Yahoo! Updates Again Tonight

Quick on the heels of their last update, Yahoo! Search Blog reports another update to their index will be happening tonight.

Yahoo! Update Tonight

Tim Mayer of Yahoo! posts that the index for their search engine will be updating tonight. Be sure to check your rankings in the morning to celebrate your progress and bemoan your failures.

Yahoo! Site Explorer

I'm a little late on this one, but the Yahoo! Site Explorer is a great tool for analyzing the depth of your crawl in Yahoo!'s search index. If anything, it's good to see search engines taking an active role in helping marketers do their thing. Instead of just assuming spam and junk listings are the only goal of site promoters, this kind of stuff sends a positive signal that the role of search engine promotion is being recognized and the relationship between search engine and marketers is taking a much less adversarial tone.

Google Expands Its Offerings

3 announcements last week by Google showed the ever increasing reach and scope of the search giant and may be providing insight into the future direction of the company and its services.

On August 22nd Google announced Google Desktop 2, which was more than an update to the system wide searching utility. The biggest noticable change was the addition of the sidebar utility which could be likened to the Dashboard feature in Apple's latest OS release. This sidebar allows you to use Google created and third party plugins to display a variety of things like weather, stock info, photo slide shows and RSS feeds. There's a lot of automated and customizable features to explore. I was able to use an RSS feed from Yahoo's Flickr photo sharing service to have the sidebar display dynamically updated photos on a particular topic. Right now I have photos of storm damage from Hurricane Katrina showing up on my sidebar using a customized FeedBurner feed showing Flickr tag word: "Hurricane". Seems pretty extensible, so developers should have fun with it and users will reap the benefits.

On August 24 the Google Blog reported that Google Talk was realeased into the wild, which will rival IM services like AOL's Instant Messenger and similar offerings by MSN and others. The system uses the open XMPP protocol which means it can be used by other apps such as Apple's iChat, Trillian, Adium and others. It also allows voice calls on the network so users on the system can communicate verbally. One has to ponder whether Google has an eye in the direction of voice over IP solutions. A Gmail account login is needed to be on the system.

Also the same day, Google announced that Gmail is open to the public. No longer do potential Gmail users need to be a friend of a friend of a friend who begged on a message board to be invited. Anyone can now go to gmail.com and signup for their free email account, and presumably ditch AOL in exchange for their ability to use Google Talk.

Three big moves, and with Google snatching up dark fiber, the overall goal of the company to possibly become a wider player in the online communication arena may have just come into a little better focus.

It's Okay to Bid On GEICO

The Google Blog has a post explaining the recent GEICO v. Google court ruling and what it's implications are. Short answer: You can bid on trademarked words as a keyword, but not include them in your ad text.

MSN Screensaver with Search & RSS

The MSN Search Weblog has a post announcing a free MSN Screensaver with Search & RSS. Every now and then something comes along that makes you have to say, huh? I guess I'm having trouble understanding the concept behind putting stuff you have to read on your screen saver. Are they envisioning people sitting around staring at their inactive screens, trying not to touch the mouse to disrupt the display of RSS feeds and web pages? Why not just go to the web pages or to one of a million start pages provided by Yahoo, Google and everyone else that provides all these features on demand. Am I not getting it... or is Microsoft?

Google to Release Firefox Toolbar

Slashdot reports that Google is soon to be releasing their toolbar for the Firefox browser. There are several extensions already available for Firefox, however, that provide most of the features of the toolbar (and in some cases better implemented.)

Yahoo! Launching New Search Index Tonight

Yahoo! Search blog for the second time is announcing when its index will be updated, which is later tonight. I guess they can expect high volumes of SEO professionals scouring their SERPs in the morning. From the announcement: "We will be making changes to the index tonight so you should be seeing more of your pages in the index as well as some fluctuations in the rankings of results from previous searches."

Tabbed Browsing Available in MSN Toolbar

MSN Search's WebLog reports that tabbed browsing is now a feature of MSN Search Toolbar with Windows Desktop Search (still waaaay too long a name). Despite the Johnny come lately headline of "Tabbed browsing is here!", this post is good news for those who still use only Internet Explorer for their browsing, adding a great feature every other browser user has been enjoying. Tabbed browsing is expected to be a built in feature of the upcoming IE7, but this toolbar update will allow IE 5.01 users and up to access the feature now. Special settings for using the tabs to enhance your search experience are included as well.

