Guess what? Microsoft might actually get a search deal done without Google getting up in its grill. According to reports, Microsoft is close to signing a search deal with Verizon Wireless–making Live Search the default search engine.

This old chestnut.

There is a post over at Search Engine Land by Danny Sullivan entitled "Conversation With An Idiot Link Broker". To cut a long story short, some guy tries to broker a link deal with Danny, seemingly not knowing who Danny is, and Danny plays him along. Danny reports him to the Google spam team.

For the sake of furthering discussion, I’ll play devils advocate

The number of internet marketing tools launched over the past couple years has been staggering. Many of them are both free and highly valuable. SEO, which was once considered a bit of a seedy niche, has grown with search to become a mainstream marketing practice, with…

 For some time now I’ve bitten my tongue on an issue that’s driven me nuts for some time – the ego involved in the SEO industry. I have WAY too often heard some of the more noted SEO’s referred to as "rock stars".

Take a test drive of Cuil this morning; you will be surprised at what you find.

It has been a while since a new product has come out on the market in the search engine space that actually works well, and is actually fairly interesting in how they present data. Cuil was released to the public this morning, and it is truly something very cool.

Contemporary Surgery, along with help from Convera, has launched a new search engine at SURGERYFINDIT.COM. This new search engine tool provides targeted search results for surgeons.

Less than two years ago, Yahoo was on a roll and had just signed a deal with computer manufacturer HP that would see its search engine as the default on all new HP computers.

Last week, IAC introduced a new search engine, Rushmore Drive, aimed at the roughly 12.4 million African-Americans online in the US.

My question for any African-American reader–and anyone else who has an opinion–do you really want such a search engine?

In last week’s Search Insider, I introduced the idea of habits, and why they can be hard things to break. This week, I want to explore how search engines can be habit-forming as well.

Cognitive Lock-In

The scarce Nintendo Wii ranked as the most searched-for item during the holidays, while Ugg boots drew the most luxury item queries.

Websites in the health & medical and the travel categories received substantial traffic driven to them from search engines in November 2007.

Google picked up more than 65 percent of the US search market in November 2007, while Yahoo, Microsoft, and Ask all ceded a few tenths of a percent each in share.