Online Stores Have Merry Christmas

Data from VeriSign's online payment services indicates that this holiday season was very good to online retailers as sales were up 23% in November alone, and a 24% increase was seen over last season. The electronics and housewares industries led the way this year in sales.

Yahoo! Maps Adds Traffic Features

The Yahoo! Blog describes a new addition to Yahoo! Maps which allows you to get detailed traffic reporting. It's a nice feature, only currently seems to work with larger cities, while Atlanta did show results, Orlando did not, but I would expect the coverage to increase moving forward.

Yahoo! Video Search

A BETA of the Yahoo! Video Search previously announced is up and viewable to the public. My initial impression is this is well done, and the results seemed to be fairly reliable, only videos posted on Blogs seemed to result in dead links. Results were usually pretty accurate and not full of too many duplicates of the same video size.

MSN Messenger Preview Contains Search

The Seattle Post Intelligencer reports MSN Messenger Preview 7.0 contains a search box that allows the instant messenger program's users to quickly launch a web search (using MSN Search of course.) I think we can expect to see search boxes popping up all over the place as the competition between the big 3 players heats up.

MSN Toolbar Suite Beta

Maybe I spoke too soon, or I just have that much sway (yeah, right) but MSN has released the MSN Toolbar Suite Beta. This brings them into the desktop search battle along with Google's offering and the expected release of a Yahoo! version in January. Like Yahoo! this toolbar helps find photos and music in addition to the expected web cached pages, emails and documents on your machine.

Google Adds Major Libraries to Database

CNET News reports that Google is developing plans to add major libraries to its database by working in conjunction with several major libraries; University of Michigan, Oxford University, New York Public Library, Stanford University and Harvard University. For now only selected out of print and some copyrighted works will be scanned in, but as technology and legal issues are worked out expect this project to expand in scope.

Google Suggestion Tool

From the Google labs: Google Suggest may finally give AdWords advertisers an easier way to get insightful data that Overture has for some time now on keyword suggestion. While it doesn't give exact search numbers (rather it provides the amount of results) it does give a quicker and more intuitive interface to the Adwords keyword suggestion tool. This BETA may not be intended for that use, but that's how I'm going to take advantage of it!

Google News Goes International

Google News has expanded to include seven new international versions of the popular news service to provide articles tailored to the inhabitants of Argentina, Chile, French Canada, Mexico, Austria, and two variations for Switzerland.

Yahoo! to Test Desktop Search

CNET News reports that Yahoo! plans to test a rival version of desktop search in January, that will allow users to include personal files such as emails, Word documents, PDFs and more. Differing from Google's current offering, this service will also allow searching for music and image files on a user's machine and eventually will contain support for archival and retrieval of Yahoo! Messenger conversations. The article also mentions that MSN still are working on their own similar service, something they have been speaking on for some time now, but have yet to produce.