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Yahoo bought Kelkoo back in 2004 and kept the site as a standalone destination and integrated it into Yahoo search results, too. Over time the quality of search interface and results declined in my opinion - I was once a loyal user (and, full disclosure, almost went to work there earlier this decade). A sale has been rrumoured before.

According to the coverage (PC Magazine, Wikio Blog) there is discontent at Kelkoo about how Yahoo have managed the company and the Yahoo share price, and this seems viewed as a welcome opportunity to strike out again on their own.

Interesting timing as Jerry Yang steps down as Yahoo CEO.

Friday afternoon speculation: Could Yahoo pull out of search altogether in Europe, and outsource SERPs to MSN or Google for a share of paid search revenue, allowing Yahoo to focus their search efforts on the US and cut their European head count and costs?

The Yahoo saga continues and I have to ask: what is their European strategy going forward?

Hat tip to OLS for finding this story. Merci!

Full story here.

Yahoos' shares today are down - continuing this year's trend.

 Update: Jerry Yang has announced his resignation. His note to staff is here. Hat tips to PK and CC.

The idea is simple: to help Google reduce the amount of heat the company's server farms expel into the environment, moor them seven miles offshore and use sea water to help with the cooling process. This avoids the need to pump and pipe water long distances or use water that communities need for industry, farming and drinking. Security can be increased too - will we see a Google mini-navy one day, patrolling the waters around their servers?

One thing that immediately struck me on reading this - if the barges are moved later on to be more than twelve miles out, they will in most cases be in international waters*. What implications does that have for data security,legal compliance and countries requesting copies of data Google holds (e.g. emails or web search history) for court cases? Could Google refuse to provide the data because it is offshore and outside of national jurisdictions? Will courts have to serve notice against Google targetting infrastructure located on land in countries with laws "friendly" to their requests?

The blogsphere agrees - alongside the normal posts verging into "Big Brother" hysteria.

Reducing the amount of heat computers, and especially server farms, expel is important in the fight against global warning. The Times cite a report stating that it won't be long before computer emissions have the same carbon footprint as the aviation industry. There's another opporuntiy here for Google - use the server heat with turbines, solar panels on deck, sea power (as per the patent) and wind turbines to generate some, or all, of the power the servers need to begin with.

*NB: international waters and the legal treaties etc governing the seas are not as clear cut as many assume. See the Wikipedia link above.

With Google dominating the search space it's inevitable that both new and existing search players are looking to go niche. They want to be known for something. Or for someone. Enter RushmoreDrive.com- a search engine for the Black community. It launched a few months ago and comes to us courtesy of Mr Barry Diller at IAC (the owners of Ask.com). It's interesting how Mr Diller is using Ask's search technology - RushmoreDrive states that it 'delivers a blend of mainstream search results plus a layer of more relevant search results influenced by the Black community.'

Rushmore.com is looking to be more than just a search engine. It's part search engine, part community, part job network. To use RushmoreDrive's words: 'RushmoreDrive is the starting point and the destination for its users to find what is most relevant to the Black community.'

Will it fly? I guess that that depends on three main things:

1/. Is it relevant? Over to the guys at RushmoreDrive to ensure that it is.

2/. Do Internet users identify with a site orientated around ethnicity or a particular target group? I'm a woman. I'm also Greek. Would I go to a 'female search engine.' Probably not. And if I did, it would be for very specific searches only. Would I go to a 'Greek community search engine' - even less likely. However, that's not to say that others wouldn't. I guess I'd just need a reason to go over and above my identity.

3/. Will it make money? Swapping my user hat for my advertiser hat, would I pay good money to get my message in front of a targeted group of people? Yes.

It'll be interesting to see how RushmoreDrive develops and we wish the guys over there every success with it.

Us Steak-ites believe in many things....purple cows, world peace and search-inspired communications. We believe that search engines are the world's largest market research tools. They tell us when what and how people are searching for your brand and category. We believe that the marketing intelligence of search (ie: all this search data) is so powerful that its insights can and should be used across all of a brand's marketing - both online and offline and from media to creative. These are the strategic insights that we offer to our clients Google's newly released 'Insights for Search' tool is definitely going to help in our search-inspired communications quest.

Google's Insights for Search tool - What is it?

