THERE’S enough room for a vertical search engine for eBooks. The few out there are mostly amateur efforts by individuals. As of now, no big corporation has poured good money into developing one. And for a variety of reasons, including the litigation and uncertainties over Google’s book scanning project, the search engine giant has not gone all out into eBook search and incorporated it as a vertical, just like it has done for flights and hotels, after acquiring or cutting deals with sites offering vertical searches. As of now, Google Books is primarily a source for copyright-free eBooks, and Google Play books are restricted to the Android and iOS platforms.

But that could change in the foreseeable future. In the meanwhile, Amazon’s Kindle Store remains the most powerful eBook store for the simple reason that it stocks almost every eBook available. Not to forget its global reach. Though there are more eBook stores on the industry standard ePub platform, by its sheer heft in the market, Amazon with its Kindle eBooks packs a punch.
All ePub bookstores are search constrained
Barnes and Noble’s eBook store which stocks ePub books with DRM comes next. Kobo, eBookmall, diesel-eBooks, and ebooks.com are the other biggie eBook stores out there. From my experience, all of them have limitations in search. Discovering even eBooks which are available are often a problem. The stores reveal them only after repeated searches, enough to deter all but the most determined. Diesel and eBooks.com have particularly bad in-house search engines.

But by vertical search engine for eBooks, we are primarily referring to search engines specialized in retrieving information about eBooks from all major eBook stores. Basically, here customers are looking out for price comparison, details about formats and devices on which they’re available, etc. There are a handful, and as mentioned before, most of them are amateur efforts.

This post will restrict itself to listing them out. A fuller review of their strengths and weaknesses has to wait for a later post.

These are the eBook search engines which I have come across:

• ·         Inkmesh  http://inkmesh.com
  
• ·         AddAll Ebooks  http://ebooks.addall.com
  
• ·         Luzme: http://luzme.com
  
• ·         Leatherbound: http://leatherbound.me/
  

In the next post, I will analyze their pluses and minuses.

THE past year was a tough one for SEO practitioners with Google drastically curtailing information on the keywords used to access websites made available through Google Analytics.
Keywords are still available for AdWords users through the Keyword Planner as well as for Webmasters through the Google Webmaster Tools, but the quality of the keywords returned are not comparable with those returned by Google Analytics. SEO practitioners will surely perfect workarounds to tide over the situation. But what's not discussed much is that the move could end up benefiting internet analytics companies like Hitwise, Comscore, Compete, Quantcast, etc.
The competitive analysis packages by these companies already cost an arm and a length. Now it looks like Google has indirectly made it more lucrative for them to charge for keywords too.
ISPs STILL PACK A PUNCH
Many people think that only search engines have access to the keywords used by searchers on the Web. But consumer connectivity to the Web is provided by the internet service providers (ISPs), and although they're now well past their heydays, the ISPs still pack a punch when it comes to accessing user search data.
Hitwise Global research head Bill Tancer has revealed how the process works through his book Click. He says the company collects search data on 10 million-plus users in the US alone. The company collects it from both ISPs as well as opt-in panels. The break-up is 7.5 million-plus from multiple ISPs across the country, and the remaining from opt-in panels. Opt-in panels are groups of internet users who have agreed to be monitored, and whose demographic details are made available to analytics companies, all for a price.
ISP and opt-in data about usage are updated every day. Search-term data is updated on a weekly basis. Tancer claims data privacy is protected by anonymizing and aggregating data, and by scrubbing search data terms off personally identifiable information. After Edward Snowden’s revelations, all such assurances have to be viewed skeptically.
So with internet analytics companies having access to search data in such a comprehensive manner, surely they have the wherewithal to step in and provide commercial solutions to any dearth of keyword data on account of Google's shift in policy?
Let's wait and see as to who will be the ultimate beneficiaries of Google's move. Will it be rival search engines like Bing? Or will it be these internet analytics companies?

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Most SEO agencies now offer Online Reputation Management services. The connection is not immediately obvious. But if you understand Online Reputation Management to be all about burying negative references about you or your business in the 10th page of a SERP, you've got it nailed! Who else is better qualified to do that than an SEO professional!! 
But Online Reputation Management is not merely about removing or burying negative references. Considering the proliferation of professionals who are attempting to do just that, the time has come to provide a more inclusive picture. To start with, for individuals or businesses to lose reputation, they need to possess reputation in the first place! This is why it has become crucial for companies as well as individuals to ensure that they distinctly stand for something unique. 
It's possible to be cynical about the whole personal branding industry, which took off in the wake of a seminal article by Tom Peters in Fast Company magazine in 1997, but one can be at peace if it's understood as nothing more fancy than individuals taking care to ensure that they're perceived for what they really stand for. So if you know who's the authentic you and what is it that you represent, you can pay attention to all the components _ your gait, your talk, your personal bearing _ which go into making others understand you. This requires some discipline. And in reality, it's much different than the popular impression that personal branding is all about pretending to be someone you're not.
For companies as well as brands, this is all the more important. Only if a brand is known to stand for something authentic, can it make that connection which creates loyal followers. And if a brand has that emotional connect with its loyal customers, then it becomes easier for it to draw support when it's facing a threat to its reputation. So online or offline, reputation has to exist first for it to be salvaged when faced with a threat. Therefore, to understand reputation management merely as a firefighting to be done in emergencies is totally misleading. To gain a deeper understanding of the subject, we've to do an overview of the theory of reputation as understood by economists. I hope to take up that soon. Once that's done, I will take up the mechanisms through which reputation is nurtured in the first place, and then consider the tools available for a professional to confront the assaults on reputation.
e.o.m.

