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Ok so it's only Thursday and already it's been a big week in online developments and here in our little part of the world it's been a week full of silliness. I don't even want to think about some of those silly things we've had to deal with so far this week so let's look at some of those things that have been happening out there in the wider world.

A new search engine
Did you know that there's a new search engine out there? I doubt that it's going to even come close to unseating the big four of Google, YouTube, Yahoo and Live but it is worth looking at. Sometimes looking at some of the big guys' smaller competitors can give you an insight into the way the big guys do things so I would encourage you to have a play with it.

The new search engine's name is Duck Duck Go ... yes, that really is the name that has been chosen for this search engine so you can stop laughing right now. You can find Duck Duck Go at where else but ... duckduckgo.com. I've given it a little poke with some search terms that are important to us and our clients and the results I got back seem to be rather lacking in relevancy but it might improve ... or someone else might buy it.

These days you can never be too sure about the motivation people have when they start up a business. Some really do want to develop their ideas while others just want to sell it to someone else as fast as they can.

Google's new algorithm changes
One guy who did start up a business in the search engine area and managed to sell it on quickly is the person behind the new algorithm changes that Google introduced this week. What you're now seeing in Google is more information in the snippet that appears below the link (although as I write this I seem to be still getting the 'old style' snippets for some terms).

The guy who developed this wants to be able to give searchers all the information they need right there on Google so that the person searching doesn't have to click through to the relevant website. For some reason terms such as 'scraping' and 'content theft' spring to mind here and I don't know about you but I don't see this as having anything good to offer website owners.

Matt Cutt's YouTube videos
Have you come across the series of videos that Google and Matt Cutts are putting up on YouTube yet? These are a series of short videos where Matt answers questions that have been posted on one of Google's forums.

Now those of you who have been reading my ramblings for the last few years will know that I'm no fan of Matt Cutts at all but these videos are definitely worth watching and some of them deal with questions that are quire important for adult webmasters. So I really would suggest that you head over to YouTube and have a look.

Engaging your surfers
I was just reading an interesting post about engagement ... that very thing that as adult webmasters we've been taught to avoid. Back when Steve and I were first starting out in this industry it was drummed into us that we needed to get the surfers to move from our free sites and galleries to the sponsor just as quickly as we could.

We didn't want all those freeloaders hanging around eating up our bandwidth, we wanted to send them off to the sponsor and signed up there ... but now I'm beginning to wonder about the wisdom of that approach. Sure, we need to get every surfer to head over to our sponsor but maybe we need to get them a bit more interested in what our sponsor is selling before they actually get there.

Getting them interested ... getting them engaged ... just might mean that we get even more sales. In mainstream many marketers are beginning to find that more engagement is leading to more sales ... even in these tough times.

So how do we engage our surfers? Well depending on the type of sites that you're using to promote your sponsors that can be an easy task or a very difficult one and what you actually do to engage your surfers is something that you need to think about and test.

I'm not going to suggest ways that you might engage your surfers here because it's going to be something that each webmaster has to be comfortable with and there's no one solution that will fit every situation. Instead, as I just said, it's something you will need to think about and test to see what works for you.

And now I'm off to continue with the silliness that's been such a feature of my week.