Face it, beyond Google, Bing, and Yahoo, there are no other players in the US.  Sure, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of smaller search engines and some are major players in other countries, but here in the US there really are only the big three.  Today the field was officially narrowed to two. (at least for organic results.)  Yahoo announced on their blog today that they have successfully integrated Bing into the backend of their search engine.   Here’s a blog post from Bing saying pretty much the same thing but offering a timeline for the PPC transition to happen.  Am I surprised?  No.  I knew this was coming.  Microsoft has been trying to buy Yahoo since early 2008.

So what does this mean?  It means less competition to deliver awesome organic results.  It means that Yahoo now has Bing’s crappy index.  On Google, I’m #1 for the search “kansas city internet marketing” but in Bingahoo I’m not placed until the bottom of page two.  What’s the #1 result in Bingahoo?  Yellowpages.  Ugh – I remember when yellowpages dominated the search results everywhere before the Google algorithm got sophisticated enough to put them where they actually belonged, instead of relying on artificially created massive link counts.  What’s after Yellowpages?  Directories, junk websites, and spammers.  The Bing index kind of looks like the Google index from about 2003.  Bing is really susceptible to manipulation and delivers what I consider dirty results.  It’s where I go to see the people that are getting filtered out by Google.

Any time there is regulation imposed or a reduction in competition on the web, it’s a sad day for search. RIP Yahoo!

Facebook has done it again.  Today I went into my privacy settings to turn off Places because I don’t want people tagging me.  Much to my dismay I found that the scoundrels at Facebook have reset my privacy settings AGAIN and worst of all, they turned on by default “Friends can check me in to Places.”  I have talked about Facebook resetting my privacy settings without my consent in a previous blog post and I see that they are at it again.  Maybe this isn’t happening to you – maybe they are just picking on me, but just in case you’d better check your settings.  There are several images at the bottom of this post showing all the different screenshots I’ll be talking about, starting with a screenshot I took of my Places settings.

Top Left Screenshot:
This shot is of the settings as they were in my Facebook account.  I did not turn on the “Friends can check me into places”, it was already enabled by default. I just dropped down the menu to show you that it was checked.

Top Right Screenshot:
Some privacy settings that I mentioned in my 5/19 blog post.  I had turned them off prior to my 5/19 post but Facebook turned them back on so I reset them to “Friends only.”  As you can see from today’s screenshot, Facebook turned these things back on again. Unbelievable. This is at least the third time I’ve disabled this.  The worst part is that the information controlled by these little checkmarks is information that your friends share about you with third-party sites without you – or them – knowing it! If you locked down your privacy settings before, you had better do it again!

Bottom Left Screenshot:
I disabled this feature as my previous post shows, but Facebook apparently doesn’t care about how I want to manage my privacy, they will do what they want.

Bottom Right Screenshot:
Facebook did a good job of burring their new “feature” in your privacy settings by making it difficult to find.  Isn’t it interesting how they hold press conferences about their newest feature, but obscure the feature’s settings?  It’s almost like they don’t want you to find it!  I’m sure they will just re-enable mine soon anyway.  As the screenshot shows, you have to drop down your privacy setting from the top right, click “privacy settings”, and then click the tiny little link to “customize settings.”  Then you have to scroll down the list to find the two little mentions of Places as I noted in the top left screenshot.

I did not change the settings as you see them! This is the default!	I made a post on 5/19 talking about these being reset, and they did it again!
Even more privacy settings turned back on by Facebook	Where to find the settings to shut off Facebook Places

Facebook isn’t interested in what you want to share and what you don’t.  They just want to make as much money as possible off of you.  I guess it’s their right for letting you use their system for free, but now they are just getting greedy.  Shame on Facebook for messing with people like this.  Keep it up Facebook… you’re just priming the pump for the next generation of social networking… hopefully it’ll be something like Diaspora.

Facebook just announced a feature called Places that is basically a rip-off of Foursquare, a geo-location service.  The CEO of Gowalla – a Foursquare-like service – called this new feature a “an opportunity for additional distribution of our service.”  Think again!  The only thing Facebook is looking to complement is their own pocketbook.

One thing I find questionable about this service is the fact that you can tag friends as being with you at a location.  I don’t want my friends to be able to tell people when I’m not at home, how far I am from my home, and my disposition (at a bar).

Facebook Places is not available to me at this point so I can’t try disabling this feature.  I suspect Facebook will make disabling the Places feature difficult, just like they have with other “features.”  The Facebook mantra: Launch now, worry about privacy later.

As an internet marketer I found it quite interesting that Facebook will “suggest” nearby places that I might like.  Suggest when?  While I’m there?  A day later?  A week later?  How much information will Facebook provide to those suggested places? Will I start getting a lot of unsolicited “coupon” emails?  How long before checking in somewhere equals a “like” on Facebook and a company added to my newsfeed?

Regardless of all the potential problems, I see why Facebook is going down this road.  There’s a huge pool of mostly untapped potential advertisers.  Places sounds like an instant – and huge – revenue stream, one that a small company might not be able to ignore.  If you have a late-night restaurant near a popular bar district you could draw all kinds of new – and loosened up – patrons.