Search Engine Engineered

As I mentioned in the previous post, the three main Long Tail business opportunities are:

1. Long Tail aggregators (that include both the head and tail of content and products)
2. Niche suppliers/producers (who get aggregated by someone else)
3. Filters (which help people find what they want)

Most of the examples I’ve been using to date, such as Netflix, Amazon and iTunes, fall into the first of these categories, aggregation. But as the smart kids in the front row always point out, there’s a seeming paradox at work in that category.

The Long Tail is all about the shift from hits to niches. But aren’t all those aggregators “hits”? They’re not only the largest players in their category, but they seem to be getting even larger, gaining market share at the expense of their competitors. Is there something about aggregators that tends to favor a few big winners, even as the other two categories fragment into a million niches of varying size?

Full Article at the Long Tail Blog

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John Battelle’s Searchblog
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The Supreme Court ruled that local governments may seize people’s homes and businesses — even against their will — for private economic development.

Could they also take your domain name for econonimc development?

Tim Roe from NetRatings presented some useful stats on country shares of the search market. Germany (29%) and UK (23%) are the largest search markets, followed by France (18%) and Italy (16%). Europe is dominated by Google and MSN, at first and second place respectively, but the market is still big enough for local players like Voila (2nd in France) and Virgilio (3rd in Italy).

Full Article: Search Engine Watch

SearchStatus is a toolbar extension for users of both Mozilla and Mozilla Firefox, designed for the highly specialised needs of search engine marketers. The toolbar provides extensive search-related information about a site, all conveniently displayed in one discreet and compact toolbar.

For every site you visit using Firefox or Mozilla, SearchStatus lets you view its Google PageRank, Google Category, Alexa popularity ranking, Alexa incoming links, Alexa related links and backward links from Google, Yahoo! and MSN - all in one place. This combined search-related information means you can view not only the link importance of a site (according to Google), but also its traffic importance (according to Alexa), so providing a balanced view of site efficacy.

…also Google Toolbar for Firedox to be released.