Search Engine Optimization News Blog

Based on what Blake Jorgensen, Yahoo’s chief financial officer has said, many are expecting a deal to happen between Microsoft and Yahoo. However, he has not said any thing very clearly or straightforward about the deal, he has said that he does not mind selling off Yahoo’s search business to Microsoft. But it is still a question if any deal would ever take place between these IT giants. It is also not sure if Microsoft would still be interested in buying Yahoo’s search business. In a conference that took place in San Francisco, Mr. Blake Jorgensen has said that, “To be very clear, we’re not opposed to doing a deal that would maximise the value of the business in one way or another, be it a partnership or be it a long term sale.”

Mr. Blake Jorgensen’s statement has given a clue about the company’s situation and wish to Microsoft. So based on the talks that are going on, both the media and the public are expecting Microsoft to initialize a discussion on the possible dealings that Yahoo and Microsoft can have over Yahoo’s search engine business. In 2008, Microsoft was interested in acquiring Yahoo for $44 billion but the former chief executive officer of Yahoo Mr. Jerry Yang rejected Microsoft’s offer. This certainly did give a very big blow to all the shareholders of Yahoo and everyone was wondering on why he did so. Now as Mr. Jerry Yang is no more the chief executive officer of Yahoo, a deal is expected to be signed between Microsoft and Yahoo.

In November 2008, Mr. Ballmer, the chief executive officer of Microsoft said that they are done with all the acquisition. His statements were disappointing to Yahoo but they still had hope, as he did not, at any point of time, state that they are not at all interested in buying Yahoo. Yahoo’s confidence did become even stronger when he said that Microsoft wants to take a challenge to eradicate Google’s dominance in the search engine market. Now, after the conference, people are expecting some changes and tie ups between the two master companies. Mr. Blake Jorgensen has also said that the dealing, if it should happen, would be little tougher and not be so easy to deal with. He has said, “It’s extremely difficult to draw a line down the middle of the organisation and split the two in to two pieces,”

Though Mr. Blake Jorgensen has spoken about Yahoo’s interest in having a deal with Microsoft, Yahoo’s new chief executive officer, Ms. Carol Bartz has not spoken a word about it. It seems that she is not keen about selling Yahoo’s search business; rather she seems to be more interested in having the business developed and having some innovative work done in order to restore the company’s condition. However, it is also a fact to be noticed that many senior officials at Yahoo have been leaving Yahoo for some reason or the other. This includes Mr. Blake Jorgensen, Marco Moerries and Neeraj Khemlani as well.

Google Map Maker is the best tool for users around the world to use when they want to create or enhance maps. Major additions have been rolled out in the past few weeks, bringing even more versatility to the application: Map Maker maps have recently been made available to the Google Maps API and 27 languages were added to the tool just last week. Now 16 new countries are being included in the Map maker:

Bhutan
Bolivia
Cambodia
Dominica
Dominican Republic
Guam
Iceland
Mauritius
Paraguay
Philippines
Senegal
Seychelles
Sri Lanka
Tajikistan
Vietnam
Zimbabwe

Anand Srinivasan, Lakshminath Bhuvanagiri and Jessica Pfund, of the Map Maker Team spoke up about the application’s growth the Google LatLong blog:

This launch is a testament to the spirit of map makers who have taken it upon themselves to map entire neighborhoods — and in some cases entire cities and counties. We have observed many users add more than 1,000 edits to maps and a few have even made 10,000. Even in countries where not many have access to high-speed internet, we have found expatriates and caring users living abroad helping map countries they are far away from. Hats off to all you map makers out there!

Google maps is a great way to familiarize yourself with the world and other users’ points of view.

Mobile phone apps have finally arrived. The top five iPhone search applications make surfing the web easier and more productive than ever before, and the ability to conduct quick searches improves almost weekly as developers strive to make mobile access more appealing.

Google Mobile. Enough said – we’ve done plenty of posts on the versatility you get from Google! It has dozens of applications that work well with either the Android or iPhone.

ISearch is a basic application; it makes search fast and dirty on the iPhonebu suggesting search phrases as you type. You also have the choice of performing the same query as web search, news search, and image search; if you pick the latter, you can then click an icon in the bottom right corner of your screen and toggle to thumbnail view!

Snappy Seeker is an easy to use, powerful tool – one interface gets you access to a variety of search tools. All you have to do is enter your query in the search box and press the Search button, then use the icons at the bottom of the browser window to perform your query to another search engine. You can also choose from a variety of vertical options: Web search, image search, business search, product search, news search, map search, Wikipedia, Amazon, ebay, Technorati, YouTube, Flickr, Price Grabber and iPhone application search. Click on a button for instant Safari results to open when you find what you need.

