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march 2006 search engine news
What's New in Search - March 2006
Google Lawyers Staying Busy
Two separate cases have kept Google's legal team busy. Recently, a federal judge stated that he intends to order Google to turn over internal records to the U.S. Justice Department. This order stems from a seven-month-old request from the Justice Department for a study related to filtering software and its effectiveness at preventing children from accessing sexually explicit content on the Internet. Google's lawyers have argued that the government could get the same information from publicly accessible services. Google is the only major search engine that initially denied the government's requests-both Yahoo and MSN complied and contributed data.
Google has also agreed to pay up to $90 million to settle a class action lawsuit related to click fraud. The settlement stems from a lawsuit filed by Lane's Gifts earlier this year. With close to 97 percent of its revenue coming from pay-per-click ads, it was in Google's best interest to settle, ensuring that its advertisers continue to have faith in the Google system. The $90 million will be paid back in Adwords credits.
Yahoo Launching New Home Page
Yahoo has been experimenting with a new home page design, and Christopher Lowell would be proud. The new look is more graphical in nature and gives prominence to search, rather than to Yahoo's directory, which was the site's original offering. In fact, there is no longer any link to the directory from the new home page, and industry experts are predicting a shift away from the directory entirely. With its pricey fees for inclusion reaching nearly $300, the value of a listing in the directory has been an item of speculation for some time now.
MSN Revamping Search
Microsoft recently debuted a new beta search engine,
dubbed "Windows Live Search." The huge advertising
blitz promoting the new MSN search has not really
worked out, as the engine's market share actually
dropped during the ad campaign. The new Live Search
features several cosmetic differences from conventional
search engines. It displays results in a continuous
scroll, rather than showing a traditional 10 results
per page. It also gives users the ability to customize
their results via sliders that can lengthen or shorten
descriptions and titles. The engine is currently pulling
its results from MSN Search, but there has been mention
of upgrades to the algorithm to improve the relevancy
of those results. Over the past few years, all of
the major engines have essentially copied Google's
design and layout, so it will be interesting to see
how searchers react to a new interface.
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