Google is believed to change its search algorithm 500-600 times every year. These are mostly minor tweaks. But every few months, the search giant rolls out a major algorithmic change which impacts the manner in which it searches the web. These changes can drive a flood of new
traffic to websites, or alternately relegate them to the equivalent of cyber Siberia.
Examples are numerous. Technorati, the blog search engine whose ranking has taken a hit on several occasions, and Answers.com, the knowledge exchange which once forfeited on a planned
acquisition after its stock tanked following a Google algorithm change in 2007,
comes to mind immediately. Still others have been punished for running afoul of
Google's webmaster guidelines. Retail giant JC Penney's website (jcpenney.com),
along with its SEO agency Searchdex, were outed after a New York Times expose in
early 2011 for buying links. Some years ago, the German site of automobile giant
BMW (BMW.de) had been erased from the Google index for creating doorway pages. 
 Another retailer, Overstock, was penalised in 2011 for benefiting from giving discounts to students linking in from prestigious .edu domains. Last year, SEO company iAcquire.com was briefly taken off Google's index after complaints about providing paid links to its
client Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corp. The penalties imposed on SEO agencies by way of loss of prestige after being outed, or the even severe banishment from  Google's index, are pointers to the risky nature of the business. Clients are often able to wash their hands of any responsibility by channeling all blame to the SEO agency.
In the case of Dun and Bradstreet Credibility Corp at least, its top leadership, starting from CEO Jeffrey Stibel, has serious internet marketing chops, and cannot escape some responsibility for not closely monitoring the actions of its SEO agency. As Stibel himself puts it in his book Wired for Thought in a passage mentioning the woes of Answers.com: "This happened to no small degree
because Answers.com did not understand the internet as well as it thought __ and certainly it didn't understand the brain. It built its castle on the confidence that it could trick Google's algorithms. And for a while, it did..." Prophetic words indeed!
SEO practitioners function in  a pressure cooker like situation. On the one hand, there's the constant demand to prove that they are indeed providing value to customers and are not, as many allege, peddling snake oil. On the other hand is the severe pressure from clients who want to occupy prime real estate in the SERP for keywords of their choice.
This pressure is in direct proportion to the growing importance of online transactions. Global eCommerce sales have topped the $1-trillion mark for the first time in 2012, growing at a
healthy 21% over the previous year, according to eMarketer. They are poised to grow at a steady pace this year, which means the pressure on SEO agencies to provide the magic recipe for higher listings in organic search is bound to increase.  
The stakes are indeed high. Not surprisingly, some very smart people and heavy duty machines are at work, parsing the search giant's algorithm to discover loopholes. SEO practitioners who discover such loopholes quickly monetize it, and when word gets around about their success, they face a deluge of eager beaver clients only too happy to sign on. It's easy to refer to such strategies as 'black hat optimization',  the dark art of raising the profile of a Web site with methods that Google considers tantamount to cheating. But these are indeed gray areas so long as the strategy adopted does not explicitly run afoul of Google's guidelines.
Let's take the case of the Overstock penalty. The company has a legitimate right to provide discounts to select  customers. And strictly speaking, it was indeed not paying websites to provide
inbound links. It just asked college and university websites to make anchor text out of keywords like 'bunk beds' or 'gift baskets' in links to Overstock product pages in exchange for 10% discount on merchandise. The SEO agency which worked out this arrangement by exploiting the high PageRank enjoyed by University sites (Cornell 9; Harvard, UPenn, Princeton, Columbia, Yale, Brown 8 each) may have considered it a genuine strategy. 
But Google thought otherwise. And Google is always right!
Good SEO professionals study the  art day in and day out, and perfect very precise techniques to raise the  organic search rankings of their client websites.  Since there's a premium on such techniques, such maestros keep them very close to their chest for the benefit of only their high paying clients. The nature of the beast is such that the most widely known SEO thought leaders may not be the ones delivering the most value for their clients. This is an important factor to be considered by anyone who is out looking for an agency to recruit.
e.o.m.