Hot off last August’s announcement that R.H. Donnelley (No. 3 Yellow Pages publisher in the US) had begun selling ad placements in Yahoo! Local, comes today’s news that Canada’s Yellow Pages Group will begin reselling Google AdWords advertisements.

Its agreement with Google allows Yellow Pages approximately 425,000 advertisers to appear alongside Google search results. Previously, Google Local or ‘Maps’ would display only names and addresses of Yellow Pages’ businesses next to results from searches on local information.

Yellow Pages Group has been working with Google since 2004, when they struck an agreement granting the Internet giant access to its databases and, quietly I may add, began embedding Google AdWords on its websites earlier this year.

Well, I don’t completely agree. Wysz from Google’s Search Quality team repeats that spam sites linking to you doesn’t hurt. (Hat tip: Barry Schwartz).

“I wouldn’t really worry about spam sites hurting your ranking by linking to you, as we understand that you can’t (for the most part) control who links to your sites.”

Uhuh. Of course. It would be way too easy otherwise to mess up Google’s ranking system big time.

Spam links count for zero. Nothing gets added, nothing gets subtracted. So just as spam links are not supposed to help, they can’t hurt either.

The deeply amazing and impressive aspect of the search function Google added to Google Reader is that it is able to search back across every feed it has ever indexed — all the way back to the very first day Google Reader was launched: October 7, 2005.

That’s no small feat to pull off. Here’s why.

Of the millions of feeds Google indexes an ever increasing number is full feed: the feed contains not a snippet but the complete item. Feeds are often (read: usually) limited to around 10 entries. After that they “roll off” the feed, being replaced with newly posted articles.

When the news about Google Shared Stuff broke I of course had a look right away.

The Email/Share icon looked vaguely familiar. A couple of hours later it came to me. I had seen the icon before on a similar service called ShareThis:

This seemed weird to me and made me wonder if Google had maybe done a buyout or buy-in that I wasn’t aware of.

Here’s the question: why do you want to rank high on Google? Why isn’t your first interest Yahoo or Live Search (formerly MSN)?

It seems a strange question. With Google having grown out to become the heart of the web, the starting point for all online activity, who wouldn’t want to rank high on Google first, right?

Sure — but why? If you’re a high school teen who has just setup her first web site it might be very, very important to see a page counter click up: 1 visitor, 2 visitors, 3 visitors (hi mom!), 4….

My friend Peter Papadimitriou at Globecraft sent me the following email he received from Google:

Dear Peter Papadimitriou,

We are happy to announce a new feature that will allow you to
easily reach additional qualified customers who are searching
Google from their mobile phones.

In the next few days, your search ads will be eligible to run on
Google Mobile Search pages (like they currently do on Google.com).
We are offering this feature - and any resulting clicks - for
free through November 18, so you can experiment with the rapidly
growing mobile platform while still reaching qualified customers.

A quick recap. Google is a multi-billion dollar US-based company which derives the majority of its revenue from advertisement on the web. These ads are shown on property outside of Google’s control as well as alongside search results which lists snippets from content Google doesn’t own.

In 2005 Google introduced an attribute webmasters were free to use on links of their choice to help flag that link as “not trusted” or “possible spam”. This attribute is called “no-follow”.

Last month I blogged about the death of the Yellow Pages being premature. The next day, R.H. Donnelley continued its aggressive online push by acquiring Business.com for $345 million.

Today, R.H. Donnelley, the No. 3 Yellow Pages publisher in the US, announced it has begun selling ad placements in Yahoo! Local, according to a News Observer report.

Marissa Mayer, Google, Vice President, Search Products & User Experience at Google (my emphasis):

“Google is painted as the algorithmic purist. That’s not our view. The algorithmic approach is important. That said, once you had the basic algorithm, you can layer human elements into it. We have properties like Google Co-op where people can label items and Google Notebook which has human interaction. But you need to layer the two together - algorithms and human elements to achieve relevance.“

I just read that the European Union gave Germany the go ahead to give $165 million for research on Internet search-engine technologies that could someday challenge Google.

Called Theseus, the project is aiming “to develop the world’s most advanced multimedia search engine for the next-generation Internet”. It would translate, identify and index images, audio and text.

European companies in general spend far less on research than US companies do, and so the EU said the project should help change that.

The Theseus project was born out of Quaero, a joint French-German Internet search initiative. Quaero was put to rest in December 2006 when the German and French researchers “took different directions”.