In a move that will have many concerns about Internet privacy issues raised, Google has started analyzing search behavior according to aggregated consumer credit information. Some worry that this could, in the future, lead to the company targeting specific ads toward consumers with high credit ratings, with custom ads.

The advantages of having a blog are pretty well-known – they are key for giving visitors an incentive to return to a site. Not only can they increase and maintain traffic, but they are great ways to incorporate keywords, which can help for SEO. Two new services on the market allow sites to increase their web 2.0 presence and search engine ranking without much bother at all.

Get ready to get excited about something pretty geeky. It’s a whole new way of searching. And it’s just been released in beta. ISEdb.com reported in March about the soon-to-be launch of WolframAlpha. Since then, a whole lot of excitement, accompanied by concerns, has arisen.

Yahoo recently announced the launch of its new online advertising service, My Display Ads. The service appears to be ideal for those smaller online businesses that want to take their bland, text-based ads to the next level. However, the service has already been proclaimed by the blogosphere to be far from perfect. Here we’ll take a look at the pros and cons of Yahoo’s new ad service.

If you’ve got nofollow links on your website, better listen up. Google’s head of Webspam, Matt Cutts, recently divulged that Google is no longer allowing PageRank sculpting.  For those of you I’ve already lost, here is a quick lesson on the history of PageRank sculpting. In the recent past, you see, Google allowed websites to determine how they would spend their own PageRank. They did this by inserting nofollows onto certain links in order to give more credit to the dofollow links.

Many of you will be familiar with the new generic top-level domain (TLD) application process being undertaken by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

The corporation has decided to open up TLDs to anyone who can afford the $200,000 price tag. This would mean that the current limitations of dot-com, dot-net, dot-info, etc., will be removed.

It could revolutionize the way we input our keywords. The Common Tag, a recent term put forth by a group of companies including Yahoo!, is a big step towards bringing semantic tagging to the World Wide Web.

In the paid search world, one of the most overlooked elements of campaign success is geo-targeting. For national advertisers, PPC geo-targeting is an absolute must; however, few are fully utilizing this tool to its full potential.

Do you like bumper cars? Your answer will determine how the newly launched Hunch search engine lists your search results. It’s one of the 20 questions users must answer before they can even register with Hunch. 

We are being contacted more and more by companies asking if we will add to our websites and/or clients' websites a short paragraph of text that includes a link to one of their clients' sites  i.e., a text advertisement. These companies are offering a monthly payment for this text and link. So this seems like a good deal for the host/publishing site.

Is there any likely negative impact on the publishing site's SE rankings, Google ranking, etc., from doing this?

Earlier today, Google unveiled its 'Quick Search Box' for Mac OS X, an application that offers search functionality across users' computer files and allows them to perform specific actions on the results based on their file extension.

Earlier today, Google announced in an official blog post the release of Google Translator Toolkit, a new Web application that builds on the popular Google Translate that might facilitate the growth of sites like Wikipedia in its alternate language versions.

Yahoo recently announced it is adding a number of third-party applications and widgets to some of its main properties, including Yahoo Mail and My Yahoo, that will allow users to, among other things, send a PayPal payment or publish a blog post without leaving Yahoo's website.

Google recently announced on its main corporate blog the release of an early development version of its Google Chrome browser for the Mac OS X and Linux platform. The software, however, is still rough around the edges and is meant for developers and early adopters only as it still doesn't support a number of features, including Flash videos.

Earlier today, the Google introduced "Squared," a new Google Labs tool that should help users perform new kinds of Web searches, and particularly comparative search on a specific topic, in a significantly faster and easier way without forcing the user to manually pick and compare different bits of information from previous search results.

After long preparations, Google recently announced that it will start selling downloadable e-books through an online store, in a move that would put the search giant in direct competition with the current market leader Amazon.com.

Yahoo recently announced on its official blog that it will close its Yahoo 360 social networking site on July 13, as the Web company originally planned to do in early 2008 and later postponed a few times. Users will have to migrate to the Yahoo Profiles service by that date to maintain their account information.

It seems that everybody knows somebody that does “website design”.  The term can refer to anyone from a high school student working on the weekends between book reports to an established professional website designer. Because of this, you need to be careful when choosing a website design company. Choosing the wrong individual or firm can mean the difference between having a website that turns out sales and ending up with a website that turns off customers. You need to do your due diligence when you sit down with your designer (or web design firm) to ascertain the level of competency and professionalism they have.  It is important that business owners ask the following five questions in your initial conversation with any potential web design firm or individual. 

Earlier today, Google announced a new and easier way for webmasters to integrate many of its products such as Google News, Maps and others into their websites. The new platform, called "Web Elements", was demonstrated today at the Google I/O conference held in San Francisco.

Earlier today, Google unveiled an innovative and highly ambitious online communication and collaboration tool dubbed "Wave" that has been in the works for over two years and aims to combine together a wide array of ways to communicate on the Web in real time, from instant messaging to document sharing and translation, all in a single platform.