By: Loren Baker | Source: searchenginejournal.com

Google has canned its Google Answers program, which was the first major search operated question & answer service. Simply enough, Googlers would rather use the Google search engine to find answers to their questions, or turn to social question & answer services which are thriving due to their active member base.

Enter Yahoo Answers. In about a year, Yahoo has taken the initial idea put together by Google, and enhanced it into its current social media driven community of niche experts. And with Google dumping its Google Answers offering, Yahoo could not be happier.

Yahoo sent over these stats on its Yahoo Answers success:

* Worldwide numbers for Yahoo! Answers and Knowledge Search (18 countries and 8 languages): Yahoo! Answers has 60 million unique users worldwide and 160 million answers.

* US/English-speaking countries numbers for Yahoo! Answers: Yahoo! Answers has 14.4 million unique users (comScore October) and 60 million answers.

And now, Yahoo has also put out a public calling for those who were using Google Answers and are looking for a new Q&A community to call home.

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By: john chow | Source: johnchow.com

Almost everyone knows Google owns the AdSense network. Google AdSense has been credited with bringing the Internet back to life after the dot com burst of 2001. Some people may even know about AdSense for domain. This is Google’s network for handling advertising for large domain name holders. Recently, Google started a new ad network but is not telling anyone about it – the Google Display Advertising Network.

Google has created a ’secret’ Google Display Advertising Network to attract Fortune 1000 companies into the Google advertising realm. Google’s Display Advertising Network is exclusive and invitation only, and based upon high CPM (cost per thousand impressions) rates and not cost per click, like Google AdWords or the current AdSense network.

The Google Display Advertising Network was created so Google can go after Fortune 1000 companies, which buy advertising to build a brand more than to sell a product. Google already dominates text and CPC ads so going after display and video ads is the next logical step. Google offers display and video ads to AdSense publishers on CPC and CPM format already. However, the formation of the Display Advertising Network is a clear signal that Google really want to push this forward.

How do you join the Google Display Advertising Network? You can’t. Google won’t even acknowledge it exists. You won’t find anything written about it in any of Google’s web properties. The only way to get into the display network is if Google invites you, which is how I found out about it.

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Source: blogs.msdn.com

There are plenty of bots out there and, as a result, some conventions have arisen.Well-behaved bots identify themselves with a unique user-agent.  They also follow the robots.txt conventions, which allow webmasters to control how their sites are crawled.

Here at Live Search, our crawlers are identified by the user-agent ‘MSNBot’.  This may seem a little non-intuitive, but many webmasters depend on this, and so we chosen not to change it.  In order to make things a little more transparent, we also identify our different types of crawlers.The complete list is as follows:

MSNBot : Main web crawler (www.live.com)

MSNBot-Media : Images & all other media (images.live.com)

MSNBot-NewsBlogs : News and blogs (search.live.com/news)

MSNBot-Products : Products & shopping (products.live.com)

MSNBot-Academic : Academic search (academic.live.com)

But what about crawlers that aren’t so well-behaved?After all, anyone could call themselves ‘MSNBot’, and proceed to be as rude and aggressive as they like. Fortunately, there is a way you can catch these impersonators. Here is how it works:

1. When you get a page view request, it specifies a user-agent and an IP address.As I described above, all requests from Live Search use a user agent starting with the word ‘MSNBot’.

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