Apparently, after being tested in the US, Google are considering bringing its TV advertising service to the British market. It would be their first so-called offline advertising scheme this side of the atlantic.

Dish Network, the United States’ second-largest satellite operator have been working with Google on technology that allows advertisers to see how many people are watching their adverts.

Google already have a search-and-video partnership with BSkyB in the UK. BSkyB are apparently keen to improve the targeting of advertising.

Google’s European, Middle Eastern and African product manger, Mario Queiroz, said that the company would be looking at opportunities in the UK TV market if the trials over in the US are a success.

Google’s TV Ads service cleverly takes information from the set-top boxes and calculates how many people are watching the adverts. The success of Google’s Adwords Online service, which allows advertisers to buy keywords. When searching, Google users are able to view ads relevant to to their search.

Data from the trials will be compiled by engineers and put in a usable in Google’s London Office.

Sky and Google see the more than 3 million people who have a Sky+ personal video recorder set-top box (about a third of its users) as an obvious test bed for such technology.

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/mar/07/google.internet

Yahoo, wanting explore alternatives to a Microsoft takeover, have taken a step to free up some time to do so.

Yahoo said they will be extending the deadline for the nomination of directors to its board. These nominations were previously scheduled for the 14th March but Yahoo now say that an exact date was not set so the annual meeting could be scheduled for a later date allowing them breathing space.

This nomination process is of key importance to Microsoft because after Yahoo rejected the buyout offer they have threatened to nominate their own slate of directors who would obviously agree to the takeover.

Microsoft went public with the bid for the company last month after apparently being in talks for around a year. The bid of $42 billion in cash and stock, worth more than Yahoo’s market value at the time was rejected as the board felt the price undervalued the company, even when they were struggling to compete with Google’s online advertising revenue.

Source: www.mercurynews.com/archivesearch/ci_8464569

Google’s latest test is apparently to allow users to view a secondary search box in the search results. A search on amazon, for example, would return a search box directly under the phrase but above the URL. Below is an example.

It will also work for a search on wikipedia and even possibly for newspaper news sites as it will for the NY times, which also has Sitelinks.

Upon typing a keyword into the search box and clicking search, essentially you are searching the site via Google’s search engine. So you will be able to view selected areas of another site through Google.

Source: http://searchengineland.com/080304-162923.ph