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Yahoo (I’m sorry, I’ve lost the enthusiasm for the brand required to call them “Yahoo!”) is putting a long neglected sponsored search program to bed for the last time. No, it’s not their PPC program, though that was long neglected, it is their paid inclusion program — Search Submit.

Search Submit allowed you to pay a fee to guarantee inclusion of your pages in the Yahoo Search index. We actually used that service years ago. It was a convenient way to ensure that you had new pages indexed quickly, and that large sites like ecommerce sites were fully indexed.

These days failure to get your site fully indexed has more to do with poor site design than with failure to cough up some extra cash to Yahoo. And, for commerce sites there is always Yahoo Product Submit.

The program will end at the end of this year. Buh bye.

I love this new Google Street View trike. I’d love to see them do a street view of City Creek canyon here in SLC — but Central Park may be a bit more of a priority.

You can nominate a location here.

From the size, it looks like the street view trike would be a thigh-burner:

Interesting post on SEOMOZ on how the story of Michael Jackson passing spread online over time.

According to the article over the course of 3 hrs the story went from:

1. Entertainment Niche Site
2. Larger Entertainment Site
3. Wikipedia
4. CNN Twitter
5. first Bit.ly link (others tweeting)
6. Story hits Digg front page
7. massive RTing
8. MSNBC confirms
9. CNN confirms
10. Story on Google News

The story really took fire on social media, with the MSM and Google News following later. I don’t think a 3 hr delay is too bad on Google News’ part, but it is interesting to see how quickly stories like this can spread now.

Read the rest here

We just made a simple Green Theme (Persona actually) for Firefox to show support for the people of Iran. You’ll find it here:

http://www.getpersonas.com/persona/31913

To install:

Go here: http://www.getpersonas.com/
and click Get Personas for Firefox.

Then go here: http://www.getpersonas.com/persona/31913
and click “Wear this”.

That’s it.

If you’re a person who makes websites and are wondering how your current situation compares to others in the same field head over to A List Apart and see their 2008 Survey.

They asked 30,000 web types their opinions on topics from their “level of excitement” to “how long since your last raise” for this year’s survey. And, if you are so inclined you can even download a copy of the raw data yourself to play with.

Go to the survey.

Here’s an interesting site for you word lovers out there. Word Spy is devoted to :

“lexpionage, the sleuthing of new words and phrases. These aren’t “stunt words” or “sniglets,” but new terms that have appeared multiple times in newspapers, magazines, books, Web sites, and other recorded sources.”

Here’s one that I’ve experienced myself at times:

semisomnia n. Mild but chronic exhaustion caused by poor sleep habits.

More here: Word Spy

One interesting site mentioned in this morning’s keynote was SearchMe.com. They are taking the same kind of idea that I’ve seen before–giving you a preview of the sites that appear in a search box–but to a whole new level. Rather than a small little badge preview, they show the search results in categories of Apple Cover-Flow style result sets.

Pretty cool, and something I think I’ll actually use.

This is backed by Sequoia Capital, who’ve previously been involved with little web companies like Google, YouTube, Yahoo.

As a side note, one of the first speakers we saw after starting COGBOX in 1997 was Mark Kvamme, now one of the partners of Sequoia. This was at an AIGA brand design conference, and really got us excited about our new business. Our paths have remained almost eerily synchronous ever since. He went on to fund Google, we…ok, maybe not perfectly synchronous.

See you there next week. I’m looking forward to a lot of back-to-back sessions filled with practical real-world details.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

A few months back Yahoo launched Panama, their long awaited update to their sponsored search management tool. And, while I think most would agree that it is an improvement over the old system, they did not address a few critical areas.

So Yahoo!, for your own good, and mine, grant me these three wishes:

1. Get rid of “match driver”.
Six years ago GoTo.com, Yahoo Search Marketing’s ancestor, dominated the Sponsored Search market. At the time, there was no AdWords. Their closest competitor was FindWhat (now Miva). Yahoo, MSN, AOL all distributed GoTo search listings. Feeling their power, GoTo decided it would be a good idea to artificially boost the number of competitors for each particular term by consolidating like terms together into one bidding pool.

Here’s how they described it:

“Our Match Driver tool takes search term misspellings, singular/plural combinations and other variations, and maps them to a primary term so that consumers get the best and most comprehensive search results we can offer.”

