Today, DMNews reported that the current CEO at Ask.com, Jim Lanzone, will be stepping down, and be replaced immediately by Jim Safka, the current CEO of Primal Ventures, a new venture firm that identifies business opportunities for Ask.com’s parent company IAC Search and Media.
In a January 3, 2008 article titled “Global Search Revenue on the Rise” from DMNews, JPMorgan is upping its prediction of total 2008 global search revenue from $26.6 billion to more than $30 billion. Not only is the investment firm predicting $30.5 billion in global search revenue this year, they also expect this number to reach $60 billion by 2011.
During first week in December 2007, key EngineWorks personnel will be at two of the search marketing industry’s most important conferences, Search Engine Strategies (SES) Conference & Expo in Chicago, and WebmasterWorld’s Search Engine & Internet Marketing Conference, PubCon, in Las Vegas. If you are going to be at either of these industry events, please drop us line, or submit a post to this blog. We’d love to meet up with you!
In the past couple days, our SEO Department here at EngineWorks has observed an apparent major update being made to the Natural search ranking algorithms at Yahoo!. We have seen a significant improvement in positioning within the Yahoo! index for several of our clients.
Today, Yahoo! announced its financial performance for the Third Quarter 2007. This was the first full quarter in which CEO Jerry Yang has been in charge of the company since former CEO Terry Semel resigned in June 2007. Wall Street has been impressed this morning, however, the company’s stock has slumped more than 30% since the beginning of 2006.
As anticipated from an announcement earlier in the month, last week Microsoft launched its major update to Microsoft Live Search. The company is touting that its search engine is “faster and easier to use”. Not to be outdone, both Ask and Yahoo! announced significant improvements to there search engines as well.
Yahoo recently announced that it was buying BlueLithium, a behavior and demographic ad network, for $300 million in cash. BlueLithium claims to be the fifth largest ad network in the United States, and the second largest in the UK with a combined 145 million unique visitors every month. The company has two proprietary technologies called AdPath Behavioral Targeting and Selective Inventory Partnerships. The company was founded in 2004 and has 10 offices globally.
Yahoo’s official search blog recently announced that Yahoo has made significant improvements to their crawl, index and ranking systems. The majority of these updates concentrate on improving the efficiency and comprehensiveness of Yahoo’s search crawler called Slurp.
An interesting study was released last week claiming that consumers now express more satisfaction with Yahoo! than Google, Ask.com, MSN, or AOL. The study by the American Consumer Satisfaction index was reported in the article titled “Is Yahoo! Better Than Google?” on eMarketer.
Here’s an insightful article released yesterday by Business Wire through Target Marketing Magazine, entitled “Yahoo! and comScore Study Finds Online Consumers Who Pre-Shop on the Web Spend More In-Store“, that reports that even though almost 90% of consumers shop for information online, not even 7% of retail sales actually take place on the Internet.
