It is once again Thanksgiving, the time of the year when we thank our Lord for his abundant blessings and grace upon us. And also a time for most of the search engines to come out with their creative logos to depict how they perceive this day to be.

The famous Google Doodle for Thanksgiving has Snoopy at its star donning the chef’s hat and the equally famous roast Turkey and mashed potatoes. The logo exudes warmth and homeliness, two qualities which capture the main essence of this day.

Yahoo’s logo for the day was quite mellow with autumn leaves strewn around and also showed a pumpkin, a vegetable for the rich and poor alike. AOL had a logo which was predominantly blue and was more of Halloween than Thanksgiving. A witch’s hat was displayed along with pumpkins as if to say ‘trick or treat.’

Bing displayed a screensaver than a logo which depicted a giant turkey walking down the road held by many people with ropes. There was a caption that said ‘Don’t let today’s turkey dinner spoil tomorrow’s waistline. Can you feel the burn?’ But this line takes away the entire concept of a turkey dinner where diets should be forgotten completely.

Ask.com also depicted turkeys which have become synonymous with Thanksgiving; the picture showed two turkeys waiting near the shore looking out a ship sailing by and a caption that said ‘Why do we eat turkeys on Thanksgiving?’ Dogpile.com showed a bunch of doggie buddies around a table having a feast along with the caption ‘Happy Thanksgiving! Enjoy the traditions of this festive holiday!’

Cre8astie forums had a picture which showed turkeys and a tray filled with fruits and a goblet of wine. A man carrying a tray of roast turkey was the logo on PPC Heros. And to end, Search Engine Roundtable displayed pumpkins and turkeys along with the caption ‘Pulse of the Sear.’

Once again, wishing everybody a Happy Thanksgiving.

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Microsoft has re-introduced MSN portal with a completely new look and feel which has been termed by users as the most dramatic redesign of the decade. The newly redesigned MSN portal webpage is much simpler to use and a lot of unwanted elements that earlier cluttered up the page has been cleared. The new things introduced include a central location for video, Facebook and Twitter incorporation, a new local area and an emphasized search option.

Microsoft reports that MSN currently has about 600 million uses globally making it larger than Yahoo. This website is a huge asset in many ways the most important of which is the fact that it drives approximately forty-five percent of all Bing queries. A glance at the new MSN portal is all that it takes to reveal the superiority of the new outlook and design of the webpage.

Users can log in and access their Facebook and Twitter accounts through the new MSN portal and the activity streams of both websites will be displayed at the lower right of the homepage. The local edition has also undergone a tremendous change with a range of local content like restaurants and hotels, entertainment, news, traffic and gas prices getting aggregated and displayed in a direct and easily accessible format complete with maps and local search functionality.

Microsoft decided to revamp the MSN portal based on user feedback and a growing sense that the old look was outdated and non functional. You can see a lot of personalization on MSN but not to the extent of Yahoo as Microsoft believes that very few users will be interested in such a high degree of personalization. The new portal is believed to roll out globally within a few months time and the look may vary slightly from country to country. The newly designed MSN portal will definitely be one to look out for in the coming months.

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The three major search engines, Yahoo, Google and Bing have removed GeoCities.com domain from their search indices but you can still find some zombie GeoCities sites online. Anyone who searches for the site geocities.com on Yahoo, Google and Bing Search will see a message displayed that this site does no longer exist.

Yahoo had announced earlier during this year that it planned to close down the domain GeoCities, a free web hosting service, on October 26th of this year. But most users were still able to access this site after this date too; finally Yahoo pulled the plug on GeoCities by the end of October. And along with it disappeared millions of WebPages, images, URL’s and everything else associated with the domain. But most importantly, millions of links have also vanished which is huge when seen from an SEO perspective but small in the web’s overall link graph.

Google was the first website among the three to remove GeoCities from its search index. A Google spokesperson reported on Friday that once the domain was shut down, the pages were fragmented and broken; so the company took immediate action to avoid users from landing on broken pages and not finding the right information.

Yahoo followed suit and zapped the domain by early morning on Friday and Bing removed GeoCities by the end of the weekend. It was also removed by Ask.com and AOL search by November 3rd from its indices. But the fact remains that the domain is still not completely buried and you could find a few websites still active if you use Yahoo search.

Some of these zombie GeoCities pages are www.geocities.com/bolerama/ and www.geocities.com/bradreviews/. You could also find a couple others which were tweeted by Range Online Media through Twitter. These seem to be GeoCities Plus sites which the user can still access but cannot use the tools required to manage the site.

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Yahoo seems to have hit a rough patch with its search engine but is still trying to convince everyone that it is very much ‘in search.’

