The Microsoft-Yahoo stage show is in a hiatus and Microsoft wants to spend the money. That’s how all seems like. Microsoft has acquired Greenfield Online, the owner of ciao.com for a stunning $486 million. Ciao is a popular price comparison website on the European market.

Microsoft’s long wait and dream to buy Yahoo failed early this year and it had $47.5 billion left out which made its wallet heavy. That’s how Microsoft got into this shopping spree.

This acquisition would be a huge benefit for Microsoft as Ciao reportedly has more than 26 million unique visitors each month and has over 5 million product reviews. However, business analysts feel the money paid out is more than it is worth for.

Ever since Google captured the internet and not just dominated but also started ruling over it, Microsoft, the once big giant has been on acquisition one after another to get back its lost kingdom. But would this strategy work out?

MSN adcenter has released a new keyword research and optimization tool to plan and build keywords. This tool is based on Excel 2007 and includes the Ad Intelligence model.

The adCenter Add-in is still a beta version and can help in planning keyword strategy, find out daily keyword impressions and even future trends. Microsoft also claims that this tool would not require expertise in Excel or have knowledge on search engine marketing or online advertising.

The main features of adCenter Add-in for Excel 2007 are:

1. Keyword Expansion – This option helps expand keywords based on the keywords suggested. There are also three algorithms provided.
   • Campaign Association
   • Contained
   • Similarity
2. Keyword Forecasting – Using monthly traffic feature, you would be able to retrieve future forecasted impression counts for the keywords you provide.
3. Keyword Monetization – Provides performance reports like the number of clicks or impressions, position, CPC, CTR and other vital information for the keywords in a given time period.

Studies have revealed that banner ads, campaign programs and visits on a branded website helped pharmaceutical companies create a brand awareness and better sales results among prospects and patients.

A recent study by comScore evaluated the impact of banner ads. The study found that interactions and expotures thru online ads improved adherence rates among patients. This resulted in pharmaceutical companies resorting to the brand’s website for online marketing.

Bridget O’Toole, executive vice president at comScore stated, ““The most effective online marketing tool for both patients and prospects is the brand’s Web site.  It’s important to realize, though, that visits to a brand Web site are achieved through the use of a variety of offline and online tactics, such as online banner ads, search and offline advertising.” He also added, “This is why it is essential for marketers to develop fully-integrated campaigns that not only raise awareness and educate consumers but that also drive visitation to a site.”

These reports reinstate the fact that brand value is vital in life saving products as it helps create a trust factor among patients.

U.S. has sort after Yahoo! Finance for information about economic conditions, general inflation and stocks. More than 18 Million visitors have accessed Yahoo! Finance in May making it the top financial news and research site.

According to comScore, a Internet research company, Yahoo! Finance topped the category followed by AOL Money & Finance with 15.2 million visitors. This is a 58 percent increase for Yahoo! And 48 percent increase for AOL when compared to their previous year.

Demographic Indicators

The report by comScore also reveals some interesting facts. 46 percent of unique visitors who accessed the financial news and research category were persons above the age of 50.

Also, 40% of the visitors had a house hold income of above $60,000. A large number of visitors have also been from large families with more than 5 people. This report portrays how families who have more financial responsibilities or needs keep themselves updated on today’s economic growth.

The recent reports by comScore reveals that 81% of internet searches done in India were using Google sites. This shows Google’s monopoly in the country which has the world’s second largest population.

Google reported 1 billion searches in June which is an 81 percent of the total searches done. Google’s dominion was followed in a far distance by Yahoo with just 117 million searches. This is a huge difference when compared to Google. With just 9.4 % by Yahoo other sites like Ask had 1.9 and MSN sites had just 1.7 percent of total search.

Rediff.com, one of the hugely popular internet portals in India shared 1.5 percent of the searches ranking in fifth position.

Jack Flanagan, executive vice president at comScore stated, “As the top local player in the search market, Indian web portal Rediff.com attracts slightly less than 2 percent of all searches, indicating that there is substantial room for growth among the local Internet brands.”

