You’ll find a copy here (PDF) at the Public Index. The New York Times has a summary up here. Gary Price has a press round-up here. A Google statement is at the end of this article, along with one from the Open Content Alliance, which opposes the settlement.

As for the article itself, I’m reading through the entire filing from top to bottom, pulling out parts that seem worth highlighting and providing my own commentary along the way. I’m not a lawyer, keep in mind. James Grimmelman IS a lawyer, has been following this case closely, and provides his own commentary here.

Read full post at Search Engine Land

“During the past four years we’ve monitored billions of clicks for top search engines, ad networks, publishers and advertisers. This scheme is one of the most sophisticated we’ve seen,” said Paul Pellman, CEO of Click Forensics. “The botnet is effectively disguising the fraud it produces as ‘good traffic’ by altering the interval and breadth of the attacks across legions of infected machines.”

Click Forensics has found malware associated with the botnet in search results on Google for “Facebook Fan Check virus.” The malware behaves similarly to the advertising malware that the New York Times fell prey to last weekend. The Times inadvertently sold advertising to a “scareware” program that encouraged consumers to download malware-checking software. The software itself was actually malware.

source

I would think that MSN is now in the position to challenge Google and they are in much better shape now then they have been in awhile, at least in the search engine game. Plus they have a lot of money and maybe they aren’t done spending it.   Yahoo didn’t do that bad here because they have been overmatched and out of it for a long time and they knew it, the results at Yahoo organic suck and the Yahoo PPC program is weak.  So now they can focus on other things and in the long run it probably will be the end user and advertisers who come out ahead.

From Matt Cutts Blog:
Who did better in the Microsoft-Yahoo deal?

BACKGROUND ON DEAL

*  The term of the agreement is 10 years

* Microsoft will acquire an exclusive 10 year license to Yahoo!’s core search technologies, and Microsoft will have the ability to integrate Yahoo! search technologies into its existing web search platforms

* Yahoo! will continue to syndicate its existing search affiliate partnerships.

* Microsoft’s Bing will be the exclusive algorithmic search and paid search platform for Yahoo! sites. Yahoo! will continue to use its technology and data in other areas of its business such as enhancing display advertising technology.

* Each company will maintain its own separate display advertising business and sales force.

* Yahoo! will become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers. Self-serve advertising for both companies will be fulfilled by Microsoft’s AdCenter platform, and prices for all search ads will continue to be set by AdCenter’s automated auction process.

The search brand at Yahoo will remain to be “Yahoo Search” but it will have a label at the bottom of the page that says “Powered by Bing.” Nothing is changing now, not until they get regulatory approval, and then when they get that approval, they will begin pushing out the integration.

So Bing will now power search on Yahoo! and Yahoo!’s salesforce will sell the premium (non-self service) search advertising for Yahoo!/Bing. Bing also gets access to Yahoo!’s core search technology and can, at its option, leverage that to help create more relevant results.

BOTTOM LINE

Nothing is going to happen until 2010 at the earliest, so you do you have time to prepare.  I would say now that Bing will have a 15-28% share of the market, that it makes a lot of sense to start optimizing for BING now.  In the past MSN was hardly worth optimizing for because they usually didnt send much traffic but now it will make more sense.  A good tool to use to see the differnent results that come up now at Google and Bing, is the Bing v. Google tool.

They now serve up a central search box as the main feature with trending topics below in almost a tag cloud style. The top row, with the biggest font features current hot topics. The second row with slightly smaller font features hot topics from the past day and finally the third row with topics from the past week.

Learning By Experience

Defining a “tweet” for the uninitiated and explaining how to create an account doesn’t resonate with everyone. “Why would I want to do that?” is a common reaction. However, demonstrating the power of Twitter as a discovery engine for what is happening right now through our Search and Trends often awakens a sense of wonder which inevitably leads to a much more compelling question, “How do I get involved?”

We will see if this helps those people that think Twitter is just a waste of time.

IPHONE WHITE SCREEN SOLUTION

All you need to do is first press and hold the top power button, THEN at the same time hold the main front botton, hold it for about 10-15 seconds and you should then see it go black and then you should see the APPLE Icon appear and it will take about 30 seconds while it does a hard reboot BUT it should then come back to life! It lives!!

