The Microsoft Yahoo deal has finally been given the go ahead by the European and US regulators the BBC has reported. The European Commission found that the deal – which was announced back in July 2009 – “would not significantly impede effective competition”. (more…)

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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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…)

This news is from a couple of weeks ago, but is still worth mentioning. A representative from Google has stated that they now view a 410 HTTP status code as “more permanent” than a 404 code. (more…)

Further to reports made earlier about Google UK still displaying irrelevant US search results, a second ago I came across a number of peculiar natural listings on a search for Google Wave.

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Earlier in the year Google released an update to their algorithm which became know as the “Vince update” (named after the Google engineer that created the change). The update affected a relatively small pool of generic queries in competitive niches, and saw “big” brands gain visibility for such queries where they had none before. The fact that big hitters started getting visibility and traffic for high volume keywords had commentators crying foul that Google was favouring corporations and multi-nationals, possibly even going outside the boundaries of their algorithm and hand editing natural results to move them to the top of results in exchange for a few twenties…

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iCrossing yesterday released the US search engine market share figures for September.

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The META keywords tag, do we still use them or don’t we? Since Matt Cutts confirmed that Google do not use the keywords tag as part of their algorithm people have still been arguing that other search engines – in particular Yahoo –still are. Well Yahoo have now confirmed that they are using them no more which should finally put this META element to rest. (more…)