Search Engine Marketing Profession Organization, SEMPO, has announced its nominees for the Board of Directors for the 2012-2014 Board. Of the 38 highly respectable nominees, 13 will fill the seats of SEMPO Board of Directors. 

The nominees are chosen on the basis of their standing, achievements and influence in the search industry. The top 13 Directors forming the 2012-2014 Board will be selected via electronic voting to be held from February 14 to February 22, 2012. The submission of votes is to be completed by February 22 at 5pm EDT.

The editor of PageTraffic Buzz and CEO of PageTraffic Web-Tech, Navneet Kaushal, is also one of the nominees. Navneet’s decade long experience in the industry and the global presence of PageTraffic has made him one of the most sought after search marketing expert. You can read his Bio to know of his other accomplishments.

 He is one of the few members representing India on the SEMPO platform. At the recently held SEMPO Chennai, he gave a presentation on Global SEO Strategies before eminent members of the search industry. 

The entire team of PageTraffic wishes him the best of luck!

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SEMPO Board of Directors 2012 Nominees Announced!

Christmas is a couple of days away, and search engines are fused with the Christmas spirit too.
First up is Google, which has literally 'put up' Christmas decorations. Simply key in search terms christmas or merry christmas and you will see colorful decorations along the top bar.

On to Bing. The photo in the Bing home page is of a beautifully done up tree placed in a huge room with bright Christmas decorations.

Yahoo search page is nothing out of the ordinary, however, the offices have a different story to tell. It is believed that Yahoo employees are celebrating Christmas in a full blown manner. There is a Christmas decoration competition going on, and the offices are looking like something out of a store display.

(Photo Courtesy-seroundtable.com)

Have you decorated your offices/homes to the hilt too? PageTraffic is all set for the Christmas Eve!

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Search Engines Christmas Decorations!

Like every year, Google came up with a doodle to celebrate Halloween, 2011. The difference being, it's a video doodle.

The video features 6 Google employees, carving it's name out of 6 huge pumpkins. The video, after beginning with 6 people, see more joining in. Many of these people appear in costumes, there was a Santa and an Android Bot.

The first doodle came out in 1998 and since then we have seen more than 1000 new designs.

So, Trick or Treat?

Happy Halloween!

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It's Halloween!

A survey conducted by About.com has identified the following three reasons behind why people do online searching-

1. They want answers
2. They want to be educated
3. They want to be inspired.

Tracy Raiser, senior vice president for sales, About.com, explained the findings in the following way -

“These findings offer advertisers and marketers a better understanding and valuable insight into the way consumers search online. The Three Mindsets of Search study aims to improve the understanding of how consumers search. It’s a real opportunity for marketers to think about campaigns in a whole new light.”

A key significance of these findings is that they can provide a clue to marketers on how to connect more effectively with people doing Internet searching.

People doing Internet searching for answers-

There are people who do the online searching either to find a quick solution to a problem or to get some details about something. The questions they are looking answers for can vary like anything, such as “how to fix a broken radio” and “who is the villain's sidekick in the movie that I saw last evening”. And yes, the questions concerned are not necessarily important ones all the time. Nevertheless, people like to search for the answers to them.

About.com suggests that marketers can tap this type of searches, by presenting ads talking about clear benefits, such as “coffee in under 5 minutes”.

As per the survey, 46% of the total number of people doing online searching do the same to seek answers to some question.

People doing Internet searching for getting educated-

People doing online searching to get educated over something do the same to get better command over a topic or subject, with Health and Finance being the most searched topics/subjects. These people look for relevant information, with the objective being getting as much detailed information as possible.

About.com suggests marketers to provide such people with informative ads that cover a topic from various angles. For example, a company into selling organic foods can allow such searchers to track the food as it travels from the farm to table. And that can be accompanied with detours discussing health, safety and economic factors.

As per the survey, 26% of the total number of people doing online searching do the same to get educated over something.

