Is there a new interface in the works for Yahoo? Search Engine Roundtable reports August 19^th on grouped or indented search results.

“In the past, Yahoo never ever indented search results. In fact, in the past I thought they did do indenting and then stopped, but Yahoo told me that they have never grouped results.

Many search results, including a search for search engine roundtable return grouped results now. Here is a picture:”

by Bill Stroll, Sales Manager, StepForth Web Marketing Inc.

Celebrating over 10 years of web marketing excellence.

News.com says Google is number 4. For a brief period of time last week Google’s market cap slipped from third to fourth position. Apple’s market cap reached $158.84 billion and edged out Google which was at $157.84. Wikipedia defines market capitalization as “…a measurement of corporate or economic size equal to the share price times the number of shares outstanding of a public company. As owning stock represents owning the company, including all its assets, capitalization could represent the public opinion of a company’s net worth and is a determining factor in stock valuation.”

The post states “Google’s share price is much higher, at $505.82 compared with Apple’s $178.97, but Google has only 314 million outstanding shares while Apple has nearly 886 million.” Microsoft is still the leader at $255 billion and IBM follows at $170 billion.

by Bill Stroll, Sales Manager, StepForth Web Marketing Inc.
Celebrating over 10 years of web marketing excellence.

Before the Search Bash began CEO Daron Babin of WebmasterRadio.FM got everyone talking after he proclaimed the entertainment at the Search Bash would be better than ever… even to rival Google’s impressive Google Dance the night before.

Well, it is safe to say we were all pretty skeptical that Google’s party could be beat. That said, I don’t know of anyone that would doubt Daron’s capability to go over the top – he is a true entertainer. As a result, attendance was high for the kick off and I don’t think anyone was dissapointed by the entertainment that got progressively awe inspiring as the night continued. Read more…

When you look at it on a global scale Google is by far the leader when it comes to searching for online information. Nobody really questions that. But what is the next step for Google? For some time now they have been helping users to find images, videos, news reports, and so much more – but once the internet is fully categorized within the depths of Google, and the monetization is solid for all its efforts, what will Google move to after that?

It seems that I cant escape the mention of anything work related during my personal life. This weekend when reading the September issue of Discover Magazine I saw an article on DNA testing that mentioned Sergey Brin and Google’s contribution of $3.9 Million to 23andMe, a genetic testing company back in 2007. This is old news, but it got my brain thinking off to a tangent.

Could the goal behind this investment be to prime the company for a future takeover by Google? Perhaps the future for Google is to index you, and me, and all our deceased relatives. By fully indexing DNA, perhaps we will someday have the ability to load in a drop of blood, saliva, or a hair, into our computers and have Google spit out a complete list of all our relatives, their info, and real-time Google Earth images or videos from above showing what they are doing at this exact moment, all with ads of course.

It may sound far fetched – (and okay, maybe it is), but less than 50 years ago so was the idea of us having personal computers in our homes – and only a few centuries ago the world was still flat! So while it may be unrealistic, in a few generations we may be able to research the DNA of potential mates from our homes by simply entering their name (probably telepathically) into Google. What a scary thought.

About three years ago Google took on a 5% stake at AOL for a whopping $1 Billion. Today Google is not so sure that the investment was a good choice.

While they are not saying the value they believe the investment is worth, they are certainly not pleased by the past decision.

“Based on our review, we believe our investment in AOL may be impaired. After consideration of the duration of the impairment, as well as the reasons for any decline in value and the potential recovery period, we do not believe that such impairment is ‘other-than-temporary’.” Google noted in their lengthy 10-Q on June 30, 2008.

AOL apparently has also been looking for potential buyers – Certainly MSN and Yahoo have been in consideration, but one must wonder, that even if they think their $1billon investment may have been a bad idea, would they be willing to buy out AOL to keep it out of Yahoo and Microsoft’s hands? Time will tell.

Looking for free music online in China just got a lot easier – and its legal! Google recently launched Music Onebox over at Google.cn to try and grab a larger percentage of the search market over in China according to the LA Times. Currently Baidu is the Chinese leader in search – one of its strongest features is music, however, most if which is illegal.

By providing a legal alternative Google hopes to snag some additional market share. According to a Google spokesperson: “We are launching Music Onebox to give users an easy and legal way to find the music they’re looking for, and to give music labels and publishers a new channel to distribute, promote and make money off of their valuable music content.” Read more…

Today is the first day of the 2008 Olympics from Beijing China and Yahoo has made it incredibly easy for us to track the medal standings. Now, when you perform a search in Yahoo for “Olympic medals” at the top of the search result pages you’ll see the standings for the top 5 countries along with a “more” link to see the full results.

This year there will be no need to surf and hunt through various news and olympic sites as the medal standings have never been easier to find.

Last year StepForth celebrated its 10th year anniversary as a company and today we get to celebrate another auspicious event; the 1000th post in the StepForth SEO Blog!

Since 2002 the StepForth staff has been writing newsletters, articles, and white papers which if totalled would accumulate to far more than 1000 pieces of content but the StepForth’s SEO Blog’s inaugural post was published on August 20th, 2003; “Yahoo and MSN Continue to Grab for Google’s Gold” by our previous in-house writer Jim Hedger. Not long after, on August 27th I wrote an article about the advantages of having a blog called “A Marketing Tool that is Difficult to Ignore.” I was pretty excited about the whole concept of blogging and the obvious marketing benefits inherent to the medium. But little did I know we would actually see the day where we would break the 1000 postings barrier. Read more…