The keywords of the Oxford 3000 have been carefully selected by a group of language experts and experienced teachers as the words which should receive priority in vocabulary study because of their importance and usefulness.
Oxford University Press | The Oxford 3000™
Don Reisinger writes …
A slew of companies rely on Google’s AdWords system to bring users to their sites. But in an attempt to improve the quality of AdWords, Google will unveil a new judging system in the next few days that could have a major impact on current AdWords users.
The most important change the company announced Monday has to do with how it calculates the AdWords Quality Score, which helps determine the order of each ad for a given keyword. Google said that it now calculates quality in real-time as a Google user performs a search, along with its current practice of analyzing click-through rates, and landing page quality is evaluated less frequently.
Google is also eliminating its “inactive for search’ moniker for those keywords that would yield few (if any) impressions. The company said that all keywords are now available on Google.com and although the company said those keywords will probably still yield less than ideal results, they may add some impressions for those sites using them.
Google Tweaks Its AdWords Algorithm
Caroline McCarthy writes …
Google has taken its popular Google Trends and launched a spin-off product called Google Insights for Search. Geared toward advertisers, it’s a tool to track a particular search term’s popularity across the Web and geographic regions of the world.
For Google, this can help boost advertiser confidence and potentially win its program some new converts who would’ve otherwise been skeptical regarding how effectively they could target an online ad campaign.
With Google Insights for Search, you can search for a term to track how much it’s been googled over time, where on a “heat map” it’s most popular, and what the top “related” and “rising” searches for the term are.
Google offers ‘Insights for Search’ | News - Digital Media - CNET News.com
From the Global Language Monitor …
Austin, Texas June 30, 2008 - MetaNewswire — Never before in the history of the world has a single language held as dominant a position as English does today. Over a billion people can now read this sentence-think about that for a minute. With a mind-boggling 25 percent of the world speaking English, that’s a lot of sources for new words to be added to this global language, which brings us to another awesome statistic: according to Paul J.J. Payack, English will adopt its millionth word within a ten-day period centered upon April 29, 2009.
Nicholson Baker writes …
Ammon Shea, a sometime furniture mover, gondolier and word collector, has written an oddly inspiring book about reading the whole of the Oxford English Dictionary in one go. Shea’s book resurrects many lost, misshapen, beautifully unlucky words — words that spiraled out, like fast-decaying muons, after their tiny moment in the cloud chamber of English usage. There’s hypergelast (a person who won’t stop laughing), lant (to add urine to ale to give it more kick), obmutescence (willful speechlessness) and ploiter (to work to little purpose) — all good words to have on the tip of your tongue when, for example, you’re stopped for speeding.
Book Review - ‘Reading the OED,’ by Ammon Shea - Review - NYTimes.com