People doing Internet searching for getting inspired-

This type of searching is done with the objective to kill time. The popular topics for this type of searchers are travel and home, with the other ones being books, movies, new images, games, etc. The motivating factors behind such searches are creativity and world of possibilities. About.com suggests marketers to approach these searchers with something captures imagination, like the video trailer for a new book or the images of an ice hotel.

As per the survey, 28% of the total number of people doing online searching do the same to get inspired for something.

The survey also reveals some interesting data. For example, contrary to general belief, people doing internet searching for an answer do not feel it is very important to to talk to an expert.

• People doing Internet searching for answers said that all that they bother about is getting an answer, irrespective of the fact it comes from an expert or not.
• People doing Internet searching for getting educated appreciate the value of expert inputs, but are equally open to learning from online friends and followers.
• People doing Internet searching for getting inspired simply do not bother about experts, but just depend on their friends and social networks.

Another notable revelation of the study is the evolution or broadening of the meaning of expertise, thus giving validity to multiple types of expertise. As per the study, people feel the type of expert in a given situation is defined by the type, category and intensity of the search. As far as defining the experts is concerned, 96% of the surveyed people said they accept “self taught allies” with high level of experience and motivation as experts. However, 87% of the surveyed people said they accept as experts those people who have formal education and traditional credential. 89% said they recognize the knowledge of crowds or other experienced users they come across in social or other networks.

The people surveyed have given a positive feedback about brands as experts. 64% of them have said that ads have been helpful in finding great options or deals. 86% have said that they love to take notice of ads that prefer teaching something useful rather than teaching something useful. 77% have acknowledged that ads are helpful when they are adequately relevant to their search. And 88% feel that those ads are the best ones which in combination with the information source help the searchers get what they need.

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The Three Reasons Behind Online Searching, As Identified By About.Com!

Blekko, the new search engine founded by Rich Skrenta has finally been launched to the public on November 1, 2010. The goal of this new search engine is to be able to provide useful search results without the irrelevant links. It claims to offer results collected from 3 billion trusted websites and exclude materials from content farms. With slash tags to let the users “slash the web” and other SEO related features, Blekko seems to have enough tricks to interest casual users and webmasters alike.

The slash tags (Blekko's unique feature) will let users filter their search results based on a user- or Blekko defined list of websites. It has already maintained over 250 slash tags in the beta version, including some like:

• /beer
• /christianity
• /green
• /startrek
• /blogs
• /traffic
• /flickr
• /define and so on.

You can create a slash tag and do a search against them by typing the slash tag followed by your search query, the format is: “/<your-username>/<your-tag-name> <search>”. Danny Sullivan's in his post “Blekko: New Search Engine Lets You “Spin” The Web” goes in to an in depth explanation with examples of using slash tags. Danny searched BP (its Gulf Coast oil spill), and what websites are discussing using slash tags. In the first first he typed in bp /liberal (indicating that the result expected are the ones with liberal slants). The result of the search looks like:

In the next search for the same topic (BP), he used another slash tag, this time for a conservative view – bp /conservative (indicating that the result expected are the ones with conservative inclinations). Now the result looks like this:

In the first search result, sites like the Huffington Post or Mother Jones were returned while in the next one, the result looks totally different with Fox News topping the list.

Thus it is evident that much of the usual clutter that a user has to go through while using other search engines are done away with at Blekko. It is like using the regular Google search for images and then later using the Google images for the same. Google images is solely for images, likewise, using slash tags your search result can be made much more specific and relevant. That’s what Blekko is offering, the ability to apply a viewpoint to search results in a way that is impossible at the major search engines.

However, it would be inappropriate to call the slash tags at Blekko – perfect. Although it is easy to do slash tag searches on Blekko than on Google, there are other searches where Google's “searching across the entire web” proves more relevant than Blekko and its use of slash tags. Blekko knows this and readily acknowledges that it has imperfections.

