Steep holiday discounts and bargain hunting boosted Black Friday sales, but a dour economic outlook leaves analysts skeptical that Americans will be able to sustain their buying frenzy for the duration of the holiday season. Spending over the four-day Thanksgiving weekend rose 7.2% from a year ago to about $41 billion, according to the National Retail Federation (NRF). However, a shorter holiday shopping season and frugal shoppers could soon drive retail sales back down to their pre-holiday lows. “Pent-up demand on electronics and clothing, plus unparalleled bargains on this season’s hottest items helped drive shopping all weekend,” said NRF President and CEO Tracy Mullin. “Holiday sales are not expected to continue at this brisk pace, but it is encouraging that Americans seem excited to go shopping again.” The NRF continues to forecast a mild 2.2% jump in holiday sales, the smallest ...

Local.com is a leading local search engine and the largest local search network in the United States. Powered by the company’s patent-pending Keyword DNA™ and local web indexing technologies, Local.com provides users with targeted, relevant local search results. The company provides over 17 million consumers each month with the most relevant search results for local businesses, products and services on Local.com and over 700 regional media sites. Businesses can target ready-to-purchase consumers using a variety of advertising products including subscription, pay per click, banner and pay per call ad products. Local.com consistently ranks in the Top 100 in U.S. website traffic according to Internet research firm, comScore.

During the 17th annual Conference on Information and Knowledge Management event, Local.com will be presenting a paper titled, “Experiences in Crawling Deep Web in the Context of Local Search,” that explores the process of crawling and extracting structured data from a wide variety of

...

Technical picture shows Google (GOOG) shares returned back above 200 days moving average. This confirms growing trend giving nice signal to long term investors. Open long position with stop loss on level of 200 MA.Main fuel for Google share were Yahoo (YHOO) - Microsoft (MSFT) - Google (GOOG) deal news together with latest ComScore (SCOR) statistics. Numbers indicate 20% growth in paid clicks. Total clicks growth is 28%. Better than expected data includes only US clicks.It's still in our mind last ComScore report before Google's Q1. Nevertheless ComScore released slower growth for US clicks, Google posted very good Q1 results which lifted stock. Mainly due to growth outside of US.Coming back, good US paid clicks rate altogether with possible outstanding global growth. It could be good time to think about Google.http://stockweb.blogspot.com/atom.xml

...

Coming back to the latest statistics released by ComScore in mid of April. It shows the biggest growth in searching for Google among heavily used engines. Month on month the change is +12%. But total winner is Craigslist with 16%. This is very good result for Craigslist. It generates now almost one third of search queries on AOL. Company Mar 08 (MM) MOM growth Google Sites 8,267 12% Yahoo! Sites ...