Google has already faced quite a bit of examination for their proposed advertising partnership with Yahoo and now they are on the receiving end of a little more. During separate House and Senate hearings on Internet competition recently Capitol Hill turned their attention to the potential deal.

Executives from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft were all questioned by lawmakers about the impact consumers and advertisers would face from the deals. An announcement made by Google last month about providing search advertising for Yahoo is what brought about the hearings.

A main concern is that Yahoo will be reduced to “a satellite in the Google orbit” should the deal go through. And the Justice Department is investigating whether a Google and Yahoo deal would create a monopoly.
Google and Yahoo defend their deal as a way to deliver more relevant ads to consumers and more valuable leads to advertisers.

Google and Yahoo defended the partnership as a way to deliver more relevant ads to consumers and more valuable leads to advertisers. And David Drummond, Google’s general counselor, stated that Yahoo would still be selling its own ads which means that deal wouldn’t lead to Google having ultimate control in the search ad market.

Under the deal, Google would provide search advertising to run with some Yahoo searches in the United States and Canada. Yahoo is estimated to receive as much as $800 million annually from the deal.

Microsoft argues that allowing the two biggest players in search advertising to combine efforts would give Google control of 90 percent of the market and allow it to raise prices and have unprecedented access to information about consumers’ online habits.

Recently the zip code guy blog highlighted a zip code map in a wide array of formats. The database includes lists of All US Cities

• All US Counties
• All US Zip Codes
• Latitude and Longitude of Cities/Zip Codes
• States and State Abbreviations

For $25 this database is a great investment if you are run geo-local AdWords campaigns using tools like Speed PPC.

Determining the value of a website is not always an easy task. There are so many variables that go into the equation that it can get a little confusing at time. A general rule of thumb is that a website is worth anywhere between 18 – 24 times a company’s monthly revenue minus your expense and plus your development costs. But, here are some other factors to consider.

The age of your domain is definitely something to consider. The longer the site has been around, the more trust search engines put into it. Therefore if you have a site that is 10 years old, it’s worth more than one that is 10 months old.

Another factor is how many back links a site has and the quality of these links. Links are also seen as a source of trust by search engines. Sites with high quality links tend to place better in SERPs so a site with more quality links is worth more than a site with lots of low quality links or one with few or no links at all.

You should also look at how many active emails a site has on a mailing list as well as what kind of community if users it has. If a website has a large mailing list or a big community of users then it’s worth more to a buyer because it has a built-in database.

To show an example of this formula we’ll use a site that has monthly revenue of $300 and is 5 years old, but doesn’t have any top 10 rankings. Let’s say the monthly expenses are $50 and the so the net income is $250. So 24 months multiplied by $250 equals $6,000. If you add in $5,000 for development cost with some age premium you’ll get a  $12,500 valuation. However, at the end of the day your website is only worth what someone else is willing to pay or it.

Some tools that can help you appraise the value of a website are Alexa, Overture bid tool, a keyword tool, the site’s log files and financials. You should also consider the cost of replicating the website when appraising it as well as how much qualified, relevant, targeted traffic the website gets.

A new search engine dedicated solely to finding information within forums and communities, Twing.com recently launched new features that are said to help brand managers gain insight into company and product discussions.

General Manager Kevin Shea had this to say, “Our Saved Search and Buzz Graph products were created for our users. And they also have a lot of value for anyone tracking brand conversations.” These Buzz Graphs allow a visitor determine the popularity of a range of terms within a community space online. You can also filter terms by category and then share those results. This is fun and interesting for an average web browser, but for a brand manager it offers insight into what’s being said about different products and companies.

Twenty-eight percent of U.S. consumers read online forums compared to 25% that read blogs according to Forrester’s North American Social Technographics Online Survey, Q2, 2007. Additionally, 18% of those contribute to forums, while 14% do the same for blogs. A lot of online conversations are happening in forums.

Twing offers multiple search options plus advanced filtering and sorting tools so people can effectively search forums in ways not available until the advent of Twing.com. The company also seeks to build even more awareness of the online forum space. Twing.com is easily used by entering search terms to quickly locate specific discussions and/or topics. Visitors can register – for free – to become a Twing.com member, participate in Twing.com’s forums and take advantage of current and upcoming personalization options.

Last month Google announced the release of a beta version of industry benchmarking. This recent feature allows Google Analytics users to measure their site’s performance against others in their market as well as seeing how one particular niche compares to others in a specific industry.

You have to opt in to the service and once you do you can find it in your site stats navigation under the “Visitors” section. In this section there are a variety of charts that show your site’s traffic in blue compared against other sites, which are shown in gray. This allows you to see data such as if visitors stay longer on your pages versus other pages in markets similar to yours or you can compare your daily traffic changes with that of your industry to see if your ups and downs are occurring across the board.

The entire program is anonymous and therefore the information you se is an aggregated total rather than just information from one site. Google is hoping that this data, which was a commonly requested thing, will provide insights to users that have been previously unseen.

This benchmarking has at least one stipulation though. It only works if companies chose to share their data with the system. For that Google also introduced a new data-sharing setting page. If you chose to share your information it isn’t shown individually at any point. It’s simply collected and shared anonymously as was previously mentioned.