Blekko also offers different information about websites and provides some interesting tables and graphs to help the user visualize and analyze a website's on-page and off-page SEO. At Blekko, you will be able to see charts for inbound link distribution, crawl stats, the number of inbound links, and the number of site pages. You can also compare two domains and see what other sites are duplicating this site’s content and so on. Blekko also reveals all the factors that drives their rankings, and let you get behind any URL or site to see what their web search footprint looks like. It doesn't “believe security through obscurity is the best way to drive search ranking quality forward.” Here's an image for example:

In their "Search Bill of Rights", they list the following that:

1. Search shall be open
2. Search results shall involve people
3. Ranking data shall not be kept secret
4. Web data shall be readily available
5. There is no one-size-fits-all for search
6. Advanced search shall be accessible
7. Search engine tools shall be open to all
8. Search & community go hand-in-hand
9. Spam does not belong in search results
10. Privacy of searchers shall not be violated

Based on the above bill, seobook.com thinks that they will appeal to:

• anyone who submits themselves to the open ideology
• journalists who hate content mills
• searchers who hate junk search results
• SEOs & webmasters who like free data
• programmers who like to hack and tweak
• people interested in personal freedom & privacy

Tremendous talks and tests on this latest search engine is already circulating on the web. Experts from various sites throwing in their views with a mixture of pros and cons, with in-depth analysis, offer a good reading for all. Webuildpages notes some SEO information that Blekko offers:

•  inbound links
• anchor text distribution data
• duplicate content data
• site comparison feature
• pages indexed by Blekko
• crawl data

Another interesting feature of Blekko is the duplicate content feature. It allows you to see if you have any duplicate content on your site, and helps you find out who is jacking your content, ranked by who jacks your content the most. You can even use this feature to see if you can contact these people to see if you can get them to link back to you. Blekko makes this even easier by also providing the domain tools with information next to the website name.

Yet another feature that can be used for a variety of SEO purposes is the site comparison feature. You can use it to estimate the problem-size of authorized URL issues on your site. For example, when you click on the compare tab, Blekko automatically compares the www. domain with the non – www. domain. You can use this to see how many links are going to the www. , as well the non – www., side by side. Also while comparing two sites for Domain Link Stats, you can compare inbound links, inbound domains, and cross links too. Blekko also compares the Domain Top Ranked pages for the two websites being compared and give you comparative Domain Crawl Stats, and Top Inbound Sites By Host Rank.

There are a lot more at Blekko that is definitely worth exploring. Although the information it provide cannot be called complete, there is no doubt that it does provide great information on trusted links one can use. Therefore, even with its (Blekko) visible flaws, any user or webmaster would be easily impressed by the daring efforts Blekko has put in.

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Blekko Review: The New Search Engine in Town!

Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) released its second In-House salary survey result. Despite the economic disorder, the result came out to be positive for the search marketers as an increase in the compensation was reported. Sara Holoubek, the President of SEMPO mentioned that even in recession period the result was good and signifies the brighter side of employment in the sales and marketing of search engine marketing sector.

The survey was done by SEMPO for more than 600 in-house SEO professionals. Conducted during the second quarter of this year it helped in reaching up to some major findings. For the year 2009, those having a relevant experience of 1-3 years gets an annual income ranging between $40,000 to $80,000. Whereas in the case of professionals like Senior manager, vice presidents and specialists it is different. Their annual income ranges between $70,000 to $120,000 for the former and between $160,000 to $250,000 for the later. The budgets of an In-house SEM are generally found below $50K or above $250K with some of them lying in between.

The survey also revealed that a major section of professionals worked with an aim to increase and maintain the ROI. Search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns being the most prominent factors that helped in increasing the ROI. An expansion in the organic marketing activities has also been seen. The practitioners took several steps needed for broadening the online marketing activities. Some of the activities included were organic SEO and SEM programs, social media campaigns, email marketing, graphical ad campaigns, paid inclusion programs, vertical search engine targeting, affiliate marketing programs, and shopping engines. The most striking finding of the survey was that the changing impression of search marketing from IT/programming to marketing

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SEMPO Announces Second In – House Salary Survey Result

Twitter has unveiled its new homepage, that features search box at the core. Then, the trending topics get a noticeable position below the search box with three categories. The top row with the biggest font features topics that are hot currently, followed by the second row with slightly smaller font featuring hot topics from the past day and the third row with topics from the past week.