In the earnings call that was conducted earlier this week, Yahoo’s CFO Tim Morse said that the company is planning to create a better, enriching and relevant search experience. According to him, Yahoo intends to differentiate themselves from the others in the rat race without investing billions, yet generating relevant search results. He also said that the company’s aim is to develop new search experiences for its global users.

All this talk does not seem to be convincing the bigwigs of the search industry who still believe that Yahoo is out of search. Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin also voiced his disappointment in the ‘abdication’ of Yahoo search; he said this at an interview with John Battelle at the Web2.0 event which was hosted in San Francisco on the 22nd of this month.

When asked about his opinion on the various search engines, Brin commented that he like Microsoft Bing which is really doing its job in the competitive search market. He also mentioned the names Powerset and Cuil before going on to say that it is really a shame that Yahoo is moving out of search. When the interviewer asked him about his opinion on the Microsoft-Yahoo search deal, he said that he is no one to talk about it but also added that Yahoo has been doing a lot of interesting things in the past and should continue sticking on to those.

Though we do not have any concrete or official information as of yet about Yahoo search, we too can go by the opinion that things seem to have gone out of control for the company as far as search is concerned. Let’s wait and watch.

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Twitter has once again confirmed the fact that they are not going to allow other search engines access to their private tweets. Because of the recurrent confusion regarding this matter, the website has decided to do something more concrete so that such false rumors do not do the round any more.

The report about the so called ‘Twitter hole’ appeared in the LA Times; according to this report, Google had some kind of a special access to all the private tweets which have been actually protected by its owners from being made public. In reply to this, TechCrunch clarified that this access to protected tweets that Google was given was before these account holders had locked down their accounts and protected their tweets. If the account has been made private after the tweets are released then they cannot be un-cached; this should pretty much clear the confusion that arose out of the whole Google episode.

Twitter has made this point quite clear on its help page where it says that if you have a public account and has decided to make it private, then all the updates after the time of protection will be locked and made private. But all the tweets before the time of protection will still be public to any other user. This rule goes for all websites including Google and Topsy which is a Twitter-specific search engine.

Google always relies on the last information it has in hand and hence will keep re-visiting the tweets that were posted before the account was locked and this will go on for a few weeks or months. But Topsy only displays public tweets; once the account is protected, a click on the refresh button and all the tweets vanish.

It is finally up to the account holder to make sure your tweets are accessed by only those who you want to follow you or you might end up getting retweeted for some of your private tweets.

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The launch of Bing was in such a manner which made everyone stand still for a while and think about it. It certainly showed up a steady shoot up on its clinging onto the market thus proving out to be a good competitor for Google. Recently, the studies from StatCounter and Net Applications state there has been a decline in the shoot up by Bing since its launch.

But there is nothing to be too much worried about as there would certainly be uproar in the beginning and then a fall or a slight variation. This is something common experienced by all. With this news on line, we should never conclude the results as it might be something with this season. The same should be monitored for a period of time and only then the final conclusion must be brought about.

Bing is not just being stable; they are in the process of bringing up newer things to attract more users to them. There is no doubt that they are a bonafide competitor for Google. Latest releases and enhancements are in the queue for Bing to make its hit on the search engine traffic. Microsoft knows what is to be done after all they are new to the search engine field.

The Yahoo deal is yet to be finalized and hopefully with the positive clearance of the same, everything might work out to be perfect and even more for them. Something new which is being talked about is the mobile which is soon to steam up the season.

To check on the other side, if the growth of Bing has been stabilized, it would certainly high time that Microsoft think of something to get back to this. Microsoft should start thinking about this right now so that they do not regret at the end.

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Microsoft unveiled its latest venture, Bing 2.0 also known as Bing Visual Search on the 14th of this month at TechCrunch50. This is a unique tool which allows users to ‘search by picture’, hence the name. Since the highly speculative annual meeting of Microsoft at Seattle, many had expected Bing Maps to get updated by using Silverlight technology.

Instead Microsoft rolled out Bing Visual Search using Silverlight technology which allows users to easily browse and navigate through ‘structured data sets’ obtained from key partners. This new tool can be found just below Travel on the homepage under the search categories but there is a high likelihood that the links can get lost in the vivid colors of the homepage image of the day. Similar to Travel, Visual Search link also cannot be found on the top navigation once the Bing search results are displayed. Along with general web search queries, users can also make use of the Visual Search data set to explore the visual images accompanying the data.

Bing 2.0 Visual Search intends to provide its users clear imagery to sort through a vast amount of data that is available. This feature has been launched in beta and the visual information is currently limited to a few things like cars, animals, people and products. It is necessary to have Silverlight application installed on the browser for users to experience the visual richness of Bing 2.0.

