Bing Is Finally Powering Yahoo Searches

yahooAfter plenty of talking, buying, and rumors, Bing is finally powering yahoo searches. But what does that really mean?

Microsoft now controls 28.1 percent of the search engine market. Google is still looking high and mighty at 65.8 percent.

If you do any kind of search, it may look the same, but simply look at the status bar and you’ll see results are being taken from Bing.

Now the only question left in mind is how long it will take for Microsoft to do something else new to try and steal some more market share?

For any more SEO help, strategic internet marketing company Leadgenix is here to help.

Google Buys Like.com

Google Buys Like.com For $1,000,000Google has recently extended it’s reach by purchasing like.com, a site that allows people to search for clothes that have a similar pattern or color.

The website was created by Riya, a company built to create a search engine used to search for similar faces among photos. The company found it difficult to monetize the service, however, so they created Like.com to use the same technology for a different purpose. Riya’s CEO, Munjal Shah, noted that “the same technology works well to find similar-looking products.

In effect, Google has acquired a visual search engine for fashionistas. While Google won’t say what it plans to do with the technology, the Google spokesperson dropped hints in this statement:

“While Like.com will operate its Websites separately in the near term, we’re excited about the technology they’ve built and the domain expertise they’ll bring to Google as we continue to work on building great e-commerce experiences for our users, advertisers and partners. We’re pleased and excited to welcome Like.com to Google, where they’ll work closely with our commerce team.”

Could Google be trying to expand it search? How far away are the days when we can upload a photo of a bird and Google can tell us it’s genus and species, it’s migratory patterns, and it’s mating call? Is this the next step in search? Surely the google boys aren’t going to limit themselves to text. Whatever they plan on doing, it’s going to be a breakthrough.

No official price tag was given, although the experts at Techcruch estimated it to be around USD $1 Million. Not bad, Munjal, not bad.

Facebook Places

Facebook has officially announced the launch of Facebook Places. Places is service a lot like foursquare, and other geo-location services that allow you to check in to a place using your smart phone. Places integrates this feature into Facebook and allows you to see if any of your facebook friends are nearby. You can also see if any of your friends have been to the same location as you and what they said about it. You can even tag friends with Places like you would with a photo.

I think that integrating more of a review system like Yelp will be important because you are getting reviews from trusted sources. It is becoming more for prevalent for social media marketing services to motivate people to post reviews online for reasons more than just a fondness of the business and or its products. If you see that a friend of yours or even a friend of a friend has for example been to a restaurant, you will have more confidence that the review isn’t bogus.

When I was on YouTube today looking up some videos at least 90% of the comments are negative. Some of my favorites are “seems a little big brother” and “stalk book has now recently made the change to stalkbook 2.0.” I can easily see these peoples concerns, and I personally don’t think I like the idea of little known Facebook acquaintances that I accepted out of friendly guilt being able to track me down.

Places is likely to be a big competitor for other location-based apps like Gowalla, Yelp, Booyah and Foursquare. Apparently these companies were at the press release of Facebook Places, and they all have plans of how they will integrate their services into Places. If you cant beat them join them, right.

Check out these 2 videos

Facebook’s heartwarming commercial

This one seems a little more honest