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Bing is now fully fueling English language Yahoo! search results in the U.S. and Canada, Yahoo! and Microsoft announced in the US today, with the roll-out for other languages and remaining countries expected to be completed within 2 years.

The announcement marks a major milestone since the two companies signed a 10-year deal last year for Microsoft to power Yahoo! search and for Yahoo! to use Microsoft’s AdCenter advertising platform.

The U.S. Department of Justice and European authorities approved the deal in February this year.

While people can continue to use Yahoo! for search, they will see “Powered by Bing” displayed at the bottom of searches that use Microsoft’s results. The transition to AdCenter is still underway according to Microsoft. Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz has already said that she expects Yahoo! to be using AdCenter by October.

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Yahoo! and Microsoft seal search deal
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Fact is, for many businesses, the Internet is all about local search.

That’s because for many small businesses, the majority of their revenue is generated from a local catchment area.

(Let’s face it, no-one is going to drive halfway across town to a supermarket, especially when there’s almost certainly one that’s closer to home.)

So if this applies to YOUR business, there is a post over at UndercoverStrategist that you really should know about.

It is called Small Business SEO and Local Search – and it shares a 10 step strategy for taking your local corner store from obscurity to the local limelight.

Of course, local search traffic doesn’t have the glamor of huge search numbers – so lots of businesses don’t bother with it.

They are like a wild animal, blinded by oncoming headlights at full beam, overwhelmed at the possibility of somehow getting those huge numbers of traffic coming to their website.
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Jon Stewart Addresses Google and Net Neutrality.

“It’s kinda like creating a carpool lane on the Internet, except instead of high occupancy vehicles, only rich a**holes will be able to drive in it.”

An oldie but a goodie. Click on the image to take a trip to the video.

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GOOGLE has revealed it is under investigation in Spain over its Street View mapping feature.

A Madrid judge has issued a subpoena for an October 4 appearance by a Google representative.

Spain is the latest country to take on the internet search giant over Street View, which provides detailed photographs of neighbourhoods.

More in The Australian.

Alternatively, check out these 10 Unforgettable Streetview Moments.

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“When you are part of a company that is trying to digitize all the books in the world, the first question you often get is “Just how many books are out there?”” says Leonid Taycher, Google software engineer working on the Google Books project.

They counted 129,864,880 titles, or almost 130 million.

As you would expect, not everyone is buying Google’s count of all the world’s books, with Jon Stokes amongst others coming out with their own announcement, and that is the Google book count is bunkum.

So, a long time ago (at least it feels that way), having posted about Google’s desire to reproduce the world’s books, and the ensuing arguments that arose from it, I thought it was time to do an update on the books project to find out where were at and what had happened since we last discussed it.

So last time we talked about the Google books project, Amazon (who stood to have its book retailing market pulled from beneath it), Microsoft and various Governments (including the German and French) had weighed in on the opposing camp.

There was a fair bit of commentary, like this piece in Boing Boing and my own piece, How much power is too much power?
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It was going to be bigger than Google Maps. Now it’s deader than, well, a dead duck.

Google has announced on its blog that Google Wave, a web app that allows realtime communication and collaboration, is no more.

According to Google, the problem is that not enough people were using it. The demand wasn’t there to justify continuing to pursue it. Good on them, though, for testing the boundaries of what the market might want in future technologies.

Here is what Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President, Operations & Google Fellow had to say:

“We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects. The central parts of the code, as well as the protocols that have driven many of Wave’s innovations, like drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing, are already available as open source, so customers and partners can continue the innovation we began. In addition, we will work on tools so that users can easily “liberate” their content from Wave.”

You can check out Google Wave (or at least what’s left) by going here.

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GOOGLE is “reviewing the feasibility of our business operations in China” and may back out of China entirely, as it disclosed it had been hit with major cyber attacks it believes to have originated from the country.

In a blog posting, authored by Google’s chief legal officer, David Drummond, Google said:

“First, this attack was not just on Google. As part of our investigation we have discovered that at least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses–including the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors–have been similarly targeted. We are currently in the process of notifying those companies, and we are also working with the relevant U.S. authorities.
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Both Google and Bing face challenges if they want to remain relevant to Internet news consumers and nowhere was this challenge more highlighted than with the death of Michael Jackson which took Google 1 hour, 20 minutes to report after the story was posted on TMZ and a full 20 minutes after “RIP Michael Jackson” topped Trends on Twitter.

So given its laggard reporting, and the expectation of its users to perform better, it’s no surprise that the Internet giant has gone to great pains to refine its engine to lift its game in the real-time news arena.

Here is some of what Google has to say:
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Ok, here is proof of something that I have been saying for a long time.

In fact, I’ve said it so much, I feel like a broken record.

If you’re doing this with your site (see super-nice screen shot just below):

You have joined the ranks of those who stuff code and waste time, my friend.

Need proof? Here it is:
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According to searchengineland, you have until mid/late 2010 to prepare your website for Microsoft’s Bing search engine ranking. The bad news is, if you’re already ranking well in Yahoo! it will all count for nothing.

So how do you know whether you should worry about Bing? Start with identifying how much traffic Yahoo! is sending your way. If the number is significant, you should invest the effort to do what’s needed in Bing.

Check out David Shapiro’s great post on this subject.
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