This week Yahoo unveiled a new feature. It doesn't really change the search game that much in terms of competitive functionality. If anything, it's another case of Yahoo catching up with the competition. But it may have dramatic implications from a user's point of view. To illustrate that point further I'd like to share a couple of stories with you.

After back-to-back trips into the heady searchosphere to explore Ambient Findability and MyLifeBits, I've decided to come back to reality and take stock of the current landscape. One of the topics that still seems to have people buzzing is universal search. Fellow Search Insider, Gord Hotchkiss, wrote a few columns recently about how personalized universal results are changing the way people interact with search engine results pages (SERPs).

Video search optimization and advertising worlds have collided, and the big bangs bursting forth will shape the video marketing landscape for years to come.

In what's become something of a quarterly ritual, Google and Microsoft are now dueling to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. The fight this time is over Facebook, for which Microsoft is reportedly looking to pay up to $500 million for a 5% stake -- and over which pundits are on the lookout for a Google countermove. Let the games commence. But whether Facebook ultimately migrates towards Google, Microsoft, or neither, it's still worth evaluating which of the two competitors could go furthest with the social network.

Whenever I find myself speaking on day 4 of a Search Engine Strategies conference, I enjoy pointing out that attendees who have lasted that long are now qualified to start their own search marketing practice. I say that partially in jest, but also because the only way you fill four days is to get so far into the weeds that you can't help but spend most of your time learning the nuances of every angle of search.

This week (actually, right about the time you'll be reading this column) I'll be talking to the American Business Media Publisher's Summit in Chicago about online opportunities, from a user's perspective. As I was getting ready for the address, I realized there's a substantial piece of the B to B market that's missing online. I call it a market enabler.

Whether you are trying to justify natural search during a site redesign or domain move, or even pitching to open up your paid content to the crawlers for free, here are five ways that natural search provides value, and can help you appeal to various people in your organization who have an impact on natural search performance.

Everyone wants to be social these days. Given the hype around social networks and social bookmarking, it's little wonder that search wants to be social too. The problem is that when you refer to "social search," the odds are that whoever you're talking to will have a very different idea of social search than you do.

Two Fridays ago, Yahoo acquired news aggregator / blog search platform BuzzTracker for $5 million Yahoo also made Alan Warm, CEO of BuzzTracker's parent company Participate Media, the new general manager of Yahoo News. Yahoo is also hiring the entire Participate workforce. The message in all of this is simple. Yahoo is finally getting comfortable in its own skin

In the ever-evolving world of search engine marketing, staying idle can be deadly. The ongoing cycle of updating and re-launching is something that all the engines seem to accept as the price of doing business and that search marketers, who must respond to all these updates, know all too well as their daily routine.