Google’s Custom Search Business Edition enables shopping cart and website owners, particularly small-to-medium sized enterprizes, to utilise google’s search technology.

The custom search engine will let visitors access search results from any website or websites that you, the Webmaster, chooses.

Starting at around $100/year, you can add Google search to index and search up to 5,000 pages on your website; $500 gets you up to 50,000.

Google’s Business Edition also gives you the ability to remove Google AdWords advertisements and change the colors of the results pages so it matches your shopping cart. You can also choose to feature specific content in your search results or display particular promotions or events above the search results.

To ensure the highest level of compliance under the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI), Viart Shop has recently added two 3D secure payment gateways to their shopping cart software.

Viart.com (http://www.viart.com/), an online company supplying PHP shopping cart software worldwide, has recently enabled two more 3D secure payment systems.  This will help merchants to safeguard online shoppers and help protect them against online credit card fraud.

3D secure is a new technical standard developed by Visa and MasterCard to secure CNP transactions over the Internet.  Visa brand their version of the scheme ‘Verified by Visa’ and MasterCard have called their initiative ‘MasterCard SecureCode’. Other cards included in the scheme are Maestro and solo.

“3D secure transfers the liability for fraud from the merchant to the card issuer, under a range of conditions. It’s an online version of ‘Chip and Pin’ technology, making shopping online more secure for both merchants and shoppers. Explains Mr. Birzul, Technical Director of Viart.com.

Fraud and security concerns have grown in tandem with the growth of eCommerce.  By offering 3D secure payment systems, Viart is making shopping online safer for both buyers and sellers.

3D Secure authentication requires the cardholder to enter a PIN/ password they previously assign to their credit card.  This is needed to complete any transaction online and therefore protects the cardholder from unauthorised use of their card.

For merchants, the benefits of 3D secure include confidence in order acceptance and protection from fraudulent charge backs. (more…)

Wikipedia continues to grow, with the online encyclopedia recieving around 20 million more vistors per month, than it did 12 months ago.

As reported by Nielsen/ Netratings, Wikipedia had 46.8 million unique visitors in May 2007.  This is a huge 72% increase compared to June 2006.

Research carried out ealier this year also found that 36% of online users in the US consult Wikipedia on a regular basis.

While Wikipedia is often criticised for the imprecision of its articles -  “the truly remarkable thing about Wikipedia as a news site is that it works as well as it does.” (Why Wikipedia Works- Center for Citizen Media)  It’s chaotic - but it just works!

This tremendous growth in the past year has made the open-access website the most popular news source online.  The speed at which the news items are added, edited and expanded no doubt plays a part in its popularity.

The big search engines deliver search results that are dramatically different, according to a new study.

According to a new study the big players in search; Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask, all return very different search results.  In fact the first page results from all four search engines overlapped by less than 1%.

The study, conducted by metasearch engine Dogpile and technology provider InfoSpace, also revealed that 3.6%of the top organic search results were the same across all search engines for any given query.  This result is down from 7.0% in July 2005.

The study also found that:

1. A huge 88.3% of all search results were unique to one search engine.
2. Only 2.2% of total results were shared across 3 search engines.
3. The majority of all first page results were unique to one search engine:

• 69.9% of Google first page results were unique to them.
• 79.4% of Yahoo’s first page results were unique to them.
• 80.1% of MSN’s first page results were unique to them.
• 75% of Ask’s first page results were unique to them.

I find these results very suprising actually… I thought there would be a lot more of an overlap between search results!

For those of you taking advantage of Google Analytics, many of you may have received an email from google this morning announcing its new features and interface.

Google’s hope is to offer more comprehensive data to those shopping cart owners that need it, and simplify the vast amounts of data available to webmasters.

The main upgrades to Google Analytics include:

1. Email reports and clearer graphs to enable users to understand data and draw solutions to potential problems.
2. Plain, straight forward language descriptions to help users better understand what the statistics mean and what can be done to improve their website.
3. Score cards that help to explain what certain statistics refer to.
4. The dashboard also has more customisable features.

In a recent update Viart shopping cart software actually introduced a new feature that allows you to integrate Google Analytics into your shop (8th point down).  For those Viart owners that haven’t done that yet - I would definitely recommend it.  Every shopping cart owner should analyse their traffic as it can often reveal a lot about where problem areas exist in a website, for example, points at which a user is leaving a website and as a result not converting into a customer.  For marketing a website online, Google Analytics is a great tool.  It can tell you where your traffic is currently coming from, what keyterms they are using to find your shopping cart and much more.

If your Google Analytics account hasn’t been upgraded yet, don’t worry, Google only started yesterday and will continue to upgrade accounts for the next several weeks.

For those shopping carts owners who advertise with Ask.com…

Ask.com is launching a new sponsored listings contextual product.

So how is Ask’s new contextual product different from Google Adsense and Yahoo Publisher Network?  There’s two differences:

1. Publishers will be able to set ‘page yield’ thresholds and ‘relevancy’ thresholds.  There will be levers to allow publishers to determine if they want higher paying ads or if they want more relevant ads.
2. The new contextual ads will have “very customized” interfaces such as customized backgrounds and graphics.

The Ask contextual product will initially launch with Ask’s own network of sites including Match.com and TicketMaster.  Individual publishers will have to wait a little while to gain access.

Current Ask sponsored listing advertisers will be opted into the content network automatically - so be aware of this if you’re a current Ask advertiser.   In addition, advertisers will be able to preview the new tools and features they have before the launch date; the week of May 21st.

Google has been ranked the most powerful brand of 2007, above businesses like Coca Cola, Microsoft and eBay

The BRANDZ Top 100 most powerful brand of 2007 was created by Millward Brown Optimor.  The ranking is measured by their dollar value.  So, here’s the stats I think you might find interesting…

The top 5 were:

1. Google with $66.4 billion
2. General Electric with $61.9 billion
3. Microsoft with $55 billion
4. Coca-Cola with $44.1 billion
5. China Mobile with $41.2 billion

Other companies that may be of interest to you include:

eBay at number 43
Yahoo at number 42
Amazon at number 92

Some of these rankings came as a little surprise to me, what do you think?

Google’s certainly didn’t.  Google is on the growth curve.  Google dominate search and having this power has allowed them to jump into other areas of advertising where by ’search’ is central.  Google are sure to jump into more areas as they continue to grow, but who can blame them?