Yahoo Travel keeps Kelkoo as Provider in the UK

We've read about FaceChase being adopted by Yahoo Travel today and kicking Travelocity into touch for now.

That's the American news. Here in the UK Yahoo Travel's search is still routed straight into Kelkoo results. There's still a lot of catching up to do but at least Yahoo is keeping it in the family.

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Matt Brittin joins Google from Trinity Mirror

As the Guardian says:

His role will be UK-specific, working alongside Mark Howe, who is the UK director of sales focusing on agencies.

Google UK counts "agencies" as a vertical. When you visit you'll find Account Managers who specialise in the likes of Travel or Finance or... Agencies. Mr Brittin is coming in to oversee relationships with advertisers. I suspect this will be larger firms who come to Google directly.

Matt Brittin has come from Trinity Mirror where he was the the Directory of Strategy and Digital. The funny thing about Trinity Mirror is that I always associate them with the icNetwork because of a fairly aggressive sales call I was once ambushed with. Despite explaining again and again that we didn't buy links because we felt it was neither ethical nor in the best long term interest of clients it was one of those calls that would not finish. I need to have two phone manners; one for clients and one for everyone else.

The links there come from the bottom of icWales's homepage. Some links go to partner sites (also within Trinity Mirror) like AdZooks and other links point to competitor sites for Trinity Mirror properties.

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Google Finance to Google Flights

Money vertical searchers/aggregators like moneynet and even news-profit-through-money-search sites like the famous Motley Fool will be breathing a sigh of relief this week.

Google Finance is not a threat to them. This is not a new money aggregrator but instead more of a FT style summary of big businesses around the world. Yeah; it has the usual American bias but there is Google Finance UK too. In other words, you can't search Google Finance for a mortgage for yourself or a new credit card. Why not? This requires the user to tailor the search with some pretty specific information - the mortgage you're after, your salary, whether you're applying alone or with a partner, your partners salary, etc. These details tend to then query databases directly. This is not Google's style. Google tends not to plug into other data sources as directly preferring to take the information off web pages (one exception being the flight onebox which may be powered thusly). After all, reading web is what Google does best.

Instead we have reports for large companies. The system nearly works. If I search for BA I do not get to the British Airways (BA) summary but to Boeing's instead. Why? Boeing has the BA stock ticker. I get Boeing even if I search Google Finance on .co.uk and even though the company trades on the New York Stock Exchange rather than the London Stock Exchange. The American wing of BA trades on the NYSE with the ticker BAB and so we find the profile under BAB.

Perhaps www.google.co.uk/finance should simply redirect to www.google.com/finance. It would seem to be more appropriate.

Well done to the news sites - especially Reuters - which power so much of the content. There are some interesting links in there though. While checking out BA I could but not help notice the links to CheapFlights. CheapFlights isn't a news source, it's a very commercial and very SEO savvy flight vertical search. Is this fair? ... Actually, it seems to be simply because you can find the very same story in Google News. Whether CheapFlights should be in Google News is another matter but it gives the rest of us reason to keep trying.



Other aspects of Google Finance are very search geeky. Google blocks spider access to these pages via its main robots.txt. This means those links to the news and finance sites are not PageRank carrying. The AJAX is slightly off Google's norm insofar as that the event driven text is SEO and accessibility friendly (rather than being produced by JavaScript). Since the page is blocked to spiders the SEO benefits of the style are pointless but it's good to see Google make another stab at accessibility.

In summary - I can see why Jeremy Zawodny is disappointed that Yahoo didn't make more effort on their own Yahoo Finance. Google Finance is niche but good.

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