For about a year now, I've been saying that Apple should get in the search game . Now business analysts are beginning to agree and experts are pondering the possibility. Per Business Week Some analysts believe the Apple-Google battle is likely to get much rougher in the months ahead. Ovum's Yarmis thinks Apple may soon decide to dump Google as the default search engine on its devices,

Over at MIT's Technology Review, they have the goods on how Google ranks tweets . Ok, like your regular old organic results, they didn't learn the secret sauce. But they did get some good info on how you can optimize your Twitter account so your Tweets have a better chance of appearing in real-time search results. Reputation is key. Who follows you determines reputation. If your followers have a lot of followers, that gives more authority to your tweets. "You earn reputation,

Typing on a mobile phone is a pain in the you know what no matter what device you're using, so query suggestion features on search engines come in handy. Now, Google is making its Search Suggestions on mobile devices even easier. The feature now serves up query suggestions based on your location . The update is only available for iPhone and Android devices at the time. You might need to refresh Google.com on your device in order to see the updated suggestions.

After three months at AOL, Shashi Seth jumped ship to join Yahoo! He's been named Vice President of Yahoo! Search Products. Basically, Seth went from AOL, which is powered by Google to Yahoo!, which will soon be powered by Bing. Meanwhile, Sue James has been elected to Yahoo!'s Board of Directors. James has spent a huge chunk of her career at E&Y. She joined the company in 1975, became a partner in 1987, and retired in June 2006. Then,

After meeting with President Obama at the White House today, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer appeared on CNBC . When asked about China, Ballmer asserted that they will continue to offer Bing according to Chinese law. However, Ballmer did talk about issues that need to be addressed in China - such as the enforcement of intellectual property laws. It seemed pretty obvious that he does want to see progress in China.

The White House has thrown its support behind Google in its quest to provide uncensored search in China. "We support Google's action in a decision to no longer censure searches that happen using the Google platform," said White House press secretary Robert Gibbs in his daily briefing . This is not a new position for the administration, which has always supported an open internet. President Obama made this clear at a town hall when he traveled to Shanghai. "The President has,

Image by SESConferenceSeries via Flickr Google News is like kudzu, which is known as "the vine that ate the South" because of its out-of-control growth in the Southeastern United States. Although I'm from New England, friends like Stacy Williams of Prominent Placement , which is headquartered in Atlanta, tell me that kudzu is called the "mile-a-minute vine" in her neighborhood. According to the Nielsen Company , there were 15,895,000 unique visitors to Google News U.S.

Next week, Yahoo! plans to release two updates to their Sponsored Search program. First up, the Network Distribution feature will allow advertisers to run ads on Yahoo! search pages, partner sites or both. Advertisers will also be allowed to set different bids for Yahoo! and partner sites. Secondly, Yahoo! is adding the ability to import campaign data from your Google AdWords account. If you want to see how these new features will work, Yahoo!'s prepared a video,

After Google threatened to pull out of China, the world waited with baited breath to see what China would do. Deep down, I think many of us hoped that China would open the Internet to its citizens. That does not appear to be the case . The Foreign Ministry of China has reiterated their policy that Internet companies are welcome to operate but most do so within the confines of Chinese law. The ball is back in Google's court. Over at Techdirt,

On CNN's iReport, they've set up a page to help people look for and find loved ones in Haiti . Thankfully, they've added a search function to make the process much easier. It's kind of slow and you may get error pages - likely due to timing out. There are probably so many people trying to use the tool, it's going to take awhile to get your info . Also, it will automatically add in the words "haiti earthquake" to your search query.

Yesterday, we learned that Google gained while the other lost search market share in Nielsen's December 2009 rankings . That scenario played out in Hitwise's data for the same month. Here's how the search engines are doing, broken down by certain verticals: Hitwise also released data on the percentage of clicks according to length of query.

The Google Maps team has been working hard with partner GeoEye to push out an updated imagery of Haiti. The update includes imagery taken at 10:27 am EST on Wednesday, January 13 - approximately 15 hours after the earthquake hit. You can download the KML file to view in Google Earth and the layer is available for viewing in Google Maps as well. The imagery is primarily for Port-Au-Prince. Google says they'll add more imagery, but you only need to download the file once.

Real estate search site Trulia is now offering the ability to purchase a percentage share of advertising on their site in order to target markets geographically. Dubbed simply Trulia Local Ads , the offering includes both display ads on the site and search listings. "The Trulia Local Ads platform has completely opened up the ad market on Trulia, allowing individuals and businesses of any size to easily, quickly and affordably reach hyper-targeted, hyper-local audiences,

One of the best things I find about international SES conferences is just how much you can learn about the cultural and political differences in attitude to marketing. As a formal marketing student you learn very quickly about performing an environmental scan. This is not specifically about whether your viewed as a "green" marketer but more about variables within the marketing environment you can control and those you can't.

Google and AOL are up while Yahoo!, Bing and Ask.com are down from November in Nielsen's December 2009 search rankings . But let's face it, AOL is fueled by Google, so pretty much all of the gains belong to Google. When you compare year-over-year numbers, things are pretty much abysmal for everyone but Google, who gained, and Bing, which remained steady. Here are the stats from November: Here are the stats from December 2008 .

If you are running an AdWords campaign for a website on a shared domains, then you'll want to be aware of a new policy for displaying those URLs in your ads . From now on, the ad must show more clearly the destination a user will be heading to should they click on your ad. Let's say you have a blog at Blogspot. Perhaps you sell your handmade goods on there and you want to drive traffic. Your ad now needs to show the Blogspot name in the URL, like this: exampleblogname.

Bing has updated its health search results to assist in navigating to specific information that you'll find useful. If you're curious about a medication, you can get quick info and search filters in a box that appears at the top of the results: When you search for a disease, you'll find a box containing a definition and links to related information. Since January is Thyroid Awareness Month, I thought it would be prudent to search for "hypothyroidism.

For the citizens of Haiti, real-time search may have arrived just in time. The 7.0 earthquake that shook the poverty-stricken nation hit just 5 hours ago, but you can easily find information about the disaster, and, most importantly organizations to donate to . On each of the top four search engines, searching "Haiti relief" yielded extremely useful information.

Many in the West reacted negatively when Google kowtowed to the Chinese government's demands to censor its Chinese search engine Google.cn . At the time Google said that it would monitor conditions in the country and make adjustments in policy as necessary. Looks like that time has come. Agents who may have been working on behalf of the the Chinese government have apparently attempted a coordinated hacking attack against Google and over a dozen other major corporations.

Facebook has released a new email feature that will streamline the conversation process for many users. Now, when you get an email notification of a comment on an update, you can respond by replying to the email. Since some employers block Facebook, this is a way to keep up with some aspects of your social networking while at work. Social media marketers in charge of Facebook campaigns will find this an extremely efficient way of engaging with consumers.