Search Month: February 2007 Search News, In Review

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Mar. 5, 2007 at 5:53pm Eastern by Danny Sullivan

Search Month: February 2007 Search News, In Review

Search Month is a monthly newsletter that recaps stories covered on Search Engine Land over the past month. It's also available by feed here. Below, news about Search Engine Land itself, then our 10 most popular stories written last month, then a major story for various search marketing topics along with other stories related to those topics.

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Search Engine Land News
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Search Engine Land has continued to grow in traffic and added three additional columns on search marketing topics since the last newsletter. Our sister site Search Marketing Now continues to run successful free search marketing webinars, with the next one on paid search happening this Thursday. In addition, we've just posted more news about the Search Marketing Expo conference series programed by Search Engine Land. Our first show SMX Advanced is set for June 4 & 5 in Seattle, with SMX Local & Mobile in Denver from Sept. 19-20 and SMX Social Media in New York from Oct. 16-17. More details on everything I've summarized can be found below:

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Our Top 10 Most Popular Stories
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1) Google Releases New Link Reporting Tools - For years, Google's link: command has deliberately failed to show all the links to a website. This came out of Google's fear that site owners simply wanted the data to try and manipulate rankings -- which was pretty true. Instead, they only provided a sampling of backlinks. Today, that changes. Google Webmaster Central is rolling out new support allowing you to view and even download thousands of links to your site.

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2) Squeezing The Search Loaf: Finding Search Engine Freshness & Crawl Dates - A reader emailed me today noticing that Google was showing a date next to his listing, which made me think this was a good time to revisit how, when and where search engines show crawl dates for pages. These dates are a useful way for site owners to understand how often they are being revisited or for anyone to "squeeze the loaf" of a search engine to see how fresh it is. Here's a search engine-by-search engine rundown on date display. I'll also cover how we've sadly lost crawl dates being embedded next to listings, over the years.

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3) Netvibes: Will Google Remain 'The Start Page For The Internet'? - Google has been dubbed the "start page for the Internet." But a "post-search" future may indeed be coming. I don't mean to imply that search will ever be obsolete; it won't. What I mean to suggest is that reliance on search and time spent with search may diminish as RSS feeds and other structured content delivery mechanisms are adopted by users. Enter Netvibes.

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4) Why The SEO Folks Were Mad At You, Jason - Jason Calacanis is riled up about SEO today, telling the world that "90% of the SEO market is made up of snake oil salesman" and still confused over why the "SEO folks" were mad at him when he said "SEO is bull" during our keynote conversation at SES Chicago last December. I love Jason. I really do -- he says what he thinks, with passion and clearly deeply cares about things. And I've enjoyed some of the arguments we've had via instant messaging on this topic recently. But Jason -- and a lot of other people -- need some more education about the myths and misperceptions of SEO. So let this open letter do both.

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5) Google Ramps Up Personalized Search - Google is stepping up the push into personalized search results. A new change announced today should cause many more people to take up the service. In turn, the growth of personalized search should have a dramatic impact on search marketers as the days of "same results, all around" eventually come to an end. For searchers, the change means needing to be more careful about when you sign-up to use a Google service, if you're concerned about having your search history recorded.

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6) 3 Ranking Survival Tips For Google's New Personalized Results - Personalized search at Google is now the default and none too easy to escape from either through opt-out. This means that every search result you click, every link you bookmark, every RSS feed you subscribe to using Google services can be used to improve your personal search results. For search marketers, it means new skills and techniques are needed to achieve search visibility.

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7) Diggers Can't Handle The Truth (About SEO) - It's been a busy day, with me trying to provide some more balance and education about search engine optimization in today's "Why The SEO Folks Were Mad At You, Jason" article. About two hours ago, I noticed it drew the attention of those on Digg. It jumped to the Tech News popular page, in fact. And about 30 minutes after that, it was gone. Gone? Flagged as spam by some, which seems to be a euphemism for some on Digg to mean "I just don't like a story that I didn't bother to read." Let's see some of the ignorance and absurdity, shall we?

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8) Google AdWords Quality Score Has Major Bug - There is a bug that makes good performing ads prices spike through the roof with Google AdWords. Many are seeing high quality ads and keywords hit with incredibly high CPC prices overnight. Google replied to several advertisers telling them they are aware of the "temporary issue" and "they are working to resolve it as soon as possible."

