According to Techcrunch.com and Search Engine Land, Google is acquiring Feedburner for a juicy $100 million.  Pretty funny…we were just recently discussing this within the office as a possibility.  We all agreed it was a logical next step for Google to get its hands into the growing RSS market.  It also lets Google get a head start in the RSS feed advertising market which Feedburner is pushing.

According to Techcrunch:

Feedburner is in the closing stages of being acquired by Google for around $100 million. The deal is all cash and mostly upfront, according to our source, although the founders will be locked in for a couple of years.

Congrats to the Feedburner team.  The people I’ve met there are good guys and I wish them the best in the acquisition.

Just finished reading some speculation and rumors floating around at Mashable.com and Telegraph.co.uk regarding a possible takeover of social networking site Bebo.com by Yahoo!.  It’s not coming cheap either.  Yahoo is reported to be in discussing a $1 billion acquisition.  Telegraph.co.uk reports that Bebo has an estimated 25 million users worldwide, compared with MySpace.com’s 100 million users.  Yahoo! has attempted to buy its way into the social networking scene before when they offered a large amount of money for Facebook.com, only to have their offer rejected.

Why would you care?  What would Yahoo! want Bebo? Mashable suggests:

Why would Yahoo buy Bebo? Possibly because without MySpace, Facebook or YouTube, they don’t have a major stake in the social networking realm. Flickr is fairly big, and they have lots of smaller social sites, but nothing generic that lets them integrate all their other services.

The big three, Yahoo! / MSN / Google, are all about expanding their empire as far as possible.  Increasing their piece of the search market (multi-million dollar ad campaigns).  Buying advertising and marketing firms (DoubleClick and aQuantive being purchased for billion dollar figures).  Acquiring social networking sites where users congregate (Youtube purchased for $1.65 billion).  I’m surprised it wasn’t MSN or Yahooo that bought Myspace.  I wonder if MSN will come in with the big dollars to buy Facebook?

Lee has a screenshot, click the thumbnail to your right, of a new Google SERP layout which includes a different designated spot for the “related searches” and also includes links to category refinements.

I think it looks decent, and its about time they made some improvements to their SERPs.  That said, I can’t imagine this one will stick due to the fact it pushes the Adwords ads in the right column down removing at least one ad from above the fold.  Would you be pleased if it was yours that got knocked out?

Lee also points to some other SERP layouts that have been found.

It’s Mother’s Day tomorrow, so being the nice man that I am, and the horrible procrastinator, I just now sent my mother some flowers using FTD.com.  Kudos to them for allowing me to order one day before and arrange for the flowers to be there tomorrow!

The order process was standard, but on the confirmation page I noticed something odd.   At the bottom of the page directly next to the “Continue Shopping” button was a “Google Site Stats - Send Feedback” link.   Click on the thumbnail to the right to see this in full view.

To me this is a horrible placement of an unnecessary link.  First of all, I’m astonished that the link even appears on the page, but if it has to be there for conversion analysis, why not place it in a more inconspicuous place like below the footer?  Or even below their tag line so it isn’t so close to the desired action item “Continue Shopping”?

While discussing a vertical search idea with someone, I couldn’t resist thinking about how the idea may be doomed to second-tier success. Before it even began.

No one will topple Google in the search space for the same reason that no one will topple Microsoft in the personal computing space. There was a time when they didn’t have a strangle hold on the market. A time when a competitor had a chance to take a significant slice of the pie. That time has come and gone. Even a company with the money and resources like Microsoft and Yahoo can’t compete with Google in its current state. They own the market and everyone else is playing catch up.

How do you compete with a company when their service has become so popular it is a verb? People don’t search, they google. How do you compete with a company when users don’t even choose their service, they just associate it with the task on a subconscious  level? I find myself doing this. I want to search for something but I don’t think about what site to go to. I don’t even consider going to Yahoo, MSN, or Ask. I just go to Google and start searching.

Is Google’s search engine superior to that of Ask, Yahoo, or MSN? Maybe MSN. But Yahoo and Ask have results that are quite similar. In some cases Google’s results are even spammier due to every spammer in the world aspiring to be number one in the Big G.

They don’t offer features that Yahoo doesn’t. They don’t have key partnerships that Yahoo doesn’t. Yet Yahoo, and all other search engines, are stuck on catch-up mode.

This is partly why I was initially excited to hear about the possibility of a Yahoo / MSN merger. If they can’t compete with Google on their own, would they have a better chance of competing if they combined resources and market share? I know there are many who are skeptical and I also have my doubts. Especially since I also recently went through a merger and I’ve seen first hand the issues and problems that can arise when two companies are thrown into the ring and asked to work together. That said, wouldn’t working against a common enemy unite them? I don’t know….but someone needs to step up and give them a run for their money.