Twitter has always been working to improve the site. Ever since its introduction it has evolved into a multifaceted real-time tool. It is always nice to look forward for something new from Twitter!

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New Twitter Homepage Gets Search At Its Core

IxQuick, one of my favourite meta search engines and what it bills itself as “the world's most private search engine” has renamed itself to Startpage. Name change apart, there is no difference in the existing search engine.

The meta search engine has been known for using privacy as a marketing feature, which set it part from many other search engines. In 2006, shortly before the mistaken release of three months of AOL search data, IxQuick announced that it would remove its users personal data within 48 hours. Last January, it stopped recording IP addresses completely and started offering secure searching via the https protocol, which further enhanced the search engine's leadership in privacy. Big three search engines- Google, Yahoo and Microsoft/Bing still keep user data for nine months, three months and eighteen months respectively.

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IxQuick Now Becomes Startpage

The much awaited search engine Wolfram Alpha has finally gone live with a few glitches here and there. The search engine is believed to be of Google's stature is speculated to give tough competition to its popular rival. Wolfram Alpha was in development stage for five years before it was finally launched on 18th of May. Brainchild of physicist Dr Stephen Wolfram, Wolfram Alpha is first of its kind "computational knowledge engine" i.e it stores and searches its own huge database to give specific results. Unlike Google, yahoo or any other search engine it does not come out with useless search results not even remotely related to the topic. If it is unable to find the required information it pulls up a error page but does not pull out gibberish. In short, it tries to understand the user query first and then reply with specific answer if available.

Google Vs Wolfram Alpha

• less computation time More computation time
• Multiple results oriented Specific result oriented

As a response to the launch of Wolfram Alpha, Google has also doled out its new tool Google Squared. Like Alpha, Google Squared also returns specific search result on the specific query. Though Wolfram Alpha is appreciated for its search specific results and extensive database but still it will be hard for it to break the convention. Since most of the time users use wrong search keyword, in that case pulling up multiple pages will only provide necessary assistance. The system which is now in its nascent stages is believed to undergo more serious transformations to be able to provide refined information on new and more topics as per the user's requirement.

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Wolfram Alpha up and Running

Interesting changes are headed for twitter search in the coming days. Santosh Jayaram, the Twitter’s new VP of Operations, said, “Twitter Search will begin to start crawling the links which are posted in tweets and index the content of those pages. Instead of simply indexing the tweets of its users, Twitter Search will now offer search technology which will transform it into more of an open window of the live conversations and real time indexing which is happening within the Twitter community.”

Here's a screen preview of Twitter Search:

According to Needleman reports, Twitter Search, which currently only searches for Twitter posts will now add a new reputation ranking system. It will take into account user's reputation who wrote the tweet, and ranked its results based on the reputation. Although, no exact information have been provided about the reputation calculation. It is believed that it will be built upon trust factors and influence.

In simple words, Twitter improves its search capabilities by indexing its web pages and reputation ranking. These improvements will surely enhance the company's outstanding leverage in the future.

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Twitter Improves its Search Capabilities by Indexing Pages and Reputation Ranking

Jimmy Wales announced a few days ago, the closure of Wikia Search due to the ongoing economic recession. Wikia Search was designed with the primary purpose to allow users determine the rankings of sites and pages for all other users.

Wales summed up the decision like this,

“In a different economy, we would continue to fund Wikia Search indefinitely. It’s something I care about deeply. I will return to again and again in my career to search, either as an investor, a contributor, a donor, or a cheerleader.

But for now, we will be closing the doors on the Wikia Search project (as of March 31, 2009) and will be re-directing and refocusing resources on other Wikia.com properties, especially on Wikianswers. Join me there to help provide freely licensed answers to all the world’s questions.”

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Closure of Wikia Search for Now!

