Featured posts to the Search Engine Watch blog in the past week, along with recent search-related headlines from around the Web. Read Original Post Here

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on
Search Engine Land and from other
places across the web.
From Search Engine Land:

Is Microhoo a Done Deal? Lately, a merger between Yahoo! and Microsoft is looking more and more probable. Not only have reports been flying around that Yahoo! and Microsoft are in negotiations, but Yahoo!’s SEC […]

Lately, a merger between Yahoo! and Microsoft is looking more and more probable. Not only have reports been flying around that Yahoo! and Microsoft are in negotiations, but Yahoo!’s SEC filing last week (Tuesday March 18 2008) has added significantly more fuel to the merger fire.
Click to continue reading…

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My family was recently in Boulder, CO—a place we had hitherto not been. Nice town, but where to go?
We spent most of our time at The Spot rock climbing gym because our kids were competing in the bouldering national championships. After a day of intense heart-stopping competition, with thrills and spills set against a […]

Eric Goldman commented on a case between one advertiser using another advertiser’s trademark in Google AdWords. The court has made a decision (PDF), ruling for the plaintiff, Storus, who sued Aroa for using their trademark in the AdWords title text. Eric Goldman said this is one of the first times we have seen the […]

On Friday, Google announced they launched demographic bidding to every advertiser in the AdWords program. In short, demographic bidding allows advertisers to show their ads to specific age groups and genders. They did a beta launch of this earlier this year, where they dropped using comScore data for their own.
The problem is, I, […]

The Google News Blog announced that they have made two changes to the commenting feature, in order to make it more visible to their users.
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Read Original Post Here

Urban blight is easy to recognize: seedy liquor stores and payday lenders on alternating corners, trash-strewn lots and front yards, graffitti-covered buildings, crumbling sidewalks, broken glass, and billboards everywhere you look. Websites afflicted with virtual blight are just as easy to spot: banners promising hot sexy singles and cheating spouses, pornography and Viagra, payday loans […]

Spotted over the weekend by Garrett Rogers, Google has quietly introduced a new, experimental mobile interface called “LCB” that emphasizes browsing instead of search. Something of a radical approach for Google, which is synonymous with search, the site allows users to get to results in top “local search” categories such as restaurants, travel, transportation, retail, […]

I’ve been writing about Mapspam appearing in both Google and Yahoo search results for some time now. Mapspam is where black hat SEOs spam local search and map listings, and like all black hat techniques, it seems to get more sophisticated as the search engines find ways to combat the spammers’ techniques.
There’s a new species […]