The so called search engines war, is not a search engine war anymore. The war was taken further to advertising, blogging, news and so on. Whatever service from any of the three major competitors in the field, is proved succesfull or potentially succesfull, is taken over by the other two. There was Bloggers from Google. Then just like this there was MSN Spaces from Microsoft (which actually didn’t prove to make too much buzz around). Now, Yahoo! doesn’t like to be left behind, and start teasing us about their future blogsphere presence: Yahoo! 360°. The new blogging service promise to integrate most of Yahoo! functionalities: photos, LAUNCHcast station, Yahoo!Messenger, probably MyYahoo and most likely the very rumored Yahoo!’s text ad system designed to compete with the succesfull Google AdSense.

Talking about AdSense and contextual ads, Microsoft’s Internet group is developing a pay-per-click ad-bidding system that pairs search results with sponsored text messages from advertisers called adCenter. Meanwhile, Google seems to prepare for the two new major competitors in the marketplace and is revising its AdSense policy, adding some small (for now) changes to it out of which the most important are:

• new ad formats – AdLinks
• allowing user to disclose their incomes generated by the program (what better promotion Google needs than the success stories that, I think, will invade the web after this change in policy)
• updated payment options – offer checks to be sent in local currencies to 35 countries and Electronic Funds Transfer to 15 countries

I am looking forward to see how things will move from now on since AskJeeves, the fourth major player in this game, is not making too many moves lately.