I'm surely not the first to notice this, but I saw MySpace video thumbnails in Google SERPs for the first time today: Looking around, G is pulling from multiple sources, including MetaCafe , CollegeHumor , and this example from Spike : A couple months ago, AccuraCast noticed two video results in a horizontal line, but in that sample, both videos were from Google-owned YouTube. This is the next logical step in the universality of Universal Search, so to speak.

I wanted to let everyone know how happy we are with a new addition to our staff. Angela Moore has joined us as Director of Link Development, a position that we built around her significant experience and skills. She'll be managing a team and will really broaden the scope of our link building services . We have already seen great things and expect that to continue. Here's the release . Angela is also a mod at SEW Forums and is already a veteran blogger ,

I talk a lot about crawling and indexing )to the point that we have a dedicated category (, but I think it's worthwhile to back up and describe some of what's going on. The terms crawling and indexing )and indexing's cousin, caching ( are frequently used together, but you should not consider them synonyms. Exact definitions probably differ from person to person,

In a post last night entitled " Improved Flash Indexing ," the Google Webmaster Tools blog reports that We've improved our ability to index textual content in SWF files of all kinds. This includes Flash "gadgets" such as buttons or menus, self-contained Flash websites, and everything in between. ... In addition to finding and indexing the textual content in Flash files, we're also discovering URLs that appear in Flash files,

Google's Prashanth Koppula wrote a ready-to-bookmark post over at the official Webmaster Tools blog, showing tons of different robots-exclusion protocol )REP( directives that can be implemented in various ways. Following is a listing of directives discussed and the methods of implementation: Directives for the robots.

Here's a quick case study in how social media sites )more important, the conversations going on at social media sites( are enabling companies to interact with and respond to their users. Here's the rough chronology. I may have missed some letters in the middle, but points A and Z are pretty accurate. Melissa Chang runs a blog on her own domain, using the Tumblr platform. )For the uninitiated, Tumblr is roughly similar to Blogger or Wordpress,

In 2005 )as reported by Search Engine Journal (, Google applied for a patent called " Results based personalization of advertisements in a search engine ." Part of the patent abstract reads as follows: The search results are personalized based on a user profile of the user providing the query. The user profile describes interests of the user, and can be derived from a variety of sources, including prior search queries , prior search results, expressed interests, demographic,

A little over a month ago, I wrote about Google showing robots-excluded URLs as Sitelinks . Here's a shot of what Google showed for the query [seo speedwagon] in mid-March: The ip login link was )and is( excluded via robots.txt. A month prior )in February(, a link to one of our monthly archives - a page with the robots "noindex" meta tag - appeared as a Sitelink also. Since then, the SERP has been cleaned up. I use the passive voice because I don't exactly know who to thank.

Good article in Computerworld this week called Life After Page Views: Web Analytics 2.0. To sum up, the page view has been tossed into the Pythonesque "bring out your dead" cart by a lot of people, including me, in an article I wrote at ClickZ a year ago : Page views have long been one of the Web's most reliable measurements. But because of technologies like AJAX, Flash, and RSS,

I haven't seen this anywhere except ClickZ and I thought you might be interested. As of last Thursday, Steve Berkowitz, the SVP of Microsoft's Online Services Group, is out. He'll be staying through August " to ensure a smooth transition ." In the big picture, two years doesn't seem like quite enough time to have turned the MSN Search ocean liner around, despite the fact that Berkowitz is credited with Ask's financial turnaround during his tenure there.

This isn't breaking news, but in their recent versions, both Netflix and iTunes have integrated some very smart internal search utilities into their systems. They're using a type of search function that goes by several different names, including "predictive," "intuitive," or "suggestive" to offer users additional help during the internal search process. Here's an example of Netflix's system in action: The Netflix system appears to list terms in alphabetical order,