This day in search marketing history: February 11

Yahoo officially rejects Microsoft

In 2008, rumor became reality as Yahoo rejected Microsoft’s $45 billion bid to buy Yahoo.

The company concluded that the proposal substantially undervalued Yahoo and was not in the best interests of Yahoo and its stockholders.

Microsoft basically rejected Yahoo’s rejection, calling it “unfortunate” and pledging to “pursue all necessary steps” to get what it called its “full and fair” proposal to be accepted.

In other words, this wasn’t the end of the story.

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Also on this day

2022: The company was working on recovering the data.

2022: The design was a throwback to 2017’s green, boxed ad labels.

2022: Automated and manual extensions could be shown together, Google Ads added a report and they could be added at ad group, campaign, or account level.

2021: Google said it could have a 7% impact on search queries.

2021: Google wanted to display images that were relevant yet visually distinct.

2021: Businesses could message customers through their web browser, not just the mobile app.

2021: Light mode showed a black ad label on a white background but on dark mode, it showed a gray ad label on a black background.

2021: Employers, landlords and credit providers could keep their ads from showing to people of “unknown gender,” enabling discrimination against nonbinary individuals.

2021: Keys to diversity and inclusion include mentorship and promotion of Black search marketers.

2020: It seemed like Google had pushed out some ranking algorithm change over the weekend, resulting in a large shift in the rankings of many websites.

2020: New Posts would publish after the “fix” and rejected Posts would go live that week.

2020: Scale expanded text ad messaging by device or audience – and it worked with Google import.

2020: The products were intended for national and multi-location brands.

2020: After a disappointing opening weekend, the film’s new title began showing up on movie ticket booking sites last night.

2019: The Google webmaster trends analyst also touched on topics like the possibility of an Indexing API, whether internal over-linking penalties exist and how the clustering of duplicate pages works.

2019: The rollout of click share could be seen as a follow-up to the position metrics Google introduced the prior fall, as average position had become less useful.

2019: Bing Ads issued additional guidance for advertisers wanting to target multi-lingual users who may search in multiple languages.

2019: Google was actively testing augmented walking directions with select Local Guides.

2016: GTINs would be required for brand name products sold by multiple merchants.

2015: Google’s John Mueller said there was no whitelist (or “exception lists”) for the Penguin and Panda algorithms.

2015: A $20 billion holiday in the U.S., Mother’s Day-related searches started rising roughly a month in advance, though search habits varied by gift category.

2014: Google started showing complete restaurant menus in its search results when a query specifically looked for menu information. 

2014: Google was suggesting racist terms when users searched for a number of UK cities, including Bradford, Leicester and Birmingham.

2014: Bing Ads introduced the full set of conversion fields to all Performance reports.

2014: Business profile pages were changed to emphasize images, featured user reviews and key pieces of local content.

2013: Cutts answers: “How do I know which links to remove when I get an ‘unnatural links’ message?

2013: It was believed that Google paid Apple roughly $3.20 per iOS device, which would avoid the accounting issues arising from a revenue-sharing agreement.

2013: Google led in the number of searches, but had seen a marked drop in unique searchers over the past few months.

2013: The Apple-like ad showed people around the world getting useful and “just in time” information from Google Now.

2013: Although Gates never really said which search engine he used.

2012: Google registered 14 domains.

2011: Google dropped from 66.6% to 65.6% share, still way in front of Bing, Yahoo, and their combined numbers.

2011: Critics argued that once Google became a participant in the travel services market, it might use its advertising dominance to steer consumers to its services, further limiting competition.

2011: Google representatives would meet with local businesses to talk up the benefits of promoting their goods and services through Places.

2011: Nokia would build and distribute Windows Phones as its primary competitive offering to go head-to-head with the iPhone and Android.

2011: Search Engine Land’s 10 most popular stories from January 2011.

2010: A vocal contingent of SEOs were up in arms over Google “offering SEO consulting services.”

2010: For $50 million.

2010: Brin and other Googlers either needed to be enabled to tap into the public version of Google Buzz or open new accounts.

2010: If you searched for something and clicked through to a site with AdSense ads on them, Google would store the query that led to that website and use it 2 or so hours later, when you visited another website with AdSense ads on them.

2010: The PDF download was 28 pages long, 82 questions and answers deep and broken out in 12 categories.

2010: Bing announced that in the near future, it would allow people using StreetSide to look “up” virtually and see what was in the sky.

2010: Yahoo sought to dispel the “misconception” that Yahoo was no longer investing in search.

2009: Cutts said Google.co.jp PageRank was ~5 instead of ~9 and he expected it to stay that way for a while. He also confirmed it was a paid link penalty.

2009: It showed the continuing ascent of Google Maps and the simultaneous decline of MapQuest traffic during 2008.

2009: You could append your current location to your email signature, when you used Gmail or Google Apps email within the Gmail interface.

2009: Microsoft was starting to integrate FAST Search & Transfer’s capabilities into its other products and to market FAST more aggressively.

2009: Ask made a bid to improve its search index and efficiency, having completed a move to a new datacenter.

2009: In exchange for the introduction of fees, BOSS added several new features. Key among them was the ability to monetize results. 

2009: Twhirl to the rescue.

2008: Complainant claimed when you turned his social security number upside down, it spelled Google.

2008: Rand Fishkin was slated to share how he popped the question to his fiancee.

2008: Instead of going skiing, as they had traditionally done for their annual company trips, Google went to Disneyland.

2008: Google Images search team debunked a rumor that Google censored an image of an Egyptian football player stripping off his team jersey during the African Cup Of Nations to show a “Sympathize With Gaza” T-shirt underneath.

2008: Maker of the T-mobile “Sidekick” device and the Danger operating system and platform.

2008: Would Android be the success Google was hoping for?

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Past contributions from Search Engine Land’s Subject Matter Experts (SMEs)

These columns are a snapshot in time and have not been updated since publishing, unless noted. Opinions expressed in these articles are those of the author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

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