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9) Wikipedia Enters Top Ten Most Visited Sites - Impressive. Scanning the latest top web sites rankings from comScore for January 2007 , Wikipedia sites are highlighted for just entering the top ten most visited. OK, technically -- they're in the top ten for having the most unique visitors. In December 2006, Wikipedia sites were ranked 13th of all US web properties, with 39 million unique visitors.

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10) Google Customized Search Engines to Harness The Wisdom of Experts? - Back in October, 2006, Google announced on the Official Google Blog that they were enabling people to create their own custom search engines. If you asked yourself why they were doing this, and how it might provide benefits to individual site owners, searchers as a whole, and Google itself, there are some answers that came out yesterday at the US Patent Office...

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Ask.com
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Search Love Triangle: Ask.com Wants Those Looking For Yahoo.com On Google.com - It's not new for search engines to advertise on other search engines. We wrote about Live.com doing that on Google earlier this year, and that was just the latest in a long line of examples over the years. But we've never heard of a search engine advertising for those seeking another search engine on a third search engine until now. The screenshot above explains it all. It's a search for yahoo.com on Google, bringing up an ad from Ask.com. Ask -- going after Yahoo users who are searching for Yahoo at Google. See also:

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Digg
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Digg's Kevin Rose Fails To Stop The Bury Brigade - After a week of questions about Digg's "Bury Brigade," Digg founder Kevin Rose has come in with some public comments about the system and the "alleged" brigade. Unfortunately, they're just comments -- not solutions to protect Digg from the actual brigade I myself can see. More about that in the article below, plus how buries work and can be misused. See also:

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Business & Revenues
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Baidu 4th Quarter Profits Quintupled - Reuters reports that Baidu's fourth quarter profits "soared 400 percent." Baidu's fourth quarter net income increased to "122.8 million yuan (US$15.7 million), or 3.54 yuan (45 cents) per diluted share, compared with the year-earlier quarter's 24.5 million yuan, or 0.71 yuan per diluted share." But they expect revenue to "decelerate sharply" in the first quarter of 2007. See also:

SideStep Raises $15 Million

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Feeds
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The Numbers Behind Your Feeds - FeedBurner's View of the Feed Market at FeedBurner's blog gives us a detailed look at the numbers and statistics behind your feeds. With the recent adoption of Google Reader subscriber numbers, many bloggers have seen their "subscribers" and other feed stats spike up. In fact, we learn from FeedBurner's post that overall; publishers noticed an increase in subscriber numbers by 53%! In short, the statistics behind our feeds show us just a small snippet of our true feed universe.

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Google: Apps
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Google Launches Fee Based Google Apps - As we expected, Google has launched a "Premier Edition" of Google Apps. Google Apps Premier Edition will give you everything standard Google Apps has plus the following features. See also:

Google Docs and Spreadsheets Tops Web Productivity Tools

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Google: AdSense
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Google AdWords To Show Advertisers Exactly Where Their Contextual Ads Are Displayed - If you are an advertiser running Google AdWords on the content network, the only way to know where those ads are being run is to dig through raw logs and extract the content site URLs from the massively long AdWords referral strings. But in an article in the New York Times about competitor Quigo, Kim Malone from Google has revealed that they will be listing all URLs where advertiser's ads are appearing. See also:

Google Ordered To Change AdSense Contract By South Korea's Watchdog

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Google: AdWords
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Google: Click Fraud Is 0.02% Of Clicks - Finally, we have a click fraud rate from Google itself: less than 0.02 percent of all clicks slip past its filters and are caught after advertisers request reviews. That low figure is sure to bring out the critics who will disagree. Below, more about how Google comes up with the figure plus some click fraud fighting initiatives it plans to implement later this year. See also:

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Google: Checkout
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Google Ads Getting New Google Checkout Badges - Since Google Checkout was launched last June, merchants in the program who also advertise on Google through Google AdWords have had little Google Checkout shopping cart icons in their ads. Today, Google Checkout announced the icon will be updated to a badge format similar to the Google Checkout buttons used by merchants since the program started. The image above shows the before-and-after look. See also:

Google Checkout Australia Coming Soon?

