In that vein, we have recently added two new features over the last few weeks, both of which deserve a look-see: Topic pages and job listings.

The first is our attempt to offer a new and easier way for the ATD audience to navigate specific information, by gathering in one place a selection of blogs, columns, videos and photos on the site, all related to a single popular topic, all without requiring a user to search via keywords.

The variety of our topic pages will grow over time. But right now we have special pages for the Apple (AAPL) iPhone 3GS, the Palm (PALM) Pre, the new Bing search service from Microsoft (MSFT) and news from Apple’s recent Worldwide Developers Conference.

Secondly, we’ve partnered with Simply Hired to offer paid job listings on AllThingsD.com, right from the front page. Starting this week, you’ll find Simply Hired widgets with current job opportunities on pages across our site, including here.

Recruiters can post jobs directly to the ATD jobs page, and these listings are also distributed to more than 5,000 partner sites in Simply Hired’s network, including GigaOM, Mashable and WashingtonPost.com.

(Full disclosure: Simply Hired, which is based in Mountain View, Calif., has raised some of its funding from the News Corp. (NWS) digital unit, Fox Interactive Media. News Corp. also owns Dow Jones, which owns this site.)

My story about EMI’s lawsuit against Web music start-up Grooveshark elicited this email from Ben Patterson, who runs indie Web music distributor DashGo, about his experience with the service.

I think Patterson’s remarks are useful because they spell out Grooveshark’s business plan, or at least part of it: Charge labels to promote their acts on the service’s search engine. And I think it’s also helpful to hear an obvious but little-voiced argument about the “free Web music = valuable promotion” thesis: It works best when the act or label is playing along. With Ben’s permission, I’m publishing his entire email.

I’ll caveat this by saying they are nice guys and big music fans and I’m always rooting for new music services that work for bands and music fans alike.

Back in 2007 DashGo signed a deal with Grooveshark that basically amounted to a digital download service delivered via P2P. Users who used Grooveshark’s P2P service to search for songs would be presented with a download / buy link and the revenue would be split between fan hosting the file, Grooveshark and the band.

A couple months later we got a nice packet–a t-shirt, letter and wax-sealed, yes, wax-sealed, envelope with a check for $0.59 in royalties. (Coconut Records “West Coast” I think)

Then I didn’t hear much for 6 months. No checks, no real action. At the end of 2008, they reached out and told me about their new music search engine at listen.grooveshark.com–basically Seeqpod / Songza / all other stream song aggregators…not what we licensed for, but not egregious enough to get huffy.

Of course, that was before they offered to sell me advertising for my bands as the default search keyword. For $0.05 per search, I could make the default phrase “DashGo Band Name” instead of “Search here.” I had to ask–am I getting paid per play? No of course not. Because “[they] are not profitable and can’t afford to share that advertising revenue.” So I’m paying, not even for a play, but for a search term on a service where they have users and can sell ads ONLY because people can listen to music, and because it’s free, what incentive is there EVER to buy the song?

So we don’t deliver there anymore.

I’ll tell you why all these free streaming music services are broken–because they rely on music advertising to pay the rent but give away the advertisers product. If I got free McDonald’s and Budweiser by watching the Super Bowl, why would I buy the food? As an advertiser, why would I pay a CPC to advertise streaming music and promote listens when the per stream rate a existing subscription services is AT BEST $0.02 per play?

It sucks to get sued. I’m sorry Grooveshark, but really..what did you expect? You’re soliciting labels and bands to pay your bandwidth, rent and operating costs and giving away the product.

While I’ve got this soapbox out, let me preach one more gospel; offering free music accessible via a search engine is NOT promotional if the band hasn’t opted in.

If a user SEARCHES for the music and listens to it for free in an environment where someone ELSE has posted the music and the band doesn’t have the option to ask for an email address or even pitch a tour or merch or actual album; then the service is just ripping off the band by giving free content to someone who asked for it–not promoting it to a new fan or adding a filter that helps expose and distinguish music.

