The accountancy firm, Deloitte have today announced that the UK online retail market will hit £25bn in 2010, a massive increase of £16bn in just 5 years (2005 UK online retail market £9bn).

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2009 has seen quite a few changes in the way in which search ads can be displayed and the information that can be augmented in search ads in Google. However many of the new additions are still being tested and many are still only available in the US. For this reason I thought it would be useful to discuss the recent  additions in terms of what is available to us in the UK both live and in beta so you can take advantage of these new additions. (more…)

Google’s mission to better improve display advertising continues as it announces its acquisition of Teracent. The technology enables advertisers’ to get the best from their display ads by being able to “pick and choose from literally thousands of creative elements of a display ad in real-time — tweaking images, products, messages or colors”. So essentially the technology - which uses sophisticated machine based learning - is able to optimism ads for each impression opportunity so you do not waste you advertising spend on “hit and miss banners”. (more…)

Another eventful week in search has seen Microsoft deploy dirty tactics against Google, the ongoing dispute with Rupert Murdoch and Google continue, Twitter partner with LinkedIn, Bing partner with pretty much everyone going, and not forgetting the PubCon conference in Las Vegas. So it has been difficult to come up with a top 10 list of stories in search this week (in no particular order) but nonetheless I managed and here it is… (more…)

Google have announced that they are rolling out another change to the way they display their search results by getting rid of the green URL under the search result and adding a “hierarchy” for some search results. The change is aimed at improving the relevancy and understanding of a site by showing the user how a specific page fits into a given sites hierarchy. The new hierarchy feature - which will roll out in the next few days - is seen as a vast improvement to the current structure where landing page URLs can be “too obscure” and therefore lack the necessary information for the user. (more…)

The biggest news to come out of PubCon was the fact that Google are introducing a new ranking factor into their algorithm: speed. The speed in which your site loads will become detrimental to how well your site can rank. This is probably not that surprising as Google have made it no secret that they want search to be a lot faster in the past. (more…)

So finally Bing has come out of Beta and is fully available to us in the UK. This now means we can finally begin to optimise for local search and with it look at local business listings. From reading a post from Greg Sterling at Search Engine Land over the weekend UK business listings have been listed differently form that in the US using Multi-Map, a company acquired by Microsoft. Well Bing has now updated its maps for the UK also. (more…)

Another list of 10 posts (in no particular order) that we have found the most interesting and found important in search this week including Rupert Murdoch’s bid to make even more money… (more…)