fantomNews™ — the ultimate know

When you’re traveling or running errands, far from the office desktop or in lack of that nifty laptop, having to make do with your smart phone’s standard search function usually sucks bigtime. The last thing you need is to wade through a hundred search engine results on a display screen the size of a postage stamp!

If you still believe in the search engines’ blogs and public announcements and whatever purportedly “helpful” advice their spinmeisters (aka reps and engineers) are feeing you, it may be time to reconsider. Here’s a brilliant piece that should serve as a real eye opener. Ignore at your own peril as a search marketer!

Ask.com has come forth as the first major search engine to adopt a robust privacy protection policy for searchers, possibly heralding a new round of competition in capturing users’ hearts by addressing ever growing concerns about the engines’ data mining practices.

Seeing that domain parks seem to be outranking search in terms of conversions and ROI, and providing this data is robust enough to be verified across the board, many SEOs will probably have to rethink their monetization strategies, making a “life beyond AdSense” an entirely feasible possibility. Time to add a slew of generic domain names to your portfolio now.

While recently launched Mahalo is anything but a bona fide search engine, it does seem to demonstrate that big money has finally figured out how to game Google and their ilk in their very own cunning way.

Last month, the Electronic Frontier Foundation received some flak from anonymization experts (ourselves included) for their less-than-state-of-the-art white paper recommending some stragegies. Well, they’ve listened and issued an update now.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has published a well intended guide on anonymous blogging. Unfortunately, their technical advice on defeating the search engines as privacy hazards is disturbingly naive.

Slashdotters have proven themselves utterly clueless at what the whole story re Google using cloaking is about

Self-declared “do no evil” maverick Google has admitted to cloaking and had to remove its own offending pages after having been found out

Threadwatch on Google cloaking and keyword stuffing