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Google: Custom Search
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Google Customized Search Engines to Harness The Wisdom of Experts? - Back in October, 2006, Google announced on the Official Google Blog that they were enabling people to create their own custom search engines. If you asked yourself why they were doing this, and how it might provide benefits to individual site owners, searchers as a whole, and Google itself, there are some answers that came out yesterday at the US Patent Office. See also:

Google Custom Search Engine Gets Supplemental Results

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Google: Employees
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Keane, Head Of Advertising Sales Strategy At Google Goes To CBS Interactive - CBS Interactive has named Patrick Keane their new Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer. Keane was previous Google's Head Of Advertising Sales Strategy. See also:

Sergey Brin's Story

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Google: Gmail
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Google Officially Opens Gmail To World - Google finally makes it official. Gmail is open to all. An announcement on the Official Google Blog confirms what everyone already discovered last week, that Gmail restrictions have been dropped. You still can invite friends and family to use Gmail, like you did before. However, invitations are no longer necessary to open an account. See also:

Google Sues Group Of Polish Poets Over Gmail.pl Name

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Google: News
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Google Loses In Belgium Newspaper Case - A Belgium court has found that Google did violate copyright when including material from several Belgian newspapers in its search index. Google may have to pay a fine, but the ruling is far more positive for the company. Google can continue to index content without explicit permission. See also:

Google News: Top Of Mind, Even If Not Top Of Traffic

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Google: Non-Search Ads
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Google Buying TV Scatter Units - Google is looking to hire a head of national TV sales in New York and dive into their TV ad play with "scatter inventory," ads that aren't sold well in advance. See also:

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Google: Personalized Search
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Google Ramps Up Personalized Search - Google is stepping up the push into personalized search results. A new change announced today should cause many more people to take up the service. In turn, the growth of personalized search should have a dramatic impact on search marketers as the days of "same results, all around" eventually come to an end. For searchers, the change means needing to be more careful about when you sign-up to use a Google service, if you're concerned about having your search history recorded. See also:

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Google: Revenues
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Google Releases 2006 Annual Report & Google Subsidiaries - Spotted via Resource Shelf, Google has released its annual report (more precisely, Securities & Exchange Commission form 10-K), with financials for the year, and a list of all of the company's subsidiaries, as well as details of Google's merger agreement with radio advertising placement firm dMarc. The subsidiaries list is particularly interesting because it discloses acquisitions that Google hasn't previously talked about, offering clues for potential projects or new services the company may be working on. See also

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Google: SEO Issues
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Google Webmaster Central Leaves Beta; Its Blog Gains Comments - Google Webmaster Central has officially come out of beta, about a year-and-a-half after Google Sitemaps -- core of the service later renamed Google Webmaster Central -- launched. See also:

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Google: Searching
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Google Images Reverts Back To Old Design - Last month Google redesigned Google Image Search. Now it looks like Google reverted back to the old design today. Overall, many people did not like the new design, and I guess Google decided to listen to those comments. See also:

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Google: Security
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Google Desktop Hole Exposed, Fixed - BusinessWeek reports that Google Desktop had a major defect that could have potentially enabled hackers to view personal files on a computer with Google Desktop installed. The hole was plugged February 1st, a few weeks after it was discovered by Watchfire Corp. Google says it has no evidence the vulnerability was exploited.

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Google: Video & YouTube
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YouTube Pulls Videos That May Not Violate DMCA Law - Friday I reported that Google said they would comply with a demand from Viacom to remove content from YouTube. But how did Viacom determine what was infringing? By way of Techmeme, Jim Moore reports his video of a Sunday night dinner seems to have been yanked due to Viacom simply searching for their trademarks, rather than actually viewing videos.

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Google: Other Products
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Listing Of Lists Of Google Products - Google has tons of products and services, they list some of their products here but there are many more. So I decided to compile a list of resources that list out many of Google products. See also:

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Google: Other Stuff
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Aaron Stanton Earns Meeting With Google? - A reader to a site the story of a guy named Aaron who wanted to meet with Google. Aaron had a business proposal, but his attempts to contact Google via phone or email did not work. So he decided to fly to Google, sit outside Google for several days, until someone at Google would agree to meet with him. See also:

Contact Google Via Legal Action: Texas School Left No Options?

