New Study: Newspaper Website Users 50% More Likely than Non-Users to Be Influencers

Via Marketing Charts, a new study (pdf) indicating that people who read newspapers online are far more likely to share the information they read with other people. They define “influencers” as people who share their opinions in at least three different ways.

They are also more confident that their opinions resonate with peers.

For the purposes of this study, they define “influencers” as people who share their opinions in three or more ways.

Cuil = Not Cool

I mentioned Cuil the other day, the new search engine promising to compete with Google. Though Cuil has been praised for their impressive privacy policy, they’ve been widely criticized for their quality of service. The most common complaints so far are downtime, inaccurate and incomplete search results, and the fact that images displayed with search results are often not related whatsoever. Here are a few of the biggest gaffes I’ve seen so far.

1. A search for “The Hatcher Group” brings up our website, but it displays an image for another organization.

2. Searches for the well known programming language COBOL and the even more well known continent South America return exactly zero results.

3. Although they claim to index over 120,000,000 websites, they seem to have forgotten one.

Want more proof that Google will remain the king of search? They indexed a Reddit.com thread about Cuil’s shortcomings within a few hours. Well done, Google.

What else have you seen on Cuil? Let us know in the comment section.

The Value of Backlinks, The Changing Newsroom and the Google Keyword Tool

Ever wondered how Google came up with its formula for ranking websites? Here is the original paper Sergey Brin and Larry Page wrote at Stanford to introduce the idea.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism has released an excellent new report entitled, The Changing Newsroom.

Meet the American daily newspaper of 2008.

It has fewer pages than three years ago, the paper stock is thinner, and the stories are shorter. There is less foreign and national news, less space devoted to science, the arts, features and a range of specialized subjects. Business coverage is either packaged in an increasingly thin stand-alone section or collapsed into another part of the paper. The crossword puzzle has shrunk, the TV listings and stock tables may have disappeared, but coverage of some local issues has strengthened and investigative reporting remains highly valued.

Linda Bustos has some great tips for using the new Google Keyword tool.

Cuil Enters the Search Market, the Digg Merger, Multiple Word Order Search Phrases

A former Google employee is launching a new search engine called Cuil, pronounced “cool”.

On Monday, their company, Cuil, is unveiling a search engine that they promise will be more comprehensive than Google’s and that they hope will give its users more relevant results.

“I think it will be better,” Costello said in an interview. “But there is no question that the public has to decide.”

The much anticipated deal between Google and Digg fell through over the weekend. Here is a good roundup of what folks are saying about it.

SEOmoz has step-by-step instructions for multiple word order search phrases. For example, you could optimize for both “California tax policy” and “tax policy, California”, or any other combination of those words. This is useful since different ordering of keywords in search phrases can provide different results.

Reading anything interesting today?

Driving Traffic to Statewide Environmental Websites