April-May 2008 – Week 4: Weekly Cover-up of Important Search Engine Related Happenings

Here is all the news, launches, updates or any thing that happened in world of Search Engines. All in a nutshell for you all to enjoy.

• Microsoft Raises Bid for Yahoo! after Yahoo's Impressive First Quarterly Results!
  Microsoft has risen its bid for Yahoo! To above $31 per share, hoping to achieve a friendly merger of the two Internet behemoths. After an impressive First Quarter Financial Results for 2008, Yahoo's CEO (Chief Executive Officer) Jerry Yang had announced that Yahoo! was open for any and all deals that would come its way, including Microsoft's bid for Yahoo!.
• Google Crawlers Record Slowest Crawl for April'08!
  In a forum thread at Webmaster World there are numerous reports that Google crawlers also known as GoogleBots have recorded their slowest crawling graph yet. For the month of April, the crawling rate fell by almost 75% almost multiple
  websites.
• Google Updating its Toolbar PageRank- Hold on to Your Seats! Might get a bit Bumpy!
  Google is updating its PageRank algorithms for the parameters with which it rates a website and the changes have started to show in the rankings. It seems that inspite of Google's repeated statements about the Toolbar PageRank's zero-impact on websites' rankings in Google, an update in the simplest form is also considered to be a major event.
• Google Working On Ranking Algorithm For Images!
  Google Research Team is currently testing a form of PageRank, which is designed specifically for images. It would be similar to what PageRank does for the web pages. This method will use a unique algorithm, that will take advantage of image-recognition softwares and fuse it with techniques for evaluating and ranking images. It is known as VisualRank. For the testing phase of VisualRank, Google had focused on the 2000 most popular product searches such as iPod, Xbox and Zune. It then sorted 10 images from its ranking system as well as the standard Google Image Search. After that an image relevance scoring system was created. After the test, the researchers were able to successfully extract 83 percent less irrelevant images.
• Google TV Ads Expands. Reaches out to all U.S. Advertisers. Gives Rebate of $2000 on the First Advertisement!
  Google TV Ads, which had been in Beta Test Phase and also in 'Invitation Only Mode' since its initiation in June 2007, but Google has expanded its reach to all U.S. based advertisers. This will allow advertisers to launch national television advertisement campaigns from their existing AdWords Account. As a special bonus for its launch, Google will cover the cost (limited time period only) of creation of TV advertisement through its Ad Creation Marketplace, which amounts to $2000.

These are all the events that have taken place in the last week and have helped give a new dimension to the Online World. Enjoy the Recap.

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