The following is a summary of the major changes in the search engines in the month of March:
March 10th: Google takes over the Go Network as the primary search feed. Google AdWords dominate the search results, displaying from 3-10 paid listings on each page.
March 17th: Overture’s “grandfathered” bids of less than five cents have been moved to the old minimum of five cents. While there has been a lot of public complaining, Overture could have raised the bids to the new minimum of ten cents.
March 19th: Yahoo! and Inktomi announced completion of the acquisition.
Grub has joined the LookSmart team to assist LookSmart’s engine, WiseNut to crawl pages. The drawback is Grub needs volunteers to use computer resources to index web pages. I have it running on three of our lab computers, I will inform you of any positive results.
March 29th: Yahoo! begins testing their new search results which is a mix of Inktomi, ODP, Yahoo! directory listings and a penalty for not having an Overture account.
Other News:
Google announced in the Search Engine Strategies Conference (SESC) in Boston in mid-March that they would be changing the way that PageRank is calculated for domains that have expired sometime in the future. While the change has not happened now, we will advise you on the right domains to get so they aren’t purchased solely for their PageRank merit.
Google Dropping the ODP soon?: Daniel Dulitz, the Google rep at the SESC, was asked about ODP directory listings still counting in Google despite how outdated the ODP is. He noted that Google treats links differently, and “links from directories that people still use” would be considered an important and quality link. He didn’t elaborate but his comment could signify Google’s move away from the ODP and using another source (internal perhaps?) for their Directory.
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