Google opened more information for site publishers everywhere, with an update to their Webmaster Tools. Google’s Vanessa Fox said they now show the top one hundred anchor text phrases used in links to a website. Search expert Danny Sullivan praised the shift from showing only keywords, and called phrases “datalicious, tasty, and helpful.”

Microsoft may be trading software for usage of its Live Search. Federated Media leader John Battelle said he received a tipoff about the plan for Microsoft’s large enterprise customers. The “Microsoft Service Credits for Web Search” would require usage of the IE 7 browser preset to Live Search. Big firms could earn hundreds of thousands of dollars of software from Microsoft if they join the program.

Research firm ComScore has announced support for a new way to measure how people engage websites. By using a ‘visits’ metric, they can show how many times a unique visitor accessed content on a site. Web programming techniques like Ajax have pushed the older ‘page views’ metric into being less reliable. ComScore’s first report on visits showed Yahoo as the top web property for February, with 128.6 million unique visitors.

Yahoo’s hire of former PubSub CEO Salim Ismail to head Yahoo’s Brickhouse incubator has received some criticism. Gawker Media publisher Nick Denton said on Valleywag that Yahoo needed to hire someone with real power, on the lines of Steve Jobs, instead of “another press-friendly conference-going schmoozer.” Current Brickhouse leader and Flickr cofounder Caterina Fake defended the hire, saying, “Salim is a great catch for us.”

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