Omar Kattan - search in a nutshell

After a few months of wrangling, MSN has now officially abandoned its efforts in bidding for Yahoo. Yahoo shareholders are now bracing themselves for a share slump as a direct result of this news.  

MSN’s decision to officially bid for the world’s second largest search engine was made towards the end of January when it bid $45 Billion for Yahoo!.  This bid was swiftly rejected.

Yahoo went on to make a deal with Google allowing the search giant to take on the advertising platform by serving Google ads to its customers.  The deal was meant to add hundreds of millions of dollars to Yahoo!’s bottom line and fend of MSN from making a move to becoming a force to be reckoned with.

Yahoo!’s decision to reject the MSN offer has angered its shareholders and the pressure is now on Yahoo! management to prove that the decision was right.  This can only be done by improving financial results and adding value to the Yahoo shares over the next few months.

Unless your head’s been in the sand for the past week, you’ve probably heard by now that Microsoft has made an unsolicited offer to buy out Yahoo for $45 Billion.  You’ve also probably heard that Google has proposed an unholy alliance with Yahoo to save it from being swallowed.

It all started just over 7 months ago when Jerry Yang decided to get back at the helm and run the company he founded in the mid nineties, needless to say, things didn’t go as anticipated.

Steps in Google…

Google has masterfully capitalised on this hidden opportunity by lobbying against MSN’s offer and claiming potential anti trust issues. 

To add salt to injury, Google has also proposed an alliance with Yahoo that could keep it independent and out of the hands of MicroSoft.  The deal broadly presents Yahoo with an opportunity to add 25% more cash to its income statement by handing over its advertising platform to Google in return for a very “lucrative fee”.

No matter how things pan out, the next 12 to 18 months will be very interesting indeed!  Stay tuned…

MSN has announced that it will buy the FAST “Enterprise” Search engine for $1.2 dollars. 

Fast is a Norwegian enterprise search company focusing on providing tailored search software and solutions to large global businesses.  The deal was announced last Tuesday and gives Microsoft a strong footing in the Enterprise search market where “Fast” has traditionally been a leader. 

Analysts say the purchase of Fast Enterprise Search will fill in the gap by giving Microsoft a strong footing in the business search sector and complement Microsoft’s MSN Live Search and Microsoft Search Server and SharePoint Server for small businesses.

Where Google is a dominiant player in the mainstreaam search market, MSN is now trying to get a dominant position in Enterprise search where they’ve always been comfortable.  Through the acquisition of Fast, they’re well on their way.

Fast Searh is now a business offering but its story began with consumer web through its AlltheWeb.com search engine which was aquired by Overture in 2003 and later purchased by Yahoo!

It’ll be interesting to see what Google will now do to counter this unexpected move.

Back in June I posted about SEO for Universal Search and how the future of search results will, in some form or another include images, videos, maps, news, books and now blog posts!  Yes, it is official folks, Google will in the coming weeks start to include blog posts as part of its search engine results pages (SERPS).

This news was confirmed by Marissa Mayer, Google’s VP of search products and user experience who was quoted as saying that Google search listings will start including blog pages from this week or next.

Google rivals Ask, Microsoft and Yahoo! are all playing the Universal Search game, each with their own version and/or interpretation of what it actually mean.

 Mayer continued:

“We talked about it as a new playground for our engineers and it’s true. We’re actually developing a bunch of interesting experiments in terms of the interface and what could happen in terms of Universal Search.”

The next few months are going to be very interesting in terms of SEO as Google et al decide what percentage of their SERPS should include non-traditional (Universal) results.  However, in my opinion, savvy SEO’s should have preempted this move a while back and should have already started to advise their clients about the importance of Universal Search 

In response to Google’s promise to only keep search records for 12-18 months, asked has announced that it will allow its users to completely erase their search activity from the search engines within 2-3 hours.  This development comes only 6 months after the official announcement by ASK. 

According to the ASK Eraser FAQ, users can now click a link on the homepage that will activate the privacy feature by deleting the IP and any search records conducted by the user within 2-3 hours. 

Its worthwhile to note here that even though ASK are taking steps to increase their users’ privacy, its not completely secure.  This is due to the fact that Google (as a supplier of paid ads to ASK) still has access to ASK’s searches.