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Legal
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Search Engines Do Not Have To Display All Ads Says Court - Eric Goldberg summarizes a court decision in Langdon v. Google (PDF) showing a court deciding how search engines do not have to display all ads. Langdon took Google to court to force Google to display ads that "attacked people." Reportedly, Langdon is a complainer or griper and he wanted to use search ads to air his complaints. The court ruled in favor of Google, "calling some of his claims "specious" and "frivolous." See also:

Free Speech Vs. Trademarked URLs & Keywords

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Link Building
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3 Jump-Start Methods For Passionate Linking - For a lot of people, link building is a drag. It's like going to the dentist or writing that tax check every quarter... you don't really want to do it but you know you have to. It's that drag factor that makes a lot of people look for short cuts and easy methods to hurry the process along and get maximum bang for the shortest buck. Unfortunately, if this is how you feel about linking, it will be difficult to communicate the kind of enthusiasm you need to entice customers and industry experts to link to you. See also:

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Local Search
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Google Local Search Algorithm Explored - Matt McGee's 10 Likely Elements of Google’s Local Search Algorithm explores what makes Google Local different from Google.com algorithmically. See also:

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Mapping
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Google Maps Tailgates Yahoo, Microsoft With Real-Time Traffic Info - Google Maps has caught up with Yahoo and Microsoft in adding live traffic reporting for the United States to their online mapping service. Google Operating System spotted the change today (and Google now has the official word up here). To see the traffic yourself, just go to Google Maps and click on the new "Traffic" button that you'll see in the upper right-hand corner of the map page, right before the "Map" and "Satellite" and "Hybrid" buttons. See also:

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Microsoft
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Interview with Microsoft Live Search's Justin Osmer - This week, I talk with Justin Osmer from Microsoft, a Senior Product Manager with the Online Services Group, which includes both MSN and Windows Live, including Windows Live Search. Obviously, the last few months have been busy ones at Microsoft, with the roll out of Windows Live and the transition from MSN Search. We talked about that, Microsoft's rebranding strategy for its search product and the reasons behind it, as well as where they plan to take search in the future. See also:

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Microsoft: adCenter
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New Usability Changes For Microsoft adCenter Beta - If you are an adCenter beta user, they have made some new changes to the account interface this past weekend. Most of the changes are from a usability standpoint, such as better navigation between campaigns and ad groups, the ability to import third party campaigns and remove poor performing keywords right on the keyword performance page. Microsoft has made a webinar of the changes here. See also:

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Mobile Search
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Mobile Search Still A Close Race - Google may dominate in web search, but it has only a slight lead over Yahoo in mobile search users, according to new stats from research firm M:Metrics. See also:

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Paid Search & Contextual
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Are You Putting Web Search Results at Risk with Paid Advertising? - If you bid on keywords for a term or phrase that you rank well for in a search engine, might your organic result be filtered in some instances, when your ad appears on the same page? A newly granted Microsoft patent is the first I recall seeing which discusses such a possible interaction based upon the appearance of paid listings and Web search listings for the same page (URL) on a single search engine results page. See also:

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Search Marketing Industry
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The State of Search Engine Marketing 2006 - Search marketing is thriving, according to SEMPO's annual "State of Search Engine Marketing" survey, with North American advertisers spending $9.4 billion on search engine marketing in 2006, a 62% increase over 2005 spending. SEMPO collected data on spending trends on paid placement, paid inclusion, organic search engine optimization (SEO)and SEM technology platforms.

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SEO
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YADAC: Yet Another Debate About Cloaking Happens Again - Sigh. Double sigh. Triple sigh. I guess now that the SEO industry has had the required twice-yearly debate about the reputation of SEO, it's time to do the go round about cloaking once again. A quick word about cloaking has Google's Matt Cutts trying to clarify concerns that Philipp Lenssen of Google Blogoscoped has been raising about WebmasterWorld. The comments are now up over 100, as people rehash things that have been hashed, mashed, rebaked so many times before. Below, some cloaking history plus an honest plea about trying to get past this stupid, stupid issue. See also:

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Searching
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The User Experience Interviews Recap: Search Strategies Compared - For the past three weeks we've let members of usability teams from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft talk about a user experiences on their respective sites. Today, I'd like to point out what was interesting in each of these three interviews. See also:

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Small Business
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Here's What's Different About Being Small - Last week's Small is Beautiful column asked, "What's So Different About Being Small?" The answer? Time. Money. Knowledge. Those are the three biggest challenges a small business must overcome to achieve search marketing success, and the three things that make small business search marketing unique. Many small businesses have one or two of those, but not the third. And some small businesses don't have any of the three, making their road to search success even harder to travel. Here's a quick look at each challenge in more detail. See also:

What's So Different About Being Small?

