Search Engine News

Microsoft has hired Dayne Sampson, a Yahoo vice president of operations since 2006, the software giant said Monday. “We’re very excited to have Dayne Sampson join the team, reporting to Debra Chrapaty, corporate vice president of Global Foundation Services (GFS). Operations and foundation services are key to delivering the Microsoft software plus services vision, and Dayne’s extensive operations and industry experience will be a strong asset for GFS and the company,” the company said in a statement.

More from news.cnet.com…

SEOs and Webmasters are noticing major shifts in the Yahoo Search results over the weekend. I reported the threads discussing the changes at the Search Engine Roundtable and noted that Yahoo has yet to post a “weather report” on this update at the Yahoo Search Blog.

More from searchengineland.com…

Over the course of the past month or two, there have been several reports that Google is allowing AdWords ads to have extended character limits, above what is allowed in the guidelines. I reported this at the Search Engine Roundtable earlier this month, where Google told me “We haven’t changed our AdWords policy regarding the number of characters allowed in the title line.” Google also told me, they would look into the issue and resolve the bug.

More from searchengineland.com…

Google has launched a venture capital arm to invest in a diverse array of industries, including the consumer Internet, software, clean tech, and health care. The fund, which was announced late Monday in a company blog, will be headed by William Maris, an investor and entrepreneur who was hired by Google last year to help set up the venture, and Rich Miner, former manager of Google’s mobile platforms group.

More from news.cnet.com…

Virtual Earth, which has been somewhat in the shadow of Google Maps and Earth released a large volume of new images for Live Search Maps for a range of countries and cities around the globe.

More from searchengineland.com…

It didn’t take long for Douglas Bowman, Google’s former visual design leader, to land a new gig. Creative Capital’s Spencer Ante reports that Bowman is taking the helm as creative director for Twitter, a spot that, up to now, was being held down by Twitter co-founder Biz Stone.

More from news.cnet.com…

Earlier this month we reported on Google’s test of favicons in Germany and Poland in AdWords. Subsequently I was alerted by someone in email that this was happening in the UK as well. Dave Naylor noticed it today in the UK and has some screenshots. I was unable to find any conducting various searches on Google.co.uk.

More from searchengineland.com…

Credit card information of 19,000 British Web surfers was exposed on Google search before being removed, according to a report this weekend. It is unclear exactly when and for how long the information was available to Google searchers, although most of the cards had been canceled, The Telegraph reported the UK payments association APACS as saying. Visible were names, addresses, and credit card data for thousands of people. Originally, the data was posted on an unsecured server in Vietnam used by criminal gangs that was closed in February, the newspaper said. However, the “cached” version of it on Google remained.

More from news.cnet.com…

Google sometimes turns off features. One such feature that I remember fondly is that at the bottom of Google’s search results, we offered nine other search engine suggestions. The idea was if you didn’t find what you were searching for on Google, you could click on the other links and easily run the same search somewhere else. Luckily, due to an April Fool’s joke about the Mentalplex, you can still see what these links looked like:

More from www.mattcutts.com…

Yahoo technology to bring Internet services to TVs has fledged from the demonstration realm to become available in an actual product, Samsung TVs. Yahoo calls the technology TV Widgets, but Samsung is branding it as Internet@TV. It provides access to a handful of Yahoo services–news, stock quotes, Flickr photos, weather–as well as the Twitter microblogging service, sports scores, eBay shopping, and CBS content. (CBS is owner of CBS Interactive, which publishes CNET News.)

More from news.cnet.com…