Here’s an amusing story about a retailer asking a blogger to remove himself from Google because the blogger was ranking higher than him. He goes as far as threatening him with lawyers. It demonstrates the low level of understanding some people have of how search engines operate. Dean Hunt (the blogger) is being very kind to the retailer by not revealing his identity.

Here’s a podcast from Practical Ecommerce with one of our customers Mike Baranov from Footwear Etc. He is talking about the service we are providing for him, specifically our Learning Search and Learning Navigation.

So how big was Cyber Monday? I took a look at the search traffic on a handful of our retail customers’ sites and compared their search traffic on Monday November 27 to their average search traffic for the 3 months before Thanksgiving. On average there were 90% more searches on Cyber Monday compared to the average, 70% more than on an average Monday.

Note: A couple of the customers showed no significant increase. One customer saw a 400% increase! The regular variation you can see here is the typical pattern of there being less activity during the weekend. But as you can see, the holiday season is well and truly upon us.

Last month the guys in our NZ office have participated in Movember. This is essentially an excuse to grow facial hair. What does this have to do with search? Almost nothing, except these mustachioed faces belong to men that live and breath search (at least while they’re at work).