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Social Media
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Social Media Marketing Is Ethical! - There seems to be a lot of misconception that social media marketing isn't ethical. Almost daily, I come across bloggers who denounce SMM as spam or suggest that social media marketers are poisoning the community well. In reality, they either aren't properly educated or perhaps only see the "bad apples" of social media marketing. See also:

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Video Search
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Video Search Challenge Isn't Speech Recognition, It's Content Owner Management - "Millions of Videos, and Now a Way to Search Inside Them from the New York Times" is a big giant love story to video search firm Blinkx, suggesting that the idea of finding video content will take a leap through new idea of speech recognition. In reality, it's not a new idea. It's been in practice for years. And despite those years, it has failed to transform how we search for video on the web. That's because speech recognition video search is overrated, especially given the true challenge video search faces -- just getting the content centralized in the first place. See also:

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Yahoo: Employees
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Details On Yahoo's Advertiser & Publisher Group Leaked - Michael Arrington of Techcrunch has posted an email sent by Yahoo's CFO, Susan Decker, that she emailed all Yahoo employees yesterday on the topic of the new Advertiser & Publisher Group. In the email she explains how the group will be organized into "demand channels, supply channels and marketing products." See also:

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Yahoo: Paid Search
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New Panama Ranking System For Yahoo Ads Launches Today - Today, Yahoo will flip the switch for the new "Marketplace Design" algorithm in the US market, the system commonly known as Panama. Parts of Panama have already gone live in the past few weeks. But throughout today, Yahoo will be rolling out the last piece -- a new ranking algorithm and its associated new pricing mechanism. With the new ranking algorithm, Yahoo will move from its long-standing and original bid-to-position model (where those who pay the most rank first) to a system that takes bids, ad quality and other factors into consideration in determining how ads are ranked on search results pages (a system similar to that long used by Google). See also:

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Yahoo: SEO Issues
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Yahoo Provides NOYDIR Opt-Out Of Yahoo Directory Titles & Descriptions - The Yahoo Search Blog covers how at long last, you can now tell Yahoo to not use Yahoo Directory information to make a title and/or description for your web page listings. It also cover how Yahoo's currently doing a reindexing change that might impact rankings. More on that below, plus tips about also blocking the Open Directory information from being used for your pages and some possible conflicts with multiple robots tags. See also:

Yahoo To Redirect More Search Query Types Site Explorer

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Yahoo: Other
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Larry Cornett, Yahoo Director Of User Experience Design - This week I caught up with Larry Cornett, the relatively new Director of User Experience Design at Yahoo and Kathryn Kelly, Director of PR for Yahoo! Search. Again, to set the stage for the interview, here are some high level findings from our eye tracking study that I'll be discussing in more detail with Larry and Kathryn. See also:

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Search Engine Reviews & Mentions
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Searching For "The Next Google" - "Company X could be the next Google" is a platitude often bandied about by financial journalists or investment analysts touting typically obscure companies that could, potentially, score success on a Google-like scale. Most companies never come close to achieving Google's financial or commercial success, of course. But say you were interested in finding one of these semi-mythical firms—how would you go about it?

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Keyword Research And Consumer Demand - Kevin Delaney at the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) today has an interesting article that borrows a page from John Battelle's "database of intentions" idea of search as a kind of repository for consumer demand, buzz meter and perpetual focus group all in one.

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Krillion Launches 'Actionable Local Search' - Joining the ranks of a small but growing list of companies trying to connect online product research and offline buying, Krillion launched this morning. Other companies offering local product information to varying degrees in this segment are ShopLocal, StepUp, NearbyNow, Yokel, CNET, Froogle, Become.com and data provider Channel Intelligence.

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MojoPages: Whole Lotta Yelp, A Little YouTube - Even as several local search competitors have been forced to rethink or exit the space, others still see it as a big opportunity. And in fact it is, just one that's very hard to capture. The latest contestant to enter the race is San Diego, California-based MojoPages, which I wrote about briefly here but which officially launched today.

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Outside.in: Building The 'Hyper-Local' Internet - The awkward phrase "hyper-local" is now embedded in the discussion about local search. It's a phrase, for example, that online newspapers are using to describe their community strategies, and it's a phrase that I may unwittingly have coined in 2005 (if I did, I apologize) to describe a category of sites that were seeking to penetrate below the metro level to "surface" and generate content at the neighborhood and zip levels.

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Pagebull - A Visual Internet Search Engine - Pagebull is a visual search engine in the sense that it displays search results simply by visually displaying page thumbnails, highlighting the term(s) searched on.

