Yahoo recently launched a new note-taking research tool called Search Pad. The intention behind this is to automatically detect research intent among people using Yahoo! search.

Once the tool start detecting the user’s intent, it may prompt the searchers with an invitation to use Search Pad. The tool can be used with drag and drop and also includes the ability to write free form notes as well.

The tool has rolled out to several countries as mentioned below:

United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, United Kingdom, France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina

Bing has started capturing online market share. It has been noticed recently that Bing nibbled at Yahoo’s slice of search market for the month of June ’09.

For the month of June, Microsoft’s search of U.S internet searches rose to 8.4% of queries from 8% in May ‘09. Yahoo’s share gone down to 19.6% in the month of June from 20.1%. Google remains flat at 65% of overall market share.

Bing – Mircosoft’s search engine has now become publicly available, and the onus is on you to decide whether it can take on the might of Google. Available at www.bing.com, this search engine replaces Live Search and is garnering a lot of attention. Microsoft is going all out to promote Bing; it is expected to spend an estimated $80 million to $100 million on Bing marketing. This search engine from Microsoft is expected to be a hedge against Yahoo and capture some of its market.

One thing is certain, With Bing firmly in place, Google would have to pull up its socks and keep innovating its search initiatives. There would also be some competition in the pay per click domain and Google cannot get too greedy.

Do you think Bing is different from Google? It is not dramatically different from Google; but some people have found its results to be stronger. The visible changes in Bing are listed below:

A preview of a web page is available when you hover your mouse pointer at the right side of any search result.

Fewer results are displayed when this search engine understands your intent.

Many a times, the search results are divided into categories. Your search for the popular musician Justin Timberlake could get you results in categories such as songs, movies, biography, wallpaper, and downloads. You could also get images and videos while using this search engine.

You can display the Wikipedia searches inline and you would not have to leave the Bing site. All that you need to do is click the “Enhanced View” link and you are done.

You get a different background image every day. There are special hidden hot spots in these images and you can click on them to know more.

It does not take much time to load the Bing’s homepage on your web browser. There is a provision of turning off the background image as well.

You could make the most of the video search option to enjoy the videos without leaving the search engine altogether.

There are special search engines for health, shopping, and travel – and this makes the search process more easy and hassle free.

You can return to the most recent searches of the last two days using the search history feature. If you want to protect your privacy, you can turn off this feature.

Bing does not recognize misspellings and returns no results for such searches.

Google is becoming quite strict these days regarding the techniques that are being used by various websites in order to promote them on web. Various websites are adopting spammy techniques to gain rankings. In this post we will discuss on how to gain trust level with Google to promote your site on web.

Trust is an important factor in Google’s Ranking Algorithm. Some websites get high rankings in Search Engines like Google even if they do not publish any content on the websites while others cannot get rankings even if they have optimized web page content.

Trust level plays a very important role in gaining high Google Rankings. Some websites manage to reach a very high trust level with Google. Google always discourage spam sites in search results. Therefore, it is always important to show Google that you are not a spammer and your site is real and you have designed the site to stay in business for longer period.

Following activities helps you in showing to Google’s algorithm that it can trust your website:

Source “ http://www.free-seo-news.com”

“Never participate in automated link programs. Aggressive link building is always considered as spamming technique by Google. Avoid getting all links with same link texts. Combination of Keywords must be used in order to do real link building for your website.”

My Comment: It is important not to get too many links for your website in a single day. Link should grow gradually for your site. This will look more natural to search engines and helps you in getting links from most trusted sites.

“Please ensure that your contact information is easily accessible by users. Mention the complete contact details and not just the email address. Your website must have privacy policy and terms and condition and both are linked from the site Map.”

My Comment: Some companies display only the email address at the contact page of the websites, this provides incomplete information. Users are not aware of the geographical location of the website. Displaying the complete information helps you in getting more targeted visitors.

“The age of domain plays an important role here. When you are starting a new business, prefer buying an old domain if suitable name is available. In case if old domain is not available with the suitable name, purchase a new domain for a renewal period of atleast 2-3 years to show Google that the domain you have purchased is not a throwaway domain and you have purchased this with an intention of staying long in business.”

My Comment: It is important to get your domain hosted with a reliable service provider. If required get the unique IP for your website. Get your sites hosted for longer period. Search engine gives more weight ages to the sites those are hosted for the longer period and also helps you in saving time spent with the service provider every year to get this renewed.

“Never get links from the paid sites. Google always consider Paid links as a spamming technique and an artificial way to promote your websites. Even if you do so in order to get rankings, you will end up loosing money.”

My Comment: Some of the website owners have a strong belief that getting the paid links at the high Page Rank websites helps you in gaining rankings and winning trusts with Google. But these are all artificial ways to promote your site on the web and Google is no longer considering this to be the fair practice.

If above factors are adopted, than it will be easier for you to gain Trust level with Google and hence helping you in getting high Google Rankings.

Twitter is planning to make their search better to create a better user experience. They are mainly looking to change the indexing pattern and criteria of indexing in tweets. They are actually looking forward to index links in tweets.