Jumpsearch lets you type your query once and run it on different search engines. It’s an easy interface with 50 different search destinations in these categories: Storefront retail, web-only retail, news and sports, book sellers, quotes/finance, reference, general search and social networks; if you change your mind midcourse and opt for Yahoo over Google or Barnes’ and Noble instead of Amazon, it only takes two clicks to redirect your focus and then you can open the web pages in Safari.

iClueless is a search portal for the iPhone which is waiting for approval to be included in iTunes App Store. You can perform general web search queries using Yahoo and Google, as well as other popular sites: Wikipedia, Answers.com, Amazon, ebay, espn, Flickr, IMDb and TMZ. There is also dictionary search, weather search, news search, stock search and local search for movie theatres, etc. Strangely, the Phone’s GPS unit is not used for local search – you are required to enter a city or a zip code.

Yahoo and Facebook have joined hands together in order to make a difference in the search industry. The innovation is that when you searching for communities and people with whom you can be friends, the public Facebook profile that would be displayed in the results would also have many options for your benefit. The options would work based on the viewers interest. The viewer would be able to add the person to his or her friends list. The viewer would also be able to see the friends they have in their friends list and would also be able to send them messages and poke them. The person’s public profile picture would also be visible to the viewer. This would of course happen only with those profiles that have been allowed for public view or search engine indexing. Facebook introduced this option only during late 2007 so users who had registered before that or who have not had their accounts upgraded recently. The Facebook profile owners would anytime be able to get out of this indexing as well. It would all depend on the liking of the user.

The term “On Facebook” added along with the search name in Yahoo search would generate the exact results and would also place the results on the top in the results page rather than having them listed in the second or third page. The addition of such useful and innovative features would certainly have increased possibility of having the market share increased for Yahoo and would be welcomed by the users as well. Technically speaking, what happens exactly is that Facebook would be sharing the data with the SearchMonkey application by adding semantic mark ups to the public profiles that are allowed in Facebook. SearchMonkey application would automatically be turned on when anyone opens a yahoo search window. Other accessories that are available along with it are Wikipedia, LinkedIn, Yelp, Yahoo Local and city Search and Zagat. This new feature that has been included has started making Yahoo search more interesting. But the actual efforts that have taken with this regard would bring colors when people actually start liking the feature and regularly use Yahoo search.

Facebook users need not be worried about their privacy as the SearchMonkey team has assured full protection to their privacy and to their personal information. They have said in a post, “We care about privacy as much as you do, so you’ll only see results for Facebook users who have enabled their profiles to be publicly searched and viewed”. The changes that are taking place in Yahoo after Carol Bartz becoming the CEO of Yahoo seem to be interesting and are expected to impress and interest the searching crowd as well. If this should happen the right it is expected to happen, there would be considerable amount of users using Yahoo as their default search engine. Eventually, this is expected to happen.

Google has announced that it will start displaying Adwords ads in the Google News search starting from 25, Feb 2009. They are initially starting to display the ads for the US visitors, which is likely to be extended to other geographic locations as well soon. It is rather surprising to see that Google which has been highly innovative in coming up with new ways of expanding the online space to display its ads did not utilize one of the most obvious spaces within its own network. However, those who are in the US can start getting ads in the news search too. However, the relevance and the effectiveness of the ads in the news search should be determined by the users. As of now, Google will be delivering text ads like in the regular search pages.

Because of the diversity of the news results and the nature of the content that is listed, we need to wait to see the performance of the Adwords ads in the news search pages. When people come to search in the news search page, they are not looking for a service or a product 90% of the times. They are more likely to be looking for some useful information and by placing the ads in such pages, the ad budget of the advertisers can get depleted by clicks that do not produce any conversions. As we all know that traffic for traffic reasons is no good to any website. So only when the conversion level increases, it will be useful for the website.

We can easily understand the hesitation of Google in implementing their Adwords ads in the news results pages. We need to wait to see whether any webmaster is protesting against this decision of Google.

Even Google is not spared by the current economic trends. Google has to strive hard to keep itself profitable. It has to make the best use of all its online properties and unutilized spaces to maximize its profit.

From what has been observed so far, the ads in the news search pages are not highly effective in terms of their relevance to the news items that are listed.

Google is experimenting on the ads and various formats for the ads to see what will work best for the news search page.

In Google’s own words, from Josh Cohen, Business Product Manager, “In recent months we’ve been experimenting with a variety of different formats, like overlay ads on embedded videos from partners like the AP. We’ve always said that we’d unveil these changes when we could offer a good experience for our users, publishers and advertisers alike, and we’ll continue to look at ways to deliver ads that are relevant for users and good for publishers, too.”

If Google continues to operate with best interests of its advertisers in mind, it will certainly need to find effective ways of displaying its ads in the news search pages to ensure that the advertisers’ ad budget is not depleted.