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Well, it is Search Engine Strategies week this week, and true to form there were some significant announcements made during this industry get together.

Aside from the free flowing alcohol at the Google Dance, there was some real news to report.

All the major search engines are working at making their contextual ad programs more relevant to the content near which the ads are displayed.  Yahoo! also announced, at the same time, that their Contextual program – LinkSpots, which began testing in 2003, will be rolling out soon.  “After testing this pretty extensively, you’re going to see this roll out in Yahoo Music and more spots,” said Barry Chu, senior manager, product development for Yahoo Content Match.

In other paid search related news, MSN has announced that it’s paid program - MSN Keywords – will be going live in October.  This will mean that all 4 major search engines will have their own paid advertising program.  Microsoft says the advantage to their program is the many different ways advertisers can slice and dice the data including correlating demographic data to the clicks.

Google has also made some announcements regarding it’s paid advertising program.  The company plans to allow AdSense customers more control not only over the layouts of the ads, but some more control over the ads which are displayed.  through the use of heading and font tags, a webmaster can let Google know what content is more important, therefore signaling the types of ads which should be placed.

In other Google news, it’s been a long time coming.  According to the Google Blog, Google is now allowing wildcards (denoted as “*”) in their queries.  You know, I don’t know why it took so long, but I’m really glad to see this.

Finally today, Yahoo has finally released the long anticipated Yahoo Instant Messenger with VOIP (Voice Over IP) technology.  That means you can now speak to other Y! IM users.  And if you aren’t home to receive your call, the system even has built in voice mail!  The new IM client can be downloaded for free at the Yahoo! Website.