Posts tagged Decision
The Decision Engine is Dead: Now Bing is For Doing
Jan 20th
Bing is evolving. Emphasis on the “ing.” Microsoft’s search engine is ditching the “decision engine” label and rebranding with a new message: Bing is for doing. And Bing is no doubt hoping that the rebranding will stop people from Googling.
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
EU Commission: No Decision Yet on Objection to Google
Jan 5th
A spokesperson for European Commission Vice President Joaquin Almunia confirmed to ReadWriteWeb this afternoon from Brussels that the Commission has yet to come to a decision over whether to issue a Statement of Objections to Google, specifically with respect to an official investigation into whether the company weights search results – especially searches for commercial products – against certain sites, including online retailers.
The confirmation comes after a Bloomberg News report this morning appeared to indicate the EC had yet to reach a decision about an investigation concerning whether Google makes arbitrary choices with regard to which sites receive higher-ordered results in Google News. As Comm. Almunia’s spokesperson tells RWW, his statement was actually in response to something else entirely: specifically, a question submitted by another commissioner into whether, over a two-year period, the Commission has obtained evidence showing Google actively demotes specific retailers.
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Comm. Sabine Verhayen, who caucuses with the European People’s Party (PPE) representing the Aachen province of Germany, submitted a question to Comm. Almunia, in a format resembling a written version of Question Time in the British and Canadian parliaments. Almunia’s answer, in its entirety, reads as follows:
The Commission agrees with the Honourable Member on the necessity to intervene in a timely manner in fast moving sectors such as the ones in which Google is active. The Commission is dealing with this case as a matter of priority. However a thorough assessment of the several categories of allegations of infringements of competition rules brought forward by several complainants is necessary.
The Commission is to date not in a position to say whether its investigation will lead to issuing a Statement of Objections.
In her written question, Verhayen referred directly to “Panda,” the code-name for the adjustments to Google’s search algorithms that the company rolled out through the second half of 2011. These rollouts were intended for many reasons, most ostensibly the filtering out of content that some blogs – which Google representatives have called “scrapers” – copy, often in their entirety, from their original sources without permission. Though the Commission’s investigation began well before the Panda rollout, Verhayen alleged that Google may be demoting certain sites, implying these actions may be intentional.
“The urgent need for action has become even more acute since Google’s introduction of its ‘Panda’ algorithmic update earlier this year,” Verhayen wrote Almunia. “With Panda, Google is now targeting many established vertical search brands, as well as emerging ones. Panda’s algorithmic demotions are more subtle than their predecessors. Although affected sites do not completely disappear from Google’s search results, they are systematically demoted to a point beyond the reach of most users, and so receive little or no traffic from this vital channel. Given the fast-moving environment of the Internet and the fact that the Commission’s investigation into Google has been in progress for almost two years now, can the Commission indicate what it regards as timely action in this case? Can the Commission indicate when it might reach its preliminary conclusions and issue a Statement of Objections?”
Almunia left a conclusive response to Verhayen’s final question up in the air.
Although the Panda upgrades resulted in very noticeably reduced instances of “scrapers” appearing in Google search results, one of the more interesting side-effects for a multitude of legitimate, “non-scraper” Web sites was a sudden drop in overall traffic across the board, which analytics could directly attribute to reduced referrals from Google, especially from Google News. Theoretically, one of the unintended – and perhaps unavoidable – side-effects of Panda’s more vigorous filtering may have been to reduce the level of assessed popularity of a multitude of topics, especially those pertaining to technology, from Google search results. That popularity is believed to be a direct factor in determining placement for headlines in Google News. While the real reason for the reduction in instances of certain articles may actually be due to vigorous filtering, the effect from Google News’ perspective could appear the same as if the whole world stopped being interested in such topics by about 40%.
Thus there may be a scientific, rather than a conspiratorial, reason behind certain perceived demotions. Ascertaining whether this is true could require a lot more time.
A Statement of Objections is the first step taken by the European Commission in advancing an investigation to a formal proceeding, allowing the recipient to present a formal defense. Such steps were taken after the EC’s previous investigations of Intel and Microsoft found evidence of possible wrongdoing that was brought to the public attention.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Using SEO to Connect with B2B Decision Makers – Business 2 Community
Dec 9th
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Using SEO to Connect with B2B Decision Makers
Business 2 Community You need to develop a B2B SEO campaign that allows you to connect with those decision makers via multiple platforms, numerous touch points and at every stage of the buying cycle to get their attention and earn their business. The competition to win the … |
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Yahoo Appealing Italian Court Decision
Apr 8th
The Italian court had recently “found that Yahoo was liable for contributory copyright infringement for listing links to websites that hosted the film “About Elly” by director Asghar Farhadi.” PCWorld reported. But Yahoo has stated they will appeal the decision.
and won’t remove the links unless the company loses the case.
The Italian courts seem to be chasing the search engines out of their country. As we reported yesterday:
Click to read the rest of this post…
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FTC Realizes ‘Do Not Track’ Too Complicated For Quick Decision
Mar 25th
FTC Commissioner J. Thomas Rosch gave AdAge some insight into the difficulty of implementing a Do Not Track registry or plugin .and why the commission is taking its time before making any permanent decision.
