SearchCap: The Day In Search, August 3, 2007

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Aug. 3, 2007 at 4:10pm Eastern by Barry Schwartz

SearchCap: The Day In Search, August 3, 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:

Search in Pictures: Twitter Tanning, Google Camping, Yahoo Biking
In this week's Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have and more....
Google Universal Search Means Looking For Raccoons Is No Longer Family Friendly
A reader tipped me off to this. Search for raccoon, and Google Universal Search puts some pictures up at the top of the page: See it? Third one over? I didn't know a dog and a raccoon could, well......
Search Wikia Gets Open Source Categorization Software
Hot on the heels of last week's acquisition of the Grub open source crawler technology, Wikia announced today that Intellisophic has agreed to make its categorization software available via open source in conjunction with the Search Wikia project. From the press release:...
Google Building Out Non-US Maps Data With Users
Brady Forrest at O'Reilly Radar reports on Google's GPS-based "crowdsourcing" strategy to get local data on Maps outside the US (specifically in India). While Google has enormous amounts of data for the US and EU, in selected countries there's much less data to plot on Maps. Accordingly Google is relying...
Searcharazzi: Forget the GPhone, we want the new GCar
Or at least Google license plates. You might remember the English bloke who tried to sell some plates for tens of thousands in 2005. Well, this Swedish guy has most certainly one-upped anyone else out there with his brand spanking new Google license plates on what looks like a...
AdSense For Domains Opt Out Coming To AdWords Advertisers
I reported at the Search Engine Roundtable that Google has said they will be allowing AdWords advertisers to opt out of the AdSense for Domains product. I quoted AdWordsAdvisors2 from a WebmasterWorld thread as saying: We are working on making it simpler for advertisers who don't want to show on...
Building Ask's Traffic: It's The Toolbar, Stupid!
Can Zwinky Save Ask? from the New York Times reports that the real winner in growing Ask.com's search volume growth is their FunWebProducts division. The division launched a product named Zwinky.com that enables people to create avatars of themselves online. They then place these avatars throughout their social network pages....
Ask's Michael Ferguson: Optimize For Content Rich SERPs
This week kicks off the first of our guest writers on Just Behave. This week, I'm pleased to welcome Michael Ferguson from Ask.com. Michael is senior user experience analyst for Ask.com, looking at how people seek, acquire, and act on information. He informs product development with user context and...
Answers.com Loses Significant Google Traffic Despite Google Definition Links
Pretty amazing -- Answers.com has issued a press release to warn that its search traffic is down 28 percent due to "a search engine algorithmic adjustment by Google." It raises lots of issues -- how dependent should you be on search traffic; how the "definitions" links that Answers.com has from...