Refuge Design

Welcome back!Over the past few days Jason Calacanis and the SEO industry have been at each others necks. SEO folks like Aaron Wall are crying foul and Jason is publicly thanking Aaron for his deep insight but is making no changes currently. At the end of the day, Rishil said it best.
You can click on [...]

The Political Debate
At the end of the day, I’m not a scientist, I’ve never taken a science class more advanced than ‘Earth Space Science’ in the 9th grade (blame Florida school system, loopholes galore, high math grades meant I got to skip science classes). But I tend to be very logical in my thinking. I [...]

Ever since the big launch of Bing, I’ve changed my default search engine (in Firefox) to Bing. I’ve used it on a daily basis. There are many disadvantages/advantages to using Bing (I’ll highlight them later in a later blog post) but not returning an accurate result for something that has a lot of online buzz [...]

(Image Source: Law_Keven)
The web is young, it’s been public for only 20 years. Due to the business opportunities it’s created (solid user base) it’s a breeding ground for innovations to reach those users in a more effective fashion. Those innovations (browsers, search, and soon mobile phone/computers) have made business profitable and changed the dynamics of [...]

Some information about Search Engine Market Share: Microsoft has been hovering at a 9% market share of search queries. Yahoo around 20% and Google 60-70% of the market share. Also, in some countries Google has a massive monopoly of 90% market share. Yahoo has 80-90% share in Japan but is continually 20% throughout the world.
Google [...]

All the major media networks are covering the Swine Flu like it’s the next bubonic plague. It’s sickening. Not only that; people are talking out it like it’s a legit reason to worry.
The truth is you have a 1 in 7.6 million chance to catch this type of flu (as of this post only 40 [...]

Whether you’ve already hired someone to optimize your site or are considering doing so, trying to discern whether or not they actually know anything about SEO can be rather intimidating.  Assessing the competence of SEOs is often like trying to figure out whether or not a doctor actually knows anything about the field of medicine [...]

I’ve noticed two changes and I haven’t seen any blog post or article about them. I could be seeing something that has been going on for a few weeks/month but to me, I think these are some amazing changes to both embedded YouTube videos and Google Image Search.
Below you’ll see the first change, that is [...]

I overheard on Twitter from NewEdgeMedia(& Twitter Account) about an affiliate program. They said:
Want to earn 18% Commission on sales? Sign up for the PrintPlace.com Affiliate Program: http://xr.com/printplaceaffiliates
So I decided to check them out, as a company (which any smart affiliate would do). I wanted to know how big this company is, do they have [...]

This is huge news, a professional organization of Search Marketers, will be ringing the bell at NASDAQ on December 1st, 2008. The organization is called SEMPO, Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization, started around 2002. From their site they say their mission is:

SEMPO is a global non-profit organization serving the search engine marketing industry and marketing professionals engaged in it.

Microsoft is doing pretty good for itself, even in search. Although they are stuck back in the 1990’s of search technology, they are innovating and trying out new things. Currently based on a mix of studies, MSN + Live, Microsoft has 10% of the search market and are currently, the 3rd most used search engine, behind Yahoo and some un-known company named Oogle or something.

They have also been gaining influences and reach, in the search market, over the years. Yahoo is on a steady decline and Oogle is still increasing twice the rate of Microsoft.

I’ve known of Google’s New SearchWiki for about 3 months now but I only heard rumors of it within the Search Marketing Community. Now it’s apart of each and every user’s experience, that is logged into Google.

The SearchWiki is a default function and you can’t ‘opt-out’. You can ‘vote’ up and down for each result and also add comments. Comments are made public, so others will know you made a comment about whatever you comment about. There is no feature to comment anonymously. This could bring up issues to privacy.