An article talks about the opening up of Yahoo, both its embrace of open source and the company’s desire to open its platform to 3rd party developers. I have seen a lot of good things come out of Yahoo in the past couple of years, from Yahoo Site Explorer to Yahoo Pipes to Yahoo’s contributions to PHP, especially Unicode support in PHP 6.

The Search Monkey initiative looks very promising, and gives developers a lot of latitude in how they present their sites in the search results. Of course it will require individual users downloading your customizations, but for websites with dedicated users who also use Yahoo, I would think it would be fairly easy to get people to install your app.

I am interested to see what else Yahoo has up its sleeves. Sounds like the MS acquisition ballyhoo hasn’t stopped innovation at Yahoo; in fact, it may have done the opposite, as Yahoo sees the need to rapidly launch new products and increase the amount eyesballs and time spent on their site.

I logged into my Google Adsense account this morning and noticed earnings that were significantly higher than what is usually in there! The click through numbers were normal, but the CPM and Earnings were very high - are people bidding up terms for the Super Bowl or what? Do advertisers think people will flock to the search engines in anticipation and during the Super Bowl, and are willing to pay out big for one day?