Tim Armstrong, (ex Google executive) replaces AOL CEO Randy Falco, who was on the job since November 2006. Armstrong was associated with Google since the year 2000 and it is not the first time when AOL has recruited a Google executive for its chief positions. According to a Press Release by Rachel Metz, AP Technology Writer:

'Tim Armstrong, who had been a senior vice president at Google and head of the company's North and South American advertising operations, replaces AOL CEO Randy Falco, a veteran TV executive who took the job in November 2006. Falco, along with Ron Grant, AOL's president and chief operating officer, are leaving AOL.

"If he wanted challenges, he picked a great place for challenges," Lee said.'

Courtesy Associated Press

All in all, it would be interesting to see how Armstrong handles the affair.

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AOL hires Google's Armstrong as new CEO

You read it right. Inquisitor is now on iPhone. The announcement is made by the Official Yahoo! Blog and users can get this plugin on their iPhones right now!

“Inquisitor Mobile Search auto-completes your search and gives suggestions as you type to refine your search. When you type in your query, websites and suggestions appear immediately below the search box. Inquisitor also speeds up your search by quickly loading site summaries and allowing you to navigate between results and the browser with just one click.” – Ariel Seidman and David Watanabe,
Yahoo! Search

Here is the download link

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Inquisitor On Your iPhone!

According to Hitwise Data (PDF FILE),

1. More than half of all search queries are at least three words long.
2. More than a third are four words or longer than that.

That means that Internet users are typing long words in different search engines as a part of their search queries. Have a look at this table that gives us a deeper insight on all the observations concerned with search queries:

It is easily depicted from the above table that 1- and 2- word queries are almost losing their impact and are becoming less common to see. On the other hand, word queries with 4, 5 (up to 8 ) words are becoming quiet a trend these days. That is why more and more webmasters are concentrating on creating contents based on long search queries these days!

The same announcement also stated these words: “Google’s search share held steady at 72% in January. Yahoo also held steady at 17.8%. MSN/Live Search saw a slight drop from the month before, while Ask saw a slight increase.”

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Hitwise Report: "Search Queries Are Getting Longer"

Mobile phones have come a long way since the initial days. Search engines are available at your fingertips, stock market revolves around your mobile set and cricket scores are just a click away! What else can you ask for!

Further the availability of iPhone and Android, has even added a new dimension to this local live search. They come with GPS navigation and help one to access all content, data and maps in seconds. And now Google has even refined the appearance of its search page when you browse through your iPhone or iPod touch.

In addition to conducting manual Google searches through Google Search application, iPhone users can now conduct searches using “Voice-Based search”, a feature that makes use of voices and is getting immensely popular and viable, all thanks to the enhancement in speech recognition technology. In this case, spoken prompts guide the users to know about their relevant queries. Amazing enough!

Smartphones are marking their existence with a bang.

“A new consumer study of U.S. mobile phone users revealed that 18.9 percent of mobile consumers now use a smartphone. It also showed that 49.2 percent of those
surveyed plan to buy an advanced mobile device within the next two years.”

Booth, senior vice president and program director, Interactive Local Media, The Kelsey Group said, "The implication is that users will increasingly turn to their smartphones for local commercial and social search experiences, and the data certainly suggest this is already happening."

People are flocking in to Livesearchmobile and now we know why! It is all about enhancing business ventures, socializing with others, performing a live search on mobile, navigate different sites, find latest news item, get turn by turn driving directions, and everything that you can ever imagine of! And not to forget the advertising revenue through PPC, adwords and other advertising campaigns.

Then you have GoogleSearch technology that provides the option of local search along with other features like Gmail, YouTube, Orkut, maps and more.
Or if you are addicted to Yahoo, then this one is for you: Yahoo on Mobile!

Here is one more finding: “Nearly 1.3 billion mobile users – 30% of the subscriber base – are expected to utilise local mobile search services by 2013, according to a new report from industry analysts, Juniper Research.”

