Today ChaCha launched a powerful new mobile initiative. The human-powered search engine’s service is called textChaCha. WebProNews Reporter Abby Prince sat down with Brad Bostic, ChaCha’s President and Co-Founder. Bostic explains how their service sets them apart from the other search engines. Rob Enderle, Principal Analyst for the Enderle Group, reviewed the service and gave us his perspective on it. For more information, tune in to the full story, only on WebProNews.

Online auction sellers, take notice. The IRS may start asking eBay and other auction sites to report the gross sales their users make each year. People are supposed to report the income they earn from their online sales, and the IRS thinks not everyone may be doing so. The San Francisco Chronicle said President Bush wants to have the definition of “broker” expanded to cover sites like eBay. As of today, online auction sites don’t fall under that definition. One big group of eBay sellers, the Professional eBay Sellers Alliance, isn’t worried. Their marketing chairman, David Yaskulka, said, “Every professional seller I’ve ever talked to pays their taxes and has no problem with anyone finding out about the level of business they’re doing.”

Advertisers love the idea of having their marketing appear in video and mobile search. But many of them aren’t willing to pay a premium price for it. A new survey by the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization said that two out of five marketers want to pay the same for video ads as they do for traditional search advertising. Mobile ads have less appeal right now, with more than half of those surveyed saying they will not pay a premium for them. Kevin Lee, member of the Board of Directors of SEMPO and chair of its Research Committee, compared video and mobile advertising to the early years of cable TV and pay per click ads. Once upon a time, no one wanted to buy those either.

Google has had its ups and down in South Korea. They have been slowly gaining more users for their search and Gmail services in the country. Google has gained much more attention from the Korean government’s Fair Trade Commission, which recently told Google to change a number of clauses in its AdSense contract. Those clauses violate fair trade laws in Korea, like one that allows Google to refuse participation to any AdSense network member at any time at Google’s whim. Google’s office in South Korea told the Commission they will revise the offending clauses. The country has a fast-growing online ad market that should top one billion dollars in spending this year, and Google does not want to be shut out of that.

Jason Calacanis plans to embrace S-E-O. This might be a surprise to you considering his latest rant about S-E-O, where he called ninety percent of the industry a bunch of “snake oil salesmen.” But a challenge from Neil Patel at Pronet Advertising may make Jason rethink his stance. Neil said he can take Jason’s blog, increase his daily search traffic, and do so without being shady or unethical. Jason accepted and that’s quite a turnaround from the man who said, “Don’t smoke the S-E-O crack.”

Jason found his rant against S-E-O dismantled when a name everyone in the search industry knows took him on. Danny Sullivan posted a long response to Jason’s rant, and gave us some of the juiciest quotes outside of a Paris Hilton - Lindsay Lohan catfight, like this one:

“…you and other thought-leaders are often too ignorant and too lazy to fully understand something you want to attack. Rather than educate, you toss out linkbaiting, flame-producing lines that do nothing to solve the problems you perceive.”

Jason responded to this by backing off a little from his rant and saying he’s just talking about fringe SEO players, not the majority of good ones that attend Danny’s conferences. Gee Jason, thanks for clarifying that now.

It looks like eBay and PayPal are more than a little scared of Google and its Checkout service. Google has been offering a ten-dollar bonus to people who sign up for Checkout. PayPal doesn’t want to be left behind, so they’re dangling a fifteen-dollar rebate in front of people. Jason Calacanis, yes, we’re still talking about him, called the promotion a “dog fight for customers.”

Mobile E-S-P-N is coming back, even though just about nobody wanted it the first time. But this time they promise they have everything figured out. Verizon will help E-S-P-N come back to people’s pockets as part of their V Cast service. Only about thirty thousand people picked up MobileE-S-P-N when it was available as a stand-alone service. Engadget’s Thomas Ricker quipped that:

“MobileESPN is back from the dead sheriff…This must be what the execs at Verizon had in mind when they passed on the iPhone. Braaaaains, give us your brains!”

The success of Google has inspired a lot of new search engine startups. An article at OEDb created a list of their “Top 25 Web 2.0 Search Engines”. Many of the new search engines mash together other online services using programming tools like Ajax.

A good example of this is FlickrStorm, which gives the searcher a new … more interesting way to search for Flickr images.

Will one of these search engines become the next billion-dollar internet darling?

Speaking of new search engines, PowerSet will announce today according to VentureBeat that “they have won exclusive rights to significant search technology that may propel it past Google”.

The technology developed at the Palo Alto Research Center in Silicon Valley will enable PowerSet to better interpret natural language … which has long been considered the holy grail for search engines.

With this technology, instead of tossing out common words such as “the”, “in” and “of” like Google … PowerSet will utilize those words to understand searches and content which it then believes will provide much better search results.

Will Google become the next AltaVista? … probably not… but if the short history of the internet means anything … Google will eventually be challenged by a search engine with better search technology… Will PowerSet be the one?

It’s February, and everyone knows what’s coming up next week. I’m sure you’ve been thinking about it too, but if you haven’t, it isn’t too late to get ready for the big day. And it’s not just the men out there I’m talking too, because I’m sure a lot of ladies need to be reminded.

Tuesday the Thirteenth is Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday, and in their advance announcement, Chris Budd of their Security Response Center said there will be updates for Windows and Office, along with other fixes. So mark your calendars. Oh, and Wednesday is Valentine’s Day, you might want to mark that down too.

Are you a two-timing jerk? If so, Google can help. According to a poll conducted by Google and Harris Interactive, over half of US adults buy gifts for more than one Valentine - though most say the other one is their mother or their dog.

Sure it is, fellas. You better hope your lady can’t hack your email and find your order confirmations.

Also, 43 percent of survey respondents planned to buy more than one Valentine’s Day gift for that special someone or someones in their life, probably to try and make up for being a double-dipping a-hole.

So to help out with that made-for-marketing holiday, Google is offering Checkout users $10 off purchases of $10 or more through February 15th - you know for all the day-too-late cheapskates out there.