The Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance is a major initiative between our companies to create a competitive choice in search for advertisers and consumers. The combined scale will assist both companies in speeding the pace of innovation to improve the search user experience, as well as help advertisers get better results and help improve monetization for partners.

Google PowerMeter is a free software tool that allows you to view your home’s energy consumption from your personalized iGoogle homepage.

This is an effort by various large and small companies to launch better and smarter home energy monitoring services. Today, Google took the next step in its efforts to make PowerMeter a ubiquitous service by launching an API for PowerMeter that allows device manufacturers to create PowerMeter-compatible devices. This, according to Google, will allow hardware manufacturers to integrate “in-home/plug level energy monitoring devices with Google PowerMeter.” Thanks to this, you may soon be able to check how much power your lamp or TV is currently using by simply checking the PowerMeter gadget on iGoogle.

At a recent meeting at Yahoo, in which the company sought to correct the impression that it was “done” in search, Greg sterling asked about the status of Yahoo! Maps and Yahoo! Local.

Yahoo! was originally the innovator in these areas but eventually ceded them to Google and Microsoft amid internal turmoil and budget decisions. During that meeting Yahoo! said it recognized the importance of these areas and would be reinvesting (especially given their importance in mobile).

At SMX West yesterday, Greg moderated the “Ask the Local Search Engines” panel. That panel was supposed to feature Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft. But Yahoo! pulled its speaker citing scheduling conflicts. It was totally amazing to see that the company didn’t provide a substitute speaker. At the very last minute Yelp came in.

The session was great — the Q&A was 45 minutes — and Yelp’s presence gave the conversation some interesting new energy and direction,  about reviews and the challenges on the SMB side as well as the publisher side of managing the process.  It was noticed that there was an unexpected change that was symbolic of Yelp’s rise and Yahoo!’s unfortunate decline in the local space.

Yelp is now more important than Yahoo! Local to businesses and consumers.

Google, Yahoo, and other search engines have revolutionized how we learn, how we communicate, how we shop, and in general have helped billions of people around the world develop the full strength of the internet’s bright glow. Sometimes we may take the strong ability of the local search engine for granted, but what we should do is take the time to appreciate and understand the benefits of local search.
Why is it so important? (We, as business owners and personal explorers, know now that we could not live without its delectable taste and modern ability to make life easier).
Today, there are well over 10 billion unique searches done each month online, and that’s just in the United States! Of those searches,
40% of queries have Local intent (1)
5% use the city and/or state name
2% use informal terms, like neighborhoods
0.5% use zip codes.
Recent research states that on Yahoo alone, 100 Million unique visitors per month search with “local intent” (2). We can extrapolate that there are half a billion unique Local searches per month on Google, based on Yahoo’s ~15% market share (though we’ve not seen any “hard numbers” released by Google about its average Local Search volume). We’ve seen both Google and Yahoo make dramatic shifts in how they return results in 2008, and all the trends point to Local.
WOW!!!
On top of that data, respected technology experts from around the world think the creation of mobile search is ready to take off even further in 2010. Japan is already involved in numerous mobile search technologies. The United States is starting to catch up with more sophisticated devices like the iPhone and future Verizon phones. (Mobile searches primarily pulling their searches from Local Search Engines).
This leads to one overwhelming fact: The potential to attract new customers via Local Search is enormous. Of course it is!
GetListed.org will hopefully help your business get started building and improving its search engine presence. And if you find yourself overwhelmed by the world of Local Search, help is here below for you:
http://getlisted.org/resources/
So, let’s not take these Local Searches for granted anymore, but understand that it is only the beginning of success for you, your business, your personal life, and this world. We are involved in a new world of technological communication that is just beginning to bloom and prosper. This is why Local Search, from the simple to the complex, is so valuable and important! You better believe it and use it to your expense!

Microsoft and Yahoo recently gained regulatory approval on a search and advertising deal announced last year, which will see Yahoo using Bing’s algorithm in its search results.We know that Bing will be used in the back-end of searches on Yahoo, but we don’t know what other elements Yahoo will still be incorporating into the search experience.

Optimizing for Yahoo is not going to be limited to showing up in Bing’s results. That’s not to say that showing up in Bing’s results won’t have its advantages for Yahoo search, but there is a lot more going on at Yahoo than that. The company has been stressing that it is still very much focused on search, and under the deal with Microsoft, Yahoo will still be controlling the user experience at Yahoo.com.

Right now, Yahoo.com has plenty of elements to consider, from news and trending topics, to a whole slew of “applications” that users can customize on their Yahoo homepage. Among these are Facebook and Flickr. If you want to get in front of Yahoo users, it’s not limited to Yahoo search results. That said, Yahoo search results also have their own thing going on. Keep an eye on the box that appears under the search box after you enter a query. It contains related queries, and “related concepts”. This is one area that could conceivably be independent from Bing (although that remains to be seen at this point). Yahoo is not shy about putting brands in these “related concepts” either. You can find WebProNews in there for a query like “ebusiness news”.