Additional findings from the Juniper report include:

• Local search is expected to account for 43% of cumulative mobile search advertising revenues between 2008 and 2013.
• User response rates to advertising which supports mobile local search are expected to be significantly higher than for advertising on general mobile web search.
• While Western Europe currently accounts for the greatest volume of mobile search enquiries, it will soon be overtaken by the Far East & China region primarily through a surge in adoption within China itself.

The mobile users are using Internet at a much faster pace then ever before. Have a look at this Screen shot:

Almost all mobile carriers are equipped with local mobile search offerings, provided the handset supports it. Certainly the local search on mobile phones are on a roll!

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Rise In Local Search- Thanks To Technology!

Chinese search giant Baidu has received lots of suspicions for its so-called “Baidu Bidding Ranking program”. China Central Television and main competitor Google were the main critics of the program run by Baidu.

News has spread that some competitors have even filed a lawsuit in the local court to get a justified answer.

Baidu gave a prompt response on this issue stating that it has closed all the bidding rank campaign because of some quarrel generating keywords. Along with this, Baidu has strengthened its governing policies regarding Bidding Ranking program. More remedial measures are now expected to be carried out in order to regain Baidu’s high public recognition.

CCTV criticized Baidu by saying that it only wants money and pays a little attention on checking the legal status of all the bidding ranking advertisers.

Now the question that comes in our mind is: Will the Baidu issue influence general public to look for an alternative search engine? There is nothing to be afraid of, until Google can catch up. But according to a study, it has been found that Google can not catch up with Baidu for the coming 1 or 2 years because Google does not have any idea of market and its all about

According to Sterne Agee & Leach analyst James Lee “there might be some consumers, who found their way to unlicensed private clinics and other health centers by finding their ads, when searched for health related topics on Baidu”.

E-commerce times stated that such damage to Baidu’s reputation can provide more strengthening opportunities to Google because Chinese consumes will now view Baidu’s search results less pure than Google.

But according to a report, Baidu was not actually doing anything illegal as there are no laws in China, which can prevent Baidu from accepting ads from such organizations. Baidu does not even have the responsibility to find out the legitimate nature of these organizations.

All such claims have sparked widespread criticism about Baidu and this is affecting Baidu’s stock as well. CEO of Baidu, Mr. Ronin Li has promised to take action against the matter. He also told that Baidu has removed the keywords for all the four clients named in the report. Baidu is now checking the licenses of all the hospitals and pharmaceutical companies listed in its website.

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Baidu Finally Taking Steps to Rescue Its Reputation!

Amazon is taking opportunity of Thanksgiving day by releasing the bad news of shutting one of its web service i.e. Alexa Web Search. This service provides programmatic access to Alexa’s web search engine. Introduced in 2006, the service is already closed to new customers but the existing users can utilize it till January 26, 2009.

Amazon has mentioned in its mail sent to developers that the reason of closing the service is its low usage. Most of us agree with the point as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft offer more competent services. On the Alexa Web Search site, you will find Amazon saying that the service has been deprecated.

The email sent to developers by Amazon was:

Dear Alexa Developer,

The Alexa Web Services Team.

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Amazon Closing Alexa Web Search Service!

The Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization has launched its fifth annual State-of-the-SEM Market Survey.

SEMPO (Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization) recently announced its fifth industry-wide survey in order to assess the economy's effect on the annual online marketing spending and the change in budget allocation across the various media segments. The economical turbulences felt all over the world this year make it extremely important to evaluate each and every spending decision. Although Search Engine and Internet marketing is expected to grow in a robust fashion, it is important to understand the impact of the the latest economic happenings on the same. The annual survey's primary objective is to not only explore more about this impact and give a reality check on the current state of search marketing budgets, but also to give an idea of what to expect in this field in the next year.

The market survey is SEMPO's fifth successive survey in as many years and is open to all SEM professionals working in an agency or in-house corporate position. The 4th SEMPO SEM Market Survey conducted in the year 2007 got around 900 responses and this year's survey promises to go beyond that figure. The deadline of the same is January 15, 2009.

