In a recent survey about holiday shopping , 64% of the people said they'll be spending less on everyone this holiday season, so that means marketers will have to work a little harder to make sure it's their company that gets the cash and not their competitor. The trick is paying attention to how and why people are spending and customizing your marketing efforts to match. eMarketer has a nifty new report called,

No, not like that, but in the good way! :D The following is a guest post by Jim Kukral highlighting one of the most fundamental tips to succeeding online. Have you ever really taken a step back from all the technical SEO stuff and thought about why Google wins? The real reasons why they have mass-market share and why they continue to dominate? It's time you should, because once you understand how to start thinking like Google,

A little over a month ago, we reported this story " Facebook In Early Stage Search Engine Tests? " and detailed some of the changes we were noticing. Well, today, based on another tip from bloggers at All Facebook , we can confirm that Facebook is indeed displaying 'liked' news content in it's search result drop down. In fact, further to what All Facebook reported, they are also displaying content shared by your network of friends that matches the keywords you are sharing.

AllFacebook has discovered that Facebook is now testing showing all liked news articles in its search results. This would obviously be a significant move as the company competes with Google. Nick O'Neill writes: Additionally, the results for searches now shows the results from all around the web based on two things: the number of likes and the number of friends who liked that object, most likely leveraging some of the technology shown in their recently approved patent.

Back in June, 2010, we published a blog post titled Bing crawler: bingbot on the horizon that announced our plans to retire our venerable web crawler, MSNBot, and replace it with the new. Our plans remain on track, and we want to remind you that this change will occur on October 1 st , 2010. We also want to take this opportunity to help set some expectations for this process, to discuss the name change details,

Filed under: Search Tips We rely on web search to help us find all kinds of information from product specs to local news to book reviews (and even long-lost friends from high school). But finding the information you're looking for depends on your ability to ask the search engine for the information; in other words, your web search results can only be as good as the query you build to find them. In this lesson, we'll look at building queries from the ground up.

Apple's Ping social network, which the company launched as part of the new iTunes 10, has drawn a big mix of excitement and criticism. While most seem to agree that the concept beind Ping is a pretty good idea (social network-meets-music-buying) it's not exactly the seamless experience one might hope for. Let's take a look at some points made around the Blogosphere. Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch says , "The biggest problem I have with Ping is that it lives in iTunes.

by Mike Fleming If you manage a PPC account, you know that for several years now AdWords has had three match types: exact, phrase, and broad. You also know what they mean and how your keywords are matched to search queries. Up until a couple of years ago, broad match meant that the keywords in your phrase were matched to queries that had all of your words in any order . Then,

Besides hinting at new features and talking about user stats, Twitter also made a couple announcements this week. One is that all Twitter apps use OAuth . The other is that it will start tracking every t.co link users click. This is Twitter's own default URL-shortener. Twitter sent an email to users saying, "In the coming weeks, we will be expanding the roll-out of our link wrapping service t.co, which wraps links in Tweets with a new, simplified link... When this happens,

by Claudine Zap Here's some advice for any rock star wannabes. Show up to your shows on time. Axl Rose and his Guns N' Roses band made the mistake of arriving an hour late at their latest gig in Ireland. They were greeted by flying water bottles and boos . And these are fans. Rose told the crowd to shape up or they would take off. The crowd didn't, so the band did.