Written by Jason Lee Miller for WebProBusiness

Who owns Gmail? According to Benjamin Cohen, nobody yet-well, one guy in Germany, but he doesn’t count for much-and a British company is claiming the intellectual property rights to the Gmail trademark, even if the patent office hasn’t awarded anyone that credit.

The first battle for the claim to Gmail was brought by Daniel Giersch, a German entrepreneur, who actually does own Gmail, but only in Germany. Giersch recently blocked Google’s web mail service in the Land of Eternal Oktoberfest. But in the rest of the world, Gmail is still in dispute.

Written by David Utter for WebProBusiness

New approach to video search utilizes “visual crawling” to find video the same way a casual Web surfer would.

Burlingame, CA-based Truveo has announced the debut of its video search engine. The privately held startup says on its web site that its technology will be an improvement over existing video search products.

Video search has been around for a while, with Yahoo, AOL, and Google all making inroads into indexing video content. Truveo describes how it can do a better job with finding and indexing videos online:

Written by David Utter for WebProNews

Greater extensions by Google into traditional advertising media could mark a sea change in ad buying.

In the latest edition of divining Google’s future, MediaPost discusses a scenario where the search engine company extends beyond print ads in traditional media. The assumptions could apply to Yahoo as well, as they extend further into the entertainment industry.

Both Google and Yahoo have been working on video search, and Yahoo has unveiled audio search recently. In the TV and radio markets, it could be possible that the continued refinement of those searches may lead to a change in where contextual advertising appears.

By John Stith for WebProBusiness.com

The Nielsen/NetRatings organization, long known and prized for its ratings systems announced a new way to track ratings and figuring in the folks who toss their cookies. They’ve been testing the method in the U.S. and using it in Australia and Italy.

The system incorporates raw visitor numbers mixed with information about cookies tossed from their consumer research panel. The cookie information comes from Site Census.

“This integrated solution is the successful culmination of work we undertook in response to resolving the panel vs. site-centric methodology debate, which often showed data discrepancies,” said Manish Bhatia, senior vice president of product development and measurement science, Nielsen//NetRatings.

Written by Brad Callen for SiteProNews

Today, I’m going to try something different. I’m going to go out on a limb hëre and make a blind assumption about you.
“You think that the Q-square formula (quality + quantity) of getting inbound links (reciprocal or one-way) is the best way to increase your search engine rankings.”

Just about right, eh? And unless you are a complete newbie to search engine optimization, this is exactly what SEO experts have been telling you time and time and time again. And if there was any doubt that search engines were being spammed, paid links put rest to those fears. The SEO experts make monëy, you get a boost in your rankings, everyone’s happy.

Written by Mike Banks Valentine (c) 2005 for www.sitepronews.com

I am ranked #1 for that silly phrase at Google. So What?

Here’s a secrët. You can be ranked #1 at Google for the phrase “Waterfall Watches” if you put the phrase on your page 4 times and in metatags twice. How do I know that? I did it in 2001 and still rank number one in Google for the phrase in 2005. On another of my sites I rank #1 for the phrase “Screeching Camels” by simply putting it on the page once in a comment about silly SEO guarantees.

Written by Robin Nobles for www.sitepronews.com

Most search engine optimizers get rather nostalgic when they remember the “good old days” of paid inclusion programs. Do you remember when we could submit a Web page for a one-time fee and get it spidered and indexed within 24 to 48 hours? The page would then be respidered every 48 hours for an entire year.

We could work on building our on-page and off-page factors while confidently knowing that the paid inclusion spider would be back to recrawl our page within that time frame. We didn’t have to pay any pay-per-click fees. For new pages or Web sites, or for pages that we had problems getting in the indexes, paid inclusion programs were ideal. We nevër minded spending the monëy at all.

Written by Chris Richardson for WebProNews

One of the more important tasks in relation to search engine indices involves the keeping this content fresh and up to date. To accomplish this, search engines have developed a number of procedures designed to refresh and update their respective databases. In all likelihood, the most popular of these events has to be when Google performs a backlink and PageRank update, which happens throughout the year at determined intervals.

By Joel Walsh for SiteProNews

Many website owners and SEOs (search engine optimizers) believe that trading links is the most effective way to build the hundreds of links necessary for good search-engine ranking. But there’s another way to build links that deserves your attention: content distribution.
A time-honored way of getting one-way inbound links to your website is to distribute content, usually articles, for other websites to publish in exchange for a backlink. Most often, the backlink is included in an “author’s resource box,” which is a brief “about the author” paragraph promoting the author’s site.

by David Utter for WebProNews

Google may plan to redefine the term PPC to mean “pay-per-call” as it focuses on dominating local search markets.

The recent post on noted industry observer Om Malik’s blog sees a connection between Google’s plans for dark fiber and Wi-Fi, and the newly debuted Google Talk voice and IM chat application.
Mr. Malik, by way of comments from Lachlan Yachau, gives a nice summary:

“So could all the talk about Google’s VoIP plans really be all about extending its advertising franchise into pay-per-call, rather than offering plain old consumer minutes, a la everyone else?”