Say hello to the new generation of leadership at Yahoo! His name is Scott Thompson.

Does the name sound familiar? It might, because Scott Thompson was once the president of PayPal. Part of the reason why Yahoo decided to snatch up this guy in the first place was that they say he was responsible (at least in part) for doubling PayPal's active user base from 50 million to 104 million. That's a pretty big deal, especially since Yahoo's user base is probably going in the other direction.

On the financial side, Yahoo saw a 5 percent decline for its overall revenue in the third quarter 2011 (compared to the same time the year before) to $1.1 billion. Sadly, the net earnings dropped a much larger 26 percent year-over-year to $396 million. That's not good and the financial savviness of Thompson could turn that ship around. At least, that's what they hope.

According to Search Engine Watch, the focus is to "quickly evaluate its sprawling products and kick them into shape to boost appeal to suitors and investors." Thompson says that they need to balance "value between consumer experience and the advertisers."

Yes, it's true that Yahoo is still relevant in some parts of the world, but Thompson certainly has a huge task ahead of him. If you were hired as the new CEO of Yahoo, what would be your strategy moving forward?

Bing might already be aiming to take Search to the next level. They are already on the right track as they announced the Spatial Search . Bing have been discussing about Spatial search from last December. The idea is simple. Bing wants users to make most out of their search results. They have introduced the idea based on human psychology. Humans makes decision based on senses like sight, sound, touch, smell and taste.

Bing is making the new search considering the two main sense sight and touch. Bing Maps will start giving an immersive experience of a particular place. Bing have already started their advanced map feature with Twitter real time physical location map and Bing Local Lens .

Is spatial search important ?

Yes. Spatial Search is extremely important when it comes to local search queries like "Hostels in Los Angeles" . I can get a better result with Spatial Search. I am looking foward towards great changes in the search industry with search going to real world datas.

Daniel Lew's post search engine result display made me think about the vertical search engines. Vertical search engines are entirely different from the general search engine's like Google,Yahoo and Bing. Vertical search engines know their visitor and they are made based upon the visitor's interest. You can easly find a lot of travel based vertical search engines like Kayak. There are search engine which go beyond the general search engine feature to provide results based upon word relation in context to search query. Truevert is one such search engine which provides true vertical results beyond general search engine niche intention based result. Another interesting search engine I came across was Bossy which provides single answer to visitor queries.

An example is

Question:: When did germany invade poland ? Answer:: Month: Sept Year: 1939

The latest computational knowledge engine Wolfram Alpha was intended to provide visitors with systematic knowledge on their queries.

Where is the search heading towards?. The search engine future might go beyond general search engines as new signals of relavance becomes important. Certain factors like user behaviour, speed of providing search results etc will play a much more dominant role in the coming years and this will make general search engines to start taking measures to understand about the user query signals to stay on top of the search industry.

The battle between search engines and social media websites to dominate the most visited sector of Internet have started long back. The battle now seems to be more strong as Facebook have been the most visited website in US during three days in December. Facebook have overtaken search engine gaint Google and achieved this visitors stastics in US. Will this be a holiday trend or will this become a global trend ?. The days are Christmas day eve, Christmas day and New Years Eve. The information has been published on Hitwise US Twitter account. This trend of facebook trafficcould attract some US advertisers to facebook. The US visits to Twitter have increased 4% in December 2009 as compared to November 2009. This is a strong indication that Social Media websites are emerging as a competitor to Search Engine.

The top searched term in 2009 was "Facebook" as per Hitwise Information. This gives Facebook a competitive edge ahead of the other social media gaints to compete against the search engines. Facebook has moved 10 position as compared to previous year to gain the position of top searched word in 2009.

The growth of Facebook has made advertisers to think on moving their ads to Facebook as well. This will certainly make facebook to gain some dollars through the ad medium. Facebook offers lot of options for advertisers. Advertisers can target their audience based on age,sex as well as location. This will facebook a slight positive edge ahead of Google. Google is still the strongest search engine but they now have a strong competitor from the social media. Facebook can grow into a much powerful social media if they uses the strategy in the correct manner.Andy Atkins-Krüger CEO of WebCertain points out facts about facebook's chances of emerging as a real powerful social media website in the Global front in one of his latest post in Search Engine Land.