J.D. Power and Associated rated Dogpile with the highest rank in customer satisfaction among search engines for the second year in a row.

Based on 1,000 points, Dogpile earned a score of 818 this year, up 14 points from 2006. Google fell in second at 794, with Ask filling in the top 3 at 784 points.

Dogpile users report that they are particularly satisfied with the limits placed upon paid advertising within search results.

This study is in its fourth year and looks at overall consumer behavior, experience and satisfaction within a number of search functions.

While Dogpile has a long way to go in the major search engine race, it is nice to see an underdog (no pun intended) holding its own against the major search engines.

Yesterday, Yahoo announced in the Yahoo Search Marketing Blog, a few updates to the Panama platform have been released making life slightly easier.

Custom Reports
Yahoo now allows advertisers to create custom reports and set up a report scheduler. These reports are available in XML, TSV, CSV or Excel. This is a feature that has long been a part of Google AdWords and is a welcome addition to YSM.

Lateral Navigation
Before whenever you wanted to switch from one AdGroup to the next you had to jump back to the main campaign page. Moving from one to the next was quite inconvenient. Now with the new previous and next links at the top right, moving from one item to the next is much easier and faster. This feature works on the campaign, ad group, and keyword levels. It would be also nice if Yahoo could take this one step further and simply provide a dropdown menu visible on the campaign and ad group levels that would allow you select the specific group desired.

Calendar Date Range
Under the calendar drop down when selecting a date range, “Today” has also been added as a preset option. Often the results for the current day are incomplete, but if you want to see where you stand this does make it much quicker then entering a custom date range for the current day.

While there are still many features needing improvement within the YSM interface, these few adjustments are certainly a step in the right direction.

It all started with a value of $85 a share back in 2004. Since then Google has spent literally Billions upon Billions of dollars snatching up businesses and expanding its overall online presence. Now, after roughly 3 years, it’s about to surpass the $600 mark.

According to Bloomberg, at 1:54pm today (New York Time), shares rose $12.90 up to $595.45. Web analyst Gene Munster said in a report yesterday that he estimates stock will reach $660 within a year.

According to ZDNet, vulnerability within Gmail could allow hackers full access to Gmail accounts giving them the ability to steal contacts and incoming emails.

Security researcher Chris Gatford noted that “attackers could compromise a Gmail account–using a cross-site scripting vulnerability–if the victim is logged in and clicks on a malicious link. From that moment, the attacker can take over the session cookies for Gmail and subsequently forward all the account’s messages to a POP account.” Read more…

Introduction
Back in July I wrote about keyword research for SEO. Although researching keywords for SEO is similar to that for PPC there still are many core differences.

In many cases using the generic targets with high searches can be very costly in the world of PPC. While they can offer a good return, often long tailed, very specific phrases can offer more qualified traffic at a lower price. Read more…

In most places Google dominates search over rivals Yahoo and MSN, however, in China it’s a different story.

Google has been investing heavily in search for China, however, despite this; Baidu.com is up 7.6% this year reaching a 69.5% market share in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou. Google’s share fell 1.1% down to a still respectable 23 percent.

Yahoo China also saw a sharp decline with its share cut by more than half, down by 2.9% to 2.3% market share.

Microsoft has attacked Google in a statement released on Monday. ZDNET reported the statement was released shortly after Google signed a deal with Capgemini to promote its office-productivity software.

The statement had 10 questions directed at Google App users and those considering the software. These questions addressed the perpetual beta stage for many of Google’s products as well as the minimal functionality for fundamental features such as headers, footers, and footnotes.

There has been no word on Google’s stance on this statement.

It is now a widely known fact that duplicate content is bad (with some exceptions such as BLOGS where it is expected). Yesterday on the Google Webmaster Central Blog, Maile Ohye posted some important notes on duplicate content directed at those who use multiple URL parameters on their site.

Essentially, variables placed in a URL for the purposes of tracking will result in duplicate content. This tracking can be in the form of affiliate ID’s, session ID’s, or any other form of tracking you may be implementing.

While the article does not address if there are possible penalties due to these duplicate URL’s it does point out that these longer URL’s can offset branding efforts and decrease the chance of your listing being selected by the searcher.

So how can you help search engines to understand your site? By removing any unnecessary URL parameters and submitting an XML sitemap with the clean version of each of URL will help, but your best bet is to permanently clean it up through the use of cookies. By 301 redirecting any inbound affiliate ID or tracking encoded links to the short clean URL and storing those affiliate and tracking variables in a cookie you can ensure that only one version of each URL is accessible on your site.

Duplicate content can come in many forms. Ross Dunn has published some articles which cover other aspects of duplicate content:

Most Common Reason for Dropped Rankings
What Determines Duplicate Content SPAM?
Does Article Syndication Amount to a Duplicate Content Penalty

So you have decided to venture out into the world of SEO. The first thing you will need to do is determine the direction of your campaign in relation to the key phrases you are choosing to target. This article will focus on how to find keywords for your organic campaign, as the process is slightly different for PPC.

Many site owners know immediately what phrases they want. If you feel like you know what you want, before you start take a brief step back and assess if this really is the best phrase for your site. Yes, it just may very well be the perfect phrase, but if it isn’t, you could wind up spending a lot of time and money pursuing a ranking that either will never happen, or will provide very little value to your site. Read more…

The latest figures from comScore are in and Microsoft is picking up speed.

While long standing search leader Google continues to dominate by a large margin, comScore reports Google losing some ground in June, while MSN saw a noticeable increase.

Latest figures for Google show a drop to 49.5%, down 1.2% from May. Yahoo also saw a decline of a little over a percentage point down 1.3 to 25.1%. Meanwhile Microsoft had a significant gain, up from its low 10.3 to a higher low of 13.2%. Ask remains unchanged at 5%.

In June Americans performed 8.0 billion online searches, which are up 6 percent from May, and up 26 percent from June 2006.

Interestingly enough, while both Google and Yahoo both saw a decrease in their percentage share for the month of June both search engines actually saw an increase in the actual number of searches conducted. With Microsoft’s nearly 3% jump, along with an increase in American searches, Microsoft experienced a spike in search volume up 36% over May, a substantial increase by any means.

Microsoft’s increase is partially credited to the introduction of the Live Search Club launched in late May, a program created to reward users of Live Search. Using their Windows Live ID and logging in to play games, and completing puzzles that involve searches users earn tickets which can then be redeemed for rewards.