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Jan. 15, 2007 at 7:37pm Eastern by Danny Sullivan

SearchCap: The Day In Search, Jan. 15, 2007

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web:

From Search Engine Land:

• Greg Linden Mothballs Findory
  I never got into Greg Linden's Findory service much. Now after three years, he's announced the personalized information service is effectively being mothballed. What's there should keep working, but he has no plans to expand or improve the service further. I may not have used Findory much, but I've continued to be impressed on Greg's thoughts on search and personalization that he shares via his personal blog. Best of luck, Greg, on whatever you do next....
• SEO Blogs Under Hack Attack
  First Graywolf's blog was hacked, then I just found Stuntdubl has gone down when I was about to send some link love his way. I'll hold that for tomorrow. They're not the only ones. The culprit is over here and writes (NOTE: Links no longer work as this WordPress hosted account was promptly suspended for violating the terms of service):...
• More Spotting Google's Related Searches At Bottom Of Page
  Last month, we reported how Google was testing related searches at the bottom of search results pages, which Google's Matt Cutts confirmed in comments on our post. In the past few days, I've seen a flood of further posts about related searches as more and more people spot these. Yes, they do seem to be more noticeable and frequently appearing. I've been getting them myself over the past two days. You get a series of eight suggested searches as links, under the heading of "Searches related to:" followed by the original word you searched for....
• Googlers Give Overwhelmingly To Democrats; Google's PAC Gave More To Republicans
  Google contributes thousands to conservatives from USA Today looks at how while 98 percent of Google employee money went to Democrats in the last election, the company-controlled Google NetPAC gave 61 percent of its contributions to conservative candidates. Then again, donations of $31,000 were tiny and the "company" PAC has donations that come almost entirely from only seven employees, hardly feeling that much like a real company effort....
• Looking At Microsoft's Continued Long Game In Search
  Hooked on Google from the San Jose Mercury News revisits a theme from Microsoft that I've reported to readers over the years. That's how Microsoft's failure to beat Google in search -- despite millions in spending -- gets the "it's early days, give us time" defense from Microsoft. The defense is partially true, but it gets weaker and weaker as the actual years of saying that mount....
• Hacking Google To Help It Improve Security
  Last Friday, Philipp Lenssen wrote a fascinating post describing how his associate Tony Ruscoe was able to access Philipp's Google account: "It’s your worst nightmare – someone reads parts of your Google emails, views your docs, modifies your spreadsheets, checks out your reading habits on the Google personalized homepage or Google Reader, and goes through your search history." Tony's a white-hat hacker, so he reported his exploit to Google's security team, and they've now closed the hole that allowed this to happen. Today, Tony explains what he did and how he thinks Google fixed the problem in Details of Google’s...
• Microsoft Live & Yahoo Push For Firefox Users, Plus Revisiting The IE7 Search Battle
  Today I noticed Live.com trying to get me to search with it in Firefox. Then Yahoo did the same thing. So I guess a new round of "let's change search defaults" is going on within Firefox. That seemed a good excuse for a revisit how the various search engines are trying to pull us as their default choices in both Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox....
• Study Says Get In Top 5 Not Top 10 & Search Engines May Need To Highlight Official Sites
  On Friday, we reported briefly on a new eye tracking study from Microsoft on how users interact with search results. I spent some time doing a deep dive into the survey, which is full of interesting information. Among the findings is that search marketers may need to be more concerned about getting into the top five rather than the top ten, if they want to be seen. In addition, search engines might want to seriously experiment more with adding "official site" links at the top of their pages and possibly enlarge the size of listing descriptions or "snippets" to help...
• New Year's Resolution: Know Your Inbound Link Potential!
  So what's your linking strategy for 2007? I mean besides get as many as possible? Maybe you're adding link bait? Or buying links? Or ramping up your link-loaded "press releases" to six per month?  Buying old sites and 301'ing them? Or maybe you want to get to the Digg homepage? Reciprocals? Three ways? Ask your college kid for a link from his .edu page? Outsource it all? Or how about this? Works for me. Whatever your linking strategy -- and there are many -- one thing has not changed a bit in the 14 years I've been in the link...
• Link Week: New Column From Search Engine Land
  I'd like to welcome Eric Ward who kicks off Link Week today, a regular weekly column from Search Engine Land. Eric's has been both building links as a professional over the past 14 years and educating people about the space over that time. We're thrilled to have him writing for us. Link Week is the first of several other columns that will be launching on Search Engine Land over the coming weeks. I'll provide an introduction for each one of them, as they launch....

