hakia , the semantic search engine, has launched its Syndication Web Services for publsihers and businesses looking to offer semantic search to their visitors. hakia's Syndication Web Services deliver the semantic technology that powers hakia, providing an XML feed, and options to customize the feed. hakia Syndication Web Services offers 30,000 searches per day free of charge and free of advertising that is available to early adopters until the partners' quota is filled .

A long time aggregator of information provided by third parties, the perfectly named local search engine; Local.com , has launched their own proprietary local consumer ratings and reviews system whcih allows users to create an account and enter ratings and reviews for any business listing that appears on the site. Now, in a Yelp or Yahoo Local style fashion, Local.com users can enter comments,

Google is doing their part to celebrate gay pride and gay marriages in California with a new addition their search results for gay oriented terms; flying the gay pride flag between the organic search results and the Adwords search results on the right side of the serps. A colleague sent me a screenshot he took when searching for gay marriage on Google. Does this influence the click thru percentage of the sponsored Google Adwords listings? Perhaps.

A couple of weeks ago Search Engine Journal covered the controversy behind Google StreetView and their Google Armada trespassing on private property and filming homes and the happenings on such property despite obvious no trespassing postings. The story was about a small St. Paul Minnesota suburb named North Oaks , which is a private city of 4,500. In North Oaks, the community is owned by the residents and the streets are private property.

" In addition, Yahoo! and Google agreed to enable interoperability between their respective instant messaging services, bringing easier and broader communication to users ." This sentence was probably the most overlooked part of the Yahoo & Google press announcement which was sent out last week as the two Internet giants formed a partnership based upon monetizing Yahoo with Google AdWords and AdSense.

The verticalization of search has made its way into the analytics market, as Indeed.com , the search engine for jobs, has announced the launching of Indeed Job Analytics. Indeed Job Analytics reports are customized for each company and will answers many questions commonly asked by employers,

Do you love Search Engine Journal? One of our lovely and loyal readers, a staff member of Dr. Michael Dorausch )who we sent to SMX Advanced ( and Planet Chiropractic , sent us this appreciative photo this morning, via Twitter and Flickr : Wowza! After picking my jaw up off the floor I was thinking that I <3 SearchEngineJournal.com too!

Yahoo and Google are planning a massive announcement this afternoon on the same day that Yahoo has announced that they are no longer entertaining offers from Microsoft. Microsoft and Yahoo had been in discussions about partnering on certain offerings, more or less paid and organic search,

Travel search engine Kayak.com has launched a display advertising platform optimized for the travel industry. The new ad platform is based upon technology developed by Sidestep.com, which Kayak.com purchased in December 2007. Like Google AdWords style text ads, the new display ad system helps travel marketers target their ads based on search criteria including destination, origination, trip dates, length of stay, specific airline/hotel/car brands and car type. Kayak.

Yahoo and Coupons, Inc. are now working together to deliver mobile coupons to Yahoo Mobile users, expanding their current partnership. Mobile coupons are considered a promising source of revenue for mobile publishers; they are one of the marketing tactics consumers say they would welcome as part of their mobile experience says Coupons, Inc.

If you use Google Blogger to produce your blog or host your Blogger blog on Blogspot, this could happen to you : This week I attended a Blogger MeetUp which I set up in the Tampa Bay area to meet and get to know other bloggers. I found the MeetUp to be a success and hope to work with others to grow the networking of bloggers in this area. One major question by an attendee was about where to host a blog and the difference between Blogspot,

Semantic search engine Hakia has intensified its health and medical search coverage by adding more than 10 million abstracts from PubMed, a medical database maintained by the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health. The new service is available at Pubmed Search . Compared to searching for documents on PubMed itself, hakia's advanced technology saves time to reach relevant information.

When I think of Wordpress blogs and SEO, I generally think of a handful of experts on the subject of Wordpress and SEO oriented plugins; one such person being Joost de Valk. Joost has mindmapped his knowledge on SEO for Wordpress Blogs into a wonderful guide on establishing high rankings via optimizing a Wordpress Blog.

When I think of Wordpress blogs and SEO, I generally think of a handful of experts on the subject of Wordpress and SEO oriented plugins; one such person being Joost de Valk. Joost has mindmapped his knowledge on SEO for Wordpress Blogs into a wonderful guide on establishing high rankings via optimizing a Wordpress Blog.

360 Enterprises Inc, which is the parent company of TextLinkBrokers.com and SponsoredReviews.com , has acquired HybridSEM.com , an SEO and social media firm headed by Joe Whyte, who has been a contributor to Search Engine Journal. "Access to 360's resources allows HybridSEM.com to scale our services from a niche market to a massive market. I am proud and excited to be working with such talented and energetic industry leaders who share the same innovative vision.

Google search engine usage climbed again in May according to Hitwise reporting, moving from 67.90% of US based searches in April 2008 to 68.29% of US based searches in May 2008, up almost 3 percentage points from May 2007. Hitwise also added that Google now accounts for 87% of the searches performed in the UK )between Google.com and Google.co.uk(, which represents a 12% increase compared to May 2007.

A common misconception is that your job search starts once you decide you want to make a career change. In reality, there are simple things you should do on a regular basis to position yourself to be successful in your job search whenever that time comes. Given our industry is experiencing dramatic growth in SEO jobs ,

Yahoo Directory pages have lost their Google PageRank )Google Toolbar PageRank that is( and are now showing a greyed out PageRank box. Example, the Yahoo Directory page for Entertainment currently has no PageRank : Has the Yahoo Directory lost its PageRank? Being a link building cornerstone of the Internet's solid foundation, I find it highly unlikely and fairly ridiculous that Google would slap a PankRank penalty on the Yahoo Directory for selling links,

Google has launched a new competition to build awareness of their Google Website Optimizer which will give four winners special attention to increase their sites' conversion percentages, usability and overall user experience : especially in terms of making sales or generating leads. The idea behind the contest is simple: we're looking to help four businesses "pump up" their websites so they can get more sales, leads, or signups.

Yahoo Search has finally gotten the monkey off of its back, the SearchMonkey that is, as the Yahoo SearchMonkey Gallery and Yahoo Search Customization has launched in public beta to give Yahoo users the options of customizing their search results with applications built by third party publishers. As posted on the Yahoo Search Blog : The Gallery is still in beta, but there are already a number of really useful apps included.