In addition to her skills as the well known VP of search and user experience at Google,  a wardrobe including Oscar de la Renta and Armani helped land this girl from a (very) small town in Wisconsin on Glamour Magazine’s 2009 Women of the Year list.

Marissa Mayer, Glamour Magazine Woman of the Year

Marissa Mayer is profiled as a “visionary” in the magazine’s annual spread of influential women and newsmakers from 2009. CEO Eric Schmidt is quoted in the article as saying: “It’s pretty hard to overstate her impact…She built the team that designs the products we all use.”

This morning on the Today Show (video), she found herself in good company on the couch among other listmakers Serena Williams and Maya Angelou, and First Lady Michelle Obama earned a special recognition within the list.

Somewhat quietly, last week Kayak posted a new feature that opens up access to their search data using Kayak Trends. A key feature of Kayak Trend data is the KAYAK Travel Index™, an a statistical model that provides a measure of travel demand from analysis of searches on KAYAK sites, and aligns that with average combined prices people select for hotel and flights.

In Kayak Trends, you can get a snapshot of most popular destinations and search demand for them by day, week, month or year, as well as see a shift in seasonal trends by looking at the biggest upward and downward trends at a glance, or by Top 50 destinations.

Download and dissect data by destination

All of the trend data can be exported to CSV with average price data and demand averages, and one of the more interesting features of the Kayak Travel Index is the ability to look deeper into the search behavior surrounding target destinations. By putting in any airport code or city name and looking at 3 months, 6 months and 1 year trends in search demand for that location, it becomes  a useful baseline tool for a travel search marketer. You can get an at-a-glance overview of search origin data (useful for better geo-targeting in paid search ads and conversion factors), the most searched hotels in the destination, and the most popular hotel selections. Kayak says better labeling is coming next week.

Coming out of (private) and into public Beta today is a new hybrid travel and local search engine, Goby.com (GO-be), a new entrant into the foray of “deep web” search technology, led by a founding team with web and search experience from Endeca (CEO Mark Watkins), Lycos (Jim Fell) and Reprise Media (CTO Vince Russo), MIT (professor Michael Stonebraker, co-founder) as well as travel distribution experience with John Walsh (World Travel Holdings.) The start-up received its funding from Flybridge Capital and Kepha Partners.

Using a 3-box format for search queries, Goby’s intention is to help guide the user through task-centric discovery to answer queries relevant to “things to do nearby”, whether that location is a vacation destination or your local city area.

Throughout its (private) beta phase, Goby.com identified up to 250 categories of content surrounding popular themes and search queries that fall into these three categories of understood concepts. In addition to queries on things to do, outdoor recreation and activities, dining, entertainment, live music, museums, historic sites are top suggestions, as well as more travel specific concepts, such as hotels and lodging topics.

Currently using about 500 pre-qualified, authoritative data sources (or “deep web” databases) or known local sources such as Yelp.com, Goby contextualizes and organizes these results in a clean format, using Google Maps and images (also from Flickr) to enhance results.

Interestingly, Goby appears to cover a broad range of (and even some obscure) locations across the USA, as opposed to a beta launch with limited destinations. If you live in a large city like San Francisco, you can browse for things to do on a foggy day, or if are looking for a weekend getaway in a small coastal town for a food and wine festival, you might give Goby a try. Although some users may initially be disappointed to see a limited number of results to any query (very few test searches return more than 100 listings), it may not matter if the first ten to twenty are the most relevant and useful results.  An iPhone app is currently in development.

According to a post on the Bing Community blog, Bing should be your first stop for Emmy updates, starting now, leading up to the broadcast on Sunday, September 20th on CBS. A query on Bing for “Emmy Awards” and searches related to the Emmys will produce an Instant Answer result like this:

Bing Instant Answer

For now, you’ll see the quick details including links to information about host Neil Patrick Harris (provided by MSN Movies) and the nominees (provided by MSN TV), along with photos and videos, and recaps from the 2008 Emmy Awards. Following the broadcast, Bing will update the Instant Answer for quick and easy access to winners, photos and videos from this year’s event. Might we see a run of Bing commercials and promo slots during the televised event?

