Ask Kalena

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You all know by now that Yahoo has rejected Microsoft’s 45 billion dollar offer to acquire them and form a super search company (which I nicknamed Microhoo). The price was unanimously rejected by Yahoo’s Board of Directors and described as “substantially undervaluing the Yahoo brand”.

But what I found the most interesting development in the whole chain of events that unfolded last month was Google’s reaction. Check out their public statement on the potential acquisition. Not only does it use a scathing language against Microsoft, but it’s issued by a single person instead of the company as a whole: David Drummond, Senior Vice President, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer. Here’s an extract:

Could Microsoft now attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC? While the Internet rewards competitive innovation, Microsoft has frequently sought to establish proprietary monopolies — and then leverage its dominance into new, adjacent markets.

Could the acquisition of Yahoo! allow Microsoft — despite its legacy of serious legal and regulatory offenses — to extend unfair practices from browsers and operating systems to the Internet?

I may be completely off base here, but this suggests a couple of things to me:

1) Senior staff at Google weren’t comfortable enough with the content of the statement to release it as a standard-issue corporate press release.

2) Some staff at Google clearly have an axe to grind with Microsoft.

3) A potential Microsoft-Yahoo deal scares Google. A lot.

4) Google may approach (or may have already approached) Yahoo with a similar acquisition offer.

Maybe the threat of a Microsoft buyout of Yahoo will force Google’s hand. I am betting we’ll see some big moves from the big G this year.

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It’s time for another episode of: Search Industry Flashbacks!

Date: 3 July 2002Original Post: AltaVista Boasts Larger Index

Summary: It’s July 2002 and AltaVista have been steadily losing market share to Google and Yahoo for some years. In an attempt to turn things around, they dramatically increased the number of files being indexed and updated their news feed:

Content:

According to AltaVista, their index now contains 1.1 billion pages, representing over 120 million video, audio and image files. They’ve also increased the frequency of their news feeds, updating news sources every 15 minutes.

Not only that, but AltaVista have also improved their Express Inclusion offering by increasing their refresh rate. Effective August 1, 2002, all URL’s using their Express Inclusion service will be visited on a daily basis.

They said it couldn’t be done, but it seems AltaVista are proving the critics wrong by finally turning things around and offering a better user experience.  Let’s hope this new customer focus will help them regain market share lost over the past 12 months.

Postscript: At the time, I (rather optimistically) thought it could be AltaVista’s big comeback. How wrong was I?

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Hi Kalena

Can you recommend a service that will give me a monthly report on page positions for my website based on keywords. I have been using Submitnet.net, but they recently changed their program and no longer give me what I need.

Thanks
Robbi

Dear Robbi

Web Position is probably the best choice for running monthly search ranking reports. They have a free trial. BUT you should be aware that some of the functions performed by this tool (e.g. automatic submissions and search rank querying) are discouraged by Google in their Webmaster Guidelines.

Other tools you might find useful for SEO and SEM are listed here and here.

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If you’re a blogger in the search industry, you’re probably still reeling from the jaw-dropping news that broke on Saturday: Microsoft has made a 45 billion bid to purchase Yahoo.

So if this rather ambitious acquisition proceeds, what exactly will this mean for the search industry? There is a lot of speculation right now that it will never happen, but let’s just imagine it did.

For starters, I’m sure MS would scrap their existing PPC offering AdCenter and incorporate the better known Yahoo Search Marketing system under their own brand. They would also likely scrap Yahoo’s Directory and combine the Yahoo search data with their own Live Search results to create a super search engine of sorts, running on their own algorithm.

The new Microhoo could be a definite threat to Google. Just how the acquisition could or should proceed is perhaps the most interesting part of the whole deal. There are bound to be market monopoly issues at stake. You can bet both the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission are watching the unfolding saga very closely.

Meanwhile reactions from bloggers in the search industry are fun to watch.

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Hi Kalena…

I’ve a question: There are thousands of Internet Directories on the web, is still a good idea submit a link to my page in those directories to improve my Page Rank?

Thanks
Roberto

Dear Roberto

The whole idea behind Google PageRank is to rank sites based on a kind of voting system, with each link pointing to your site acting like a vote. However, some links pointing to your site can have a negative effect, particularly links from sites that are considered low quality, contain mainly duplicate content or don’t have a very high PageRank themselves.

So by all means, submit your site to directories and search engines, but just be picky about the sites you choose to link to you. Don’t try and obtain links from dodgy looking sites or from directories that list dodgy looking sites. Quality is more important to Google over quantity so if you’ve got 10 links from trusted sites they are more likely to help your site’s PageRank score than 100 links from lower quality sites. See my past post about linking to bad neighbourhoods for further clarification.

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