According to the latest search market share figures released by Compete, the MSN/Live search engine increased its market share by 67% from May to June 2007, putting Microsoft’s share of search at 13.2% behind Yahoo at 19.6% and Google on 62.7%. Over the year, Microsoft’s search traffic is up 47%.

In this context, safety meaning not sending you to web sites that can infect your computer, harvest your email for spammers, or do other unsavory things.

According to a study by McAfee Site Advisor, most leading search engines are similar in the safety of the sites they link to, though AOL replaces MSN as the safest engine and Yahoo! replaces Ask as the engine with the most risky results. Across search engines, they found sponsored results significantly less safe than search engines’ organic results. [Emphasis added}

Unsavory e-mail conduct is the dominant security risk although search engine users are also heavily exposed to risky downloads, browser exploits, and scams.

Yahoo has filed a new patent with the name “Link based spam detection”. It’s another attempt from Yahoo to improve the relevancy of their search results by detecting links from link farms and other shady link sources so they can discount them. Links from such sites don’t count for your site’s link popularity if the search engines can identify them.

Yahoo uses PageRank and TrustRank to rank your web site, which is amusing because both terms are trademarks of Google.

How Yahoo tries to identify spam sites by using PageRank and TrustRank

In the patent application, Yahoo explains how they want to find spam farms  with the help of PageRank and TrustRank:

“A spam farm is an artificially created set of pages that point to a spam target page to boost its significance. Trust-ranking (“TrustRank”) is a form of PageRank with a special teleportation (i.e., jumps) to a subset of high-quality pages.

Using techniques described herein, a search engine can automatically find bad pages (web spam pages) and more specifically, find those web spam pages created to boost their significance through the creation of artificial spam farms (collections of referencing pages).

In specific embodiments, a PageRank process with uniform teleportation and a trust-ranking process are carried out and their results are compared as part of a test of the “spam-ness” of a page or a collection of pages.”

What does this mean to your web site?

Search engine engineers are not stupid. And search engine algorithms are evolving faster than ever. For that reason, it’s increasingly important that you don’t use “quick fix” solutions to get links to your web site.

If a service promises hundreds of links to your web site quickly and easily, then chances are these links are from a link farm. Search engines don’t like link farms and it’s been reported that some web sites even get penalized by participating in a link farm system.

Focus on organic link building and get high quality links that are beneficial to you and your web site visitors. If you use high quality links then you don’t have to be afraid of link-spam filters. With these links, search engines will see your web site as a useful resource and that will result in high rankings for your site.

It’s no surprise that one of the major search engines has ended the practice of selling trademarked brand keywords to competitors. But it is a surprise that the motivation comes not from legal setbacks but from business pressures, according to iMedia Connection.

“A few months back, Yahoo said that its search engine index had topped 20 billion items. 20 billion! To put that in perspective, 20 billion seconds ago, Columbus had yet to make his controversial journey. [...] I know it’s trite to say, but we are surrounded by a cacophony of media. [...] This cacophony is why search marketing is so successful.” <more …>

Google pulled away from Yahoo in search engine usage during November in a major way, according to comScore Networks Inc. Google nabbed almost 40 percent of all searches in the U.S., a commanding lead of more than 10 percentage points over Yahoo, which took second place.

ITWorld.com reports these figures:

• Google 39.8%, up from 34.6%
• Yahoo down to 29.5% from 32%
• MSN dropped to 14.2% from 16%
• All three add up to 83.5% of all searches

Mindset is new twist on search from Yahoo! that uses machine learning technology to give you a choice. You can view search results sorted according to whether they are more commercial or more informational (i.e., from academic, non-commercial, or research-oriented sources).

Sometimes you want to buy stuff and sometimes you just want to do research. In a typical search page, results point to commercial pages that are mixed together with non-commercial pages, so it’s harder to find the type of information you’re looking for. Mindset is our attempt to help solve that problem.

Yahoo!, which owns Overture dropped its Overture Services brand on Monday and renamed the unit Yahoo Search Marketing. The replacement of the Overture brand will take place in the U.S. market initially and other international markets will be re-branded later. Apparently Overture brand will remain active in Japan and Korea only.

There’s a pretty neat new search tool out there that compares results for a given keyword in Yahoo and Google, both at the same time. It’s fun to play with once in awhile, and can be surprisingly informative. Check it out at YaGoohoogle.com. [Oops! Sorry, but as of August 1, 2005, this domain seems to be inactive.]

UPDATE ::: As of July 1, Yagoohoogle seems to be closed. A similar service is now provided at Twingine.