Weekly Rap-up of Search Engine Industry News – 12/24 – 12/28

A summary of search related news items that occurred this week including Wikia Search launches in private beta with public launch to occur by January 7th, Tamar Weinberg puts together a list of over 250 best Internet marketing posts of 2007, Wal-Mart is now offering “cheap” SEM services after their movie download service fails, and finally, R.I.P. for the Netscape Browser as AOL announces they will no longer support it.

Monday

• Wikia Search Launches in Private Beta – According to TechCrunch, Wikipedia/Wikia
  Founder Jimmy Wales has publicly announced the private beta for Wikia Search. In a note to the Wikia Search email list, Jimmy writes, “I’m going to be letting people in slowly over the next few days and we are aiming for a January 7th public launch. We want to run over the system with help from people to complain about what is broken.” Users are being asked politely to withhold posting any information about the beta until the public launch in January.

Tuesday

• Merry Christmas! – Sorry, didn’t search for any related news this day.

Wednesday

• Best Internet Marketing Blog Posts of 2007 - Tamar Weinberg has put together a list of what she feels are the best Internet marketing blog posts published in 2007. One of ours made the list of over 250 posts which Tamar has categorized by subject matter. The list includes links to each post as well as a brief description of what the post is about. Hats off to Tamar in what had to be a tremendous amount of work putting this together.

Thursday

• Wal-Mart To Offer SEM Services - No this is not an April Fool’s joke (not to say it isn’t a joke itself) – Karl Ribas was one of the first to point out that Wal-Mart is now offering SEM services for as little as $100/mo. Actual services are provided by Innuity, a Redmond, Washington-based search engine marketing company. I actually hate Wal-Mart but do find myself visiting the store once in awhile to take advantage of their “cheap” items. Therefore if you are in the market for “cheap” SEM services, you may want to check them out. Maybe the monster retailer will have as much success with this as they did for their movie downloading services. (Yes I am being a bit sarcastic).

Friday

• Netscape Browser R.I.P. - Netscape Navigator, the browser that launched the commercial Internet in October 1994, will die on February 1, 2008. TechCrunch reports that AOL, which acquired Netscape in November 1998 for $4.2 billion, announced that they will discontinue development of the browser, currently on version 9. Recent surveys suggest that Netscape currently has only 0.6% market share among browsers, compared to IE’s 77.35% and Firefox’s 16.01%. This, of course, is the same browser that once claimed more than 90 percent of the market, sparking the browser wars of the 1990s and the subsequent Microsoft antitrust trial. AOL is also setting up a Netscape Archive where users will be able to download old versions of Netscape, however without any support.