http://news.com.com/2100-1032_3-5087489.html

Thought some of you's maybe interested in this.
This will effectively drop Looksmart out of any serious position in the search engine market.
:D
I'm personally going to be looking forward to the challenge of learning about MSNBot's algorithm after this happens.
MSN currently rates at #3 behind Google and Yahoo in the search engine biz when delivering search engine traffic to my/clients websites.
More competition for Google in free serp results = good.
expect Yahoo transition soon to after this announcement! *me thinks*!
:)

yahoo is already mixing ink results in with google's, it's not going to be such a 'one man' show pretty soon, which will make it fun.

i don't currently see on yahoo, inktomi results.. this would be news to me what did you search for?

the next big announcement i think will be yahoo implementing results from the 3 companies they purchased - ink/altavista/alltheweb and they could possibly drop google altogether or drop google results to the back of the pack.

it's just going to be interesting to see how yahoo will implement things =]

at the end of the day, the 3 major players in free serp will be google, yahoo and msn.

they will all try and divide things to be like:

google/adwords/dmoz
yahoo(free results ink, altavista, alltheweb)/yahoo directory/overture(ppc)/ maybe google?
msn(free results msnbot) /

msn will be in the market for a directory and ppc alternative / wont be suprised if they buyout looksmart/zeal.. now. But you never know!

heh

so shall be good when things all fall in to place :)

p.s if i just confused alot of you's im sorry!

it's on and off, i've seen inks results mixed in for a few keywords i track but at the moment it is back to google.
Have you noticed the titles being slowly replaced by yahoo's directory titles!!
They seem to be moving things around their datacentres, try doing a search on yahoo.ca see what the results are liek there.
Just seen looksmart has dropped 55% in after hours trading!!!

It's definetly gonna make things quite exciting :)


/edit

ps for those of you with looksmart, keep an eye on your recurring debits with them!! this looks like the end for them!!

Heck, our site is old enough it shows up in most engines now... it's just a matter of getting the new one online and optimising a bit. :) (read: a lot)

I've given up worrying about SE's these days. They seem to change quicker than the weather.

We canceled our looksmart account this morning. They weren't sending any true quality traffic anyway (not after they "optimized" my description). This was the final straw as far as I was concerned.

Guess time we cancel our Looksmart account too. I got zero leverage out of the money we spent on them monthly.