Eighteen months after being indicted by a federal court, one of a group of seven Romanian citizens pleaded guilty to involvement with phishing bank details from people.

Romanian Pleads Guilty In US Phishing Case

Ovidiu-Ionut Nicola-Roman admitted to one count of conspiracy to commit fraud in connection with access devices in US District Court in Connecticut, the US Attorney’s Office for the state said.

Nicola-Roman and six other Romanians had been indicted in January 2007 for their roles in a phishing scheme that sought banking information from victims. The group compromised a computer in Minnesota and published a fake site for Connecticut-based People’s Bank.

The group also took on numerous other financial targets. Those institutions included Citibank, Capital One, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Comerica Bank, Wells Fargo & Co., eBay and PayPal.

One unnamed bank claimed losses of $150,000 from the phishing scheme. Nicola-Roman faces up to five years and a $250,000 fine for his role in the program.

Such news comes as major web-based email providers like Google and Yahoo make gains by supporting DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) to identify and weed out emails coming from domains other than the one they pretend to be. Broader adoption of DKIM may be what email needs these days.

More: continued here

Yahoo researcher Peter Mika has written up an extensive article on semantic search. First he talks about the limitations to syntax-based search:

• It is almost impossible to return search results that relate to the secondary sense of a term—especially if a dominant sense exists—for example, try searching for George Bush the beer brewer as compared to the President
• The capabilities of computational advertising, which is largely also an IR problem (for example, retrieving matching ads from a fixed inventory), are clearly impacted because of the sparsity of advertisements.
• When no clear key exists, search engines are unable to perform queries on descriptions of objects. For example, try searching for the author of this article with the keywords ‘semantic web researcher working for yahoo.’
• Current search technology is unable to satisfy any complex queries requiring information integration such as analysis, prediction, scheduling, etc. An example of such integration-based tasks is opinion mining regarding products or services. While there have been some successes in opinion mining with pure sentiment analysis, it is often the case that users like to know what specific aspects of a product or service are being described in positive or negative terms and to have the search results appear aggregated and organized. Information integration is not possible without structured representations of content.
• Multimedia queries are also difficult to answer, as multimedia objects are typically described with only a few keywords (tagging) or sentences. This is typically too little text for the statistical methods of IR to be effective.

Mika says there are two approaches to semantic search: Natural Language Processing (NLP) and the Semantic Web.

Natural Language Processing “builds on the automatic analysis of text.” Semantic search company hakia is an example of natural language processing. Interestingly, hakia uses Yahoo search technology, including the recently announced Yahoo’s BOSS (Build Your own Search Service). Powerset, which was recently acquired by Microsoft, is another example of NLP. These NLP semantic search providers “extract entities from text, disambiguate them against large-scale background knowledge sources (PowerSet uses Freebase, Hakia has its own ontology), and then record the relationships as found in the text.” Users can query by asking full questions, though many still use keywords.

Semantic Web “aims to make the web more easily searchable by allowing publishers to expose their metadata.” Mika says most publishers are willing to share their data if it results in increased traffic. Plus, semantic web allows publishers to avoid costs and quality issues associated with NLP. But last year, Yahoo researcher Mor Naaman declared the Semantic Web dead. Naaman’s reasoning was the limitation of microformats, but Mika says that the new RDFa standard would have greater capabilities.

What Mika wants to do is to integrate the best of NLP and semantic web. He says Yahoo’s SearchMonkey platform allows for this integration to occur.

To dig into all the technical nitty gritty, check out Mika’s full article, “Semantic Search Arrives at the Web.”

More: continued here

Are your landing page tests telling the whole story? In today’s By the Numbers column, “How Valid Are Your Landing Page Test Conclusions?,” Tim Ash talks about the care and feeding of landing page tests - and their results.

»Full story

More: continued here
Powered by SmartRSS

“Drive to search” campaigns are hot in Japan. In today’s Searching for Meaning column, “The Japanese Search, Why Don’t We?,” Kevin Ryan explains the trend and how you can implement similar techniques in your search marketing campaigns.

»Full story

More: continued here

PRWeek reports that a new study conducted by Burson-Marsteller has found that 15% of Fortune 500 companies communicate with consumers via blogs.

The survey, conducted in February and March this year, found that 74 Fortune 500 companies actively maintain blogs, many of them technology-related corporations. The top four industries with blogs were: Computers and Office Equipment (IBM, Dell, etc.); Network and Other Communications Equipment (Motorola, Lucent Technologies, etc.); Semiconductors and Other Electrical Components (Intel, AMD, etc.); and Internet Services and Retailing (Amazon, Google, etc.).

Of course, the next step is learning how to optimize your blog. For that, may I recommend that representatives of Fortune 500 companies attend the “SEO Through Blogs & Feeds” session on Wednesday, Aug. 20, at SES San Jose. The session will be moderated by Rebecca Lieb, Contributing Editor, ClickZ, and the speakers are:
* Chris Boggs, Search Engine Watch Expert & Manager, SEO, Brulant, Inc.
* Lee Odden, CEO, TopRank Online Marketing
* Amanda Watlington, Owner, Searching for Profit
* Daron Babin, CEO, Webmaster Radio

Check out the session to learn more about the unique advantages that optimized blogs and RSS feeds offer to companies large and small.

More: continued here

A few months ago we explained why Digg would be worth $200 million to Google.

Now it appears the rumor mill is reporting that Google will buy Digg for $200 million or so.

Rumor has it the two companies have signed a letter of intent and are close to a deal that will bring Digg under the Google News property.

Microsoft has an advertising deal with Digg so the deal would be a competitive blow to the Redmond giant.

This is the third time the buyout rumor has surfaced.

Is it “three strikes and you’re out” or the “third time’s the charm?”

Digg has yet to publicly disavow the rumor but it’s still early on the West Coast.

More: continued here

Tel Aviv-based search engine marketing platform provider, Kenshoo, has announced plans to open an office in the United States. The office will be located in San Francisco. Kenshoo has a European subsidiary in London as well.

Kenshoo provides a third generation SEM platform called KENSHOO SEARCH.

“We see North America as a key market and are very happy to hit the ground running. Following our plan, we have decided to take the needed step and establish a local company. This move will help us expand our already solid base of U.S. customers while improving our service.” said Yoav Izhar-Prato, CEO of Kenshoo.

Related Reading:
Online Advertising Shifting from Branding to Direct Response
Local Advertisers Shifting Dollars to Internet
Global Internet Ad Spend to Exceed $106 Billion by 2011
Online Ad Spend Intact Despite Weakening Economy

More: continued here

I know, whenever someone offers to pay you for surfing the web, searching or sending emails around you should be suspicious right? This morning I received an email from a friend inviting me for this new search engine called Scour, which promises to pay you for searching, commenting and voting on the results on their website. It got me curious so I went to check out.

More: continued here

Monday’s video post is up. On this one I did a quick SEO review of the factors that you need to have in place on single post pages.

More: continued here

There have been rumors for a while on the possible acquisition of Digg by the Mountain View behemoth. Yesterday TechCrunch reported that the negotiations should be on the final stage. The price tag is around $200 million, and Digg would be joining the Google News umbrella.

More: continued here