Google Insights for Search is an advance on Google Trends and I think it's great. The tool uncovers search volume trends over time, regional interest, and the top related and rising searches.  Specifically designed with you in mind, Google Insights for Search provides comparison functionality between search terms, across specific regions, categories, and time frames.

Give it a go here.

Not quite.......

The Google 'special sauce' will always be a secret but in an effort to become more transparent with how they customise search results for the likes of you and me, Rachel, a Google Product Manager posted this on the Google blog yesterday:

"As we continue to refine our search algorithms to deliver more relevant results, we strive to be as open as possible about how we use data to improve your search experience. Today, we're rolling out a new feature in Google Web Search that will help you better understand how your search results are already customized. Over the next few days, you may start to see messages like this in the upper right corner of your search results page (click on the image to view larger):

You can click the "More details" link to get to a page like this:

You'll see these new messages whenever your search results have been customized based on one or more of the following types of information:

• Location. By default, we identify your approximate city location based on your computer's IP address and use it to customize your search results. If you'd like Google to use a different location, you can sign into or create a Google Account and provide a city or street address. Your specific location will be used not only for customizing search results, but also to improve your experience in Google Maps and other Google products.

• Recent searches. We take into account whether a particular query followed on the heels of another query. Because recent search activity provides such valuable context for understanding the meaning behind your searches, we use it to customize your results whenever possible, regardless of whether you're signed in or signed out. In order to customize your results and show you the customization details, we keep the most recent query on your browser for a limited time. After that, the information is removed from your browser and disappears immediately if you close your browser.

• Web History. If you're signed in and have Web History enabled, we customize your search results based on what you've searched for in the past on Google, and what web sites you've visited. One important note about Web History: it belongs to you and you have complete control over it. You can remove specific items or pause the service at any time. And if there's a particular search that you'd rather not have personalized based on your Web History, you can also just temporarily sign out of your Google Account.

This new feature doesn't change anything at all about how you search on Google and the results you get; it just gives you more of a behind-the-scenes look at how we customize your search experience. We consider this to be an important step in our commitment to transparency, and we hope you find it informative and useful."

Posted by Rachel Garb, Product Manager

Source: BBC News - Google 'UK's top consumer brand'

 The risk here for Google, of course is their UK market share, perceived dominance and privacy concerns will (especially given wider UK privacy and security concerns) be used against them.

Thank you Google! We asked and you have delivered. Google is now including search volume data in their keyword estimator tool. You can read more about it here on the Google blog. Thanks to Barry at Search Engine Land for the finding.

This is great news. At Steak we firmly believe in the marketing intelligence of search. It's powerful. People, through the search engines, are telling us what and how they search. Search engines are in essence the world's largest marketing research tools. Steak believes that the information we glean from the search data should be used across all marketing - both online and offline and from media to creative. And Google's new feature is another step in helping us make sure that the search data we are use and the subsequent strategic recommendations we make to our clients are rooted in an even greater degree of accuracy. Thank you Google!

• Enter a domain name to trigger results (or multiple sites up to 5)
• Not all sites will return results: expect more data in future
• Results also show "Also Searched for..." keyword results - useful for keyword research (a bit - capped at 10 results)
• "Also Visited" results show 10 sites - might be useful for identifying link partners or potential ad placements

For an example of sites compared, here's the 6 main UK TV broadcaster sites for UK traffic over the last 12 months and here's the Democratic and Republican nominess websites compared.

Update: here's the official blog post. 

Google Trends with volumes. Whoop Whoop! Sadly, this gets me excited on a Wednesday morning. It can also provide CSV exports. Whoop again!

I might have to revisit my US election and Euro 2008 posts, and apply this data...

Google have blogged it here. Hat tip to SearchEngineLand for the first mention.

An example for Barack Obama:

Note from the Google blog:

"You'll notice a number at the top of the graph as well as on the y-axis of the graph itself. These numbers don't refer to exact search-volume figures. Instead, in the same way that a map might “scale” to a certain size, Google Trends scales the first term you've entered so that its average search volume is 1.00 in the chosen time period. So in the example above, 1.00 is the average search volume of vanilla ice cream from 2004 to present. We can then see a spike in mid-2006 which crosses the 3.00 line, indicating that search traffic is approximately 3 times the average for all years."

Ok, that's useful to know but doesn't get a whoop.