AskEraser, Yahoo Increases Support & A Facebook Upgrade

Ask Gives Users Control With AskEraser

There’s lots of buzz today regarding Ask.com’s launch of AskEraser, a new (and very welcome) feature will allow Ask.com users to search anonymously.

If you head over to Ask.com right now (you know you want to) you’ll see a link for AskEraser in the top right hand navigation. Clicking on that link will allow you to activate the feature.

Once enabled, AskEraser will no longer keep track of your search queries or the information related to them. They won’t keep any reference to things like your IP address, User IDs, Session IDs or the actual text used for the query. Unless you go ahead and manually disable it, Ask will hold on to this setting for 24 months.

It’s probably worth noting that when AskEraser is enabled, you won’t have access to personalization options like the fancy home page skins or your MyStuff. So, if you’re a big personalization junkie or emotionally attached to your MySTuff folder, you may or may not want to activate this feature. It’s a decision every surfer must make for themselves: What is more important – search with pretty trees in the background or protecting your privacy on the Web?

Andy Beal exhibited just a touch of Susan’s killjoy mentality when he asked "what’s the difference" considering Ask.com holds only 5 percent of the market share? It’s a valid question. Clearly, the announcement would have more pizzazz if it was Google making it, but the fact is, Google hasn’t made it. Neither Google, nor Yahoo, nor MSN, has agreed to give users the kind of privacy control as Ask.com has. And that’s both notable and worthy of praise. And of course, now that Ask.com has stepped up to the place, it somewhat pushes the hand of Google and the rest of the engines to do the same.

On the other side of the coin, Seth Godin makes a good argument that searchers don’t truly care about privacy. It’s worth a read.

Yahoo Adds Support for X-Robots Tag Directive

I’m a little slow to report this one, but my BFF Tamar made sure I saw the news that Yahoo is now supporting four types of exclusion tags in the robots.txt file. The four new additions are: [drum roll please]

• X-Robots-Tag: NOINDEX — If you don’t want to show the URL in the Yahoo! Search results.
• X-Robots-Tag: NOARCHIVE — If you don’t want to display cache link in the search results page.
• X-Robots-Tag: NOSNIPPET — If you don’t want to display summary in the search results page.
• X-Robots-Tag: NOFOLLOW — If you don’t want Yahoo! to crawl links in the page.

Still Searching for Tamar Palgon on Facebook?

Well, if you are, you may actually find her now! Keri Morgret let the world know via Twitter that Facebook is now allowing users to offer up an alternative or maiden name to make it easier for users to search for them. To offer up an alternate name, head over the Relationship section of your profile information and enter it in.

A quick search for [Tamar Palgon], the unmarried version of our own Tamar Weinberg, shows it’s already working.

Yey for the married people! [I wonder if this would also work for nicknames. Can I put in "The Lisa"?]

Share Your Gmail Story

If you’ve logged into Gmail recently and see the link to Share Your Story, you may be wondering what that’s all about. Bigmouthmedia tells us that Google, along with One Laptop Per Child and UNICEF, has launched the new Stories platform as a way for people around world to share their stories about their experiences using the Internet.

You can learn more about how to get involved by visiting Google’s Stories portal page or reading through the Google Groups thread.

Fun Finds

The SEO 2.0 blog created a chart to illustrate the differences between traditional search engine optimization and SEO in the 2.0 world. Is it on point?

Nathan Weinberg shows us how to make a holiday card with any YouTube video. My favorite YouTube video of all time will always be the mom singing on the beach to Boyz II Men. What’s yours?

Lisa Barone is a writer, content marketer & VP of strategy at Overit Media. She's also a very active Twitterer, much to the dismay of the rest of the world.

See Lisa's author page for links to connect on social media.