Weekly Rap-up of Search Engine Industry News – 2/18 – 2/22

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A summary of search and social media related news items that occurred this week including Yahoo is set to launch a social news site called ‘Yahoo! Buzz’ which will directly compete with Digg, social news site Mixx will add new feature called ‘Related items’ that will allow users to cluster related stories, Search Engine Journal launches a jobs board, Microsoft increases storage space on their Windows Live Skydrive service, and finally, the European Union declares that search engines must comply with EU privacy rules.

Monday

• Is Yahoo! Buzz the Next Digg Competitor? – Valleywag has screenshots of a service Yahoo plans to launch on February 26th called ‘Yahoo! Buzz. The new service, which will be a direct competitor to Digg, will begin with about 100 publishers and will rank stories based on popular search results and user voting. By summer, Buzz will open to the entire Yahoo Publisher Network meaning that if you let Yahoo sell ads on your site, it will allow your stories to appear on Buzz.

Tuesday

• Mixx To Add Clustering Feature for Related Stories – Social news site Mixx is launching a new feature this week called ‘Related Items.’ TechCrunch notes that it will solve a common problem found on Digg and other sites where multiple articles on the same story compete with each other to get to the home page. The new feature will flag a submission when it thinks that a story is similar. A message will appear that says “We may already have this story! Or at least one startling similar. Take a look at the stories below.” The user submitting the related story can then choose to submit it anyway, or add it as a related item to the previous submission. Digg also flags stories that may be similar to other submissions, but does not offer the ability to cluster the new story to the old ones.

Wednesday

• Search Engine Journal Launches Jobs Board - Last week we announced the launch of the Search Engine watch jobs board. Now Search Engine Journal has followed suit with the launch of their own Search Marketing Job Board. Partnering with JobThread, users can review job openings in the search marketing, SEO and online marketing industry from various US and Internationally based companies. Monitor job openings with their RSS feed. They are also running a special for the next 30 days which will allow businesses, agencies, consultants and other relevant organizations or individuals post their full time and part time search marketing openings.

Thursday

• Microsoft Increases Storage on Windows Live Skydrive - TechCrunch reports that Microsoft has increased storage on their Windows Live Skydrive service to 5GB, up from the previous limit of 1GB. Google’s GMail still offers more strage space but it is speculated that most average people won’t use GMail for online storage. In fact, Microsoft continues to grow its online storage offering when Google still hasn’t launched the fabled Platypus online storage solution despite years of speculation and rumors. This is one space where Microsoft has the upper hand, and a 4gb storage jump will further increase the appeal of the product.

Friday

• Search Engines Must Comply With EU Privacy Rules - From The Associated Press, European data privacy regulators said Thursday that Internet search engines based outside Europe must also comply with EU rules on how a person’s Internet address or search history is stored. And just what are those rules? EU rules state that someone must consent to their data being collected and give individuals the right to object or verify their information apply to search engines. And what do the three major search engines think about this? Google said the statement didn’t change its position and it is committed to working with privacy and consumer advocates as well as EU regulators to improve privacy online for all users. Microsoft said companies should remove the IP address from saved information — which would make it anonymous. Yahoo had no immediate comment.