Microsoft Plus Yahoo vs. Google, So It Begins
The Microsoft and Yahoo marriage has been blessed by antitrust regulators both in Europe and over the pond, giving the two companies green light to implement their anti-Google search alliance. On the morning of February 18th, 2010, the U.S. Department of Justice and the European Antitrust Commission have wrapped up their reviews of the Microsoft-Yahoo search agreement. With the alliance between the two giants cleared without restrictions, the duo will now move to implement the deal.
“Although we are just at the beginning of this process, we have reached an exciting milestone,” said Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer. “I believe that together, Microsoft and Yahoo! will promote more choice, better value and greater innovation to our customers as well as to advertisers and publishers.”
Microsoft claims that the search agreement was announced in late July 2009, but the company has been flirting publicly with Yahoo for a total of over two years, but there’s no way of telling just how much time had Ballmer actually spent on this deal ahead of the start of 2008. The debut of February 2008, brought with it an unsolicited offer of $44.6 billion from Microsoft, which at the time was trying to acquire Yahoo. Making sure that the deal fell through was Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, then occupying the position of CEO. Read more
Google Books Gets a Major Update
Google Books has made the headlines mostly with the controversy surrounding the project rather than with the product itself. But this hasn’t stopped the search giant from improving it and it has just announced a major update adding some very useful features.
“Today I’m excited to announce that we’re rolling out changes to Google Books that give readers and book lovers everywhere new ways to interact with the words and images contained within the books we’ve brought online. We’ve also made it easier for users to share previews of their favorite books on their blogs or websites,” wrote Brandon Badger, product manager for Google Books.
The most important new feature is a much simpler way of embedding the books on other websites. The Mountain View-based company now provides a small code snippet that should make sharing a book just as easy as sharing a YouTube video. Read more
The Efficient Usage of Google Webmaster Tools
The Google Webmaster Tools are a suite of web-based applications managed from a single control panel. They allow you to check your website visibility for Google search engine, identify potential problems of site navigation system, improve your Google search rankings and more.
In order to be able to use these tools, you must have a valid Google account. After you login, on dashboard you must add the site that you need to analyze. Then clicking on it you will see an overview that presents your site status regarding Google indexing actions: the date of the last visit of the Googlebot and if your web site pages are included in Google index. It is very important to setup the management of site verifications from Tools menu, by selecting the most convenient method offered. Read more
