Weekly Rap-up of Search Engine Industry News – 3/26 – 3/30

A summary of search related news items that occurred this week including Citizendium makes plans to build a better Wikipedia, Yahoo! launches Mobile Publisher Services, Yahoo! click fraud settlement receives final approval by federal court, Yahoo! Mail now has unlimited data storage, reputation management tool Serph comes out of beta, and finally, BusineesWeek takes a look on whether Google is becoming too powerful for their own good.

Monday

• Citizendium Sets Out To Build a Better Wikipedia - Larry Sanger who was part of the original team that launched Wikipedia is now behind a new rival, Citizendium, that hopes to improve on Wikipedia and bring accountability to the information listed. he hopes to help accomplish this by making authors and editors more accountable for their work and removing the anonymity that shields many Wikipedia entries. Sanger is also hoping that making contributors confirm their identity will help reduce the incidences of vandalism. Will it become a better Wikipedia? Only time will tell. Citizendium officially launches this week with 900 authors, 200 editors and 1100 articles.

Tuesday

• Yahoo! Launches Mobile Publisher Services - Yahoo! has launched a suite of services designed to enable publishers to increase the discovery, distribution and monetization of their content on mobile phones. The new services publishers will have access to are the Yahoo! Mobile Ad Network, Mobile Content Engine, Mobile Media Directory and Mobile Site Submit. “Yahoo! has become a leader in the global mobile Internet by leveraging the reach and popularity of our innovative mobile services for consumers and our competitive expertise in digital advertising,” said Steve Boom, senior vice president of mobile and broadband, Yahoo!. “Now, we are enabling publishers to grow their own mobile businesses by taking advantage of our unique experience, technology and services.” Learn more about each service at the official press release.

• Yahoo Click Fraud Settlement Finally Approved - CNet news reports that a federal judge has given final approval to a settlement in a class action lawsuit over click fraud that requires Yahoo to pay nearly $5 million in attorney fees and give full credits to advertisers dating back to 2004. The settlement agreement was given preliminary approval by the court last summer. However, attorneys involved in a class action suit over click fraud in Arkansas contested the settlement arguing that Yahoo was not responding to the Arkansas lawsuit in good faith when it was settling the case in California. The California settlement releases Yahoo from all similar click fraud claims against it in other actions, including the Arkansas litigation. The report did not provide any details as to how much each advertiser would be credited. I guess that is something that will pan out in the coming months.

Wednesday

• Yahoo! Mail Now Offers Unlimited Storage – Starting in May, Yahoo! will offer everyone unlimited email storage. The official press release includes all the details as well as provide a historical look at how Yahoo mail has evolved since its initial launch in 1997. AOL plays down the significance of this by reminding us that they have offered free, unlimited email storage since 2005. The company also pointed out in its email that “AOL has offered Web users 5 GB of free online storage since September 2006″ through its Xdrive service.

Thursday

• Reputation Management Tool, Serph is Live - I had blogged about this towards the end of January, Cameron Olthuis and Neil Patel’s Serph which is an tool that helps you find what other people are saying on the web right now. Now it is out of beta and ready for use by anyone in the world. If you haven’t used it yet, the idea behind Serph is that it allows you to track and monitor buzz as it happens in real time. Results are gathered from blog search engines, social media websites, social news websites and social bookmarking websites and include Technorati, Flickr, Yahoo Answers, YouTube, Digg, and Delicious just to name a few.

Friday

• BusinessWeek Asks if Google Is Becoming Too Powerful – More and more articles such as this are surfacing all the time. Sure Google is by far the most dominate in search. They are so dominant that many people don’t use the word “search” anymore but rather “I googled something.” So they rule search! Besides the other search engines, what does everyone else have to fear? It’s selling ads in newspapers, magazines, radio, and, in a trial program, television. In February it fired a torpedo at the software industry with a suite of online office software it is selling for a small fraction of the price of Microsoft’s Office. It’s spooking the telecom industry with fledgling efforts to provide free wireless Internet access. Google’s phenomenal ad machine, in short, has the potential to vaporize the profits of any industry that traffics in bits and bytes and to shift the economics to the advantage of Google, its users, and its cadre of partners.Read the article in its entirety as the author provides further details as to Google’s dominance and how that may or may not work against them in the future.