Yahoo! continues to launch interesting new services. In what I see as a poke at certain products which remain in beta for years the new tool is called Alpha and it is in Beta. That’s funny.

Yahoo! describes Alpha (Beta) like this:

Alpha is a new beta product from Yahoo! that introduces the concept of Federated Search. With Alpha, you can search across many different search indices all on one page. Also, if you have a Yahoo! ID, you can log in to personalise your experience by moving the search sources around to suit you, or adding completely new ones of your own.
This offers a comprehensive search result that’s tailored and controlled by you, the searcher!

Search Engine People is extremely generous (my boss is standing behind me…). The extra mile is the usual distance we put in for our clients and more often than not a complete team is working on their project.

At a price.

And because Search Engine People is extremely successful at what it does that price is not the lowest in the industry. For the quality and dedication it certainly is the best price but still it might not be something you can fork over at this point.

There are places to go, of course. Forums. E-books. SEO software. Sites that charge extra to get to “premium” content.

Picli is the latest addition to the web’s social recommendation networks. Usual stuff: submit, vote up or down, become popular or not.

Nothing new, except for the fact that Picli is all about images.

I’ve been browsing around there a little bit, obviously with SEO in mind (or in our case Canadian SEO). A nice place which already gets some good activity and which clearly presents multiple ways in which it can be used to promote a web site.

Famed adman David Oglivy is usually credited as having said: “Half my advertising is wasted, the trouble is I don’t know which half.” In fact, it was actually John Wannamaker, considered the father of modern advertising.

No matter who said it, ROI (Return On Investment) or in Googlespeak, ROAS (Return On Advertising Spend) has long been the bane of marketers and advertisers alike.

Google was supposed to have solved that but according to ex-Google employee Adam Goldberg, responsible for the $500 million team behind Google Adwords, this may not in fact be the case. According to the ZDNet Digital Markets blog posting by Donna Bogatin, Google clients ‘frustrated’ by unprofitable AdWords buys,

It’s “how to” day.

This is a tremendously easy way to see your Google Adwords Results in cities or countries where you’re not located.

To see Google Adwords Results In Another Country:

Move there

Append the following code to the end of your query: url &gl=country iso code (ISO stands for International Orgzanization for Standarization — why it wouldn’t be an IOS code is quite beyond me, but I digress…). For the very curious, here’s a listing of the various and sundry ISO country codes.

So, a search for dentists on Google http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GFRC_enCA213CA213&q=dentists becomes http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GFRC_enCA213CA213&q=dentists&gl=UK to show dentists in the UK.

When Google appeared on the search engine market there was virtually nothing. People who were using HotBot were considered geek and into computers.

Search was a big business, for sure, but it wasn’t like a whole slew of large search engine companies was out there.

Search was mostly an also done. You had a portal or a whole family of sites — and search. Don’t really need search as you already offer what anyone would ever need, right? Anyway, let’s slap it on there. Bam. Search. Thanks.

I can’t help but think that a reason for Google offering Gmail is spam or rather to help them learn and test how to get rid of spam.

Yahoo had email, Microsoft had email. Google didn’t, now they do. And Google learned a lot about getting rid of spam in a short time.

My normal Gmail account received hardly any spam. An account which I’ve set up in order to be spammed receives 5000 spam messages per week. Over 90% of it gets caught in their spam filter.

So, what are we to make of this?

Matt Cutts’ blog hacked by the French black hat group that brought us the infamous PR10 toolbar hack?

Then again, the Dark SEO Team page it links to now claims to be defaced by… Matt!

So we have two interesting options here:

• Matt’s blog was hacked — a high profile tag from Dark SEO Team
• or… Matt and Dark SEO Team came up with this together as an April Fools idea. Which is an even more intriguing idea…