Advertisers could end up paying 22% more for search terms on Yahoo if the Web giant’s proposed paid search partnership with Google comes to fruition, according to new data from SearchIgnite.
The search management tech and services firm released the “Potential Impact of a Google-Yahoo Partnership & Cost to Marketers” report just hours before the two companies’ top legal brass met with the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee to make the case for their deal.

It seems like Google is, for the time-being, experimenting with crowdsourced SERP personilization.  Apparently, a select few are able to rank the listings that show up on a SERP through their Google account.  Eventually, this will become a permanent application and when it does, it will be interesting to see how this affects SEO efforts.

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Elliance has posted another helpful ‘Search Illustrated’ graphic at Search Engine Land. We know that search engines can read PDF’s, but what can we do to better optimize these pages so they will show up in search results? Simply put, creating a keyword-rich filename and coupling it with targeted Meta data will not guarantee your charge to the first page of search results, but it’s a start.

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A new generation of search engines are starting to become publicly available and so it’s time to start thinking about how they will affect SEO efforts.

The new search engines I’m talking about are the semantic search engines, meaning they are search engines that can be queried using natural language (not keywords like when using Google). Behind the scenes, these search engines try to understand the meaning behind the text web pages and so when you query them, they map what your query means and find answer based on the meaning they’ve extracted. It’s all very neat, and there are many examples: Powerset (which Microsoft recently acquired), Hakia, [true knowledge], Cognition and a few others.

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