Yahoo Search is rolling out a new form of categorizing search results which are listed in vertical Yahoo! Shortcuts, which are intended to enhance and optimize the user experience by narrowing down broad web searches.
The first Category Narrowing Experience focus is on restaurant search results, which uses Yahoo Local search data and pulls in social data such as user reviews of the most popular restaurants in a specific area. A search for “

For those of you who have heard the false news that Yahoo Publisher Network will be spreading Internationally, be warned, they have no intention of taking YPN out of the United States anytime in the near future. I foresee YPN holding back its International expansion timeline until the complete global rollout of Yahoo Search Marketing Panama is finished (I’m thinking Q4 2007).
Barry Schwartz post on SE Roundtable that he’s fed up with

Del.icio.us yesterday launched an updated version of their Mozilla Firefox extension, Del.icio.us Bookmarks Firefox Add-on.
Del.icio.us users have skyrocketed over the past 6 months, jumping from one million users in September of 2006 to over 2 million users today. The increase in usage has been somewhat attributed to the popularity of the original del.icio.us Firefox add-on, and Yahoo!, del.icio.us & its founder Joshua Schachter were quite

This week’s In-house Spotlight is on Shopping.com’s former in-house SEO Aaron Shear. I caught up with Aaron just as he was leaving his in-house position at Shopping.com for life as a consultant, joining Joseph Morin as a partner in Boost Search Marketing.
Unlike last week’s spotlight, Dave Roth at Yahoo, Aaron is a one-man SEO team managing SEO for 12 websites in 5 countries. He’s the in-house solo-SEO poster child operating on a $0

Business Week Online has a fascinating cover story which examines the growing dominance of Google on both the information economy and the business world. The question “Is Google Too powerful” is not merely rhetorical as the article delves into details about how Google is using its profits to encroach upon traditional media such as television, magazines and radio. Experts like Tech historian George Dyson have even suggested that Googl

The new Google Gadgets have gotten a lot of attention in recent months. True, they’re a factor in Google’s personalized search algo and many Google Gadgets are quite useful. Unfortunately, some of the Gadget developers could use a lesson in usability. As a new user of the personalized homepage, I was eager this week to try as many Gadgets as possible in hopes they would make my homepage work harder and smarter for me. My highest priority was

The Future of Online Advertising conference is scheduled for June 7th and 8th in New York and is going to feature the biggest names in innovative online advertising who will be sharing their views on where the industry is headed along with their knowledge of how to increase advertising results, for both publishers and advertisers (especially inthe search marketing world).
Here’s the lineup: Darren Rowse, Problogger.net
Jay Adelson, Digg
He

Thailand blocked nationwide access to YouTube over some videos which the country’s government feel insult the country’s nobility.
“We have blocked YouTube because it contains a video insulting to our king,” said Winai Yoosabai, head of the censorship unit at the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology.
From the NY Times: Thailand’s ban on YouTube, the popular video-sharing Web site, came after YouTube&

Digg.com has blocked the Yahoo Pipes service from accessing their RSS feeds. Yahoo Pipes is a tool that came out of the Brickhouse internal incubator unit which lets users visually aggregate RSS feeds into new and better mashed services (example : Aggregated News Alerts takes the best news search engines and sets up one easy interface.)
From the Yahoo Pipes Message Boards:
Looks like we’re being blocked by user agent string. Try:
curl -IA

Google is introducing its MyMaps which will let users create their own maps using Google Maps. Interestingly called myMaps, this free tool will allow Google Maps users create maps of their neighborhoods and other places that they are aware of. To attract even the most non-techie users, creating maps in myMaps is as simple as pointing and clicking the computer mouse.
That’s why we’re announcing My Maps, a new feature that makes it quic

LookSmart has signed a strategic agreement with blinkx.com to power video search results on LookSmart’s FindArticles.com (which averages roughly 17 million unique visitors a month and houses 11 million resource articles from 3,000 sources). FindArticles’ blinkx partnered video content will include news clips, short documentaries, TV content, movies and other appropriate video served to the consumer based on their search terms. The a

Read/Write Web has a fascinating article on the outlook of Search in China. There is an intense competition for internet users among search engines, particularly between Google which trails the current market leader Baidu. According Aydin Senkut’s analysis, Baidu currently enjoys double the market share in all types of search over Google because of several key reasons. These include the strength and popularity of Baidu’s Bulletin Boa

Google has launched a version of Google Desktop for the Mac, which is available from Google’s Mac OS X software page. The Unofficial Apple Weblog has a complete rundown and experiences with installation. (Sorry for the short post, in meetings today.)

