Nano2Sol by Marc Boucher

Yahoo has updated its search index which of course is relevant to any online business. So I had a quick look to see how SpaceRef did in this update. For our most important keyword/phrase we stayed the same, in the top ten results on page 1. For a couple of secondary keywords we went down a bit and up bit. In other words status quo. Overall I’m happy with this. Of course it’s only recently that I’ve started paying more attention to this and actually working on improving our rankings. It’s all about available time. Of note, our competitors remained pretty much the same as before except for one who fell out of the top 50 for what I consider the top keyword in our business, ouch.

Weather Report: Yahoo! Search Index Update:

We rolled out an index update last night. As usual, you may see some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages that are included in the index. Those who follow these weather updates may have noticed that they are occurring more frequently; this is the result of improvements to the indexing system.

Just a follow-up to my post last week on Del.icio.us, Yahoo has added it to their toolbar. No surprise there since Yahoo acquired them recently. It will be interesting to see what affect this has on referrals.

New Tools in the Toolbar: “

We’ve been working hard on the Yahoo! Toolbar for IE and Firefox so here’s a quick update for you all.

Deliciousness
Speaking of changes, you must have heard about del.icio.us by now! People use del.icio.us to save and share web favorites. We’ve just created a del.icio.us button for our US users. You add it to your IE or Firefox toolbar to get easy access to your del.icio.us account from anywhere on the web. If you already have toolbar installed, you can add it with a click, otherwise, find it on the Add/Edit Buttons page in the ‘Personal Tools’ section.

(Via Yahoo! Search blog.)

Google quietly launched this week a new service called Google Analytics primarily for those web site owners who need to track their advertisers campaign effectiveness. And it’s free to those web sites owners who have less than 5 million monthly pageviews. Or if you have more than 5 million pageviews but use the Google Adwords service it’s free for you as well.

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I was little disappointed today when Google launched it’s new Instant Messaging and free Talk service. The client program only works on Windows. Considering that Google itself is a fan of Apple computers you have to wonder why they would not have a client for Mac OS X.

The one saving grace is that if you have Mac OS X Tiger installed you can configure iChat to IM with people using the new Google Talk client. But you’re out of luck if you want to use Talk feature.

Since I use Vonage for Voice Over IP (VOIP) and am happy with the service I don’t think Google’s new offering would interest me anyway.

Ok, so you’re headed out of town and you want to shop at this particular store at your destination and you know where on the map it is but have no idea what the sore looks like and the area around it. No problem, Amazon’s A9 new map service can help you out. In fact to make this work Amazon had people drive around 22 cities in the States with camera’s hooked up to GPS enabled laptops to take all those pictures. Now that’s cool.

A9 Officially Launches Maps Service; Block View Imagery Added for More Cities: “If you’ve come across the story today about A9 launching a map service and it sounds familiar, it just might be. About 6 weeks ago I blogged a couple of comments about the service becoming available and included a link to an overview by Greg Linden. So, what’s really new at A9 today? ‘Block View’ imagery has been made available for a few more cities: Salt Lake City, UT Sacramento, CA Long Beach, CA Reno, NV…”

(Via Search Engine Watch Blog.)