Googlers Talk SearchWiki By Jason Lee Miller “The top position is no longer winner-take-all,” Bryan Horling, a Google software engineer in charge of Personalized Search, told the SMX West audience in Santa Clara California. After a decade of trying to claim that prize, that may or may not be good news to some. (Coverage of SMX West continues at WebProNews Videos. Keep an eye on WebProNews for more notes and videos from the event this week.) Horling spoke to a crowd looking to get a better understanding of Google’s SearchWiki, launched last November, which allows users to customize and comment on Google search results. When logged into their personal accounts, users can move results up or down or remove them altogether. That’s potentially bad news for webmasters who’ve earned or gamed their way to the top of the results, and probably very good news for those unable to crack the result that gets the vast majority of click-throughs and visibility. The reasoning behind the feature is fairl

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Tells Buyer to Leave Feedback, Only Buyer was Really Seller By Chris Crum This ought to ruffle some feathers. An eBay seller forwarded an email they received from an eBay customer service rep. to Ina Steiner at AuctionBytes . Now, the seller's original email was looking to seek help from eBay because having no PayPal account, a buyer wanted to pay this seller with a check. The seller looked to eBay on how to proceed, because of course last year eBay began enforcing a no checks or money orders policy . Steiner writes :The eBay customer service representative apparently skimmed the letter and thought it was the buyer who had sent eBay the email. He replied to the seller, thinking his letter was going to the buyer in the transaction. Nowhere in the response to the "buyer" did the representative explain that it was eBay's policy to ban sellers from accepting checks.Rather, the rep apologized to the buyer for the difficulty he was having with the transaction, and encourage

New Search Pad Feature Helps Searchers Organize Their Info I got in touch with a couple of people from Yahoo including Tom Chi, Senior Director of Product Management for Yahoo Search, about their new feature called Search Pad. Essentially, it keeps track of your searches, figures out when you are researching things, and stores results of interest in a virtual notepad you can use for reference. The following video will give you a pretty good idea of what it does: Yahoo! Search Pad Preview @ Yahoo! Video "Let’s say for example, you are doing research online to buy a new TV," a representative for Yahoo tells me. "Using Search Pad you no longer need to save the sites you are researching as a bunch of links in a document, or in bookmarks or even scribbled on a sticky note. Yahoo!’s Search Pad will intelligently detect your intent to do research online, and then automatically track the websites you want to save by organizing the addresses and information in notes which you ca

Save Money On Super Bowl Ad By Getting Banned Say what you want about PETA’s vego-fascist ways and loony breast milk Ben & Jerry’s proposals, whoever does their marketing had a stroke of genius by getting an ad banned by the network broadcasting the Super Bowl—a method we shall forthwith describe as “The GoDaddy Method” of viral marketing. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals’ “Veggie Love” commercial was deemed too hot for NBC (except on the Today show I noticed) and was not accepted for airing during the annual Super Bowl advertising bonanza. The commercial featured lingerie-clad models really, really enjoying their vegetables and came with the tagline “Studies Show Vegetarians Have Better Sex.” The study to which they refer involves men over 40, just sayin’. You can now see that commercial, extended scenes, and other banned commercials at a special website with embeddable videos. (Word to the wise, don't click on the "Milk Gone Wild" video.) 'Veggie Lov

Even If Your Revenue Comes From Advertising? Contrary to what advertisers might like to believe, not everyone wants to see their ads. This is why televsion advertisers don't like TiVo. Advertising is how a lot of online businesses make their bread and butter though, and without ads, they simply could not generate enough revenue to stay alive. At least one online business believes that allowing users to turn off ads might actually be in its best interest. Despite getting all of its revenue from online advertising, wikiHow allows visitors to click a button to remove ads from the site. The company's co-founder Jack Herrick thinks letting users turn off ads is actually good for business. "We introduced opt out ads because it is something the community wanted and visitors love it," says Herrick. "The surprising thing is that letting people turn off ads has not hurt our revenues. If anything, treating users with respect was a contributing factor to why we saw more than