See, they were really looking out for the consumers. They also did this favor to advertisers:

“In order to maintain your competitive advantage in the search results, we take your highest bid on any form of a primary search term. You therefore need not bid on multiple versions of mapped search terms in the future. Any given search term can be listed only once per advertiser, so we removed all duplicates and retained only one of each term.”

This could alternatively be read as “We’ve now forced you to pay a higher amount than what would otherwise be warranted for less desirable terms that we’ve pooled together with other more valuable terms. If you want to be competitive with the valuable terms, you’ll have to pay for our other junk as well”.

There was of course a lot of dis-satisfaction with this decision at the time in the still relatively small Search Marketing world. What GoTo was trying to do was drive up their average revenue per click to attract more potential distribution partners.

Times have changed, but this bad idea hasn’t. It still sucks. Jerry, it’s time to ditch it.

2. Give me an Adwords Editor for Yahoo.
One of the things that we hoped for most in the new Panama system was that the campaign management interface would be improved. And, to give them credit, it has improved over the old system. They did finally do away with the notion that each keyword had to be associated with its own creative and moved to a more AdWords-esque model where you can associate creative (ads) with groups of keywords.

But, in the meantime, Google has come out with something absolutely fantastic–an offline account editing application. This tool allows you to download a snapshot of your account to your local machine, then very quickly execute thousands of changes. Cut, paste, search, replace. I love it. And, I love how Google took the almost counter-intuitive step of building a desktop app as an upgrade for their online platform.

So, Yahoo, take a look at the AdWords editor and try to make managing very large campaigns through your system as easy as it is now with Google.

3. Let me opt-out of specific partners.
This is really a pet peeve. With Yahoo, you can’t opt out of specific publishing partners–even if you absolutely know that they never, ever, result in quality traffic.

We have a nice little ROI tracking tool we first built about 7 years ago. I keep thinking that with all the great analytics platforms out there, we’ll eventually retire this. But, it is hard to beat having direct access to the raw data when you are doing an analysis. So, it lives on. One very handy component is the ability to identify the referring URLs from any particular campaign. So, using this, we can easily see the conversion rates for Yahoo publishing partners.

For instance, the site BlurtIt is a Yahoo search publishing partner. It is similar to Yahoo answers (but not as good). Every month, Yahoo delivers (and charges us for) traffic from BlurtIt, and every month that traffic immediately hits the back button upon arriving at our client’s sites. Eliminating that traffic would instantly improve the ROI of our overall Yahoo campaign. But, it can’t be done. Why is that? I’m sure they are sick of hearing this but… Google lets me do it.

What these three wishes really boil down to is this: Yahoo, change your mindset from one of fear that giving your advertisers total control over their campaigns will cost you revenue, to one where you are helping advertisers find profitable marketing relationships, and avoiding those that are not profitable. Trying to hang on to marketing dollars by giving clients fewer options is just not going to work.

So, c’mon Yahoo, grant me some wishes.

It’s been interesting to see some of the response to last night’s Digg takeover. Quite a few people have said it is an example of mob rule, deplorable, evidence that Digg is not really a “community”, and so on.

The interesting part of all this to me is that:

1. It is a lesson in damage control gone awry. Clearly if your entire rights management scheme relies on keeping one bit of information under lock and key, you’ll have a very difficult time once that bit of information is released in the wild. And, if your plan is to brand anyone who later passes that bit along a criminal, you’ll be again putting yourself in a very bad position, at least from a public relations standpoint. And by doing so, you may just accomplish exactly the opposite of what you intended through your attempts at enforcement.

2. I think it is interesting that Kevin Rose titled his post with the key. Obviously that is a risky choice, but also in fact the only thing that could have short-circuited the massive wave of copy-cat postings that were rising up the digg ladder–short of just taking the site down. Another example of a kind of rule of opposites of online damage control : heavy handedness fed the fire, capitulation snuffed it out.

I’m not saying that I think what happened on digg was right (I’m not exactly sure it falls into the realm of right and wrong).

But, it is an example of something that is particularly despised among programmers, developers, and security types online (a big part of the digg audience), and that is an attempt by a perceived powerful group to protect an inherently flawed system through intimidation, rather than through an improved system. It is analogous to the scenario where a company like Microsoft responds with a threatened lawsuit when a security expert (aka hacker) releases a discovered bug in their code. Most smart businesses (including Microsoft) have figured this out by now, and instead treat it as an opportunity to improve their product and methods.

I think that sentiment is a big part of what fueled the Digg takeover.