Internet Marketing and Social Media Consultants

In what isn’t much of a surprise at all, the Pew Internet Project released a study today confirming that search engine use increasingly becoming an everyday activity for web users, and has email in its sights.

49% of all web users utilize search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Live Search every day. While that number doesn’t sound particularly stunning, it represents a sustained and steady rise from the 33% number reported in 2002. In comparison with email, whose usage has risen 15% in the last six years, search engine usage has risen 69%.
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This is a little off the beaten path of Google, Facebook, and iPhones, but could potentially have a far greater impact on our lives than any discovery in recent times.

The problem with solar energy is that it is extremely difficult to store. It’s great when the sun is blazing, but when it’s dark outside, the juice shuts down and the energy stream comes to a halt.

But researchers at MIT have found a way to store solar power using simple, clean, abundant resources. According to Daniel Nocera, Henry Dreyfus Professor of Energy at MIT, “Solar power has always been a limited, far-off solution. Now we can seriously think about solar power as unlimited and soon.”
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First, to get it out of the way, it’s pronounced “cool” (in my head, though, I pronounce it “kewl”). Second, don’t accidentally type in “culi.com” or you will see some very naughty things that may get you fired.

Now that we have that out of the way, what is Cuil and can it compete? Do we need another search engine?

So far, in various queries I’ve tested, the results are rather poor. However, that is to be expected on the first day of a search engine. I doubt Google had it all figured out from day one. But I also read that Cuil has one trait that a lot of people are scratching their heads over: they do not take incoming links into consideration when posting search results.
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Google’s Matt Cutts is reporting that Google plans on updating toolbar PageRank in the next couple of days, and will also be removing some of the penalties incurred during the great PageRank massacre of 2007.

Many blogs that feature paid posts were demoted last year (apparently) for chronic selling of paid links. Some paid media providers were more interested in promoting themselves than their clients, and littered their blogger sites with a cornucopia of easily identified code. I’m not saying this is exactly how it went down, but it couldn’t have helped.
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This fall, Facebook will integrate Microsoft’s Live Search with their social network, giving Microsoft the ultimate return on their $240 million investment. Along with Live Search will come Microsoft’s search advertising. Things were already looking up for Live Search, and now they’re looking even better.

Live Search had a big month in May, getting 15% more visitors than the previous month, and they have also inked a deal with Hewlett-Packard to get the Live Search toolbar installed on HP PC’s.

MySpace has a similar search and ad deal with Google, but so far, things aren’t exactly going to plan. Lackluster results have led to finger pointing from both sides, notably with MySpace accusing Google of doing a poor job with their ad service. Searches just aren’t utilized through social networks very much. People are accustomed to using the search bar in their browsers by now.
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