Nuts and Bolts of Search News
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Written By Kate Zimmermann | September 21, 2006 | Share This
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Everyone still seems to be in recovery from the explosion of product releases that happened last week. Taking a bit of a breather, the search engines have spent most of this week tweaking only bits and pieces of their anatomy.
Google kicked off the week with an update to Picasa, featuring new sharable photo albums. In the midst of the excitement over their new Political Action Committee, Google also began playing around with ad placement, changing sponsored ad location depending on user behavior. They fixed a bug with Adwords reporting and upgraded their Search Appliance for corporate intranets.. On Tuesday, they
Yahoo started Monday with an announcement about a major ad campaign, complete with Free Dunkin Donuts coffee for everyone who makes Yahoo their homepage. Things were still looking up on Tuesday, with the exclusive release of Jesse McCartney’s full album in MP3 and news of their talent “incubator”. By the end of the day, however, Yahoo’s efforts came crashing down with their stock price, following the announcement of slowed YSM revenue. Decreasing demand for automotive and financial ads provoked the rapid drop. On Wednesday, they tried a comeback with the announcement of Yahoo! Current and an update to their contextual ads display. Today, the news broke that Yahoo! is in talks with Facebook over a $1 billion deal. That ought to give the analysts something to buzz about.
MSN had a slow week, after their much discussed release of Live.com. On Monday, a bug was discovered with the referrer data from MSN, which they had patched up by today. On Tuesday, they released the beta version of SoapBox, a user-generated video site to compete with YouTube, and then today announced that they’ve partnered with Nokia to integrate Live search into Nokia’s mobile search offerings.
AOL spent the week selling itself to Europe, starting with the sale of AOL Germany to Telecom Italia on Monday. Today they unloaded AOL France on Neuf Cegetel and are still in talks to sell AOL UK. On Tuesday, they released the direct-to-download version of Tara Reid’s new movie “Incubus”, and began the long process of restructuring its business divisions.
Topics: Search: News |