Yahoo! This week, Jeremy Zawodny took McAlister’s list and added his own thoughts, noting when he disagreed. Zawodny takes issue with McAlister’s judgement that the company is “never complacent,” but agrees with the sentiment that “There are way too many people involved in very small decisions;” Zawodny calls this the greatest problem at Yahoo! as he sees it. At the end of the article, Zawodny invites other Yahoos to blog their two cents – without getting anyone “in trouble.” This is already intriguing, and it could get real interesting if it becomes a major public meme.
Suggestion noted News.com reports that Amazon has added a brand new, never-ever-before-seen tool to its listings: “Search Suggestions.” Basically, users can now ‘suggest’ search terms to be associated with items in a number of categories, even if that particular phrase never shows up in the item’s description (example “the Scottish play” for Shakespeare’s Macbeth). The suggestions are vetted, of course, to make sure they’re appropriate. If this sounds to you like a real cumbersome, roundabout way to add limited social tagging functions to Amazon’s search…well, it sounded like that to us, too.
Once more, with unfeeling zombies Last month, we told you about Google, The Musical (Speaking of transgressions…) which is…well, astoundingly, it’s exactly what it sounds like. We’re still not entirely sure why someone decided Big G needed the Rogers & Hammerstein treatment, but someone did – and we appear to have a firsthand account of a performance, by way of Philipp Lenssen reader Rishabh Mishra.
It’s apprently a Lord of the Rings take-off about people who turn into zombies because Google disappears from the ‘net. No, that’s not a joke. Here are just two sentences to mull: “The zombies challenge the main characters to a dance-off. The zombies show off some fantastic break-dancing” – and that’s only about ‘medium insanity’ compared to the rest. We’re still not entirely convinced that this is real. Independent confirmation, anyone? We’re a bit far from the Minnesota Fringe Festival at the moment.