If this above trick doesnt work, then you migth be out of luck and you could just have a bad unit that you will have to return and get a new replacement. Yet the above worked for me and I am very happy that it did.

We are giving away 50,000 free sets of 25 cards (no shipping or any other fees) over the next week. Keep an eye open for an image and link to appear in your Google Voice inbox, on the left side below the account balance, as it will appear at different times for different Google Voice users throughout the week. Once you click on the link, you will be able to customize and order your free cards through iPrint.com.

Google Voice is awesome! I just set it up but so far it seems like a really great thing.

Google Voice Blog

People think about PageRank in lots of different ways. People have compared PageRank to a “random surfer” model in which PageRank is the probability that a random surfer clicking on links lands on a page. Other people think of the web as an link matrix in which the value at position (i,j) indicates the presence of links from page i to page j. In that case, PageRank corresponds to the principal eigenvector of that normalized link matrix.

Q: Does this mean “PageRank sculpting” (trying to change how PageRank flows within your site using e.g. nofollow) is a bad idea?
A: I wouldn’t recommend it, because it isn’t the most effective way to utilize your PageRank. In general, I would let PageRank flow freely within your site. The notion of “PageRank sculpting” has always been a second- or third-order recommendation for us. I would recommend the first-order things to pay attention to are 1) making great content that will attract links in the first place, and 2) choosing a site architecture that makes your site usable/crawlable for humans and search engines alike.

For example, it makes a much bigger difference to make sure that people (and bots) can reach the pages on your site by clicking links than it ever did to sculpt PageRank. If you run an e-commerce site, another example of good site architecture would be putting products front-and-center on your web site vs. burying them deep within your site so that visitors and search engines have to click on many links to get to your products.

There may be a miniscule number of pages (such as links to a shopping cart or to a login page) that I might add nofollow on, just because those pages are different for every user and they aren’t that helpful to show up in search engines. But in general, I wouldn’t recommend PageRank sculpting.

Read the full post

Microsoft is expected to spend $80 million to $100 million on Bing marketing which would be a nice hedge against Yahoo! because Bing will most likely take market share from Yahoo!.

Whether Bing ultimately succeeds or not, it will push Google to keep innovating search, and the new pay per click competition will ensure that Google doesn’t get too greedy.

How is Bing different from Google?

Bing is not dramatically different from Google, but some people have found its results stronger. There are some visible changes:

• Bing shows a preview of the web pages in the search results when you hover your mouse pointer at the right side of the search results.
• Bing displays fewer results if it is certain that it has understood your intent. The search for “Facebook”, for example, brings up just one result linking to the site itself.
• Some search results are divided into categories. For example, if you search for the popular musician “Justin Timberlake”, you’ll get results in the categories news, songs, movies, biography, wallpaper and downloads. In addition, the search results show images, videos and the popularity of the musician.
• Wikipedia searches can be displayed inline in the search results without leaving the Bing site by clicking the “Enhanced view” link.
• Bing features a different background image every day. The image contains special hidden hotspots that lead you to more information (soon advertising?) about the image.
• Despite the background image, Bing’s homepage loads very quickly in your web browser because the search box and logo load first. You can turn off the background image.
• Bing’s video search lets you watch videos without leaving the search engine.
• Bing offers specific health, shopping and travel search engines, as well as instant answers to travel searches. For instance, the search “Vegas hotels” displays a selection of hotels in Las Vegas, including hotel stars and prices.
• Bing’s search history lets you return to your most recent searches of the last two days. This feature can be turned off to protect your privacy.
• Some of Google’s features are missing, for example, Bing doesn’t seem to recognize misspellings and returns no results in these cases.
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So far it looks like it has some cool features but it has the same results it always had in MSN.com. Some of the search results are better then Googles results but usually Google still has better overall results it seems but the jury is still out.  One thing is for sure, people are going to know the word BING because of the advertising MSN will do and enough people might actually use it but will they keep using it?

IT Simulations applies a simulation-based training methodology and delivers programs using the most advanced reliable on-line technology available.

The company provides hospitality training, restaurant training and retail sales training solutions.