Suggestive Search Assistance
Do not adjust your computer monitor. The changes in the Google results are intentional. Google has been giving suggestions for misspellings for a while now, but it has taken its \"searcher assistance\" to the next level by asking the searcher, \"Did you mean this?\" Try typing \"house\" into Google. The results will be interrupted halfway down the page asking you if you were looking for the Fox television show, House. This reshuffling of the results is going to push many rankings off of the first page. Should Google refine searchers' results or let them figure it out for themselves?
Let's Talk about Google Talk
Google has released its own instant messaging service. It is still in the beta stage, and you have to have a Google (Gmail) account to use it. The software does not offer any significant features or benefits that are not already covered by Yahoo, AOL, and MSN's instant messenger programs. The best feature, similar to Yahoo Messenger with Voice, is the free voice chat. You can call anyone else with a computer anywhere in the world for free. All you need is a microphone and some speakers.
Yahoo Follows Google in Offering a URL Submission Program
Yahoo has released a program very similar to Google Sitemaps. It gives website owners the ability to send Yahoo a list of all of their pages that they want the engine to spider and include in the index. This helps Yahoo conserve resources when maintaining and building its index since it alerts the engine to the locations of web pages. It also makes the spiders' jobs easier by telling them exactly where to go, rather than relying on them to find and index everything. This program will be very beneficial for large websites that have had trouble in the past with getting all of their pages indexed.