Yahoo made a few announcements this week concerning the search transitions for organic and paid results. You can read the details on the Yahoo! Search Marketing Blog, but here are a few general updates:

Regarding Organic Search

“Later this week, we will begin the work of transitioning the back-end technology for Yahoo! Search over to the Bing platform. This is an important step toward our goal of improving the overall relevance of Yahoo! organic search results and attracting a larger audience to Yahoo!”

Regarding Paid Search

“Soon, you’ll be able to access a transition portal from within your Yahoo! Search Marketing account. This portal will walk you through the simple step-by-step process of creating a Microsoft Advertising adCenter account and importing your campaigns, or linking an existing adCenter account that you may already have.”

To follow the transition and other Yahoo! endeavors more closely, including the SearchMonkey Program, check out the Yahoo! Search Blog.

Today, Google officially announced their new search index, Caffeine. Caffeine is a push to keep up with the most relevant, rich content for the user. The new Google index will be searching for regularly updated content, video, images, real-time information, and anything else that can provide a better user experience. Here’s an excerpt from the Google Blog on the difference between the old and new index:

“Our old index had several layers, some of which were refreshed at a faster rate than others; the main layer would update every couple of weeks. To refresh a layer of the old index, we would analyze the entire web, which meant there was a significant delay between when we found a page and made it available to you.

With Caffeine, we analyze the web in small portions and update our search index on a continuous basis, globally. As we find new pages, or new information on existing pages, we can add these straight to the index. That means you can find fresher information than ever before—no matter when or where it was published.”

Google is continually updating their index and algorithm, looking for improved methods. From a search perspective, this simply means – give the user the best experience possible and you’re also serving the engine.

While being known to keep most information private, Google made a surprising move yesterday when they disclosed their AdSense revenue share.  The numbers included revenue for both AdSense for content and AdSense for search. From The Google AdSense Blog:

“AdSense for content publishers, who make up the vast majority of our AdSense publishers, earn a 68% revenue share worldwide. This means we pay 68% of the revenue that we collect from advertisers for AdSense for content ads that appear on your sites. The remaining portion that we keep reflects Google’s costs for our continued investment in AdSense — including the development of new technologies, products and features that help maximize the earnings you generate from these ads. It also reflects the costs we incur in building products and features that enable our AdWords advertisers to serve ads on our AdSense partner sites. Since launching AdSense for content in 2003, this revenue share has never changed.

We pay our AdSense for search partners a 51% revenue share, worldwide, for the search ads that appear through their implementations. As with AdSense for content, the proportion of revenue that we keep reflects our costs, including the significant expense, research and development involved in building and enhancing our core search and AdWords technologies. The AdSense for search revenue share has remained the same since 2005, when we increased it.”

Google did not disclose revenue information for AdSense for mobile, AdSense for feeds, and AdSense for games.  They also note that AdSense for content and search varies per contract with major online publishers.

If you’ve ever felt the need to have your search history better secured, you’re in luck. Google recently announced a secured channel of search that helps protect your search terms and referrer data. Instead of the general (http://www.google.com) site, the secured site includes a SSL encyription (https://www.google.com) Here’s an excerpt from the Google Blog:

“When you search on https://www.google.com, an encrypted connection is created between your browser and Google. This secured channel helps protect your search terms and your search results pages from being intercepted by a third party on your network.”

It’s important to note that Google will store your personal search queries, they just won’t share it with third parties.

The SEO implication associated with this change is that the third parties (perhaps your personal website) will not have accurate referrer data available in analytics.  It will be interesting to monitor whether this new secured search will effect traffic sources profiles and reporting.

We’re crazy about Basecamp over at Visiture, so we couldn’t be more excited to hear that they’ve got a new message and comments editor.  Basecamp announced the upgrade today.

Basecamp is starting out simple by only adding bold, italics, and bullets options to the tool, but we think it’s a great start.  If you’ve got a Basecamp account, head over and check out the improvements.

Old Google logo (top), New Google logo (bottom)

I thought I noticed something a little different on the Google homepage this morning. Well, it turns out my eyes were not fooling me, today Google announced some new updates to their design.

Google’s goal was to add more “personality and playfulness” to their design.  They didn’t stop at the logo, they’ve also updated the search options panel and footer. Read more about the changes on the Official Google Blog.

Here at Visiture we’re not just crazy about SEO and SEM. We also have a love of cool office design. We believe that the tools you surround yourself with in your workspace can lead to more creativity, productivity and ultimately a better product.

We spent some time this afternoon vamping up our office, take a peak for a behind the scenes look at where the internet magic happens.

We let the men do the heavy lifting...

We're slowly getting there...

Back view of one of our new desks. Pretty little thing.

New desks!

Looks like Erin, our office manager, loves her new workspace.

You’ve always heard ‘Watch what you Tweet’, right? Well, hopefully you’ve heeded the warning, because Twitter announced last week that The Library of Congress will begin archiving tweets.  From the Twitter Blog:

“Since Twitter began, billions of tweets have been created. Today, fifty-five million tweets a day are sent to Twitter and that number is climbing sharply. A tiny percentage of accounts are protected but most of these tweets are created with the intent that they will be publicly available. Over the years, tweets have become part of significant global events around the world—from historic elections to devastating disasters.

It is our pleasure to donate access to the entire archive of public Tweets to the Library of Congress for preservation and research. It’s very exciting that tweets are becoming part of history. It should be noted that there are some specifics regarding this arrangement. Only after a six-month delay can the Tweets be used for internal library use, for non-commercial research, public display by the library itself, and preservation.”

If you are a public tweeter, congratulations on making it to The Library of Congress.

Well, it was bound to happen eventually.  Twitter, the micro-blogging social media platform, has finally began monetizing their service.  Announced yesterday, Twitter has begun to incorporate ‘Promoted Tweets’ in user’s search results.  From the Twitter blog:

“Promoted Tweets will be clearly labeled as “promoted” when an advertiser is paying, but in every other respect they will first exist as regular Tweets and will be organically sent to the timelines of those who follow a brand. Promoted Tweets will also retain all the functionality of a regular Tweet including replying, Retweeting, and favoriting. Only one Promoted Tweet will be displayed on the search results page.”

So what does this mean for the general user?  Not too much. For now, Promoted Tweets will only appear in a user’s search result.  Eventually expect to see Promoted Tweets contextually or locally placed personal Twitter feeds.

Last Friday, Google officially announced that site speed has become a factor in their ranking algorithm.  This doesn’t come to a surprise as Matt Cutts has been quoted several times giving indication at just how important site speed will be this year.

While site speed is an important factor in rankings (and retaining users), it’s not something to start panicking about. The Google Webmaster Central Blog explains that site speed will currently only affect less than 1% of search queries.

“While site speed is a new signal, it doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point. We launched this change a few weeks back after rigorous testing. If you haven’t seen much change to your site rankings, then this site speed change possibly did not impact your site.”

For Webmasters in worry, the post also outlines free tools to evaluate your own site speed:

Page Speed, an open source Firefox/Firebug add-on that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions for improvement.
YSlow, a free tool from Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve website speed.
WebPagetest shows a waterfall view of your pages’ load performance plus an optimization checklist.
In Webmaster Tools, Labs > Site Performance shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world as in the chart below. We’ve also blogged about site performance.

Overall, site speed being added as a ranking factor reaffirms Google’s goal to provide the best search experience to all users.