[Image credit: Mrs. Logic]

With help from advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi, the car maker is working with Dictionary.com for ads targeted to the definitions of words such as “sustainability,” “green” and “moonroof.” Those keyword-based ads launched last week, but Prius also took over the online dictionary’s home page Wednesday and Thursday, with another two-day takeover planned for July. Dictionary.com has also included Prius ads in its word-of-the-day emails, which reach 1.3 million subscribers.

Doug Frisbie, Toyota’s national media manager, said the company was active with search engines before (and this campaign ties with partnerships with MSN (MSFT) and Yahoo (YHOO), as well), but never before a dictionary site.

The objective of the Prius campaign is to integrate the ads with Dictionary.com content — to “enhance, rather than interrupt,” he said.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Gabriel Stricker, Google’s Director of Search Communications kicks things off by noting that the company will be sharing a number of new developments that cater to the growing demands of its users. With that, Udi Manber takes the stage to offer a big-picture overview of search.

Manber says what Google does is the new “rocket science.” Search has to be fast, relevant, and fresh, he explains. But even that’s not enough. The real goal is to solve users’ problems. If users can’t spell, it’s our problem. If the content is there but in a language the user doesn’t speak, that’s our problem. If the Web is too slow, it’s our problem. Manber offers a few examples of how Google works to address these challenges: real-time data, translation, etc. With these services nailed down, he says, Google can move on to the more important task of working on “understanding.”

Manber invites Pat Riley, senior search quality engineer, to the stage to talk a bit about Google’s “did you mean” link. Lots of people use the link, Riley says, and Google has been working to improve it. Called “spellmillion,” the project provides not only related results for a misspelled query but for alternate ones as well (think labor as in “work” and labor as in “pregnancy”). But it requires Google to process multiple searches for a single query and demands a lot of processing power.

Riley notes that the project has been somewhat contentious because it also potentially questions user intent. He offers the example of “Macy Ray.” Some users might be searching for “Macy Gray,” the singer, others for a person actually named “Macy Ray.” How do you address those two potential queries on a single search results page?

Riley is followed by Engineering Director Scott Huffman, whose subject is mobile search. Huffman starts things off with a few truisms. Mobile search is often local. It should be easy to use. Effortless. And it should provide all that Google has to offer. Huffman notes that this is quite a task since Google must optimize its search for different mobile experiences and different user interfaces: Google’s own Android, Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone, etc. Some of these platforms require gestures–touch, swipe–others use a keypad. All must provide access to the Web and the mobile Web–sites that have been optimized for mobile devices. On the screen behind him, Huffman displays an example of Google search that displays desktop Web results and mobile Web results, the latter denoted by a red square.

Mobile search must also be easy. Huffman demos a shared desktop-mobile search for a flight number. Since he’s logged into his Google account, his search for “ba 284? SF-London on the desktop is immediately shared with the Google app on his mobile device. An unreleased feature, but it’s on its way. A quick look at local listings automatically delivered to devices on the basis on GPS/cell tower location, and then Huffman brings Mayer on stage.

Mayer talks a bit about universal search before moving on to Google’s “bento box” of search results. She talks about Google’s focus on the importance of presentation and its efforts to make search results more usable for the user. An example of this SearchWiki, a tool that allows users to annotate their searches, to “keep their train of thought,” says Mayer. We need to help our users find more and do more with it, she says, noting that the company is still working to address some longstanding user problems:

• Finding recent information
• Expressing that you want just one type of result
• Assessing which results are best
• Knowing what you’re looking for
• Expressing your searches in keywords

Mayer introduces Google Search Options, a feature that appends a search option panel to results, allowing users to “slice and dice” the results as they choose. A demo of the feature, in a search for “Hubble Telescope,” allows for search calibration by time, pages that include images, etc. Another search for “solar oven” is filtered down to specific genres–videos, discussion forums, reviews. Click on those links and that new search context is immediately displayed on the page.

Interestingly, the reviews feature uses something called “sentiment analysis” to extract sentiments from a review and present them in displayed snippets.

Search Options also includes a timeline feature that allows users to visualize results over time. And there’s something called “Wonder Wheel,” which presents a visual representation of a query surrounded by potential refinements (hence “Wonder Wheel”). Click on a refinement and results update automatically. Search Options should be going live now, says Mayer.

