Featured posts to the Search Engine Watch blog in the past week, along with recent search-related headlines from around the Web.

A new Digital Outlook Report from Avenue A | Razorfish found that search continues to play a key role in the success of online ads, though its prominence is beginning to slip.

More providers are wising up to the tactic of offering small businesses a free and easy way to get online, in hopes that they will transition into paid advertisers.

Gary Price, Ask.com's director of online information resources, talks about his role in reaching out to the research and librarian communities.

comScore Media Metrix today released its monthly analysis of U.S. consumer activity at top online properties and categories for February 2007 and introduced a new suite of metrics based on site 'visits.' The 'visits' metric, defined as the number of times a unique person accesses content within a Web entity with breaks between access of at least 30 minutes, is a way of measuring the frequency with which a person views content, thereby illustrating a key component of user engagement. Included among the new suite of metrics are: total visits, average minutes per visit, average visits per visitor, and average visits per usage day.

The buzz about content remixing for syndication is equally misguided and shortsighted.

It was my good luck to run into Dave McMahon and Richard Costall from NxtGenUG today at the MVP Summit here at Microsoft… We had such a great time chatting they wanted to do a quick little interview for their podcast… Show #30 - The One With The Maracas ... [ list ] You can catch me at about 25:40 We start off talking about the Framework Design Guidelines book and how it is “required reading” at many companies… I am pleased to hear it and I am very happy that the book can be saving so much time for folks so they can void the arguments and just get to work… We also talked a little about WPFE, Longhorn Server, ASP.NET futures, the Design world and, of course, Mix and more! Love to hear what you think! Read More......(read more)

We have what I would call a great offering in the Web Client Software Factory. However, all of the guidance to date has been around using the WCSF in a green-field scenario, where you can start fresh. I know that in the real world, this is not often the case. This point was definitely driven home for me over the last three days. On Monday and Tuesday, we had a WCSF Workshop (see Mariano's post for some info on how it went), In talking to customers during and after the workshop, there were numerous requests on how to incorporate the WCSF into existing web application projects, and then how to convert the site from the current architecture to the WCSF architecture. To do this, we need to do a few things: Enable the guidance package Incorporate...(read more)

IBM today announced that customers, partners and users can now download and try IBM Lotus Notes and Domino 8, a next generation email and collaboration platform that helps users streamline daily business tasks that run across a variety of computing platforms and technology software systems.

The open beta program gives users a peek at a redesigned interface that includes new time saving features such the ability to quickly view important emails by grouping them into conversation threads, no-cost productivity editors that create open standards-based versions of spreadsheets, word processing and presentations, and search capabilities that let users extend searches beyond email and contacts to Web and file searches without leaving the inbox.

Beta code is currently available and can be downloaded at: www.ibm.com/lotus/getnd8now.

In the days immediately following availability, there have been more than 12,000 downloads of the beta client and server products for a variety of platforms, including Linux and Windows for clients and Windows, Linux, Sun Solaris, AIX and IBM System i for servers.


Wow, 12,000 downloads, BEFORE the announcement even went out to the press! ? ?If anyone (your boss!) ever questioned the power of the blogging community, I think this proves them wrong.

I hoped yesterday's topic was going to generate more responses! ? Thank you to those that did respond, I've found the answers very interesting, and some of them entertaining! ?It's not too late, you can still post your answers, anonymously if you want! ? ;-)

Our application is provided data by an external data vendor in an XML format for which we were provided a DTD. We would like to use XMLBeans to pull

If you've looked at the debug version of our JavaScript files, you may have noticed code similar to that: Foo.Bar = function Foo$Bar() { Foo.Bar.initializeBase( this ); } function Foo$Bar$baz() { // Do something } Foo.Bar. prototype = { baz: Foo$Bar$baz } Foo.Bar.registerClass('Foo.Bar'); And looking at that, you may have wondered what the Foo$Bar$baz names were for. That's a very good question and I congratulate you on your thoroughness . Here's why: "JScript anonymous function"? That's not very helpful in a debugger stack trace and that's what you'd get if we had written the above code this way (or run the release version of the script): Foo.Bar = function () { Foo.Bar.initializeBase( this ); } Foo.Bar. prototype = { baz: function () { //...(read more)

Every once in a while, when I've typed "blogs.msdn.com/petel" into my address bar, I find IE7 a little slow to load the site. Especially after I've gotten home and am no longer on the corporate network. As it turns out, Vista (and Windows XP), is actually checking my local network connections (mapped drives, etc) for a machine named blogs.msdn.com before it goes out to the internet to find the site. The easy work around for this, always type http:// before your web request, and it'll always use http instead of checking for local file system, networked file systems and such! Read More......(read more)

Domino Domain Monitoring (DDM) allows you to monitor the status of multiple servers in one or more Notes/Domino 7 domains, all from a single location. This compilation of tips, tutorials and resources will get you up to speed on DDM's architecture and functionality and help you weight its benefits and drawbacks as a Notes/Domino monitoring and administration tool.

Tips on how to dis-associate a site from bad sectors of the web.

Rae recently posted a 5 person interview about link building that is well worth a read.

Yesterday I attended an all day event at IBM which focused on career growth. ? We had several sessions about mentoring, personal skills development, career paths, etc. ?One of my favourite parts of the day was a self assessment exercise, where we had to think about things we like and don't like, and that we are good at and still need work on. ?The way it works is that you fill in a grid as follows:

1. Things I like to do, and am good at.	2. Things I like to do, but am not yet good at.
3. Things I don't like to do, but am good at.	4. Things I don't like to do, and am not yet good at.

• Quadrant 1 is the area you certainly want to spend the most time in.
• Quadrant 2 could represent areas where you are learning new skills.
• Quadrant 3 might represent the "necessary evils", or parts of your job that you don't really enjoy, but you are very good at, and do for the good of the company.
• You don't want to spend a lot of time doing things in Quadrant 4! ?You should either change what you are doing, or at least develop the skills that can move the tasks into Quadrant 3.

For fun, let's each list one job related skill, and one life related skill in each quadrant. ?Here are my answers:
1. Public speaking. Playing Ultimate Frisbee.
2. Statistical analysis of company data. ?Golf.
3. Creating presentations. ?Obeying speed limits.
4. Filling out paperwork/redtape/documentation. ?Sticking to a diet.

Now what are yours?

A lot has been written about UAC . Some choose to disable it. I chose not to and I'm doing just fine. At least, I don't have to type in my password on every prompt like on some other OS that likes to mock us on TV ;) Anyway, the one place where UAC has been really annoying to me as a web developer is that any file manipulation in Inetpub requires validation by default (and that's legitimate, it's not a directory that you want rogue processes to be able to easily modify). I tend to be in that directory a lot. So I was talking about that with Nikhil yesterday and we were wondering if running the Windows Explorer as administrator would fix the problem. At first, it looks like it doesn't, but Nikhil then mentioned that Explorer...(read more)

Hi All,

I have a task to accomplish based on this requirement.

How do you handle web service clients request for an order from one

Should I consider selling search engine marketing services on a performance basis?