i-level Search News - August 2007

People search

According to Spock, the online leader in personal search, more than 30% of queries on Google and Yahoo involve users looking up information about other people.

Brand building on social networks

People searching for people is just something we can't get away from these days. And social networking sites are thriving on the desire of people to connect and advertise the number of "friends" they have acquired.

Paid Search results based on user history

And while people can't stop connecting with people, Google has discovered a new way to connect and keep track of people and their search interests as well.

Local search has become an increasingly important component in natural search results. And we all anticipated that it would only be a matter of time before it became a target of "black hat" or unethical SEO work.

Google news, your news?

Google News has started to allow the integration of comments alongside various news stories. The Google News blog - available at http://googleblog.blogspot.com/states that "We'll be trying out a mechanism for publishing comments from a special subset of readers: those people or organizations who were actual participants in the story in question."