Third quarter results have been announced and it looks like Google is way ahead of Yahoo when it comes to its financial situation.

Although things don’t look too bad for Yahoo at first glance, a quick look over the current profit amounts for this year, as opposed to the last, show a very different picture.

Sue Decker, President of Yahoo Inc, stated that even though the current revenue climate was extremely tough, Yahoo have still managed to stay focused on their strategic objectives by launching major product initiatives, and are currently looking into ways to reduce their costs and enhance efficiencies to build a stronger, more profitable business.

Not all SEO companies are created equal; some boast of having the best SEO teams around while others, well, they just have a team. Some use legitimate and ethical ways to improve your search engine rankings, while others use vague and sometimes even illegal ways to get your site on top. And still others over-promise and under-deliver. My question is: what’s the point of building an ethical company, then turning around and hiring an SEO agency that uses unethical techniques to attract business? Unfortunately, many companies that work hard to maintain a good reputation are deceived by the alluring promises of shady SEO companies that aren’t shy to trick search engines into driving traffic to their clients’ websites.

There are some things in life that you can always count on: sand at the beach, ants at a picnic and paranoia in the US army. Now, I know that the US army has cause for concern; they’re fighting wars in two countries that they arguably can’t win, their embassies are prone to attack and Iran just won’t give up their nuclear energy programme. But the latest report that identifies new terrorist tools has to be a bit of joke, otherwise I don’t know how else to explain it.

In this time of financial instability, is there hope for the future of online marketing? Some say that many SEM companies will fall off the curb over the next few months, but not everyone will suffer. If you play your cards right, SEM will prove to be an indispensible marketing tool to the (sensible) clients who stick with it. Global search trends are already changing towards budgeting and money saving, for example, searches have increased significantly for ‘cheap DVD’ rather than ‘DVDs for sale’, according to the Google Trends results displayed for the last 30 days.

There are many shady SEOs out there; we call these guys Snake Oil salesmen because they’re scammers who would sell their own grandmothers given half a chance.

These are the guys  who offer “Guaranteed” first page listings in a ridiculously short period of time. They target small businesses that don’t have a huge budget and are easily sucked into the vortex of deception. Of course, it’s not only small businesses that get approached, but these are the guys who will feel the impact most.

I found out about Twitter search from Seth Godin’s blog. I had been shooting the breeze with Twitterfox before that. In blissful ignorance, I was oblivious of the existence of the twitter.com sub-domain, with a search prompt that allows anyone, Twitter member or not , to search through all public tweets using keywords in the age-old search engine style.

The search portal gives users advanced filtering similar to that of larger search engines, with ‘advanced search’ that allows one to specify date ranges, chosen sets of keywords, language, twitter members, referenced twitter members and location.

Web design has come a long way over the past 5 years. With new technologies coming up, more bandwidth, and faster browsers, designers have had opportunities they have never had before. The emergence of new programming mediums such as video streaming, flash and CSS technologies have opened up new design concepts across the web. With new opportunities come more choices, and more possibilities to pass on information to the end user. As a result of these new opportunities, we as designers must decide on the most efficient ways to incorporate meaningful site design that will appeal to and engage end users. It has become a balancing act to effectively and creatively communicate the meaning of a web site while maintaining purpose and direction.

A few months ago, a new search engine called Cuil came alive. It was founded by Anna Patterson an ex-Google employee) in conjunction with her husband, Tom Costello, a former IBM employee, and Russell Power and Louis Monier, two other ex-Google engineers. As the new kid on the block, Cuil did not have a good start, the servers went down on the first day because of high traffic demands, and people still don’t know how to pronounce the name.

Much has been said of the difference between great and merely good writers. For millennia, I think, the latter will aspire to become great, and many will not succeed. I read this post from the CEO of We Build Pages, which is a great site, by the way, and while what the author says is correct (I’ve tabulated it below), I think the difference between great and good writing is far less tangible or attainable.

Pic credit: Concurringopinions

Quite a while back Nicholas Carr suggested that Google is making us stupid. He got a lot of flack for that, but I have to admit that I agree with most of what he has to say, so much so that I even wrote my own blog about it. Now, a study by researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, claims to prove that searching the net - and by association, Google - doesn`t make us stupid but actually improves brain functioning. (At least in older internet users, and provided they already have the technical know-how to use search engines successfully.)