Chinese search giant Baidu has long been criticized by China Central Television and its rival Google for its so-called “Baidu Bidding Ranking program.” Reports also say that some competitors of Baidu have even filed a lawsuit in the local court to get a justified answer.

To this issue, Baidu had to say that it has closed all the bidding rank campaign due to some quarrel generating keywords. It has also strengthened its governing policies regarding Bidding Ranking program. Now, more remedial measures are expected to be carried out in order to regain Baidu’s high public recognition.

Recently, a team in Germany has launched front-end Keyboardr exclusively for the search engines on Google, Wikipedia and YouTube. Keyboardr will display and execute the searches that users type. This is a better interface as compared to traditional type-wait-retype techniques used by most of the search engines.

Moreover, this technique will also navigate the search results with the keyboard which will provide a speedy search option to users.

For the year 2008, Yahoo! and Ask.com came out with the Top Ten Searches. Yahoo and Ask.com, both released the hottest searches for the year as per their search engines. At Yahoo! entertainment dominated the chart, while Ask.com’s top ten list seems little insignificant.

Below is the top ten list of Yahoo!:

1. Britney Spears
2. WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment)
3. Barack Obama

Of late, Google Analytics blog has lauched a new forum within Google help. This forum would help you in handling Google analytics related difficulties or queries. From now, this more than ever, as you are not only likely to get advice from Google Analytics employees, but also you will be provided with various suggestions from Google analytics users.

Google Analytics team believes that the open forum will be a great help for users in resolving their problems in a timelier manner. Moreover, the users can also vote for the best answers that they think will be helpful for other finders who can opt for the answers just by considering its rank. When the users will create a new thread, series of related questions will also appear on the page.

In a spirit for the makeover of the navigation bars, recently, Google has updated its Google Maps navigation interface.

Here are a few changes to the tool:

• The zoom bar has been redesigned.
• Now, the Street View can be accessed by clicking the person icon that is located above the zoom slider.

If reports from Liveside.net are to be believed, then it has been noticed that Microsoft is having the ownership of a new domain name kumo.com!

The reports are even pointing towards an internal Microsoft test site as well. Can it be seen as an option that Microsoft’s Live Search is going to have a new name?

In a post that was written by Mary Jo Foley, a firm discussion has been done on Microsoft’s plan of rebranding Live Search.

Recently, an article by Skip Chilcott, Sr. Product Manager of Microsoft has amazed many SEOs, as he openly asked the entire webmasters to participate in Link Exchange program. This is because, Link Exchange program is likely to result in providing a boost to their ranks in search engines. However, Chilcott’s statement contradicts with

Google’s Webmaster and Microsoft’s guidelines

Here is what Google has to say regarding participation in the link schemes:
“…there are some webmasters who get involved in link exchange programs and other build partner pages just for the purpose of cross linking and disregarding the quality of links. This leaves a long term impact on their sites. But the strategy totally violate the set guidelines of Google Webmaster and can also have negative affect on search engine ranking results..”

Google Search’s ‘Spell Checker’, the handy feature might have helped you many times to get over searches with ‘typo’ errors. This is the feature that helps us everytime when some spelling errors occur in our typing, with its suggestion like, “Did you mean ‘relevant word’?”

Obviously, the feature has put a dent in the revenue of all those SEOs who had been making money on people who make some common spelling errors while Googling, however, it was really a help for most common people who made use of the feature to suggest correct and relevant terms.

Finally Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang officially announced his retirement from the position that he had assumed about 18 months ago. It was not an unexpected move, still it came as a shock to many of us.

The official press release begins as follows:

“Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO) today announced that its Board of Directors has initiated a search for a new Chief Executive Officer. Jerry Yang, co-Founder of Yahoo!, has decided to return to his former role as Chief Yahoo! upon the appointment of his successor as CEO, and he will also continue to serve on the Board. Yang, 40, assumed the CEO role at the Board’s request in June 2007, and he has led Yahoo! through a strategic repositioning and transformation of its platform. Chairman Roy Bostock, working with the independent directors and in consultation with Jerry Yang, is leading the process of assessing potential candidates and determining finalists for consideration. The search will encompass both internal and external candidates, and the Board has retained Heidrick & Struggles, a leading international executive search firm, to assist in the process.”

Of late, Google’s web stats tool, Google Analytics is making certain changes. Recently, Google Analytics came up with an entirely new intro page with some aspects that enable users to identify whether the traffic for a certain website has increased or not.

According to Google Blogoscoped,

Google’s Google web stats tool Analytics is rolling out a new intro page. On the upside, you can now directly see if the traffic to a certain site increased in the last specific time period. A red arrow pointing down means your site’s losing visitors, a green arrow pointing upwards means it is getting more. This should be great for spotting sudden peaks, especially on sites which you’re not watching as closely everyday; and sometimes, such peaks may require you to take action.