Random Tidbits...

Google IPO
May occur as soon at Tuesday.

New Search Engine in China
China's Sohu.com unleashes sogou.com which means "search dog"

Search.com Launches new Features
Thumbnail screenshots, custom colors, specialty searches, & customizable category searches - more info

Thumbs Down SEMPO
They are still failing to address Mike Grehan's questions despite many opportunities too. Perhaps there could be something better. Maybe there could be an organization with the same mission statement that SEMPO has which ACTUALLY AIMS TO DO WHAT THERE MISSION STATEMENT IS.

Many people have called SEMPO a marketing scam. SEMPO blatently ignores feedback and has no clue about how to pull their own name out of the mud. Not defending yourself when dozens of your peers question your intent with hundreds of forum post is an admission of guilt in my book.

I see absolutely no value in joining or supporting the SEMPO organization.

Yahoo! Renting Links?
Yahoo! has been renting links from the Internet.com network. Generally most people view the Internet.Commerce partner links as links from PageRank more than ads (since those links are rarely relevant to the page content and rarely get clicked on).

Some people think it is a big deal that they are perhaps buying links for PageRank, but I think the bigger problem at hand is that they also edit their own search results. It becomes a sticky situation if they edit their results and rent links which manipulate them.

When I glanced the links into this page were using "cellular phones" as the link text and yet Yahoo! is using "cell phones" in the page title. Somebody needs to teach them SEO...

[update] if you look at sites like gas buddy you will see that they totally are buying links to manipulate search results...almost pro style. keyword rich anchor text, keyword rich file names, keywords in the page copy, etd. [/update]

In Other News Down Under
Sensis has new competition? Yahoo! says no, but for some reason Yahoo! just created an Australian local search directory and put a new snazzy local search tab on the au.Yahoo.com home page.