I’ve written about online ad “exchanges” in the past, which is one of the more interesting developments in online advertising in my opinion. There’s RightMedia, which Yahoo! owns a piece of, Root Exchange, AdECN and, now, of course DoubleClick. Here’s the NY Times’ write up of the proposed DoubleClick exchange: The online advertisement exchange will make DoubleClick more attractive to a potential acquirer beca

Brazilians and Orkut loyalists rejoice (Orkut users are majority Brazilian), it looks like Google is going to be upgrading the outdated Orkut photos with something more Picasa oriented; perhaps just in time for Orkut users to upload their Feliz Páscoa (Easter) photos.
Seems that Google has added a new entry to their robots.txt file; Disallow : orkut/albums.
Garret Rogers has the scoop;
When Google adds something to this file, it almost alw

Turkish Google users are demanding special Turk Google logos for Turkish holidays in the same fashion Google does for US and Australian holidays (4th of July, Australian New Zealand Army Corps… etc.) and are holding a national campaign to petition Google for such logos on Google Turkey. More from Philipp at Google Blogoscoped:
This isn’t the first Google logo petition, and it probably won’t be the last. If Google would be reall

Yahoo Real Estate has launched two new search features which add to the needs of those looking for land or houses at bargain prices. Following recent trends in real estate investment markets brought upon by raised interest rates and a slowing market in some areas, Yahoo has addressed the increase of foreclosures and quick sales with the new Yahoo Real Estate Foreclosure Search.
Users can search for foreclosures in their area, sort through forecl

Google announced that it will be selling commercials to the 125 national programming networks of Echostar DISH Network, U.S. second largest satellite service. Under the said deal, advertisers can bid on Google’s ad spots via Adwords’ automated auction. Advertisers will have a free hand on uploading their advertisements and can even target the TV programs where their advertisements will be shown. The ads will be inserted into the operators’

The long awaited SES New York Party Schedule is out.
Festivities begin on Easter Sunday with people meeting up Sunday night and continue through Thursday evening.
Ladies… there’s a luncheon just for us on Thursday. RSVP to attend. Sorry gents!

Claiming to have created the first market-ready semantic search engine, ZoomInfo has announced a new version of ZoomInfo.com, a search engine that’s designed for business users who need access to information on companies, people and jobs. Integrating the comprehensive job search function of Indeed.com, ZoomInfo will allow job seekers to search for companies across a wide range of factors such as location, size and industry. ZoomInfo.com wi

Imagine literally “SEEING” your product as the #1 listing in Google’s SERPs! Today Google’s up to testing in completely new directions.
Google Book Search has the #1 listing, with a thumbnail of the book cover. These two lucky authors should have hot sales today!
Makes you wonder if Google Base or Froogle images will also find their way into the SERPs.
[Click for Full Size Screenshot] - Jessica Bowman is the Director o

Lee Odden at the Online Marketing Blog has an interesting look at the comparison of linkbaiting and Digg-baiting.
Linkbait : Focuses on creating unique, useful and provocative content that people respond to by linking to it and sharing with others.
Digg bait : Focuses specifically on the interests of social communities and what they respond to. With Digg bait, the power is not in the usefulness and value of the content, but the title and descript

We reported last week that industry speculation has Microsoft as the rumored buyers of DoubleClick, the Internet advertising powerhouse. DoubleClick would fit extremely well into the Microsoft adCenter expansion model.
However, it looks like Google has entered the picture and are serious about acquiring the company. DoubleClick would bring its potential new owner the leverage of becoming the distributor and middle man broker of DoubleClick’

This week an intro to optimization for Baidu, the difference between Baidu Japan and the Chinese version as well as the latest on Yahoo search. And not to forget, more foreign blog services are blocked again.
Optimize your site for Baidu
What does Baidu like in a website is an important question for those targeting Chinese internet users as the search engine dominates the Chinese search market. Baidu search results are different from the leading

The Yahoo Publisher Network may be testing the blocking of YPN contextual advertisements from serving in certain countries according to the accounts of some webmasters who are running YPN on their sites.
In what may be an attempt to curb International click fraud and spillover of intended US audience only advertisements, reports have come in from various webmasters that YPN is not serving ads to International visitors, specifically India.
A threa

Paying customers of the Google Apps suite are starting to question the company’s ability to offer guaranteed services, like basic uptime. Google seems to have problems keeping its uptime pledge to some paying customers of its Google Apps suite of hosted services according to PC World.
Little over a month after introducing Google Apps’ Premier version, which includes a 99.99 percent uptime commitment, Google is failing to meet that se

