OK, back to the reason for this post. I’ve read about widget ads from Google on Search Engine Land but haven’t see one that I can remember. See the example to the left for the ad from Rail Europe that showed up on a YouTube channel I was watching. So I was able to click through to Rail Europe but when I tried to fill out the form on the ad with London to Paris to find a fare the form went black. The spooky thing about this ad is that I’ve actually been considering a trip to Europe to attend the Future of Web Design Conference.  And I’ve been to Rail Europe in the last 30 days to check how much it would be to take the tube over to Paris. Hmmm.. I wonder if my search behavior pulled this ad specifically for me???

I was looking for the Emarketed Facebook fan page to post the URL from the last blog I wrote and since to my knowledge there’s no easy way to find the fan page I had to do a search for “emarketed” in the search bar at the top while logged on in Facebook and got the below results from Bing at the bottom of the page. You then have the option of viewing more web results from Bing which I did and found some interesting results where we were coming up… 500 pages to be exact which were links from sites we’ve designed over the years, different social media sites we’re on, and more! I went through about 100 of these and found some interesting links. Found a college site that used one of the sites we designed and listed us as a reference for the information.  Found us mentioned on several employee web pages listed as a reference, current and past employees. Also found one of our clients site that was copied and uploaded to a new domain. The site isn’t functioning properly but I’ll have to let our client know. Interesting stuff! I only made it through 100 results but might do some further digging to see where our name is being used.

I’ll have to do another blog post on monitoring your company name/brand soon!  We’re currently doing this through Google Alerts but we haven’t been notified of all the ones I just found so I’ll have to look for a more extensive service. One service we’re testing out now is called Trackur. I recently met the founder, Andy Beal, of Trackur at the most recent SES in Chicago and he upgraded my account to a higher level so I can test it out. Thanks Andy! I’m sure his program Trackur will be tracking this blog post. Lets put his program to a test and see if he reads this blog post. (Andy, Please add a comment if you happen to find this blog post – i’m putting your program to the test since I’m sure you’re tracking your name and/or your company name! – Thanks, Matt) I need to get on this and start tracking our name more extensively! I’ll post a review of Trackur after we’ve used it for a month or so.

So I know what you’re thinking. What if I don’t have a Yahoo account. Well I just did another search which is also below after I signed out of my Yahoo account and sure enough they’re also tracking the IP since they new the search was happening in Los Angeles. The IP however is not as accurate as my zip code since the first search result pulled up dentists that were closer. I’m sure Google and Bing will follow suit now!

Make sure and check out the original blog post by Matt McGee that talks about the Yahoo local results.

So I assume some others will post on this subject matter later today. I’ll post some recaps later. I don’t personally mind the short little text ads that Google’s placing on the home page. It is a form of advertising and I wonder what type of deal Virgin and Google worked out to get this in place. I didn’t see any direct links to Virgin from the pages explaining the deal so they might of done this intentionally since there was some uproar in the community about the link over to Verizon on the droid announcement. My only concern about this is that Google would start opening this up to others and start cluttering up the home page. People have come to appreciate the clutter free search page! Lets keep it this way Google!!