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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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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Late Monday evening Google announced they have the ability to better index Flash websites.  The ability was made possible by integrating Adobe’s Flash player technology with their Flash indexing algorithm.

Google users can expect to find more relevant and dynamic Web results in Search Engines that were previously undiscoverable by spiders due to their Flash nature.

 Adobe has also indicated their technology was made available to Yahoo! as well.

 For a more in depth perspective on the impact of crawled and indexed Flash pages, read Search Engine Land’s article here.

This is big news for flash developers and companies with flash websites.  Adobe has created a product for search engines that will not only allow them to index flash, but will also allow them to crawl content within SWF files.  Google has already applied this technology to their algorithm, and Yahoo! is expected to follow as updates are made to their search product.

What does this mean for flash websites currently in existence?  They now have an opportunity to get search engine visibility and can optimize their content to rank for target keywords.  Adobe has announced that all versions of SWF files will be readable, so there is no need for webmasters to modify the Flash elements within their current websites.

There are still some questions left unanswered in terms of search engine preference.  Will HTML content still rank better than Flash?  How will search engines determine the importance of text within a SWF file if style sheets aren’t being utilized?  Some broader questions are also looming. How long will it take for Yahoo! to incorporate the technology to read SWF files?  When will other engines get the opportunity to adapt this technology?

As search experts begin testing over the coming months, we should begin to gain a better understanding of how this Adobe ranking technology will affect SEOs, webmasters and businesses everywhere.  Regardless of the uncertainties, this is a significant landmark for search engines and their ability to give consumers a more comprehensive way to search for information.

For more information about Flash indexing, visit the SWF searchability FAQ by Adobe.

Google strengthened its analytics services on June 24th by introducing a new Ad Planner service.   The service provides media planners’ visibility into which Web sites are frequently visited by their target audience.  Ad Planner provides information on a Web sites traffic and demographics, as well as more specific data such as age, gender, education, household income and even keywords used by visitors during searches.

Google’s efforts are targeted directly at media planners that otherwise might not have had access to Web analytics.  Now that the primary roadblock to effective ad targeting has been removed, it is likely that Google will see increased revenue from coming from media planners at smaller agencies.

For eMarketer’s perspective on Google’s new Web analytics service click here.

For information directly from Google regarding their Ad Planner service click here.

Now that the first quarter 2008 numbers are in, one thing is certain: Google owns mobile search. This news comes after Nielson Mobile released its data on the mobile market. With 61% of the mobile search market cornered, Google dominated the mobile search market the first four months of 2008.

So what can we chalk this domination up to? Google is chalking it up to being the factory default on the iPhone. It seems that while smart phones have been around for awhile now, Google’s data indicates people are searching the internet more with their iPhones than any other smart phone. Who would have guessed a fully supported HTML browser would revolutionize the mobile search marketplace?