Weekly Rap-up of Search Engine Industry News – 10/15 – 10/19

A summary of search related news items that occurred this week including three .mobi domain sold for six figures at recent Moniker auction, Superpages roils out video advertising nationwide, old Yahoo! founder ad new boss, Jerry Yang, outlines the search engine’s future, MySpace will open its platform to outside developers., and finally, Michael Gray tells Jason Calacanis to shut up… well not those words exactly but pretty much to the point. Have a great weekend!

Monday

• Dot.mobi Domain Names Sold For 6 Figures – TechCrunch highlights some of the big money .mobi domain names that were sold at the latest Moniker auction. The list includes Poker.mobi ($150,000), Ringtones.mobi ($145,000), and News.mobi ($110,000). These join previous highs for dot.mobi domains including Flowers.mobi ($200,000), Sportsbook.mobi ($129,800), and Fun.mobi ($100,000). Dot.mobi domains were originally released for sale in September 2006 and are aimed at providing mobile phone specific websites. Now you might not want to rush ut and spend that kind of money on a .mobi domain, especially seeing that cell phones such as the iPhone are able to display full web pages as opposed to cut down mobile versions. However, you might want to at least secure your branding as you can still get unregistered .mobi domains relatively cheap.

Tuesday

• Superpages Adds National Video Advertising - Yellow Page companies continue to evolve. The latest is local search and directory provider Superpages decision to roll out video advertising. Greg Sterling reports that after testing in select U.S. states, Superpages is now offering video advertising nationwide. Greg reports that Superpages is charging advertisers a one-time production fee of $990 and a small monthly recurring fee to have a video icon associated with their listings. For each consumer stream/click advertisers would also be charged a fee (pay per stream) based on competitive bidding on a category basis. Category level bidding is the same way that Superpages’ clicks and calls products work.

Wednesday

• Jerry Yang Outlines the Future for Yahoo! - In a blog post, old founder and new boss, Jerry Yang, provided some insight as to what direction his company would be moving in in the near future. This comes after reviewing the state of Yahoo! for the last 100 days or so. They examined everything from strategy and culture to their competitive position and how the marketplace is evolving. What they end up with is placing emphasize in three big multi-year objectives. 1.) Become the starting point for the most consumers; 2.) Become the must-buy for advertisers; and 3.) Deliver open, industry-leading platforms that attract the most publishers and developers. Specific details of each item can be found in Jerry’s original post.

Thursday

• MySpace To Open Its Platform to Developers - Loren Baker reports that MySpace has finally decided to open its platform to outside developers, a move that Facebook orchestrated earlier in the year which led to the skyrocketing of its popularity. The first step will be the creation of a catalog of existing widgets from third-parties that MySpace has allowed on its social network for the past four years. Then in the coming months, MySpace will open its platform broadly to outside developers. This will very likely see the development of all sorts of third party applications and widgets as well as the implementation of existing ones that already utilize Facebook’s environment.

Friday

• Jason Calacanis Should Stop Bad-Mouthing SEOs - Michael gray takes Jason Calacanis, who is not too popular with SEOs these days, to school, telling him in essence not to put all SEOs in the same class. Calacanis, who often criticizes SEOs as “snake oil salesman” began to slam SEOs once again at a recent Web 2.0 conference. So Michael so graciously decides to offer an SEO review of Calacanis’s human-powered search site, Mahalo, for free and finds quite a few issues. Problems include canonical problems, robots.txt problems, duplicate content issues, and the list goes on. Michael sums it up by stating that it is unfair to criticize an entire industry just because of a few bad apples. Will it change Jason’s opinion of us? Probably not but it is good reading all the same.