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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The unveiling of the Yahoo! Build Your Own Search Service (BOSS) may spur an influx of new search engines.  Although start-up of a search engine is costly and time consuming, BOSS gives developers a head start with the ability to access Yahoo!’s search results and customize the rest. 

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Today’s New York Times discusses a declining online advertising industry and credits the economic downturn for the industries woes.  The article cites the following statistics:

• According to PubMatic, between the months of March and April prices paid to networks for online ads dropped 23 percent; and for larger publishers the decline was steeper at 52 percent.
• AOL’s display advertising declined by 18 percent, to $191 million.
• Internet ad revenue growth at The New York Times Company slowed to 16 percent in the most recent quarter from 20 percent a year earlier
• WebMD Health and Weather.com experienced shorter buying commitments from advertisers; a result of wanting to test ad products prior to prolonged commitments.

While banner investments on ad networks have declined, search engine marketing appeared unaffected.  Google’s revenue in the United States was up thirty percent from last year, while Microsoft’s and Yahoo!’s online revenue jumped 29 and 9 percent respectively.  A majority of search engine revenue comes from search advertising.

Read the entire article here.

Yahoo! appears to be heading in the right direction when it comes to regaining market share from Google.  They have taken their Advanced Search setting a step further and have now developed Personalized Search.  The Personalized Search collects information about a searcher’s interests from their search history, browsing history, and interests listed in profiles from websites such as MySpace and other social networks. In doing so, it eases the users experience by narrowing the searches. 

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Yahoo! recently paired with McAfee security solutions to launch a new feature called “SearchScan”.  Some of the new features included are “always-on” alerts and identify sites with bad e-mail practices.  The deal signed is for multiple years and Yahoo! is hoping it will help minimize the gap with Google over that time period.

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On Saturday, Microsoft withdrew its bid to takeover Yahoo!.  CEO Steven Ballmer stated that the reason for Microsoft backing off from acquiring the company was the concern that Yahoo! would take action to make the company undesirable to Microsoft.  One concern in particular was Yahoo!’s partnership to test Google’s search ads on its own search results pages.

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The author of the book The Art of War, Sun Tzu, once said, “Every battle is won before it’s fought.”  With everyone talking about the recession and rising gas prices, it seems that businesses will have to do “battle” in order to get through this downturn.  In my last blog entry, “Recession: Blessing in Disguise?” I talked about the MarketingSherpa report and how businesses can leverage online marketing during these uncertain times.  However, that report has a second part which talks about strategies that marketers are using to get through the slump.  In this blog post, I’m going to talk about those strategies, plus add some data from eMarketer that backs them up. This post will explain how local businesses can use these strategies to their advantage.  It can be your “business battle plan” if you will. (more…)