Google announced today in its official Google blog release of Instant Previews. You will be able to see it in action in google.com, but not in all country specific Google versions.

With Google Instant and Instant Previews, Google hopes searchers will find what they see faster.  As you type your query, if Google Instant is activated, you will see results matching the partially entered query. You will now also see a magnifying glass icon next to each result. If you click on the icon, a preview image will appear on the right.

It will cover the sponsored results, but Google claims it will not affect advertisers since if surfer sees instant results and then clicks on magnifying glass icon, it implies that paid ads are not f interest to her. The preview image can be closed to reveal the PPC Ads once again.

Ask.com is largely abandoning the search engine effort and will now become a question-and-answer service.  The e-commerce company IAC/InterActiveCorp, which had paid $1.85 billion in 2005 for Ask.com and then invested heavily to make the search engine more competitive against Google.

With this change in strategy, Ask.com  will avoid competing against companies with far greater resources while also reducing the cost of maintaining a search index with billions of pages, Doug Leeds, Ask.com’s president, said in an interview

Ask.com will lay off 130 workers and close its offices in Edison, N.J., and Hangzhou, China. The remaining employees will be consolidated at the Web site’s headquarters in Oakland, Calif.

Ask.com would continue to offer search on its site, but it would no longer compile an index of the entire Web. .Ask  will cease developing its own search technology based on computer algorithms, and will instead rely on algorithmic search provided by an undisclosed partner.

Google May Day Algorithm Change
A major change in Google search algorithm took place in May 2010. The algorithm has been tweaked for long tail queries such that higher quality sites appear in SERP.

Individual long tail queries would not provide much traffic, but in aggregate can provide a significant amount of traffic. Large sites with product pages that would not have individual links into them, be several clicks from the home page or be hidden behind search forms (dynamic pages), and may not have unique and value-added content on them would be impacted. Smaller sites with good or even better unique content, but with few incoming links, and attracting little traffic should be benefited.

After Yahoo and Bing announced their partnership for PPC advertising and organic search services in 2009, the landscape of internet search engines, their ranking order and nature of SEO work required of webmasters has changed dramatically.

Up till now, webmasters had to contend with four major search engines – Google, Yahoo, ASK and MSN. With the release of Microsoft’s Bing in 2009, the market shares Google and Yahoo went down by few percentage points. In July 2010, comScore reported  Google share of searches in US at  65% with Yahoo far behind at 16.7%.
Microsoft’s Bing search engine got 11 percent share.

In August 2010, Bing and Yahoo announced the transition of search infrastructure of Yahoo to Bing for results in English in North America – U.S and Canada. Users in these two countries will see ‘powered by Bing’ in small point size when they search in Yahoo  for Web pages,  image, and video on both desktop and mobile devices. The two companies, Yahoo and Bing, have not announced roll out dates for other countries, but by the year 2012, expect search queries in Yahoo to be driven by Bing index for all countries.

Mr. Cameron’s visit to India in last week of July 2010 is clear sign of UK government’s commitment to increasing ties between India and the UK. Interest in India is driven by growth of Indian economy, and emergence as future world power. India has a lot to offer the UK, especially in vertical markets such as retail, manufacturing, aerospace and engineering and in IT Outsourcing.

Year 2010 is showing signs of economic recovery across major countries like the U.S, UK, Germany and China. It is estimated that demand for IT outsourcing services will continue to rise with an increased number of outsourcing deals in the second half of the year.