Search News Headlines From Elsewhere:

• A Collection of Web Resources For Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day 2007, ResourceShelf
• Special Search Engine Logos for Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day 2007, ResourceShelf
• Podcast: Search Engines Push For IE & Firefox Loyalty; Forget The Top 10, You Need The Top 5 & More, Daily SearchCast
• Lycos Patent Lawsuit Threatens Use of Suggestive Search, PaidContent.org
• Research Paper: Making Video Search Better, ResourceShelf
• Yahoo Search Replacing Site Titles in Search Results Listings, Search Engine Roundtable
• SEO Benefits from Blogs, Online Marketing Blog
• The holidays were kind to Google and AOL but not so for the rest of the pack, Compete Blog
• Megite : Interview with Matthew Chen of Megite.com, Search Engine Journal
• Google Maps Flight Simulator, Google Operating System
• Chris Sherman Webcast: Measuring Search Success 2007, 10e20
• Game search engine Wazap raises $7.9M, to launch in U.S., VentureBeat
• I'm Not a Click. I'm Not a Keyword. I'm a Person, ClickZ
• Advertising Placements by Industry and Top Sponsored Links, December 2006, ClickZ
• Google Maps "Drops" Martin Luther King Way, Google Blogoscoped
• Google Cache Locks Browser (Almost), Google Blogoscoped
• AOL Announces Recommended All Cash Offer for TradeDoubler, AOL Press Release
• AOL Offers To Buy European Online Marketing Firm TradeDoubler For $900 Million, PaidContent.org
• AOL-TradeDoubler Deal Faces Opposition From Key Shareholder, PaidContent.org
• AOL Bids for Sweden's TradeDoubler, Wall Street Journal
• Napster Buys AOL Music: What’s Next?, TechCrunch
• SponsoredReviews is Launching Soon, Sponsored Reviews
• Smart Spam via .EDU Link, Greed and Stanford Site Exploit, Search Engine Journal
• Bebo poaches Google exec, The Register
• Terrorists 'use Google maps to hit UK troops', Daily Telegraph
• Doctor Finds Cure In Google Scholar, WebProNews
• Interview with Brett Crosby, from Google Analytics, Google Operating System
• Andy Beard Toolbar Buttons, Online Marketing Blog
• Israeli PM Gets The Google Bomb, WebProNews
• Yahoo’s Forays Into Online Cartoons, PaidContent.org
• Google boss in NZ 'on holiday', Stuff.co.nz
• DMOZ Is Accepting Submissions Again, Search Engine Roundtable
• (Mid-) January Smart Answers , Ask.com Blog
• Moving From Bloglines To Google Reader, V7N
• Michael Fagan Updates Image Search Portion of FaganFinder, ResourceShelf
• Acronym Finder’s Mike Molloy Profiled in Wall Street Journal, Zip Codes and Postal Codes Added to Database, ResourceShelf
• Digg’s Reality Distortion Field, The Mu Life
• Abusing Digg To Google Bomb The RIAA, The Mu Life
• Digg.com’s Big Yellow Dot, The Mu Life
• C.K. Sample III Resigns From Netscape.com (And AOL), The Mu Life
• Digg.com’s Lesser Known RSS Features, The Mu Life
• Making your content Del.icio.us, Pronet Advertising
• Top Domain Sales Of 2006: Complete Wastes, InsideGoogle
• Reader Poll: Best SEM Conferences, Online Marketing Blog
• Google Releases FUSE For Mac OS X, InsideGoogle
• RSS Tools and Services - The Best Picks From Sharewood, Robin Good
• MSNDude Speaks Again, Search Engine Roundtable
• Studying the User Behavior of Non-Human Web Searchers, SEO By The Sea
• A media search party to last all year, The Australian
• Google Talk to Interoperate with AIM This Year, Google Operating System
• British Newspapers Optimize for Google—and Pay Google, Just to Make Sure, PaidContent.org
• Google's Paid Inclusion Model, SEO Book
• Google Base - The Comparison Shopping Story of Q1 2007, ComparisonEngines.com
• YAHOO: Sunnyvale's parking problem, Valleywag
• Did Gmail's Spam Filtering Freak Out This Week?, Jeremy Zawodny
• WWGS: Is SEO rocket science?, Small Business SEM
• Not Search Engine Spam, Apogee Weblog
• How to Optimize your Search Engine Snippets, SoloSEO
• Cache Date as the New Google PageRank, SEO Book
• Women of Internet Marketing Wednesdays Part 5, Search Marketing Gurus

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