SEO/SEM News

Nothing really special, but I just noticed the “Ads by Google” link was not just plain text. It look pretty much like a graphic. I took a screenshot as shown on the ads on this site. But I did notice, this did not come out permanently. And most of the time it is still plain text that appears.

If they make this permanent, at least it just does not look like plain text thus Google might be a bit more lax on it’s policies of trying to make website content mimic ads and ads mimic content to a point that people get confused what is an ad and what is not where in some cases Google is against that. It still has to be clear what are ads and what are not. And their change might just help publisher to separate their ads well.

Google is known to make a lot of cool stuff in Google Labs. Most of them you hear about them when they are already done, or nearly done and appear in beta stage already. Just by looking at these applications, they try to make it simple, intuitive, a lot of AJAX, just plain robust and user-friendly which are all part of the Web 2.0 world.

There are a lot of previous news about GoogleTV and some dating back to 2004, like on ZDNet, CNet, WebProNews and BBC, but it was just recently when a certain Mark Erickson of Inifinite Solutions claims to be able to use GoogleTV already with on-demand streaming TV and has posted a demo on YouTube last January 26, 2007.

With several people trying his method of finding the GoogleTV easter egg invite which involves logging into Gmail, going to more Google products, sending an email to yourself with the product URLs, looking for the “M” graphic mouseover on GMail and clicking on it and then receiving an email invite to use GoogleTV. Several people tried it out, some successful, some not based on comments and other post in the blogosphere.Popular techblogger, Michael Arrington of TechCrunch has the title of his post: Google TV an elaborate hoax. Reading his blog post real well, he did not really say if he thinks it is a hoax or not. But quoted Google Blogoscoped and Center Networks on their belief of it being a hoax.

This time, Mark Erickson comes up with another video to disprove his detractors and show once again he can access Google TV.

Now if this is really a hoax, there are two more videos out of people claiming this to be true with their own videos. Here are two video testimonials claiming Google TV to be true.

Is it true or not? Any word from Google themselves? Or do you want to try it out yourself. Hmmm… sending your emails 100 to 1000+ times? I’ll leave it to other people and it this is true, I will wait until it’s in public release beta stage.

Overture, now known as Yahoo Search Marketing has a keyword bidding tool. This tool works fine, but in some cases you might experience it not to work and after submitting it will still give you the same page with the required CAPTCHA input box.

If you are running some Anti-Spyware or Anti-Adware software, this can disable the Overture keyword bidding tool. It will not work since these software will add to the browser a long list of websites where cookies are not allowed. I initially suspected this so I went into my browser’s settings and true enough, overture.com was listed as one of the websites where the cookies should be blocked. But after doing that, it still did not work. If you have this problem too, you should simply allow also cookies coming from 2o7.net.