Google joins race to buy DoubleClick: report  from MarketWatch  reports that Google has emerged with Microsoft Corp. as a contender to buy DoubleClick, an online advertising company. The report was given from Wall Street Journal.

The price of DoubleClick emerges to $2 billion due to the high competition between Google and Microsoft. According to the report

DoubleClick acts as a middleman between advertisers and ad agencies and online publishers.  The New York company’s Internet-based systems let advertisers deliver ads to Web sites and serve up ads for publishers when consumers view their Web pages.

The bidding is too large as four of the biggest internet players are involved(Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Time Warner - a unit of AOL).

Mark

SEO Tags : DoubleClick, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL 

Neil Patel from Pronetadvertising has created a fun game and to know more about search engines. Neil Patel says,

Search Engine Smackdown is a fun game where you can be the Google founders (Larry & Sergey), Yahoo founders (Jerry & David), or Microsoft founders (Bill & Paul) and duke it out with each other in a wrestling ring with Danny Sullivan

So there will be a question about search engines and answering it will make you win and a wrong answer will make you smack down. Three continuous correct answers will make a specail move for you. Search Engine Smackdown requires version 8 of the Flash player or higher to run.

Represent yourself with your well wishing company and smack down the one you don’t like.

Mark

SEO Tags : Pronetadvertising, Search Engine Smackdown, Search Engine Game

Readwriteweb has made an overview on the new features of My Yahoo!. More ajax and web 2.0. features added. My Yahoo! has a fresh design and good interactive features. Some of the new features are

* Pre-built personalized pages for each user.
* Category pages for topics and “content suggestions”.
* Drag and drop feature which improves cutomization.
* Feed previews and a full post reader on the page.
* Editable Personal Assistant with instant access to things like Yahoo! Mail, horoscopes, local traffic, etc..
* Redesigned modules from Yahoo! and select partners, with games, music, etc.
* Sharing feature, enabling users to send their My Yahoo! page or favorite modules to friends and family
* More “new interactive modules” are yet to come

With 50 million monthly users worldwide My Yahoo! seem to be the biggest personalised home page. New features of My Yahoo! seem to be better than the old one

Mark

SEO Tags : My Yahoo!, Web2.0., Personalized Home Page

As per the thread in seroundtable today morning, Yahoo and Google seem to update the link count for all sites. Many webmasters have reported about the increase in the number of links for their sites. Yahoo! Search Link Update thread and Google Link Update within Webmastercentral link tools thread confirms the update for Yahoo and Google respectively.

Check your link updates in Yahoo! site Explorer for Yahoo and Google webmastertools for Google.

Mark

SEO Tags : Link Updates, Back Links, Google Webmaster tools, Yahoo Site Explorer

Yahoo! search blog has announced that they are supporting Meta tag called ‘NOYDIR’ which will be a complement of ‘NOODP’ Meta tag.

Yahoo search gets information about a site both from Yahoo crawler based search results and also from Yahoo directory. Yahoo crawler based is crawled by the bots but the Yahoo directory is a human compiled one. So if there is a repetition of title or abstract that is both from crawler and Yahoo directory, Yahoo always takes the information from the human compiled one rather than the abstract or title by bots. Sometimes the abstract or title may be outdated in Yahoo directory. So if a site owner is not interested in abstract taken from Yahoo directory, the owner can use the Meta Tags for the submission.

Meta Tag : META NAME = “ROBOTS” CONTENT =”NOYDIR” or

META NAME = “Slurp” CONTENT =”NOYDIR”

Using this Meta Tag the abstract information will be taken from the bots and this announcement will make Yahoo! search more efficient.

Mark

SEO Tags : Yahoo Search, Yahoo Directory, NOYDIR Meta Tag

Yahoo search blog has announced that many shortcuts are launched in Yahoo as it is an Oscar season. So to entertain people and to know more about the searched movie, Yahoo provides trailers along with the search results.

Yahoo has also made many shortcuts nowadays in Yahoo Search. The show times of the film can be easily known by entering your postal code. Entering the country code such as ca for Canada can give you some effective results. If you search film name in google.ca it asks for a postal code and entering it will give you the moving timings. The same can also be done in Google,Ask and live.com. The film name with zip code gives you film timings.

To search about famous hotels you have to type the city name and then append hotels with it. For eg: Chennai hotels. Similarly to know about flight rates type flight rates city to city. Enter the name instead of city. These information from Yahoo makes search more easier and effective.

Mark

Tags: Yahoo,Yahoo Search, Search shortcuts, Movie shortcuts

Venture beat reports that Yahoo loses VP of consumer search, to Accel Partners. Andrew Braccia was the vice president of Yahoo’s consumer web search and he left Yahoo earlier this month. He began his journey with Accel Partners, a well-known Silicon Valley venture capital firm today.

He worked under Jeff Weiner for six years and was responsible for all business and operational aspects of Yahoo’s consumer search business. He was famously known for the integration of Inktomi, Overture and Alta Vista, launching Yahoo Answers and aquiring Del.icio.us and Flickr.

At Accel, he’ll help the firm’s consumer Internet investors manage a portfolio of investments that include Glam Media, Facebook, BitTorrent, and others.

Mark

SEO Tags : Yahoo, Andrew Braccia, Yahoo’s consumer web search, Accel