Currently search engines can’t crawl back-links on tweets. Twitter is now planning to make the search engines to crawl the links too along with text in the tweets. So that people can get real time twitter results in the search engines too. Especially it gives users better search experience to those who are looking for timely content.

Recently Twitter has announced its integration with Google Friends Connect. Now Twitter can be accessed through Google’s friend’s network. This means you and your twitter network can stay connected no matter where you are on the web.

If someone join friends connect site, he can choose to use his twitter profile, discover people he follows on twitter and quickly tweet if finds any cool website.

This integration with Twitter is an example of how they want to continue improving Friend Connect, extending the open social web and bringing social features to more places on the web.

A new search engine Wolfram Alpha launched on May 18th 2009. It’s developed by Stephen Wolfram (creator of Mathematica)

It is basically a “computational search engine”. It’s completely a different concept of search. It’s not a competitor for Google or any other search engine.

As stated by the developers of WolframAlpha:

It displays results for different queries. It was really interesting. If you would like to watch that video just click below. Wait for few mints it will take time to load.

Watch the Real Search of Wolfram Alpha Video

Look at the screen shots of different searches on Wolfram Alpha to have a better understanding about this computational search engine.

Search for “integrate x^2sin^3 x dx” in WolframAlpha:

Search for “gdp france” in WolframAlpha,:

Search for “internet users in europe” in WolframAlpha:

Search for “springfield” in WolframAlpha:

This search engine displays results in a computed mathematical way. Watch the video to understand the concept of Stephen Wolfram. Feel free write your thoughts in comments.

In Order to analyze the campaign’s performance more effectively, Google has made the search query report more comprehensive and detailed.

Search Query Performance Report is used to analyze the search queries that trigger ads on Google.

In the Search Query Performance report till yesterday, we may have noticed that some of our traffic was grouped under a line item called “other unique queries.” This line encompassed queries with very low volume, often occurring triggering our ad only one or two times. However, some advertisers found that a significant portion of their spend was grouped under this heading, which made it difficult to manage keyword variations.

As stated by Google:

“Starting today, the Search Query Performance report will show all queries that resulted in a click, where the user has not specifically blocked their referrer URL. In other words, this includes all queries that you would see in your server logs or if you use a tool like Google Analytics. In requiring that the referrer URL be present, we are upholding our commitment to user privacy.”

As a result of this update, we can see longer lists of queries in our Search Query Performance reports, most of that will have very low traffic. We can analyze this data and take our decisions on keyword variations accordingly.

Google Recently Announced that

”We are excited to be able to make this update and believe that it will help make the Search Query Performance report even more useful. To learn more about running Search Query Performance reports, you can visit our AdWords help center.”

In an effort to improve the quality of ads and user experience, Google adjusted its adwords trademark policy in the U.S. to allow some ads to use trademarks in the ad text. This change will bring Google’s policy on trademark use in ad text more in line with the industry standard.

As stated by Google:

“Under certain criteria, you can use trademark terms in your ad text in the U.S. even if you don’t own that trademark or have explicit approval from the trademark owner to use it. This change will help you to create more narrowly targeted ad text that highlights your specific inventory.”

”For example, under our old policy, a site that sells several brands of athletic shoes may not have been able to highlight the actual brands that they sell in their ad text. However, under our new policy, that advertiser can create specific ads for each of the brands that they sell. We believe that this change will help both our users and advertisers by reducing the number of overly generic ads that appear across our networks in the U.S.”

Please note that this policy change will only apply to ads served in the U.S. on Google.com and to U.S. users on the Search and Content Networks. Also, while Google will start accepting new ads that contain trademark terms as of 11am PDT on May 15th, those ads will not begin showing until June 15th.

If some of our ads have been disapproved due to Google’s trademark policy (the previous one) and that comply with the new policy, we may submit those ads for re-review and eligible ads may begin showing in the U.S. starting June 15th. Click here for more information on editing the ad text.

In order to help advertisers understand whether their landing pages meet the Google’s policy guidelines they have added some new functionality to their Search Based Keyword Tool. We can visit www.google.com/sktool and enter your website URL, to see a list of brands on the left side of the page if our site contains those brands. When we click on any of those brands we’ll notice a column titled “Extracted from webpage.” Those landing pages may be opportunities for us to show re-sale or informational ads.

According to Google:

“We believe that this change will offer our advertisers the opportunity to provide users with more relevant information, choice and options while respecting the interests of trademark owners.”

Google has come up with a new metric for their display ads, called “The Mouse Over Rate”. The Mouse over rate is defined by Google in the below snapshot which we have captured from one of our running accounts, where we could find a column of this new metric.

In a way, the mouse over rate is a measure of how interesting your ad is to the viewers.

Though this cannot be a sure shot means to derive at a conclusion regarding the quality of your ad (as people do not track where they are looking with their mouse), it would certainly give some insight into how people react to your ads. The ads which they find more interesting, & might want to click have the likelihood of showing a higher mouseover rate.

It may or may not have a value because it isn’t a perfect window into the searcher’s mind. However, we cannot even consider it useless as it might give advertisers some useful data about the interestingness of their ads.

The decision to retain or scrap this metric, will have to await certain case studies from advertisers who do or do not derive benefits from it in future. We shall have to wait & watch!