Though 15% of the world’s total population are Indians, India ranks 37th with 53 searches per user per month, the global average being 93. However, with the increase in internet users in India, there seems to be a larger market and tremendous growth for internet search.

Microsoft has been spending billions of dollars to get back its dominion over Internet search. Recent reports from comScore shows that 5.5 billion Microsoft ad views were displayed during the month of June.

The main promotion being Windows Live Search, Live search cash back program and Live Search Club games. Though Microsoft has been promoting Live Search for some years now, there is not much progress in their search users.

Recently, Microsoft had a deal with HP that all HP systems have Microsoft Live Search preinstalled in their computers. Promotional campaigns like these would attract short time visitors. However, to be successful in the longer run, Microsoft has to come up with something new and interesting.

The reports also mention that Fox Interactive Media was the top display advertisement publisher for the month of June.

E-commerce growth has reduced from 25% during June 07 to just 11% in June 2008. Industry analysts feel this might be the result of the recent economic stimulus by the U.S. government.

comScore, Inc. an internet information provider in its recent release stated that there has been a reduction in purchases during the last two months. The report also reveals that the purchase growth drop off started from November 2007.

According to Chairman Gian Fulgoni of comSore, “With the first round of the government’s economic stimulus checks having been mailed in early May, one would have hoped they would have bolstered online spending in May and June,” He also added, “However, recent comScore research reveals that fully two thirds of consumers said they had not planned to spend their stimulus checks and rather intended to use the cash to pay off debt or put the money into savings, a finding we’ll be taking a closer look at during next week’s webinar. In addition, it’s likely the impact of the stimulus may have been felt more offline, where a variety of merchants made it particularly easy for consumers to cash their checks at retail stores.”

The report also discloses that the top hot sellers were video games, consoles and accessories. This was followed by furniture, appliances and equipments.

It seems like Google would release a new product each day in the near future. Google Suggest, the latest in the offering would help you with real time suggestions. Something similar to “Did you mean?” by Google, can offer you an alternative spelling for your query in real time.

Google Toolbar users would feel this is nothing different from what Google has already added to its toolbar. However, this would not need a separate toolbar and would be available when you open up the Google Suggest page.

Google Suggest uses JavaScript and cookies on your browser. Browsers that are compatible are Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Opera, Firefox, Netscape or Safari. Currently, this feature would be available in English alone.

Some of the benefits by using Google Suggest would be:

1. Help reduce typos as you can choose from its suggestions
2. Find out better search queries to ease your search
3. Use these results for a market research or online marketing

This feature would be an added advantage to Search Engine Experts as they would now get a larger view of what people are actually searching for.

Scrabulous would no longer be accessible to users except in India. The restriction is due to the case being held in the Indian High Court.

Most of the Facebook users are aware that Scrabulous cannot be accessed in Facebook. The popular game developed by Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla of Calcutta is a game similar to Scrabble. Interestingly, Scrabble owns the rights outside North America and Hasbro another company owns the right to Scrabble in the U.S. and Canada.
 
Following the complaints and court proceedings, Facebook has replaced Scrabulous with a similar game called Wordscraper. Wordscraper is no different than Scrabulous except that it uses circles instead of boxes.

Well, if you have a site more than 1000 pages, you would have wondered this. How many URLs can I stuff inside one sitemap? The sitemap has become considerablily big. Will Google index all the pages I have mentioned inside?

Well this is what Google has to say.

1. You can have a maximum of 50,000 URLs in one sitemap. Isn’t that cool?
2. The sitemap file should not be over 10MB in size when uncompressed. Hmm. Sounds fair.
3. If you have more than 50,000 URLs create multiple sitemaps and list them in a Sitemap Index File
4. Your sitemap index file should not cross 1,000 sitemaps

I guess these 4 guidelines by Google would resolve all your queries. I am not sure about Yahoo or MSN. If any of SEO Mind readers have an answer, please do post them here.