World of Search

After a year of development, Yahoo! finally went live at 9:00 PM Pacific Time on July 7th with its new Search Pad application. Search Pad is built into Yahoo! Search to provide an online notepad, allowing searchers to collect, edit, organize, save, print and email search results or content. Users will be able to share the collected information on Search Pad via a public URL, as well as Twitter, Facebook and Delicious. This is all according to Yahoo! Tech News. Read more »

Microsoft’s Bing, the latest rock thrown at the Googley Goliath, has been nicknamed the “sound of found” search engine. This new warrior is trying to take a chunk out of the giant’s market share with more refined and accurate searches and a better overall user experience. Those who conduct the majority of their work life online, such as the SEO industry, have been wondering what this will do to online marketing and search strategies. Will Bing’s impact change the SEO game, or is it another Google wannabe? Read more »

The newest reality show to hit the screen is corporate giants who are badly in need of a facial. No disrespect to Joan Rivers and the new season of The Apprentice, but I’m talking about Yahoo’s new moves in search. For the past year, Yahoo has had pressure on them to do something about its search business, which is being left in the dust by Google. Yahoo is now binding its search business more closely to its market-leading display-ad business. Yahoo also announced it would start targeting display ads across Yahoo and its 500 network sites based on search queries, in what they are coining as “search retargeting”. This announcement came a week after Yahoo started showing display ads against search results. These two moves suggest that Yahoo is building case for why search should remain an integral part of the company. This also may provide a long-term advantage for Yahoo, who has an opportunity to make display, a category that it leads, more valuable. Read more »

Athens had Sparta. David had Goliath. Rome had... themselves. The Beatles had The Beach Boys and Rolling Stones. Magic had Bird. The Republicans have the Democrats. The Dallas Cowboys have... themselves as well, but also the Redskins, Giants, Eagles and Jessica Simpson. My point is that we wouldn’t strive to become the best we could be without the competition of our rivals. However, in the world of search engines, Google is positioning themselves far above anyone else and isn’t looking back. In fact, the government has recently scrutinized Google for its dominance in online advertising. There may be only one way for Google to have any plausible competition: a partnership between other search engines. The time may be right, and crucial, for this partnership to happen in order to establish competitive positioning against Google and to maximize the potential of the World of Search. Read more »