In addition to today’s Internet Marketing Monitor coverage, we felt these stories were worth pulling out of the multitude of news items for July 6, 2007:

Do we really need to write our own search engine? [Facebook Blog]

That’s an excellent question. As the blog post points out, many other search options existed for the social networking site. But instead of plugging into, say… a Google Custom Search Engine… Facebook wrote its own engine. Their reasoning is quite sound: Facebook searches are unique - and who better to understand how to build an engine for those searches that the company itself. They’ve also provided some interesting stats:

• Over 500 million searches per month
• 1 terabyte of data
• Most used people search engine on the web

That last point is particularly interesting, especially since both Pipl and Spock are also going after the “people search” market. I guess the main difference is that Facebook’s search engine is restricted to data included on the site (which is still an awful lot of “people info” to search). Pipl, in particular, is truly a people-specific search engine that scours the entire Internet for information. That’s also its downfall. All of that information comes with a price: information overload.

FTC OKs AQuantive Buyout by Microsoft [The Washington Post]

Microsoft announced the massive $6 billion acquisition of aQuantive back in May. After petitioning the government to investigate rival Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick on the grounds that it was anti-competitive, Microsoft itself got sucked under the spotlight and became the target of an FTC investigation. According to company sources, the waiting period required by the FTC in large mergers has passed without any further requests by the FTC. Apparently that means it’s go time for the two companies.

Best uses of Flash [Official Google Webmaster Central Blog]

Most of this will be old news to those in search engine biz. But I like seeing Google address these issues anyway. In a nutshell - Flash is not the search engine crippling medium that some would have you believe. Using it does, however, require some modifications and additions if getting indexed by Google is a high priority.

Why Yahoo won’t pay your bills [Valleywag]

The sad Yahoo! avatar that Valleywag uses for bad news from Sunnyvale just kills me. He looks so unhappy. But I really think Yahoo!’s announcement to kill off it’s Bill Pay service is good news. Sure… this is yet another item on a growing list of Yahoo! properties to be shut down. But it shows that the company is serious about trimming the fat and streamlining its operation. There’s no viable reason that Yahoo! should continue to fund a service that’s basically dead. I’m sure the folks working in the Bill Pay department won’t agree… but I think this is a great move on Yahoo!’s part.

Discover your share of voice with Impression Share reporting [Inside AdWords]

Impression Share is a new metric available in AdWords reporting that shows you how often your ads are being shown in the grand scheme of your targeted keywords. Let me try to explain further. Let’s say that, because of how users are searching and browsing, ads related to one of your keywords show up 100 times on a given day. The new Impression Share metric will show you how many of those 100 times your ad was selected for display. So what does this tell you? If your ad was shown 80 times out of 100 it means you’ve got a pretty good ad on your hands. But if it was only shown 5 times out of 100 it means that 95% of the time another ad fared better… and you’ve got some work on your hands. Instructions on how to set your account up to track Impression Share can be found here.

Have a great weekend, folks. We’ll be back on Monday!