May was certainly an exciting month for search…
Microsoft’s AdCenter release crashed accounts for a few days but Microsoft came back with the announcement of Bing, focused on addressing the fact that 25% of searches result in clicking the ‘back’ button.
Google announces Wave, a new one-stop shop for communication and information. (There are some Beta reviews floating around, including a nice one on Mashable)
Yahoo… has done nothing. There are, however, reported talks with Microsoft again. I think this is the only option for Microsoft and Yahoo. At this point, Yahoo has no relevant product and Microsoft has no relevant market. Hopefully the combination of Bing + 30% market share will be a nice boost for them.
Ask.com – well, they’ve been out of it for a while and made a lot of backwards decisions (limited paid search ads, implementing canonicalization) but they decided to pull the plug on their partnership with LookSmart.
Facebook also announced that they’ll be releasing editable URL’s soon. Details are at TechCrunch. Interesting, as even Friendster (remember them?) has done this for years. I suspect it will improve the search relevancy of your pages so make sure you have your privacy locked down appropriately.
