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.