According to a patent filing, Nokia is working to develop a Semantic Visual Search Engine to organize the multimedia content on mobile phones. The technology will enable “a system to learn, categorize and search items such as images and video clips according to their semantic meanings.” Once complete, the cell phone will contain software capable of learning about the photos and video clips stored on the mobile phone, then categorize

Welcome to Search Engine Journal’s new column, In-house SEM, which features an in-house search marketer each week. For the kickoff, I spoke with Yahoo!’s Director of Search Engine Marketing, Dave Roth, to understand how search marketing is handled at Yahoo!.
There are different types of in-house roles, and Dave’s role is that of very high-level leadership where he spends his time clearing obstacles and setting standards for search marketer

Neil Patel and the boys at Pronet Advertising have developed one heck of a fun game with Search Engine Smackdown. Think of Search Engine Smackdown as a mix between Tekken and Celebrity Death Match where you can be the Google founders (Larry & Sergey), Yahoo founders (Jerry & David), or Microsoft founders (Bill & Paul) and beat the hell out of one another in a wrestling ring.
Best of all, the referree is Search Engine Land’s

On the Live Search Weblog, Eytan Seidman addresed the problems Live Search is facing with advanced query syntax in our search engine such as link:, linkdomain: and inurl:.
For those of you who use some of the advanced query syntax in our search engine such as link:, linkdomain: and inurl:, you may have noticed that this functionality has been recently turned off. We have been seeing broad use of these features by legitimate users but unfortunatel

Serph, the reputation tracking search engine which scours results from various social media sites has come out of private beta testing and is now open to the public. Serph tracks sites including various Blogs, Flickr, Delicious, Digg, Technorati, Bloglines, YouTube, Google Blog Search, Sphere, Ma.gnolia, Podzinger, Newsvine, Feedster, and Topix.net all into one easy to manage search engine.
When Serph first went into beta testing I interviewed C

Google Notebook, Google’s online organizer, has left ‘beta’ and today got a brand new user interface. Perhaps this is an attempt to gather more user adoption with the tool, which has not been as popular as other Google offerings. From Googlified :
The new UI is pretty slick, in my opinion, and with better usability than the previous one. You can now also sort the notes by dates and their names with the Sort feature.
And Garret

MIVA Media has signed an exclusive Pay-Per-Click content deal in the U.K. with Condé Nast Interactive. According to MIVA, Conde NAst chose their service over Yahoo Search Marketing & Google.
MIVA will deliver content driven Pay-Per-Click Ads across all 12 sites in the Condé Nast Interactive U.K. portfolio including Vogue.com, GQ.com, Glamourmagazine.com, CNtraveller.co.uk, Easylivingmagazine.co.uk, Bridesmagazine.co.uk, Housean

A day after announcing the upgrade of Yahoo! Mail into unlimited storage capacity for registered users beginning in May, Yahoo!  unveils the Yahoo! Mail Web Services. With the Yahoo! Mail Web Services, Yahoo! Mail APIs are now available to third party applications developer through SOAP or JSON. Yahoo is hoping to increase its current user base of around 250 million with this new development. With the Yahoo! Mail Web Service:  you can connect

From the press release: Select LG handsets, pre-installed with Google products and services will be shipped globally including North America, Europe and Asia starting in the second quarter of 2007. These handsets will create a more dynamic user experience, including one click access to Google search through an icon in the application menu. More features of LG-Google handsets include: Google Maps for mobile, an application that enables users to

Youanimous is a AJAX-powered social search engine that provides users with additional details such as the Alexa Ranking, Google Page Rank and domain age for each website.
What’s interesting is the additional of social sharing buttons at the bottom of every individual link result. This allows you to instantly submit each link to websites like StumbleUpon, Digg and Reddit.
Not only are we a meta search engine, but we also have a passive votin

To mark its ten year anniversary, Yahoo Mail has announced that it will be expanding its storage capacity to unlimited storage. John Kremer posts on Yodel Anecdotal:
“As Yahoo! Mail approaches its 10-year anniversary, I’m the lucky one who gets to announce that we will begin offering everyone unlimited email storage starting in May 2007.” Michael Arrington of TechCrunch has more on the Yahoo Mail announcement.
Advertisement:

A few days after unveiling its Plus Box search results, Google announces a new mobile search engine that is more tailored to a user’s needs. In a nutshell, the new Google mobile search experience is all about: Getting relevant and specific information, right in the user’s mobile homepage - this includes direct link to movie updates, stock updates, feeds and other mobile gadget. These gadgets or links can be rearranged to suit the u