This tool will fit in perfectly with Bing shopping as users can now visualize the various items in the merchandise category before purchase. Unlike other categories, Visual Search targets the younger generation who are increasingly dependent on their iPods and iPhones. This novel idea from Microsoft definitely stands to win as visually enriched data is always interesting to the human eye.

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The recent Microsoft-Yahoo search deal seems to be going through a rough patch as it faces many regulatory hurdles. This leaves one wondering if Yahoo has a Plan B in sight especially after its CEO, Carol Bartz, told in a New York Times interview that the company is not in a position to run Search on its own. This statement is in complete contrast to the earlier one that came out in June before the announcement of the deal; Bartz said that Yahoo has nothing whatsoever to do with Microsoft.

But in the later interview, she mentioned that Yahoo has decided to sell Search as it cannot match Microsoft and Google in this business due to the level of investment. This statement can cause serious damage to the deal as no buyer will be interested in paying a high price if they think that the seller is desperate or has no alternative. Meanwhile a lot of high-ranking employees are quitting Yahoo, the most recent one being Doug Cutting who left last month. I believe that these people were just smart enough to foresee that Yahoo was done as a search engine.

In a recent television interview, Bartz once again pushed the fact that user interface changes will enable Yahoo to once again be a competing search tool which according to me is a complete hogwash. She also underplayed the role of Search saying people these days hardly spend any time using this tool. Yahoo might be a leader in many other areas but it can never match Google which recently made its search box bigger; though simple, this was a highly effective move which has only fetched the site more and more users.

Bartz has been seriously trying to marginalize the importance of the search tool; no matter how hard she tries the fact remains that search engines are the most popular internet activity after email. If the Yahoo-Microsoft search deal does not come through, the company will have do some serious thinking on how to revive its search tool.

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President Barack Obama’s speech to thousands of school children across United States will strike a chord with all parents. But the remarks could be a source of controversy and can make a tech company very unhappy – Microsoft. While fellow competitors like Google was praised high in the President’s speech to school children on Sept 8th ’09, he advised them to switch off that Xbox.

Speaking from his prepared notes, which more or less is an exact rendition of his original speech, his dig at Microsoft’s Xbox came early on:

He spoke about the role of parents and their responsibility to enable children to stay focused on the chosen track and how to get the homework done and also advised to spend very less time in front of the television or playing that Xbox.

“Turn that Xbox off” was his exact words and after forethought added, at least some of the time. The fact that Obama clearly mentioned the Xbox and not a PlayStation or Nintendo Wii did not go unnoticed and may not sit well with the company.

Most other technology brands that were mentioned in his speech received favored comments especially Apple. Obama encouraged the children to work harder to become an innovator or an inventor creating good things like the next iPhone, a new medicine or a vaccine.

He was also full of praise for other Microsoft competitors like Google, Twitter and Facebook when he mentioned that students who sat in these very seats twenty odd years ago have changed the face of communication by creating Google, Facebook and Twitter.

I noted that his speech mentioned five major brands, all of which were technology related and these inventions and creations were clubbed along with other major events of the world like Depression, World War for civil rights and landing of man on the moon.

The only other brand mention was Harry Potter books! Remarkable isn’t it?

Catch up on the President’s speech which is now available on YouTube.com

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After the long period of waiting, Microhoo is becoming official. The end of July saw Microsoft and Yahoo come together to sign a deal for ten years to make a search merger to run against Google, which is always considered one among the best.

The deal acted as a shut down for Yahoo as a search engine that is independent, instead pushed forward the Bing search engine into the second position just behind Google. The figures still say that Google maintains for 65% of the search market in the US. This will sure have serious effects on most of us in the local search area.

Most of the local businesses have always targeted on being ranked as high as possible on the Google. With this development they have to start focusing on their ranking on Bing as well. Decisions about the position of advertisements and sponsored links will become complicated and smaller business need greater help to make sure that they understand the change.

There will be a change in the customer’s options because as they search on both they will have to ultimately realize their choices. This will prove difficult for the businessmen to create Ad words in a manner that will resolve this problem of where the consumer will look.

The most important factor in all this is that local search engine arena is changing and we have to be geared up to face these challenges by learning to adapt to them at much easier pace. Microsoft and Yahoo have contributed to the growth of Microhoo. Microsoft contains Bing maps and Bing local which connects to the yellow pages with Yahoo having Yahoo maps and Yahoo Local and the Yahoo Yellow pages. Both the companies have independent databases for small and local company listings as well as a local search.

Microhoo has a lot of scope for growth and the competition grows too with Google aiming to beat these world number 2 players to remain on top.

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