Google Sitemaps

Google Sitemaps is a new free service that allows webmasters and marketers to submit XML feeds of the URLs they would like Google to index and how often the content is refreshed and in need of a new crawl. This will go a long way towards getting more of your sites into the Google index and keeping them updated. Some basic reporting will be provided such as when you last submitted a Sitemap and when Google last fetched it. Search Engine Watch has a great interview with Shiva Shivakumar, Google's technical lead on the project.

Personalized Google Homepage

Google has released a personalized homepage service that rivals My Yahoo and other custom start page services. The old plain vanilla homepage is still the default face of Google. I'm sure there will be two camps on this one; Those who want the simple time-tested Google interface, and those who yearn for an easier way to access all of Google's cool features, and I hope both options remain.

Final Release of MSN Search Toolbar

msnsearch's WebLog reports that their toolbar search project has reached final release and is available for download. Apparently, the new name for this product is "MSN Toolbar Suite with Desktop Search". Quite a mouthful!

Why Google Scares Bill Gates

Just read a fascinating Fortune article about the history and current events of the growing battle between Google and Microsoft. A lot of great background and quotes from the key players, a must read!

Google Maps Now Adds Satellite Imagery

I'm a little slow on this one as I've been busy playing with the awesome new addition to Google Maps, satellite views. This is a feature that disappeared from MapQuest some time ago, and now Google has implemented it thanks to the previous addition of Keyhole Corp. to their portfolio. It's incredible fast and seamless and sets the bar for online maps and direction services. With the recent traffic data systems addition Google is working on, Google Maps is soon to pull ahead as the undisputed online map source.

Google Acquires Traffic Info Start-Up

According to an article on SiliconBeat, Google's recent 2004 annual report shows a new subsidiary ZIPDash. This company provides real time traffic information, and it looks like Google Maps is following Yahoo Maps into the traffic reporting arena.

Faster Searching with Firefox

Never one to pass up a chance to tweak the finer details, Google announces faster search result loading with Firefox and Mozilla browsers. Apparently the search engine results page instructs these browsers to preload the first page of results so the deemed most relevant page that rises to the top of the SERPs will already be in your cache. Works good, and definitely makes a difference.

Google Adds Support for Stock Quotes

From the "features you thought Google already had" file, the Google Blog is reporting that Google now adds support for stock quotes. Previously it would link you to sites that had the information you're looking for, now Google provides in line graphs and recent trends when you simply search for a stock ticker symbol. You'll also find the familiar links to Yahoo Finance as well.

Google Maps

It's still in rough BETA, but Google Maps is out there for the public's eyes. The live scrolling and zooming is excellent, however every address I put in was inaccurate to a degree in regards to where the pinpoint aimed. The directions it gave me also were never the shortest route and sometimes gave odd detours that made no sense. It's BETA, so that's to be expected, but I can't wait until the technology acquired from their recent purchase of Keyhole Corp., a 3D mapping service, gets integrated.

A9 and Photo Yellow Pages

Amazon's A9 search engine project, which has been relatively unnoticed lately amongst all the changes in the big 3 engines, is now offering a yellow pages service. The difference in this service is that Amazon has sent out camera equipped vans to begin photo mapping store fronts and blocks to make a searchable and viewable yellow pages directory. Sounds like an ambition undertaking that initially is applying to only a few markets. CNET has a great article providing an overview of the new service.

Search Engine Usage Report Released

A recent study on search engine usage is reporting several interesting results on how people use search engines and their understanding level of them. A suprising number of people of an older demographic are still unable to distinguish the paid from the free search listings, and many list the inability to do so as a reason they do not trust results. Also of interest was a statistic that showed the greater majority of searchers regularly use 2 or 3 different engines as opposed to sticking with just 1. The most obvious stat in the report was that most of what people search for is pretty much useless trivia, which any glance at the Google Zeitgeist for the year will tell you.

Spotted: Google Showing Images in Main Results

Someone out there noticed Google's Suggest tool still in BETA sporting some images in the main search results, similar to how a Google Local or Froogle result might show. Is the Google Suggest BETA a glimpse of things to come?

AOL Making Big Search Changes

Not to be forgotten in the latest flurry of changes in the search industry, AOL Search is sporting several updates in features and appearance. CNET has an article outlining the current and future changes AOL is working on, including a refined shopping search, local search and the latest in popular search engine features, desktop searching of your own files.

Big 3 Engines Team Up to Fight Comment Spamming

Google Blog, MSN Search Weblog and Yahoo! Search Blog all mention a new initiative to help fight those who seek to promote their own sites via public Blog comments. By using a tag property that can be added to your templates to tell the engines not to spider specific links, such as any appearing in your comments area. I imagine this could be used for any links, so it's yet another thing to look for when trading backlinks to make sure you're getting your link's worth.