Live Search has just announced a new opportunity for online merchandisers to list their products within Live Product Search results. Until now, it’s only been by invitation - looks like the service is now FREE!

This new option gives Internet retailers a source for free, highly relevant traffic; and all the steps necessary for your products to appear on Live Product Search are short and simple. During the sign up process you should

- create an account

- set up a catalog

- upload the catalog to Live Product Search

But don’t forget to apply for registration first!

Live Search also encourages its adCenter customers to participate in the program. The first 200 adCenter advertisers have already received an invitation e-mail.

This is one of the best overviews and guides to help explain the current Search engine marketing marketplace. The newly released Ad Age “Search Engine Fact Pack” contains over 50 pages of valuable insights about search-engine marketing.

This includes data points on specific engines, keywords, referring sites and numerous case studies.

All of us in the SEM world know it’s value and ability in connecting potential buyers to sellers, but until recently, it has lived a low-profile life in the online media and advertising world.

You can download the Search Marketing Fact Pack - 2006 PDF here for free.

John Chow examines the dominance of the Google search engine in his own sites and marketing efforts. He even quotes Nelson/NetRatings, which says “Google owns 50% of all searches”, but as you can read yourselves, on Johns’ site Google accounts for less more than 80% of all search traffic. Is Nelson/NetRating full of it, or does our sites just don’t attract other search engines?

This Google dominance extends to my other sites as well. Every other webmasters I have talked to tells me that their biggest search referrer is Google, and by a wide margin.

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Microsoft corp. is about to launch its updated search engine Windows Live. Available previously in test form Microsoft’s new search engine comes out of beta today.

What changes will it have compared to MSN? According to Microsoft’s Live Search corporate vice president Christopher Payne among the enhancements implemented are improved ways to refine a search query and improved image search and image view.

Well, it goes without saying that to win the market share and become a leader of the branch Microsoft will have to implement much more enhancements and get much better users loyalty but the company’s got a good start!

Good news both for publishers and those who want to expand their ads exposure. MSN has begun inviting customers to beta version of Microsoft Content Ads. Actually the invitation emails has already been sent to selected advertisers.

According to Microsoft representative the ads distribution is not limited to only MSN.com and will also spread to many other sites.

Content Ads is Microsoft’s next product that allows advertisers to place content-targeted, text-based advertisements primarily on Microsoft-owned properties including MSN Money, Real Estate, and many others within the www.msn.com portal.

Content ads will be as flexible as search ads utilizing geo- and demographic targeting, bidding tools and other conveniences.

So now advertisers and publishers can expect on a new big player on the contextual advertisinf scene and begin to use the pilot version of Microsoft Content Ads before it actually launches officially.

When we think of optimizing a website, most of us consider 3 major players - Google, Yahoo and MSN. Basically, if you can safely rank on the first page for those three engines you have 99% of the Internet search consumers covered. A recent Fortune Interactive research paper compared the differences in how some of the algorithms analyze website characteristics. The researchers chose inbound link quality simply because it could be equally compared across all three algorithms definitively.

“It turns out that it’s actually the quality of [inbound links] than the quantity that wins the day,” said Michael Marshall, VP of technology at Fortune Interactive.

At Google, inbound links rank in the following order: quality, relevance, title keyword, anchor keyword, quantity. Further down the list, site factors such as title keyword, anchor keyword, body keyword, content relevance and title content weigh into the equation.

Yahoo places the most importance on inbound link quality. To a lesser degree than Google, it looks at inbound links for relevance, anchor keyword, title keyword and quantity. Further down in organic results priority are general site characteristics like title content, title keyword, anchor keyword, body keyword and content relevance.

Inbound links rank at the top of MSN’s equation as well, but are ordered differently. Inbound links are looked at for quality, anchor keyword, relevance, and title keyword. Inbound link quantity is weighted, but not quite as heavily. The search engine then looks at title keyword, body keyword, anchor keyword, content relevance, and title content.

“We not only know the order of importance but also the degree of relative importance for the on-page and off-page factors in a competitive landscape,” the report stated.

Here at SimpleSEM we see Companies participate in paid search despite rising CPCs and reported increases in click fraud who are spending more of the budgets on search engine optimization (SEO) every Quarter. As CPC prices continually rise, Organic or Natural Search Optimization becomes a higher ROI vehicle for most eCommerce and Search dependent businesses.

The implicit war between search engines for the search share continues and this time Microsoft is making efforts to improve its search algorithms.

According to a new Microsoft study the search results can be improved by 31 percent by implementation of new techniques based on the user behavior data. Such information as how long a user stays on the site, where he clicks and which queries sets can significantly influence the ordering of top search results.

As click fraud and spam increase search results based on users’ behavior are what will help Microsoft eliminate the problem. Here is what a study co-author Microsoft Research representative Eugene Agichtein says about the new algorithms:

By examining click-through and browsing patterns across a large number of users, we are able to learn a great deal about how people interact with search technologies and thereby improve our accuracy dramatically.

The research is published already and proved the efficiency of user behavior-based approach to websites ranking. I wonder how fast will the study be implemented into the algorithm.