Will there be a Kevin Rose #BusinessWeek cover for this? “How this kid lost $60 Million in 2 weeks”?
SearchEngineLand: “Back in November 2008, Google published a 22-page PDF guide to SEO. The company has just updated that to provide some new features and content. You can download the new 32-page PDF guide over here.
In particular, Google added a glossary of definitions and terms, additional example images to support the content in the guide, mobile devices optimization techniques and clearer wording for better readability. Google has also translated the SEO starter guide in over 40 languages.”
They’ve purchased a major content provider (techcrunch), are growing a successful local play (patch.com), and are now getting into digitial media/content with purchases of brizzly (twitter client) and 5Min (video portal) - - all signs point to a new age of Aol as a content holding company online - - - or if they play their cards wrong, becoming the first recipient of the phrase ‘they Yahoo’d themselves into bankruptcy’…
As Stoppelman sees it, Google is bringing out AJAX Search to combat Microsoft’s Bing search product, which has garnered quite a bit of attention since its launch a few months ago. Some claim that Bing is faster than Google, but an AJAX Google would undoubtedly be faster than Bing.
I think more broadly, as local begins to evolve into verticalized-local, these sorts of non-performance related add on products for SMB’s will begin to take more share from traditional SEM/lead selivery solutions. Appt. setting, event finders, assisted-search, etc, are all possible by-product industries to the local boom.
What’ll be interesting to see is how google will extend this functionality into a value add service for SMB’s – similar to Skype’s recent feature where advertisers can pay for the service of making their phone number a free call for skype-enabled consumers looking at local businesses on search engines. Google is passively building out their local business product offering as tie-ins to all their products it seems?
Starting today, you can call any phone right from Gmail.
