If you haven’t heard of Kumo or Wolfram|Alpha, you’re not alone. But you will. Kumo is a beta rebranding of MS Live Search, which was a rebranding of MSN search which … MS wants to be competitive in the search market. So it keeps changing its approach, refining it, putting new skins on it and hoping magic will strike. (more…)

Give me a hint
The Web is a seemingly endless source of information on anything and everything. Problems arise when the information is incorrect or incomplete. Suppose, for example, your company has a name like Universal Import & Exports. There are a lot of companies with this name and similar names, including Universal Exports, of James Bond fame.

So if a client looks for your company, what do they find? You? Someone with a similar (or even identical name, in a global context)? And what if they find you when looking for someone else? Should you care? To the last question, yes. Everyone is a potential client. Figure out why they are finding you. Some things you can’t fix, but some things you can.

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Google is doing it. Twine. Twitter. Delicious. They offer a version of it. Yahoo and Microsoft are discussing it. What is it? Personal search. It’s being bandied about as the next big thing. A game changer for search engines, search engine marketing and search engine optimization. How does it work? Social bookmarking sites, like Twine and Delicious are straightforward: sites you bookmark lead you to other sites other people have bookmarked that are similar. It’s not so much a search as an exploration of similar sites. A community-based approach to finding what you want. That’s not the newest twist on personal search (more…)

I am not complaining. Nor insulting your site. People are obviously finding it. Take our site (please, for all of you Henny Youngman fans. All three of you still alive.) We have analytics that indicate people have come in from search engines using just the word “web.” Our name is the most frequent search sending people our way and then we do pretty well for services we offer. But “web.” While we are a Web company, there are almost 4 billion competitors for the word “web.” We are happy someone found us that way but we are not really optimized for that. Also someone found us for “Custom programming in Gujarat.” We are not in Gujarat, not even in India. (We are in Cincinnati). So again we are happy someone found our site, but that might not have been an easily converted lead.

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