This Week in Search

By Betsy Carpenter, Coordinator, Marketing & Strategic Partnerships

In case you missed it, here it is – your latest industry search news. Read on and get ready – a lot has happened!

• Google Lively Dies: After two years of development & 5 months of being alive, Lively, Google’s 3D World was put to rest.
• Yahoo Wins T-Mobile business: When T-Mobile users launch their “web2go”, Yahoo’s oneSearch will be their default engine.
• With SearchWiki, you control the results: Google announced their new experiment, Search Wiki, which allows users to customize their web results. On SearchWiki, users will be able to add other web pages to their results, promote or demote search results, post comments to results and read comments from others.
• This is unlike anything I’ve ever seen: TimeWarner and Google announced that Google will now serve millions of images from the Life Magazine photo archive, 97 percent of which have never been seen by the public.
• Yahoo’s CEO , Jerry Yang steps down: There are many speculations around who will be the new CEO of Yahoo, but currently all we know is that Yahoo is busy with interviews for candidates both in and outside of Yahoo. Yang will remain until his replacement is named.
• Worried you haven’t cast your search net wide enough?: Google’s new Search-based keyword tool tells you what keywords you might be missing.
• On again, off again: Just 24 hours after Jerry Yang resigned, Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO, said they are open to a search-only deal with Yahoo, but not a total acquisition.
• Yahoo releases Glue Pages in US: After success in India, Yahoo is finally releasing a beta version of their “Glue pages.” “Glue Pages” run searches across multiple categories (health, sports, finance etc…) and return mixed results combining classic listings (on the left side) with visuals related to the search (in the middle and right). Results contain images, videos, blogs, news and more.
• The new face of AdWords: Google announced it is testing a new AdWords interface on a select group of US advertisers. Google hopes the new interface will make common actions within AdWords easier, and provide more actionable insights.
• Are you providing the best services?: A new study, What Does it Take to Create Best-In-Class Search Engine Marketing?, released by the Aberdeen Group study, outlines results top companies within the research reported. How do you measure up?