After Bing announced it had made a deal with Twitter that it would be able to index the Twitter database Google almost immediately replied: they too have made a deal with Twitter.

At the same conference and on the Google blog Marissa Mayer announced the deal, stressing that the new type of information Twitter is giving us is important for the web.... read more

We knew already that bith Bing and Google were in talks with Twitter about a deal which would allow them to index the Twitter database. At the Web 2.0 Summit today in San Francisco Bing announced it has struck that deal with Twitter.

Bing now has access to the entire public Twitter feed and has a beta Twitter search engine. Unfortunately this search engine is only available in the US for now. According to Searchengineland the service will feature a tag cloud to highlight popular search topics and it will be using bit.ly urls.... read more

To get the real fame you first have to die. That is what used to be said about painters in the 17th century. They would get 'famous' only after they were gone. If you look at search engines, the same thing goes for the artists these days. After a death of a famous person, they tend to dominate the search engines.

We saw this happening with Michael Jackson several months ago and numbers from Hitwise now show the same is happening in the UK with the death of Boyzone singer Stephen Gately. And if you want a piece of the action, you mock the dead.... read more

Last year SMX London closed one track just before the conference started. It was the most basic track which was canceled, making SMX a bit more advanced than other years. This year SMX London takes the full step towards Advanced.

There now will be two SMX-advanced shows worldwide. One in Seatlle, which will be held June 8th and 9th, and one in London, which will be helad May 17th and 18th.... read more

Is behavioral targeting really the holy grail? Some people believe it is. With behavioral targeting everybody seems to be getting just what they want: advertisers get targeted audiences, while the consumers only get ads served they really are interested in. Everybody wins. Or maybe not?

The Office of Fair Trading (OFT), the UK regulator, this week announced it will be doing two market studies "which are aimed at clarifying and updating the understanding of consumer harm that arises from potentially misleading advertising and pricing." One of the two studies focusses on behavioral targeting, the other one on online pricing practices.... read more