Bing is also asking users what other “Instant Answers” they would like to see in the future.

Comparatively, here’s how the same searches look on Yahoo! and Google:

Yahoo Emmy Awards Searches

Google Emmy Awards Search

Hitwise is reporting that Bing Shopping moved up to 4th place (from 8th) in the comparision shopping tools category last week, rising to 11% weekly market share. Combining the recent Double Cashback offer from retailers listed on Bing Shopping and the fortunate timing of the annual Back-to-School shopping rush has moved their weekly market share up from just 4% of visits prior to last week.

chart courtesy of Hitwise

Overall, Hitwise reports that visits to Bing Shopping have increased 169% since the week ending June 6th (the week of the official Bing Shopping launch) – Bing confirms an 3x increase in visits from internal data during the same timeframe.

Also in that same timeframe, Yahoo! Shopping, Bizrate and Shopzilla, currently the top 3 shopping comparision engines, each saw a drop of 2-5% in market share. Meanwhile, the only other shopping search engines in the top 10 to experience an increase were NexTag and Pronto.

Bing.com was responsible for sending 18.32% of visits, of those, 66.81% were new visitors (had not visited in last 30 days) and traffic from MSN accounted for another 11.34% of visits. Of last week’s visits to Bing Shopping, Google sent 5.86% and Yahoo! Search sent another 3.54% – an interesting number to watch change in the coming months as the integration of Bing and Yahoo moves forward.

For additional numbers and data on upstream / downstream traffic related to Bing Shopping, read Heather Dougherty’s post at Hitwise.

The editorial staff at Search Engine Land has just learned that over the weekend, on July 18th, Alan Rimm-Kaufman passed away following a 16 month long battle with leukemia. He bravely faced countless rounds of chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant in hopes of a cure.

Alan Rimm-Kaufman was just 41 years young, and is survived by his wife, Sara, and two young children, Sam and Davida. A moving tribute to his life can be found on Legacy.com.

Alan was a valued contributor to Search Engine Land – his articles on paid search marketing and other search issues can be found here.

Co-founder and CEO George Michie, provided us with these thoughts about Alan Rimm-Kaufman:

We are deeply saddened by this loss. Alan was a man of integrity, intelligence, and humility, which he combined with nearly boundless energy and a joy of life few can match. We will miss his exuberance and his tremendous generosity of spirit.

The Rimm-Kaufman Group remains a strong and vibrant company. We remain committed to providing both thought-leadership in the industry and peerless results for our clients. Like any good leader, Alan built this team to be stronger than any individual member. Our growth and continuing success during his 16-month absence is a tribute not only to his vision, but also to our well-established shared vision for the company.

The family has requested in lieu of flowers, that donations be made to the Alan Rimm-Kaufman Legacy Fund, CBI Preschool, 501 East Jefferson Street, Charlottesville, VA 22902. In addition, they ask that individuals consider joining the bone marrow registry at www.marrow.org.

Since the spring of 2008, George Michie has been the acting CEO of the Rimm-Kaufman Group, and will continue to lead the company and its veteran leadership team. There are no plans to change the company name.

The entire SEL staff is terribly shocked and saddened by the news, and our thoughts are with his family and his colleagues at Rimm-Kaufman Group.

We’ve done some preliminary analysis of the top-performing entries in our Biggest Search Geek Contest and have compiled some fascinating (though not entirely scientific) results by looking at LinkedIn profiles of the top 10 scorers. By the way, it’s not too late to participate in the contest—it only takes a few minutes and the prize is a free Free Ticket To SMX West in February. Do you recognize yourself in these results?

