Nextwave Media - Creative Internet Solutions

It seems that most people think Microsoft have to dig a little deeper to buy Yahoo in an effort to catch up to the advances Google has made over the last few years. Having said that Bill Gates is playing it tough, saying they’re only going to make the one offer and that they can do it with our without Yahoo.
He made this quite clear in an interview with Reuters: “We can afford to make big investments in the engineering and marketing that needs to get done. We will do that with or without Yahoo.” Considering the offer totals a staggering USD$44.6 billion thats a big investment indeed.
It would appear that Microsoft is only acting tough. In fact, if they don’t buy Yahoo, they’ll have a tough time turning those 19 billion dollars into a web platform that will be a decent competitor to Google; that’s why they went unsolicited on Yahoo in the first place.

From their website

“SpyFu lets you see which keywords your competitors are buying and which ones they optimize their site for. Once you understand the competition, you can beat them at their own game or your can exploit their weaknesses. We get our data directly from the source; there are no middlemen. Every month, we extract 125 million ads and search results directly…”

Sounds like an interesting service, peeking into your competitors notebook could certainly give you some ideas.

http://www.spyfu.com/

alleywag has screen captures of a new Yahoo web site, reportedly launching February 26th, named Yahoo Buzz Beta.Yahoo Buzz will be similar to Digg, but will start only with a 100 sites allowed into the system. After the initial beta period, all sites that are accepted into the Yahoo Publisher Network will allowed to be added to Yahoo Buzz.

By looking at the screen captures, it appears that each article is given a “buzz score.” The buzz score seems to be generated by users clicking a “buzz it” icon. In addition, on the right side of Yahoo Buzz stories are recent “Top Searches,” which are updated hourly.

Yahoo Buzz is currently a blog with data on top keyword searches from Yahoo Search. Here is the current Buzz FAQ, but reportedly, this new site will replace the current Yahoo Buzz section.