A bit of geometry monomania here today at Google Searchology. First the Wonder Wheel and now “Google Squared,” a sort of spreadsheet visualization of search being cooked up in Google Labs. Unstructured data pulled directly from search and organized according to the whim of the user. A search for “small dogs” pulls up a lists of–wonder of wonders–small dogs organized by size, weight, breed, etc. Click on an individual cell and you can change its source. Pretty slick. Still a work in progress, though. It should be available later this month, Mayer says during the Q&A.

Another new feature: Rich Snippets. A search for “drooling dog BBQ” returns your standard Google results along with a list of metadata–average user reviews, for example. A search for a GPS system includes an additional pointer to a recent CNET review of the unit in question. Rich Snippets is open API, incidentally.

Last up, an Android star map app that uses GPS to create a star map “local to your place on earth” and to your position. Move the phone and the map adjusts to your view–essentially the app transforms the device into map overlay for the sky. And how does this tie into search? Search for “Gemini” and a sort of pointer appears onscreen directing you to its location in the sky. And with that, Mayer wraps things up.

And Twitter search is indeed a powerful tool, which is why I use it as my homepage. But at the risk of being obvious, let’s spell out exactly what Twitter search does: It lets you track, in real-time, what people are talking about… on Twitter.

Which means that as fast as Twitter has been growing in the last year, it’s going to need to get much, much bigger before it gives you a real sense of what people are interested in on the Web. Right now, searching Twitter just gives you a sense of what a relatively small, self-selecting group of people are interested in.

Today’s example: The Amazon (AMZN) “glitch” story, which surfaced yesterday and been the top “trending” story on Twitter for the past 24 hours or so.

It’s of enormous interest to Twitter users, who sound off on the topic, using the keyword “amazonfail,” every couple of seconds. Outside of the Twitter hothouse, though, it’s not making much of a sound.

Last night, “Amazon rank” and “amazonfail” showed up at 14 and 38, respectively, on the Google Trends Top 100 list. But by this morning there was no trace of the story on the tracking tool.

Granted, this isn’t exactly apples and apples: Twitter is supposedly showing you what people are writing about, and Google (GOOG) shows you what they’re searching for. And Google’s own view of the Web is skewed, since it only values what people are searching for and linking to, not what they’re actually doing. But if Twitter was truly representative of the Web, you’d expect at least some overlap.

Could it get there someday? Conceivably. Twitter has a powerful hockey stick growth chart, and the four million U.S. users that comScore (SCOR) counted in February are almost certainly a low-ball guesstimate. More important, it’s up 1,000 percent from the year before. But that four million–or call it eight million, for argument’s sake–is still a footnote compared to Google’s 148.9 million during the same period.

If Twitter really does become both a commonplace verb and an activity–something average computer users do several times a day in the same way they use Web search–then the numbers above don’t matter, because Twitter will get there soon enough. But my hunch is that Twitter is going to permanently appeal to subset of the Web’s population (which includes professional self-promoters like me).

Which means that Twitter search will remain a niche product too. Valuable enough, particularly for brands that need to know what voluble people are saying about them. But hard to argue that it’s a must-have acquisition at any price. Or at least at the numbers that are floating around right now.

[Image credit: bosslyn]

Last fall, a small but vocal group of Twitterers managed to shame Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) into apologizing for one of its Motrin ads.

This weekend’s replay: a howl of outrage, amplified and directed via Twitter at Amazon (AMZN), which may or may not have instituted a boneheaded policy  regarding “adult” books on its site. Or “adult” books aimed at gay and lesbian readers. Or something.

What happened? It’s not clear. But search for “#amazonfail” on Twitter and you’ll find that many Twitterers believe that Amazon has stripped the sales rankings from all manner of books that deal with gay and lesbian, and/or “adult” topics, making them less likely to appear on the site. In essence, the Twittersphere charges Amazon with trying to hide material it finds distasteful or that it thinks some customers will find distasteful.

Example: Amazon’s listing for Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain” doesn’t have a sales rank. But the author’s newest book does have one.

