Google and Microsoft are jostling to capture the online search market in the US. The later lags behind considerably the market leader and is taking steps to bridge the gap. For example, the company announced a fresh tie-up with Facebook earlier this month for integrating tips from the top social network into results of Bing. Users get to see a sidebar that identifies ‘friends’ so as to help answer topical queries of their choice and those they had ‘liked’ or those they had posted photos about. Read the rest of this entry »

Comparison Ads courtesy Google now allow users to compare a host of relevant advertisers’ offers fast and conveniently, also providing a new, flexible, and sophisticated cost-per-lead format. Users obviously seek quick and in-depth results, so the search giant has tried to make sure that these instantly display targeted offers. At present, the Ads product offering serves across three separate verticals, namely credit card, CD, checking account and lastly, savings account vertical. Read the rest of this entry »

Unlike Bing or Google, Wolfram Alpha does not actually forage the Web. It tries to cull information from its own meticulously curated database to come up with answers. Its goal is to make all kinds of systematic knowledge immediately computable and available to all. Its researchers make constant innovations with regular data updates to countless sources and improvements to its natural-language parser, new data sets and functionality. The formal name of this computational knowledge engine’s new version is ‘Wolfram Alpha Pro, and Dr’. Read the rest of this entry »

Google’s has already began adding Google+ brand pages in results, to leverage Google profiles for ‘rel=author’ tags. Google+ circles and +1s have been made visible in SERPs. This pattern, it’s felt, would become a concerted attempt on part of the search engine giant to link up promotional efforts in organic (search) results with the former’s login/verification system. In other words, it will become tougher to ensure SEO success sans using Google+ Read the rest of this entry »

Google+ may not boast a user base with numbers as high as Facebook, but it had had one of its strongest months ever just recently. According to a section of media analysts, the search engine giant’s social site is well on track to scale 400 million mark in terms of total users. Read the rest of this entry »

Any smaller or major changes to Google algorithms are done only after thorough quality evaluation. A typical change of such nature takes off as a basic idea from one of its versatile search scientists who develop better ways for evaluating the search results quality. Read the rest of this entry »

Along with Google Adwords, Microsoft adCenter and Yahoo! Search Marketing are among the most dominant PPC engines on the scene. The transition of the latter’s ad serving to adCenter is already over in the US and Canada. It is now claimed that the combined entities can reach out to about 165 million searchers making use of Microsoft and Yahoo! sites, providing a volume of more than 5.7 billion searches every month. Read the rest of this entry »

Google may ultimately face some real competition in the domain of search it has thoroughly dominated for last so many years sans any serious competition. However, with the integration process of search businesses of Microsoft and Yahoo now well on track – the challenge is going to be there. Yahoo searches are already employing Bing engine courtesy Microsoft. Read the rest of this entry »