One new initiative is Yahoo’s new Open platform codenamed ‘Search Monkey’ in which developers are open to create and manage their own applications built for the search engine. For example one application created was a Blog tool in which if you searched for a blog you’ll get the latest posts from that blog come up in a list under the search result. Find out more about Yahoo’s Search Monkey Program Here.

“The UK search industry is now a significant advertising medium in its own right, worth over £1.6 billion in 2007. This resource, created by the IAB’s Search Council contains best practice information for all basic and advanced search marketing techniques. Explanations of the key similarities between search engine policies are also included for trademarks, copyright, privacy, invalid clicks and intellectual property in campaigns.”

Visit the new IAB Search Marketing Resource here.

Read more here.

“The Google Affiliate Network, previously known as DoubleClick Performics Affiliate, has been in operation since 1998. Through the network, advertisers can open their ads to all publishers in the network, or select specific publishers that match their criteria. You can set a CPA for your entire campaign or establish custom payment schedules for specific publishers — such as a higher CPA for a particularly optimal placement. The Google Affiliate Network is currently a separate product from AdWords and AdSense. As with AdSense, publishers must apply and be accepted into the network.“

- Google Blog

- Google Q&A

- Official Adobe Press Release

- Search Engine Watch Blog

“We’ll be rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the next few days, but expect the update will be completed soon. As you know, throughout this process you may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index.

To share your thoughts or check in with other Yahoo! Search users, please visit the Site Explorer Suggestion Board.“

Read the original article here. John Battelle’s thoughts here.

Read more here.

If you’re a media planner at an ad agency, you know that planning an online display buy can be challenging, particularly in scaling your campaign’s reach while keeping it relevant for your target audience. Plus, how do you keep track of the millions of sites out there that might be just right for your campaign?

To make your life easier, we’re introducing Google Ad Planner, a research and media planning tool that connects advertisers and publishers. When using Google Ad Planner, simply enter demographics and sites associated with your target audience, and the tool will return information about sites (both on and off the Google content network) that your audience is likely to visit. You can drill down further to get more detail like demographics and related searches for a particular site, or you can get aggregate statistics for the sites you’ve added to your media plan.

While Google Trends for Websites, announced last week, is designed for all users, Google Ad Planner is designed with media planners in mind. Using Google Ad Planner, you can quickly create media plans and export to a .csv file, which can be opened in most spreadsheet applications. Or, you can export to DoubleClick’s MediaVisor, which helps you manage all your other media planning, buying and campaign management activities.

We hope you’ll find this tool useful and discover many relevant sites–small and large–that would otherwise be hard to find. As Ad Planner is a new product, it’s currently available by invitation only. If you’re interested in trying it out, you can apply here.

The net’s regulator Icann will vote to decide if the strict rules on so-called top level domain names, such as .com or .uk, can be relaxed.

If approved, firms could turn brands into web addresses while individuals could also grab a unique domain based on their name, for example.

Read more here.