From what I can tell, the meme started up on Saturday, but didn’t start building steam until Sunday afternoon, when I noticed mild-mannered types like New Yorker writer Susan Orlean railing about Amazon on Twitter.

And it’s still going. As I type this, after 10 p.m. Eastern on Sunday night, the “amazonfail” keyword is generating a dozen hits on Twitter’s search page every couple of seconds.

Amazon hasn’t helped its case by remaining more or less mute throughout the weekend. But, by Sunday evening, the retailer had issued the same line to me and several other reporters: “We recently discovered a glitch to our Amazon sales rank feature that is in the process of being fixed. We’re working to correct the problem as quickly as possible.”

Not a terribly illuminating response, and I’ve asked for more information. But no matter what really happened, Amazon now has a real problem on its hands: A vocal group of people believe the retailer has discriminated in some way against gays and lesbians.

When Johnson & Johnson got caught in the Twitterstorm last fall, it had a relatively easy way out: A profuse apology to people it had offended. But Motrin has a very specific customer base and Amazon has a much broader one, and anything it says or does regarding gays, lesbians and “adult” material of any stripe is bound to upset some people.

But the company should do the right thing and clear the air anyway.

UPDATE: Here’s an apology from Amazon, which doesn’t really explain what happened, but says the problem didn’t just affect books aimed at gays and lesbians.

To clear things up, I’ve put together a basic Twitter guide that explains how to use it, Twitter lingo, privacy options, mobile applications that can be used with the service and problems that it has. Let’s get started.

Twitter limits social-networking updates to 140 characters or less. The service is surprisingly useful, but leaves room for improvement.

What is it? In short, Twitter is a free social-networking tool that keeps people connected with one another and with sources of information. Twitter users submit updates about whatever they’re currently doing, and these updates cannot exceed 140 text-based characters.

Lingo: Twitter is the name of the service. The term twittering describes the activity of updating a Twitter account. A tweet is an individual Twitter update. Twitterers are people who use the service.

Followers, not Friends: Social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace use the term “friend” to refer to people who are connected with one another, but Twitterers can simply follow one another’s messages by finding a person’s username and selecting a “Follow” option. This alerts the person that you’re following them, and they can reciprocally choose to follow you, or not.

Why use it? While some people primarily use Twitter to post updates about their activities or comments on the news, I use the service more as a follower, allowing me to see quick snippets of news as it occurs. Most tweets are written by real people, while others, such as updates from news organizations that you’ve selected, are automatically generated. Many tweets include the addresses of Web sites with relevant articles that tell readers more on a topic.

Where is it? Twitter works on your Web browser at Twitter.com, where user updates appear in a simple list form as they are submitted. After you’ve signed up and started following other people, those people’s updates, or tweets, will appear when you log onto Twitter.com using a username and password.

Twitter also works on mobile phones, where the 140-character limit allows messages to be sent and received via SMS text messaging. Tweets can also be sent and received via email. Users with smartphones like BlackBerrys or iPhones can use one of the many popular mobile applications for accessing Twitter, which offer much richer options than simple SMS does; I’ll get into these later.

Privacy: Unlike other social-networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter isn’t focused on holding and sharing personal information about its members. Indeed, the service operates with a majority (80%, according to the company) of users opting to keep their updates public, that is, follow-able by anyone, without permission. This openness encourages people to follow one another or to see who others are already following, and then follow the same people.

However, users can opt to protect their updates, meaning they must grant permission for others to follow them. If you’d like to sign up for Twitter, but aren’t comfortable putting your first and/or last name on the site, you don’t have to; instead, just tell others your username.

Twitter Page Personalization: Each user has a Twitter page showing all of his or her updates, or tweets. (Mine is twitter.com/kabster728, and you can follow me.) This page also shows the number of people a user follows, how many people follow her and how many total updates she has posted.

Twitterers can customize their Twitter page by uploading a photo to be used as the background. The icon representing each user can also be personalized, and this is important because it appears beside that person’s tweets on Twitter.com, where followers recognize and appreciate its familiarity. Some people, including me, use pictures of themselves as their icons, while others use random shots.

