Putting it all into context

Albeit not totally a historical day, the World Wide Web has put forth two pretty significant announcements this morning. First was the news coming from Virginia-based company, AOL, and the story that they purchased Bebo for $850 million. That’s awfully nice of them and I think it’ll give AOL a good step into breaking into the social media network…but not as Myspace has done after its purchase by Rupert Murdoch. So what other lucky social network will be the next to be taken over by a multimedia conglomerate like Microsoft, Google, AOL, or Yahoo? Pownce? Seesmic? Twitter? One can only imagine at this point. At the end of the tunnel we’ll probably see two companies owning everything and I predict it’ll probably wind up being Microsoft and Google.

And in other news, TechCrunch guru Michael Arrington announced on his blog that Yahoo has revolutionized the way that they conduct search and I think that it’ll help create better search engine optimization for many websites. I’ve heard a lot of folks ask about how they can go about to make their sites more meaningful for the spiders and search engines that crawl through the vast Internet and pick up on their site for various keywords. Perhaps now this semantic approach will help remedy those situations. There’s a lot of development speak in the article that I’m not totally familiar with, but from what I can gather, it’s Yahoo’s intentions to take a look at a page and compose it in a manner that would appear to be informative to the end user. Those algorithms must be working in overtime to get the expected results. I gotta hand it to those engineers at Yahoo. They do some good work sometimes.

TechCrunch says that we should expect the web to get more organized quickly as a result of Yahoo’s news. I think that would be a good way to put it. I’m not sure if Google is pouncing on this news and undertaking their efforts to help put their search results on a contextual algorithm, but if not, it appears that Yahoo is on its way to a revitalization and would be a really GOOD benefit for companies who want to get their names and brands out there when doing PPC, SEA, or SEO campaigns. Now there’s more meaning!

Imagine your company purchased the keyword “Washington DC Travel”. In Yahoo, theoretically (from my literal interpretation of what I understand), would then pull up all the pages that were related not only to travel, but to Washington, DC. No longer will you have pages for the city council or DC publications, but rather you’ll get links for websites that specialize in specifically Washington DC Travel. Wouldn’t it be just marvelous to get the search results that YOU want instead of having companies jockey for placement just to get their name out there, regardless of whether someone gets the information they desire?

Hurrah for Yahoo…now let’s see it executed…