In light of the holidays and the close of another year, I thought it might be nice to take a break from my more serious posts and do something a little fun.  I took a look at the four main engines and started to think about what my favorite things are about them; their interfaces, their mail systems, products they’ve launched, and so on.  Some of my favorite things are Search related, and some have nothing to do with Search at all.  I’ve limited my list to two things per engine.  Let’s jump right in!

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Google Sitelinks have recently launched in Beta for Paid Search ads.  These operate in basically the same way as Organic Sitelinks do, however, one must set them at a Campaign level versus. them automatically getting picked up by engine spiders. 

Thus far, most accounts chosen for the Beta have been enabling the links for their branded Campaigns.  Branded keywords will most likely trigger the Sitelinks versus non-branded.

An advertiser can log into their AdWords account, choose a Campaign, go to the Campaign Settings tab and post up to 10 Sitelinks.  Once the links are named and assigned landing pages, they may show along with your Paid Search ad in Google’s results.

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The Brief

Google Local Listing Ads have been launched in Beta for the San Francisco and San Diego areas.  These are not to be confused with Location Extension Ads, formerly known as Google Local Business Ads (LBAs).

Previously, Local Business Ads were managed through the Local Business Center Interface.  Now that LBAs have been converted to Location Extension Ads, they are managed through the AdWords interface.  For more information on Location Extension Ads, click here.

The new product, Local Listing Ads (LLAs), is in Beta, will be managed through the Local Business Center interface, is free only for the first 30 days, and the listings will be shown in Google.com search results as well as Google Map results.  You can view a short LLA tutorial on YouTube here. 

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A couple weeks ago, two giant sized posters on easel-like stands showed up in our St. Louis office.  I was really busy at the time and didn’t have the brain capacity to decipher what was on them, what they meant to me, and if I really needed to even care in the first place.  Hell, they could have said the building was on fire and I wouldn’t have noticed.   I wouldn’t say I’m any less busy today, however since there is one literally beside the desk next to me, I figured maybe I should slow my roll a bit and take a look.

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In November of last year, I wrote a post about the changes coming to Microsoft’s search engine. In this post I highlighted some of the plans for upgrades and the new branding push of 2009. Now that we have seen these upgrades and the launch of Bing.com, I thought it’d be a great time to revisit Microsoft.

So, Bing is finally here. I won’t go into all the details of Bing.com, but if you’d like to read more on the GroupM Search POV, you can find it in this SearchFuel post.

It feels like we’ve anticipated its birth forever. Last Friday marked Bing’s ripe old age of one month. What have we seen in the first month? Well, from my perspective, it’s been mixed. We had a ton of hype at the beginning…and then news changed newer topics as it always does.

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