A lot is happening in the world of search and social and as you know State of Search is not a news-reporting site but a site that interprets the news and looks at why something is happening and what that means to you. That doesn’t mean however we are not interested in the news. In this post we will bring the top stories of what happened last week with links to articles around the web. So you will know what you’ve missed.
Here’s what happened last week
Facebook and Yahoo?
Business Insider in the weekend ‘broke’ the story where it said Facebook and Yahoo were allegedly in ‘secret talks’ about building a new search engine. This would really upset the market if it would, but after several blogs reported on it AllThingsD, who are known for their good sources at Yahoo ‘busted’ the story claiming it was not true.
Related stories online: Searchengineland, AllThingsD, Business Insider
Related stories on State of Search: Facebook and Yahoo: No, But What If…?
Bing Publishes Webmastertools Guidelines
Google already had them, but now Bing also announced its first ever webmaster guidelines. They want to give webmasters guidance related to SEO for Bing.
Related stories online: Bing, Searchengineland, Searchengineroundtable
Firefox to add Hijacking warnings
Firefox is reported to be adding warnings about search results being hacked. Starting with Firefox 19 Firefox will warn users when any add-on modifies the keyword.URL preference. This will show when it appears someone is hijacking the search results.
Related stories online: Searchengineland, Browserfame
October 2012 U.S. Search Engine Rankings: Google wins big time
Comscore released new numbers on the market shares of search engines in the US. Google won big time reaching a record 66.9 percent of all searches conducted in the U.S.
Related stories online: Comscore, Searchenginewatch, Searchengineland
New Panda Update coming?
Searchengineroundtable reported that a lot of discussion had been going on on forums about a potential new Panda Update. When asked Google responded that it wasn’t a new update, but chances are there will be one soon.
Related stories online: Searchengineroundtable, Searchengineland
Facebook policies changes coming
A lot of changes at Facebook without people realising it. Facebook is going to use the data it has about your likes and dislikes to show you ads outside of Facebook. It is also changing the rules on ‘voting’ and changes e-mail rules.
Related stories online: Forbes, GigaOm, Reuters
Yandex Rolls Out New Version Of Its Yandex.Auto Service
Yandex lets know it has rolled out a new version of its Yandex.Auto Service which is their car classifieds search service.
Related stories online: Yandex
Is Twitter fooling around with Google and cloaking them?
Some interesting findings on Google+ where t was noticed that Tweetdeck, now owned by Twitter, was findable in Bing but not in Google. Googler John Mueller found thatTweetDeck.com is 301 redirected to Twitter.com when the useragent GoogleBot accesses.
Related stories online: Searchengineroundtable, Google+
New Look for Bing’s Social Sidebar tested
Bing is testing “a new format that drops the gray background and which shows more matching content from friends and social networks.”
Related stories online: Searchengineland
Top design Google now World wide
Google introduced a new design for their navigation bars which now are a drop down at the top instead of on the left side. It was first introduced in the US but is now going world wide with searchers reporting on it world wide.
Related stories online: SERoundtable
Twitter Says Tweets Influence Online Shopping
Twitter hired metrics company Comscore to find out some numbers. What Comscore came back with? Quite a bit, mostly positive results. Increase in traffic and apparently tweets influence our shopping behaviour.
Related stories online: Marketingpilgrim
Facebook rolling out Conversion Measurement Tool
Facebook began rolling out a conversion measurement tool, a feature which had been on the list for a while. It was one of several steps by Facebook last week.
Related stories online: Searchenginewatch, Reuters