The point is, Yahoo has made it clear that it will continue to control the user experience, and that means there should be plenty of areas within Yahoo that are out of Bing’s control. This leads me to presume that Yahoo will not be something you’ll want to ignore, just because Bing is integrated into it. Remember that at this point, Yahoo controls a much greater percentage of the search market than Bing.

All of that said, you may want to pay closer attention to your Bing rankings if you haven’t done so in the past, because while Yahoo will still be Yahoo to its users, the deal also means there will be significantly more eyeballs on what Bing determines to be the most relevant results to searches.

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/tech/2010/02/27/barnett.chili.quake.social.media.cnn

Google, Yahoo, and other search engines have revolutionized how we learn, how we communicate, how we shop, and in general have helped billions of people around the world develop the full strength of the internet’s bright glow. Sometimes we may take the strong ability of the local search engine for granted, but what we should do is take the time to appreciate and understand the benefits of local search.
Why is it so important? (We, as business owners and personal explorers, know now that we could not live without its delectable taste and modern ability to make life easier).
Today, there are well over 10 billion unique searches done each month online, and that’s just in the United States! Of those searches,
40% of queries have Local intent (1)
5% use the city and/or state name
2% use informal terms, like neighborhoods
0.5% use zip codes.
Recent research states that on Yahoo alone, 100 Million unique visitors per month search with “local intent” (2). We can extrapolate that there are half a billion unique Local searches per month on Google, based on Yahoo’s ~15% market share (though we’ve not seen any “hard numbers” released by Google about its average Local Search volume). We’ve seen both Google and Yahoo make dramatic shifts in how they return results in 2008, and all the trends point to Local.
WOW!!!
On top of that data, respected technology experts from around the world think the creation of mobile search is ready to take off even further in 2010. Japan is already involved in numerous mobile search technologies. The United States is starting to catch up with more sophisticated devices like the iPhone and future Verizon phones. (Mobile searches primarily pulling their searches from Local Search Engines).
This leads to one overwhelming fact: The potential to attract new customers via Local Search is enormous. Of course it is!
GetListed.org will hopefully help your business get started building and improving its search engine presence. And if you find yourself overwhelmed by the world of Local Search, help is here below for you:
http://getlisted.org/resources/
So, let’s not take these Local Searches for granted anymore, but understand that it is only the beginning of success for you, your business, your personal life, and this world. We are involved in a new world of technological communication that is just beginning to bloom and prosper. This is why Local Search, from the simple to the complex, is so valuable and important! You better believe it and use it to your expense!

Google announced that its launching new service called DoubleClick for publishers to help web content creators in their advertising.

Its a one-stop shop for content creators to find advertisers,manage advertising on their sites and manage data to increase ad effectiveness.

DoubleClick for Publishers also includes a new API, which will allow users to create their own Web-based advertising applications and integrate them into the service.

Google’s decision to launch DoubleClick for Publishers is a shot over the bow of start-ups like Rubicon Project that attempt to optimize and sell publisher ads.

hree out of four people surveyed said they think using the Internet is making us smarter, not more stupid, according to a study jointly done by the Pew Internet & American Life Project and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center. The question was posed in reaction to tech author Nicholas Carr’s cover story in a 2009 issue of The Atlantic Monthly — “Is Google Making us Stupid?”

The study polled 895 technologists, business executives, scientists and analysts as part of Pew’s fourth annual Future of the Internet study.

Carr’s article, which ran last summer, contended that the ease of online search and the distraction of browsing could be limiting his mental abilities.

“The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds,” wrote Carr. “In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas.”

Most of the people in the survey disagreed, however.

According to the study, 76% of everyone polled said that by 2020, intelligence will be enhanced by the ease of access to information, and that people will become smarter and make better choices. Only 21% said the Internet could be lowering the IQs of avid users.

Carr, responding to the survey, said he hasn’t changed his position.

“I feel compelled to agree with myself,” he wrote in a response that was attached to the survey’s findings. “But I would add that the Net’s effect on our intellectual lives will not be measured simply by average IQ scores. What the Net does is shift the emphasis of our intelligence, away from what might be called a meditative or contemplative intelligence and more toward what might be called a utilitarian intelligence. The price of zipping among lots of bits of information is a loss of depth in our thinking.”

Peter Norvig, research director at Google, also wrote a response, noting that skimming countless sources of information and having good concentration can coexist.

“My conclusion is that when the only information on a topic is a handful of essays or books, the best strategy is to read these works with total concentration,” wrote Norvig. “But when you have access to thousands of articles, blogs, videos, and people with expertise on the topic, a good strategy is to skim first to get an overview. Skimming and concentrating can and should coexist.”

Sharon Gaudin