The survey provides all Search Engine Marketers a crucial opportunity to get their voices heard by Search Engines. SEMPO is partnering with Incisive Media, the producers of the Search Engine Strategies (SES) conferences, and Radar Research, a Los Angeles-based research and consulting firm, to conduct this Survey. All SEM professional have a further incentive in participating in the Survey. One lucky winner would be awarded an SES 2009 full conference pass, which is valued at $1995. Moreover, SEMPO will also be awarding an iPod Touch to a random participant of the survey.

All the survey participants will be provided access to early survey results via a webcast hosted by the SEMPO Research Committee. The preliminary results of the survey will be available in February, 2009 and a full report is expected to be declared in April, 2009.

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SEMPO's 5th Annual State-of-the-SEM Market Survey

All that happened in the world of search engines in the first week of August. Once again, the blogs are all in chronological order. Enjoy!

Yahoo! Finally Gives a New Face to Yahoo! Site Explorer!:

According to the Yahoo! Search Blog, Yahoo! has finally given its Site Explorer the long overdue facelift with an entirely new interface, giving the Site Explorer an all new look and feel. You can check out the new Yahoo! Site Explorer.

Microsoft Rolls Out Another Upgrades for Microsoft adCenter!:

Microsoft has sent an e-mail to all the advertisers, in which it talks about the new upgrades that it has rolled out for adCenter. These new features have been incorporated on the behest of numerous advertisers who had been feeling inadequate due to the loss of certain features in the adCenter accounts. With the new features, the advertisers will be able to take control of their credit card payments along with keyword research data that can be used to optimize their campaigns more effectively.

Google Tweaking the SERPS again?:

According to Digital Forums, either the August Google SERP update is still underway, or Google might have introduced a new algorithm altogether, as the SERP rankings are going bonkers.

Google Finally Speaks About the Ranking Software Blockade!:

Over at the Google Groups, Matt Cutts and JohnMu have finally spoken up about why and how Google blocks ranking checking tools.

Google Patches Up the Blogger Crawling Issues Along With Pending Sitemaps Concerns!:

Now according to Search Engine Roundtable, Google has finally fixed this issue, along with the concerns of Google's Blogger tool and Sitemaps not working well together that had been plaguing the blogging community. Via a thread at Google Groups, JohnMu has announced the rectification of these concerns.

iNet Acquires Search Marketing Standard Magazine!:

As per the publisher of Search Marketing Standard, Boris Mordkovich, the reputed online magazine has been acquired by iNET Interactive, which is a social media company. Although the acquisition took place in the month of July this year, still, due to the necessary changes that had to be made, the merger is to be formally announced on August 20th 2008.

These are the news, reviews and events that have marked their impact on the Search Engine Industry this week. Sit tight for more news from this ever evolving domain. Have a great weekend!

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Weekly Recap of Top Search Engine Related Stories-August 4th Week!

One of India's national newspaper, Hindu, recently reported that India's highest court of justice, the Supreme Court, notified the Centre, Google India, Yahoo India and Microsoft Corporation, trying to impose a ban on these online search engines, which have been unlawfully promoting sex selection techniques.

In a country that is characterized by stark gender inequalities, the Indian Law imposes strict action against the sale or advertisement of those facilities that allow parents to determine the sex of their unborn child. After having successfully wiping these off the television, radio and newspapers, the Indian courts are now striving to include the online media to this list.

Dr. Sabu Mathew George filed a writ petition against the three websites, highlighting the violation of the 'Preconception and Prenatal Diagnostic Techniques Act'. A three-Judge Bench of Chief Justice K.G. Balakrishnan and Justices P. Sathasivam and J.M. Panchal subsequently issued notice on this writ. Dr. George wants the Supreme Court to give the Center a direction to take punitive and deterrent action against the three companies.

This has been a giant leap by the Indian law-givers in demonstrating that everything in this country is subservient to equality and justice.

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The Indian Supreme Court Warns Google, Yahoo! And Microsoft For Encouraging Sex Selection Techniques!