The Star reports that Yellow Pages™ Group (YPG), based in Montreal, Quebec, Canada plans to introduce variable pricing in the not too distant future. They want to charge more in headings/keywords that give the advertiser a greater return on investment.

US publishers have been doing this for some time now and even though advertisers moan and groan about the increased pricing in “Premium Headings”, they continue to place their ads.

Comscore reports growth in IYP searches. Yellowbook was up 85% over Q1 2006 while Yellowpages Network’s numbers increased by 80% due in part to the addition of Switchboard.com’s traffic.

Both Yahoo! sites and Idearc Media (superpages.com) lost ground but still retained 47% of IYP searches between the 2 internet yellow pages properties.

Webmaster World reports that Yahoo’s site explorer tool may rank the links by a quality measure. You might disagree but site explorer is a handy tool to check your inbound links.

Google Webmaster Central Blog announced the addition of a new form to report paid links. Matt Cutts explains Google’s attitude towards paid links in an April 2007 blog entry; Sign in to Google’s webmaster console and use the spam report form. Add the term “paidlink” in the text area.

Since search engines have moved towards quality-based bidding, the debate over the usefulness of bid management ttools has escalated. One session at the Search Marketing Expo consisted of a debate on the issue. Search Engine Watch has the recap.

EARTHtimes reports that the latest survey from Wells Fargo says you will.

Two-thirds of small businesses said they would pay more for goods and services if they knew they were environmentally friendly.

I believe the intent of the small businesses in the survey is to do the right thing but let’s face it; if you have to pay more, you have to increase your prices.

The big question is, will your customers pay more? Unfortunately, we all know the answer to that one.

Searchboth.ca allows users to search Google Canada and Yahoo! Canada at the same time. You can view Google and Yahoo! on a split screen and compare the results.

Even on small screens, you can toggle back and forth between the results from both search engines without too much of an inconvenience.

Searchboth.ca has also launched Searchboth.co.uk and Searchboth.com.au.

Apple already allows you to run Windows XP in a virtual environment on your Mac. You get the best
of both worlds, the simplicity of using a Mac and access to software made only for a PC. Now, Apple has released a version of Safari (their web browser) that will run on Windows and on Mac OS X 10.5. You can discover more features of the new version of Safari at Macworld.

Gizmo Project“is a free internet phone for your computer.”
Gizmo Project has now added support for MSN Messenger and AIM (AOL Instant Messenger). You can call any Gizmo Project, Yahoo! Messenger, Google Talk or Windows Live users as well. Check out Macworld for detailed info.

BBC news reports that Privacy International rated Google as “hostile” in a report on how they handle personal data. Google, of course, disagrees and to be fair, Yahoo! and AOL were said to have “substantial threats” to privacy. Privacy International will release a more substantial report in September.