Over at Search Engine Watch, Kevin Newcomb is reporting that a judge has finalized the approval of the settlement which was reached last June by Yahoo and the Checkmate Strategic Group.
“Judge Snyder’s final approval of the settlement validates the strength of Yahoo’s clickthrough protection systems and our commitment to delivering a quality experience to both our advertisers and our consumers,” Reggie Davis, Yahoo’s

Finally some positive spin on the practice of search engine optimization has come from Calacanis.com, but not from the potty-mouth of Jason, who had this to say about SEO:
90% of the SEO market is made up of snake oil salesman. These are guys in really bad suits trying to get really naive people to sign long-term contracts. These clients typically make horrible products and don’t deserve traffic–that’s why they’re not gett

Michael Douma from PHP Dev Center has come up with a list of PHP-friendly search engines that will allow you to easily integrate customizable search functions on your server while controlling the indexing process and search results. If you want your visitors to have “voilá!” moments, consider incorporating an internal search engine into your web site. Search tools not only make your information easily accessible, but they also incre

Steve Rubel points to a new web site traffic and popularity metrics tool called AttentionMeter which triangualtes graphs from Alexa, Compete & Quancast all into one easy to use interface. As the competition for best public third party site popularity & reach measurement system grows, AttentionMeter is a good way to keep tabs on all of them.
Advertisement: Text Link Ads Smart Link Marketing

Google seems to be testing a new tweak of their homepage which realigns their links to Google Services from the Search Box to the top left corner of the homepage. Search services like Images, Video, News and Maps are listed, then Google integrates a link to Mail followed by a drop down of “More” which includes quick links to Google Calendar, Docs, Groups, Blogs, Books and Patents. This is a condensed version of the original Google s

Michael Moritz has informed Google that he will not seek re-election to its board of directors at the 2007 stockholder meeting. Moritz has been a director since May 1999 and communicated that his decision will allow him to focus more time on his responsibilities as a general partner of Sequoia Capital.
“Mike’s many contributions to Google over the years as investor and director helped us immensely,” said Eric Schmidt, Google

Google Maps has announced that it is now supporting GeoRSS as a data driven geographic content integration method within Google Maps API projects.
From the Google Maps API Blog:
We’ve built support for the Simple, GML, and W3C Geo encodings of GeoRSS — all you have to do is enter the full URL of a GeoRSS file into the Maps query box to load the file. For example, take a look at SlashGeo’s GeoRSS on Google Maps.
Most importantly

Jeremy posted a bit over a week ago at his ShoeMoney.com blog his answer to the question:
“Are you a SEO or not? You say you are not yet sometimes you say you are? SEO FLIPFLOPER!”
The answer might be confusing for some, but made me chuckle.
He basically said that he is quite good at SEO and had some success with it for some of his sites, but that he is not a SEO

Yesterday on the Yahoo Search Blog, Jonathan Strauss of Yahoo! Desktop Products announced that Yahoo has developed a “Yahoo Search Gadget” for the Windows Vista Sidebar.
The Windows Vista Sidebar is a new feature in Vista that, similar to our own Yahoo! Widgets or Apple’s Dashboard, allows you to run mini applications (called gadgets) on your desktop that are connected to the Internet without having to open a browser

Answers.com has completed the first stage of integrating content into WikiAnswers, a Wiki Q&A service. The content on WikiAnswers is an ongoing collaboration of shared knowledge, using the “wiki” methodology best known for its use on Wikipedia (where a great deal of Answers.com content originates from).
Answers.com says that the quality of the Q&A WikiAnswers is monitored by category supervisors and anyone can lend their thoughts and viewpoints to the wiki.
“On other Q&A sites, similar questions get asked over and over again, and the answers can’t be improved upon when they contain mistakes,” says WikiAnswers founder, Chris Whitten, now Answers.com’s Director of WikiAnswers

Search Engine Roundtable, the blog of Barry Schwartz, has updated with a much more slick and streamlined design.
I’ve been eagerly awaiting for the day that Barry updates his design as his company, Rusty Brick, puts out some incredible work and his personal blog, CartoonBarry, is top of the shelf in blog functionality.
Excellent job Mr. Schwarzt!

Here’s a nice overview piece — together with the requisite “who will win?” dramatic elements — from BusinessWeek, covering mobile search:
The emergence of Internet-connected mobile phones, or what’s known as the Mobile Web, is turning the wireless search business into a horse race—one that’s too close to call