SearchCap: The Day In Search, February 18, 2008

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

From Search Engine Land:

Hitwise: Google Users Older, Bigger Spenders Than Yahoo’s
Hitwise performed an interesting demographic analysis last week, comparing the breakdown of Google and Yahoo search users. What it found was that Google users skew older than Yahoo search users, bucking some of the conventional wisdom in the market about the relative composition of their audiences. Google users are also…
Yahoo Buzz: Next Digg Competitor
Valleywag has screen captures of a new Yahoo web site, reportedly launching February 26th, named Yahoo Buzz Beta. Yahoo Buzz will be similar to Digg, but will start only with a 100 sites allowed into the system. After the initial beta period, all sites that are accepted into the Yahoo…
Blueprints Of Google’s Oregon Data Center
Harper’s Magazine has a spread showcasing a blueprint of Google’s Oregon data center in The Dalles. The article documents the data center at 68,680 square-feet with three buildings, two that are currently completed. The data center would require enough power to light up about 82,000 homes, equivalent to 103-megawatts of…
Google Helps In Child Porn Bust In United States
Former Batesburg-Leesville High teacher indicted in internet bust from WISTV.com reports a high-school teacher was indicted for distributing and soliciting child pornography on Google owned, Hello.com. Hello.com is a site that allows users to chat in real-time while exchanging photos. Timothy Lynn Brumit, a 47-year old high school teacher in…
It’s The Culture Stupid: Happy Googlers Sound Off On What They Like About The Place
Last week I spent about an hour and a half at Google’s New York offices talking to John Burke, Director of Industry Development and Marketing. Burke works for Tim Armstrong and has been at Google since 2002 (read: pre-IPO). He seems as enthusiastic as ever about the place. My intention…
Google 10K: 55% More Employees, 99% Of Income Via Ads & More
paidContent.org reported on Google’s recent 10-K filing with the SEC this past Friday. paidContent summarized some of the key details in that filing, I will summarize only a few points from paidContent’s article:…
Google Contractor Sues Google Over Google Sky Layer
Lawsuit claims Google stole idea for Sky layer in Earth from News.com reports a Google contractor named Jonathan Cobb is suing Google for allegedly stealing a Sky layer idea from him. Sky layers are data in both graphical and textual form that are used in Google Earth. Jonathan Cobb filed…
Micro-hoo, AOL-hoo, Goog-hoo: The Internet Yellow Pages Perspective
Over the past few weeks, and for many more to come, there will be a lot of debate about search engine consolidation. Today, the talk du jour is a Yahoo and News Corp. deal, a potential integration with MySpace and whether the talk is a real option or an…
Virtual Blight & The Ten Commandments For Online Marketers
Among the most powerful trends of the last three years has been the emergence of community-social-media-social-networking sites with large user bases and incredible traffic. The traffic enjoyed by these successful virtual communities creates financial incentives for bad actors who want to hijack traffic for their own purposes. The open participation…
All Clicks Aren’t Created Equal: Q&A With Danny Sullivan
Earlier this month, in a blog post reporting our clients’ aggregate ad spend across the major search engines, we noted that Google’s slice of the pay-per-click pie increased across 2007. I wrote “We never sat down and had meetings about moving budgets. Rather, our systems noticed that ever-so-slightly better…