June 20, 2005

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."

June 09, 2005

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.

June 03, 2005

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.