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Quintura Relaunches With New Interface - Quintura recently relaunched with a new interface, which has been receiving a fair amount of comment. I originally wrote about the search engine back in November, and I was fairly lukewarm in my praise of it; while it was a nice idea, the interface held it back. Well, the relaunched version is now much better, with the tag cloud appearing on the left hand side of the screen, with results appearing in the right hand side.

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Spotplex's "Trafficracy" Could Beat Digg But Probably Won't - Will today's launch of Spotplex be the beginning of the end for Digg? Probably not, but this new social media site might prove a more civilized "trafficracy" alternative to the mob democracy of Digg.

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Sproose - A Social Search Engine - Sproose is another social search engine where you get to vote for your favourite websites/pages, and to that extent it's very similar to previous social search engines that I've looked at recently. It's got the double 'o' in the name which always helps, and uses terminology that sounds familiar, such as 'Knowledge Rank technology'. However, to entirely dismiss it quickly would be something of an injustice, since a lot of work has gone into it.

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Widgipedia: A Widgets Supersite - Fond of Yahoo Widgets or Google Gadgets? A new site called Widgipedia.com lets you search and browse for web and desktop-based mini-applications across a number of different platforms.

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You Hum It, These Search Engines Claim They'll Find It - Recently a couple of search engines have come to my attention that are designed to allow you to hum a few bars of a tune into them, and then they'll tell you what the song is. These are Midomi and Humming Search from Nayio. That's the promise; the reality was disappointing.

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Fun, Strange, Odd & Etc.
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Search Rises Above Porn In U.K. Visits - Hitwise reports that search engines have overtaken adult sites in share among U.K. internet users.

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Top 25 Web 2.0 Start Ups To Watch - The Next Net 25 by Business 2.0 ranks the top 25 up and coming Web 2.0 for this year. Here is the ordered list:

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Pew Research: Wireless Internet Grows - Amid an increasing body of consumer research showing that more Americans are using their mobile devices for more than just voice, The Pew Internet Project surveyed 1,623 U.S. adult Internet users in December, 2006. The survey broadly asked about wireless Internet access, whether on desktops, laptops or mobile phones.

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Google's Pen Flatlines For Ask, Parody Of Recent Capacity Problems - The Ask.com Blog made me laugh with their The Latest Google Flatline post. In that entry, Ask.com writes about the recent Google capacity issues reported at Techcrunch and describes how it is so true. In fact, they say that when they were using a Google pen, and it "ran out of ink without warning." They described the flat-lining of the Google pen to cause "considerable inconvenience and loss of data." See also:

Google Ink Sends Ask.com New Google Pen

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Searcharazzi: Global Edition; GSI Acquired - Searcharazzi asks: Sprechen Zie Deutsch? Webmaster Radio reports that a slew of German SEOs has flooded its chat room in recent weeks, leaving many an English-speaking SEO to curse his lack of foreign language skills. Up to 160 German-speakers are now showing up on Tuesday afternoons when Marcus “Mediadonis” Tandler’s podcast commences in the evening across the pond. See also:

Searcharazzi, Feb. 16, 2007: SEMPO Elections, The US Elections & SEO-PPC Warfare

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Kudos To National Pork Board For Apologies & Fundraising Efforts - One more on the entire National Pork Board going up against search marketer and breastfeeding activist Jennifer Laycock. Jennifer has now received two letters of apology, plus the National Pork Board is backing a fundraising campaign for the Mother's Milk Bank Of Ohio. Good move, National Pork Board!

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The Google X Prize Gala: What You Missed - Out of this world gala at Google by SFGate.com reports on the X Prize Foundation fundraiser that Google host this past Saturday. Who was there? Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin with respective girlfriends. The Getty family. Richard Branson of Virgin; Robin Williams; NFL legend Ronnie Lott; Tipper Gore; Arianna Huffington; California Attorney General Jerry Brown; Lars Ulrich of Metallica, singer Rufus Wainwright and many many more were there. The attendance was about 400 or so, raising more than $2 million.

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Rand Fishkin's Belated SuperBowl Proposal Gets A Yes - Have you been wondering who the mystery guy was behind plans to pop the question to his girlfriend during a SuperBowl commercial last Sunday? Now you know -- search marketer Rand Fishkin. Rand's plans for the SuperBowl announcement didn't happen, so it was backup plan time -- a commercial during one of her favorite shows last night, Veronica Mars. And yeah, he got a yes :) You can see Rand's proposal on video.

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