Apps/Clients: Twitter works on any browser, and will also work on a mobile browser. If you have a mobile device like the BlackBerry or iPhone, you can jazz up the experience by downloading a third-party app like TwitterFon, TwitterBerry, Tweetie or Twitteriffic. Twittervision, another mobile app, plots points on maps to show where tweets originated. Desktop clients also abound, including Twhirl and TweetDeck. Twitterfeed will set your blog to automatically post content to Twitter.

@Replies, Direct Messages: Each tweet that appears in your Twitter feed can be replied to using a shortcut arrow that appears beside the tweet, and these responses to tweets are called @Replies. So if JoeSchmo tweets to say he saw the new James Bond movie and hated it, you can reply to this with a tweet of your own that says, “@JoeSchmo I still adore Daniel Craig.” These @Replies appear for everyone to see, and must start with @ plus the username of whomever you’re responding to.

Direct Messages differ from @Replies because they can be sent only between people who are following one another. These messages aren’t posted publicly. They appear on your Twitter.com page in a right-side section labeled Direct Messages and will also be sent to your mobile device if you have one registered with Twitter.

Favorites: If you read a tweet that you really like, you can save it as a favorite by selecting a small star beside the tweet, thus adding it to a Favorites section on your homepage. Anyone can see anyone else’s Favorites, regardless of whether or not they’re following one another.

Problems: Twitter’s bare-bones approach gets to the point quickly, displaying tweets in a simple, quick-read format. But the site is lacking in many areas. It used to enable searching for people on Twitter, but that capability is currently down. Now, to search for friends on Twitter, you must upload your email contacts from a Web-based mail service. The company says it plans to have people-search working again by the end of the year. Meanwhile, search.twitter.com enables keyword or location searches.

Twitter lacks the ability to sort tweets according to what the user wants. If I just want to see tweets from real people and not those that are automatically generated, I’m out of luck. Same goes if I want to keep certain friends’ tweets in a prominent place on my homepage; Twitter has no way of doing this.

Twitter users aren’t notified when someone responds to their tweet with an @Reply. I recently happened to look at @Replies on my Twitter homepage and found three from people who follow me (I don’t follow them).

If you’re adding a Web address to a tweet and the characters in the URL take up too much space, Twitter will automatically use TinyURL behind the scenes to shrink your long link into a shorter one when you post your tweet. But this works only if you have enough remaining characters in your tweet to fit the long version of your link. A built-in TinyURL converter on the page would help immensely.

Twitter says it’s working to make @Replies more effective. It also says it plans to do more with filtering and sorting, so that the Twitter interface is more useful. In the meantime, Twitter does a good job of giving people simplified news about others and the world around them. If you’re often in a rush, Twitter can be a great resource for fast information.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

• Email us at mossbergsolution@wsj.com. Find this and other columns and videos online free at the All Things Digital Web site: http://walt.allthingsd.com

According to figures compiled by the Interactive Advertising Bureau, spending on Internet advertising in 2007 rose to $21.2 billion, up 26% from the prior year. That’s a record high and one that exceeds the $20.9 billion spent on print, radio, outdoor and cable TV.

Unsurprisingly, keyword search, Google’s (GOOG) cash-cow ranch, generated the most revenue and claimed the largest market share–41%. Display advertising followed with 34%, classifieds at 16%.

(Image Credit: Tyler Jordan, eVisibility Insider)

The collectibles retailer claims it paid Yahoo’s Search Marketing unit, formerly known as Overture Services, some $936,000 between 2002 and 2006 for click-throughs. It assumed these click-throughs were from legitimate customers, but it turned out they were generated by Yahoo/Overture affiliates who received commissions based on the number of clicks their sites generated for advertisers.

“These clicks were not actual traffic, but were fraudulent clicks,” BigReds claims in the suit. “Affiliates of Overture used software programs, employed people, and/or directed people other than actual customers to click on plaintiffs’ links from keyword search results.”

To be fair, Yahoo did offer BigReds a refund for the fraudulent clicks. It just wasn’t as large as the retailer had hoped–$17,082.80.