Heather Hopkins from Hitwise UK reports an interesting phenomena on Google’s book search. The company may have started to offer PDF versions of out-of-print books, a very encouraging move to be sure. But a significant proportion of users go from directly from book search to book shops. Heather reports: “Last week, 15.93% of downstream visits from Google Book Search UK …read the rest of this article

Stephen Taylor is the RVP and MD Search & Search Marketing at Yahoo! UK. Before Yahoo!, he was the MD of Overture Europe. I, on the other hand, am a little-known hack from South West London with a penchant for strong lager and pizzas. Stephen may also like those things.

How are the new changes to Yahoo’s homepage reflecting the mood …read the rest of this article

Marc Fawzi at Evolving Trends attacks the whole notion of the wisdom of crowds. It’s a development of the disappointing experience he had when digg suddenly made him the number one site on Wordpress for a short period, apparently on the basis that he had come up with a catchy headline. Marc’s issue with digg’s ability to discriminate the best …read the rest of this article

Anxious about the success of your blog? With my one regular reader (me), perhaps I ought to be. But it seems one secret of blog success is to wait around for a bit and soon your day will come. Tristan Louis has analysed the top 100 blogs listed at Technorati against the same list nine months earlier. The results are …read the rest of this article