Increase your standout in an ever-competitive PPC landscape

Well, it’s been a long time coming, but the expected deal between Yahoo & Microsoft has finally been announced – with one aim, being more effective at taking on Google.

So, unless you’ve been hiding under a mighty big rock of late, you’ll no doubt have heard about Google Streetview. There’s a lot in the media at present about the privacy issue (yawn) – but this post IS NOT about that, so you can continue reading without getting bored!

There’s been a lot said of late about the future of search, and two common themes have appeared time and time again. We’ve already talked about semantic search (and its effect on PPC), and now seems an apt time to talk about personalisation.

Search is one of the most important ways that users find their way around web sites.

Google Site Search now features up to date search results following a recent upgrade to this service.

Google Site Search is a popular choice for web sites which do not already have a search facility.  It allows webmasters to quickly and easily set up a Google powered search engine specifically for their site.

Semantic Search is a term that’s been floated around the online industry for a few years now, but we’re only recently starting to see real progress in this area.

For those not in the know – it refers to the ability of a user to search in natural language phrases, and for the search engine to understand that natural language – rather than just returning results based on the main keywords within your search. To illustrate the power of semantic search – this would mean a query such as “where can I buy trainers”, would return local results of sports shops, not just websites optimised for the keyword “buy trainers”. Yes, this is big; this is the next-level of search.

There’s a recession looming, in case you didn’t know, it’s changing how we think and hitwise have been sharing some of their insights with us.

Fast moving search terms for September include Hadron Collider, HBoS, Sarah Palin, Sex on Fire, Elbow, Ryder Cup & Google Chrome, amongst others.

Interestingly, the rate of growth in the Social Networking & Forums category has slowed quite a bit, whilst blogs & personal websites have seen a decrease in popularity year on year – this could be our last post!

Google have entered the world of web browsers with one of their latest releases, Google Chrome.

Chrome is a web browser that, on the face of it, seems to be in line with most other browsers.

It's currently in Beta stage so there are certain things it still doesn't do for example, still no Google toolbar!

There are things it does above and beyond all other web browsers though.