According to InfoWorld, Yahoo announced Wednesday that it has purchased a 35 percent stake in Tyroo Media, an India based PPC internet advertising company which places ads on a network of around 1200 websites.

“Yahoo India has bought more than 35 but less than 50 percent stake in Tyroo for a significant amount and the tie up would help us cater to our international clients who want to advertise in India,” Yahoo India Managing Director George Zacharias told reporters.”

India offers a huge marketplace and its online presence is growing rapidly. It only makes sense for Yahoo to further tap into this market.

“Yahoo started its search-based advertising business in India about eight months ago and so far has a few thousand small advertisers, Zacharias said. There are millions of potential advertisers in India, which all the search companies and advertising networks are chasing, he added.”

While remaining independent, Tyroo and Yahoo will open up their back end systems so that advertisers will have access both networks.

Last week Google made its move against eBay owned Skype, an online person-to-person internet telephony company, with the purchase of startup company, GrandCentral Communications.

On Monday, Google product manager Wesley Chan posted confirmation of the deal in the official Google Blog:

“We’re pleased to announce that we have acquired GrandCentral Communications, a company that provides services for managing your voice communications. GrandCentral is an innovative service that lets users integrate all of their existing phone numbers and voice mailboxes into one account, which can be accessed from the web. We think GrandCentral’s technology fits well into Google’s efforts to provide services that enhance the collaborative exchange of information between our users.”

Read more…

The big search engines are spending money like crazy these days. From the many new multi-billion dollar acquisitions taking place over the past several months, to the second $600 Million data centers under construction by Google.

Microsoft is also expanding further with a 6000 employee research and development center currently under way in Shanghai according to Forbes. Read more…

The spring of 2009 will see the grand opening of a new $600 million data center for Google in Council Bluffs Iowa. News was announced yesterday by Gov. Chet Culver and Google in Council Bluffs.

This announcement comes just 6 weeks after an announcement for a $600 million data center in Pryor Creek OK, expected to open a year sooner in Spring of 2008.

Three parcels of land totaling 1185 acres will be used to house the massive project including two facilities, and once completed it is estimated that Google will employ 200 workers at the new location.

With all these new expansions one must wonder, is Google simply beefing up its current infrastructure, or are there plans for something bigger in the future? Only time will tell.

According to the Globe and Mail, Microsoft has taken a step back and will now allow for third party search applications to be used in the new Windows Vista operating system.

Microsoft’s decision came a week before a government review of Microsoft’s 2002 antitrust settlement compliance demanding the use of such third party apps. Read more…

Roughly 4 percent of all search results display links to potentially dangerous websites, according to a report published by McAfee’s SiteAdvisor, on Monday. The report notes that Yahoo results are the riskiest with AOL leading the pack as having the safest results.

Over the past year, both organic and sponsored links have seen an increase in safety, however, the biggest change is seen within sponsored listings. On average the number of risky links declined from 8.5% in May 2006, to 6.9% in May of this year. Organic results saw a drop from 3.1% down to 2.9%. Read more…

The new quality based pricing system being rolled out by Yahoo will allow advertisers to enjoy reduced click charges based on ad relevance and quality.

Yahoo announced in a mass mail out yesterday the launch of Quality Based Pricing. Discounts will be automatically applied to an advertisers account based on conversion rates and other measures. The roll out of the system has already begun as of yesterday.

There is nothing you need to do to receive this discount, simply continue creating quality relevant ads for your campaign, and assuming the quality is high enough you will start to see some reduced costs.

For more information visit the Yahoo Search Marketing Help page for Quality Based Pricing.

Google image searches can be further refined thanks to a hidden feature few knew about – until this week.

A blog post by Ionut Alex Chitu has shown that by adding a simple piece of code to the end of your Google image search, can be used to refine the results. Adding “&imgtype=face” to the end of the search URL string will refine the list of images with just those of faces.

Wired blogger Adario Strange posted today that he had taken this search to the next level by replacing the word “face” with “hands” during an image search for PBS television host “Charlie Rose”. Strange notes images of Roses hands appearing, however, I was unable to duplicate these results.

This kind of image and face recognition is in its infant stages and it will be interesting to see how far Google goes, and when they will in fact release this technology openly within image searches.

Its scary to think that perhaps some day, armed only with a photo of someone, a user may be able to use the uploaded image to do a name look up and background search. While the technology (at least as far as I know) is not advanced enough to do such a thing, it is certainly within the realm of possibility.

If you are currently using long descriptions for your Yahoo Ads, be warned that effective this June, the short description option will be the only way to go.

Until end of day today, advertisers have had two options for ad copy; short descriptions utilizing a 70 character limit, and long descriptions providing up to 190 characters. As of June 2007, long descriptions will be eliminated, and those who are unprepared will see their ad copy truncated with an ellipsis. Read more…

The US and Canada have had access to the new Panama platform for some time and now advertisers in Europe are able to use the new version, just launched this week.

There have been many comments on the new system on both the positive and negative side of things, but hopefully most of the initial issues that plagued US users have been corrected in time for this launch.

When it first launched in North America, Panama caused chaos for some advertisers when the transition saw ad campaigns completely shuffled about. Some key phrases were lost, where others were moved into different groups and some groups disappeared entirely. While not everyone had issues with the account switch, there was plenty to be said in the forums regarding the changeover. (see “Yahoo Panama Pros and Cons, and Part 2“)

Hopefully Europe will see a smoother transition into the new system with the correction of some of the known bugs. Currently, Google has approximately 70-80% market share for search in Europe.