Giving his own perspective, Rosch showed his solid knowledge of the difficulties any decision on tracking removal would have on the web and its users, including loss of free access to some sites, the loss of choice and innovation.
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View full post on Search Engine Watch Blog
Italians Issue Another Dubious Anti-Search Decision
Mar 24th
Earlier this year the Italian Communications Authority decided that YouTube was effectively a TV broadcaster and imposed the same rules and restrictions that apply to TV in Italy — and potential penalties for their violation — on Google. It said that Google is now legally responsible…
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3 Content Strategies To Target Decision Makers By Search Intent
Mar 23rd
One of the challenges in B2B marketing is the need to satisfy inquiries and research from multiple decision makers within an organization. Search engines are one of the first places all of these parties will go, but with different search queries in mind. This fact is something search engine…
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View full post on Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Hacker Poll: What Do You Think of Oracle’s Decision to Drop Support for Ruby in NetBeans?
Feb 1st
Last week Oracle announced it will discontinue support for Ruby in NetBeans. RedMonk’s Michael Coté doesn’t think it’s a big deal. “NetBeans was a nice tool, but it wasn’t the lynch-pin of success for that community,” he writes. “There’s a wide array of free and commercial tools out there that developers love using.”
Coté thinks that Oracle’s withdrawal of support is motivated by a lack of revenue from supporting Ruby. “Arguably, growing the ruby community helps Oracle grow the sales pie for MySQL (which they also now own), but I’m not sure that’d be big enough or a direct enough correlation for the money-minded Oracle decision makers,” he writes.
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However, as analysts are urging enterprises to look elsewhere for a programming language, it’s not hard to see Oracle’s move as signaling something deeper about Oracle’s relationship to the developer community in general and to the open source community in particular. What do you think?
Also, are you a Ruby developer using NetBeans? If so, what IDE are you going to move to?
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IT Poll: How Much Do You Consider a Vendor’s Road Map When Making a Purchasing Decision?
Jan 17th
Last week as part of the HP ISS Tech Day I had a chance to talk to Bill Haggard, director of enterprise infrastructure for the Dallas Cowboys Football Club about why the Cowboys chose HP to power its data centers. It may not seem like a professional football team would need a data center, but consider this: in addition to powering all of the 665 point-of-sales (POS) terminals for concession stands and the 82 POS terminals for retail merchandise shops within the Dallas Cowboys Stadium, the Cowboys’ data center must support all the merchandise shops across the country. The company owns several other subsidiary businesses as well, and the data center at the Cowboys Stadium is the primary location for all the businesses’ IT infrastructure.
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Haggard says the Cowboys chose HP because the company shared its hardware roadmap and had a consistent plan for the next 10 years. Haggard and his team wanted to makes sure it wouldn’t have to rip and replace its multi-million dollar infrastructure investments a few years down the road if its vendor made some sudden changes.
I thought this was interesting, as the rate of change is accelerating and technologies evolve quickly it seems like it’s increasingly difficult to make that sort of long-term plan. Certainly, it’s a good idea – but who knows what the market for solid-state hard drives will look like five years from now? Ten years ago, HP hadn’t even started offering its first private cloud bundle.
How do you plan infrastructure in a rapidly changing technology environment, and how much does a vendor’s roadmap play into your plans?
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PayPal: Decision to Drop Wikileaks Was “Straightforward”
Dec 8th
Over the weekend, PayPal announced that it would no longer handle donations to whistleblower site Wikileaks. In a late night statement, the company said that the site had violated its terms of service and would be immediately shut down.
Now, Osama Bedier, Paypal’s Vice President of Platform, has told the audience at LeWeb 2010 that the controversial decision was straightforward.
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According to PayPal’s original statement, Wikileaks was shut down “due to a violation of the PayPal Acceptable Use Policy, which states that our payment service cannot be used for any activities that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity. We’ve notified the account holder of this action."
Mashable’s Ben Parr reports that Bedier was pressed for an explanation on stage and responded by explaining the process PayPal takes for things like this. “We have an acceptable use policy group to make sure that our customers are protected,” said Bedier.
The acceptable use policy group had to address Julian Assange and WikiLeaks when the U.S. State Department issued a letter on November 27 stating that the activity of the WikiLeaks organization was deemed illegal in the U.S. “It was straightforward,” Bedier said, once the State Department made that declaration.
Ever since PayPal shut down donations to the site, Wikileaks has found itself under increasing pressure from other financial organizations. It has had its Swiss bank account shut down and both Mastercard and Visa have pulled the ability to donate to the site using their products.
It looks like the decision is becoming “straightforward” for many more payment companies than just PayPal, though Wikileaks has found a new avenue for funding – a small startup called Flattr, started by Peter Sunde, the co-founder of the torrent site Pirate Bay. In addition to Flattr, Wikileak’s support page offers a few more options, such as direct bank transfers or by “good old fashion postal mail”.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
