A couple search engines / directories got gobbled up today.

Yahoo! buys Kelkoo for $575 million. Kelkoo is a European shopping search engine / comparison directory.

InfoSpace to Buy Switchboard for $160 Million. Switchboard is a phone number directory, reverse directory, business information and stuff like that directory...electric yellow pages they say.

What is Yahoo! Webrank?
The new Yahoo! Companion Toolbar is providing a ranking system by the name of Yahoo! Webrank. As I read through the details as to how their new ranking system worked they had two words over and over again: anonymous & sophisticated. There was no real description as to whether it worked like Direct Hit or Alexa or how exactly it will influence the search results.

The Web Rank values are calculated using a sophisticated scoring algorithm provides a measure of the popularity of the Web page or Web site that you are visiting.

Yahoo! Companion helps Yahoo! find new content
This new tool has a feedback loop which can be used to alert Yahoo! of the existance of new content which is not yet in the Yahoo! Search index. Want to know more about Yahoo! Webrank? Yahoo! gives very little data on how Yahoo! Webrank will work, but you can visit the Yahoo! Companion Webrank FAQ page.

Install the Yahoo! Companion
With many webmasters already having the Google toolbar it remains to be seen what type of distribution Yahoo! will be able to obtain with it's new toolbar. Download the new Yahoo! Companion with Webrank features.

I finally made my new page on Yahoo! Search at Search-marketing.info. This blog format is so much better than that huge evil site. I could literally work on that site for 10 hours a day and it would take me months to make it as kick ass as I would like. This site is more of a post and forget it...less maintenance.

New Yahoo! Search operators

• site: this allows one to find all documents within a particular domain and all it's subdomains.
  Example: site:yahoo.com

• hostname: this allows one to find all documents from a particular host only.
  Example: hostname:autos.yahoo.com

• link: this allows one to find documents that link to a particular url.
  Example: link:http://autos.yahoo.com/

• url: this alllows one to find a specific document in our index.
  Example: url:http://edit.autos.yahoo.com/repair/tree/0.html

• inurl: this allows one to find a specific keyword as part of indexed urls.
  Example: inurl:bulgarian

• intitle: this allows one to find a specific keyword as part of

Try out the new Yahoo! Search

• Try out advanced Yahoo! Search
• Advanced Yahoo! Search Tips
• Yahoo! Search shortcuts

Bonus tips on using the new Yahoo! Search for your link building needs. You can do multiple advanced link things with Yahoo! Search. For example

link:http://www.search-marketing.info inurl:partners -inurl:search-marketing.info

Would show you sites that link to my other site with parnters in their url. In addition you filter page title instead of url by using intitle: or you can change the word partners to

• link

• links
• resources

or just about anything else that would show you the links are out of a textual context. This is a quick way to evaluate how and where to get some of the easiest backlinks that your competitors are enjoying. A good example for the intitle: might be a word like reciprical...

Another trick on the same concept. Using Yahoo! Search advanced features you can filter the domain to be .edu. If you have an exceptionally well thought out resource you can use the .edu filter and see who is linking to some of your competitors and search for certain words on that page. These .edu links are heavily weighted in Google search results...

An example of this trick might be that I could find out education sites that link to a search engine that no longer exist and update them. If I still get too many results I can search to see those that also have the words "Search Engine Watch" on the page, or further qualify the page by looking for more words in the URL. I could possibly help convince the professor that I know enough about search to ask him to link to me. There is no substitute for tact, but most people will not know how you came to their site. I never automate link requests, but I believe in making them easy to find.

Yesterday Yahoo! made a press release stating the Overture will launch new local search products in the upcomming months.

I see you baby. Shakin that ass, shakin that ass... <--- good song

Today Yahoo! announced that they are making Yahoo! Maps more interactive by including the locations of various businesses within city locations. The new Yahoo! technology goes by the name of SmartView Technology.
For example, you can check out Thai restaurants in New York City near the Greek Coffee Shop.

(found on Search Engine Lowdown)

Recently Yahoo! announced its Content Acquisition Program. Search Engine Watch did a review of the changes.

Yahoo! is to increase the size of its search database through the use of more aggressive crawling, Site Match, and human editors looking to find ways to include portions of the hidden web.

Yahoo! recently rewrote much of the Inktomi core which will allow them to

• better process 3 and 4 word querries

• easily change the algorithm in the future
• easily turn stemming on or off

AltaVista and AllTheWeb are now using the same indexes as Yahoo!, though they are still powered by their own algorithms.

When Yahoo! reviews a site for Site Match they store data that the page has been quality reviewed. These sites may receive a ranking boost for being reviewed. This move alone would make paid inclusion seem exceptionally biased. Yahoo! is offsetting this by randomly reviewing other sites in its index.

Many people are concerned as to how this website review boost will effect the purity of the index, but any bonus that may be given will not be too large or Yahoo! would earn a bad reputation and a bunch of negative press in a time period where they are trying to aggressively expand their distribution.

Yahoo! believes they can offset some of their additional charges by opperating more transparently with webmasters when issues related to search come up.