By David Snyder

Yahoo took a step towards developing its search technology for the future by announcing the adoption of some key standards of the “semantic web.”

On Yahoo’s company blog, Amit Kumar, director of product management for the company’s search site, said the organization had begun to support key semantic web standards.

In explanation of his thoughts on the semantic web Kumar wrote:

“While there has been remarkable progress made toward understanding the semantics of web content, the benefits of a data web have not reached the mainstream consumer. Without a killer semantic web app for consumers, site owners have been reluctant to support standards like RDF, or even microformats. We believe that app can be web search.”

By David Snyder

Tim Armstrong, Google’s President, Advertising and Commerce for Google in North America, outlined his companies vision for its role in media purchasing last week.

Speaking at the American Association of Advertising Agencies Media Conference in Orlando, Florida, Armstrong explained Google’s plan to develop a media buying “dashboard.”

According to Media Post, Armstrong stated:

“It basically takes a mix of different media types and puts them together,” he said, adding that the system, which is still being developed, was part of a suite of new tools Google is building to make the lives of media buyers “easier.” The new dashboard, he said, would enable buyers to manage mixes of offline media like TV, radio and print campaigns, with their online display and search advertising, and to harness their data streams to show how one platform influences traffic to the others.

By David Snyder

LiveDeal Inc., a publicly traded company out of Arizona, announced a long-term sponsored search agreement with Yahoo Inc. today.

The sponsored search results will be delivered to Livedeal.com, and will be displayed on LiveDeal’s classifieds and yellow pages.

“Yahoo’s considerable base of high quality local advertisers complements Livedeal.com’s combined classified and yellow-page marketplace platform. The result is even more relevant content that helps visitors to Livedeal.com find the businesses and services they are looking for,” said LiveDeal CEO Daniel Coury.

LiveDeal Inc. also own www.Yellow-Page.net, www.YP.net, and www.YP.com. It is not clear whether the sponsored results will be used on all of these sites, but it is a safe bet.

By David Snyder

Yahoo! unveiled a new project named “search monkey” at the SMX West being held in Santa Clara, California.

The project is a set of open source tools that allow publishers and users alike to enhance search results as they pertain to a particular web site. Basically these tools give publishers a way to refine their search results in Yahoo.

Sound familiar?

If the project does, it is because Google unveiled a similar project in May of 2006 called Google Coop Subscribed Links. Google’s program was not very successful in terms of popularity and use, so the question that begs to be asked is how Yahoo’s project will differ?