Worthy of the Weekly Wrap-Up

By Brooke Nichols

More news from the net to keep your brain busy this weekend. I recommend the article on the semantic web, which reminded me of Aaron’s Search Insider article on the MyLifeBits project. These are the kinds of innovations that will carve the path to truly personalized search and ambient findability...

Future: "Semantic Web" Google might have developed an effective way of searching for Web pages on the Internet, but its achievement pales in comparison to what is possible on the "Web of the future," says Tim Berners-Lee, one of the founding fathers of the Internet. He says the Internet will allow any piece of information, like a letter or photo, to be linked to any other. Social networks, for example, would be superseded by networks that connect all kinds of things through something called the "semantic Web." Berners-Lee says this marks the next phase of the Web's development.

Mobile search is not online search (and why that matters)
There's a lot of buzz around the mobile Web and mobile search these days. Early metrics have been impressive: Last year, The New York Times reported a mobile traffic increase of 600%, ESPN reported that its mobile traffic surpassed that of its Web site, and mobile ad company AdMob has posted impression volumes north of 2 billion per month.

Microsoft's Rapt Acquisition Enhances Ad Offerings
Microsoft took another stride in its race against Google today with the acquisition of Rapt, a company that helps Web publishers manage their advertising.

By acquiring Rapt, Microsoft continues its efforts to compete with Google to provide Web publishers with a full suite of ad serving technologies. Rapt's services are comparable to those of DoubleClick's Dart for Publishers and Google's Ad Manager, a beta version of which the search giant unveiled yesterday.

Keep Competitors From Seeing Your Data Competitive analysis is par for the course in search--but Bill "IncrediBILL" Atchison offers up a list of tools you can use to help keep your competition from stealing your SEO secrets. You can block the archive.org crawler, which will keep competitors from scraping your archived pages--preventing them from seeing how your site evolved over time. Add archive.org and the Xenu (a link sleuthing tool) to your .htaccess file and you'll keep snoopers out. You should also block bots, speeding crawlers and other unauthorized tools with your .htaccess file.

Eight Search Sites To Watch
When the research analysts at Hitwise, Nielsen, and Compete release their monthly search engine rankings, you can sometimes feel their pain in covering the same story over and over again. Check out Jeremy Crane’s latest post on Compete’s blog where he tries to lighten things up by talking about his wife’s birthday (happy belated, Mrs. C.!) and laments in the headline, “Microhoo gets boring.” I feel your pain, Jeremy. That’s why we’ll mix it up a little this week and focus on eight search-related startups

Search In Pictures: American Airlines Google Billboard, Yahoo's Birthday Party & Chris Gardner @ Yahoo
In this week's Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have, and more.