Demographics:

• 80% Male / 20% Female
• Average Age – 30 (range almost entirely from 25-35)
• Skewed Coastal Urban locations – NYC, Boston, SF, LA, Chicago with 2 outliers in Utah & Idaho

Background & experience:

• As expected, our top 10 had some online and agency and web design experience in addition to their SEO/SEM background. Some made surprising career switches from law or songwriting and seemingly fell into SEM by accident. About 70% had some type of entrepreneurial background – starting their own company or consulting on the side.
• Average # of companies/jobs: 4.2
• Avg. # Years of Online Experience: 6.7
• Avg. # of Years SEM Experience: 4.7

Education:

• Most graduated with degrees in business, marketing or communications but one in English, one in math
• Quality of schools ranged from Ivy League (Columbia, Yale) to solid, but less prestigious: (Southern CT State, Northern Illinois U). Oddly 2 of our top 10 graduated from BYU, Idaho.
• 3 out of 10 had advanced degrees (1 PhD, 1 JD, 1 MA)

Social networking use:

• Average # of LinkedIn connections: 177
• Eight out of the top 10 had LinkedIn profiles, so their info was easy to find. One had a Yahoo 360 page and 8 out of the top 10 are on Facebook

Below is a recap of stories from Search Engine Land and from around the web as presented in our SearchCap newsletter during the entire month of December. Want these type of headlines on a regular basis? Then sign-up for SearchCap and get them each day during the week! Want a more descriptive monthly summary? Get our Search Month newsletter. The first issue will be out later today.

=== Dec. 29, 2006 ===

• Of Disappearing Sex Blogs & Google Updates, Search Engine Land
• Google Pushes Forward With Newspaper Ads, Search Engine Land
• Google Jet Spotted At Christchurch Airport, New Zealand, Search Engine Land
• Google Accidentally Deletes Email Of 60 Gmail Users, Search Engine Land
• Yahoo Removes Message Boards: What Is To Come?, Search Engine Land
• Defending SEO, Yet Again!, Search Engine Land
• The People Behind Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, MapQuest & Other Mapping Software, Search Engine Land
• Google’s Not So Top Terms & Top US Gainers For 2006, Search Engine Land
• PhraseRank, Not PageRank, To Fight Search Spam, Search Engine Land
• YellowPages.com Adds ‘Send to Mobile, Search Engine Land
• 2006: The Year in Search Reviewed, Avenue A / Razorfish
• A tale of two social newsfilter sites: Digg and Newstrust, Boing Boing
• Trust is Hard to Gain, Easy to Lose, Blake Ross
• Google Self-Promotion Over the Top?, Search Engine Showdown
• Get Disorganized with Google Desktop?, Google Blogoscoped
• Google’s Orkut Down For 13+ Hours, TechCrunch
• N.C. pursues Google division expansion, The Charlotte Observer
• Interview with Google about duplicate content, Natural Search Blog
• Is desktop search over?, Geeking With Greg
• Overlap Showdown: Only at 1 of 6, Search Engine Showdown
• Best of 2006, Google AdSense Blog
• Need Content Removed From Google Quickly? Expedited Google Content Removal, Search Engine Roundtable
• Google Drops Ads Automator for New AdWords Campaigns, Search Engine Roundtable
• When Google sneezes, the internet gets flu, The Register
• Yahoo to offer full auction refunds in Japan case, Webwereld

=== Dec. 28, 2006 ===

• Google Ranks Second In Merriam-Webster’s Word Of 2006 List, Search Engine Land
• Google Blog Search Passes Technorati In Visits, Search Engine Land
• Patent Filing for Google Mobile Search Provides Indexing Clues, Search Engine Land
• How Google Sitelinks May Work, From Patent Application, Search Engine Land
• Yahoo To Open New Research Center In Bangalore, Search Engine Land
• New Mobile Flight Status Tracker By FlightStats, Search Engine Land
• Question & Answer Search Engines Ranked, Search Engine Land
• Top 101 Search Stories Of 2006, Search Engine Land
• Search Bloggers On Their Most Popular Posts & Stats For 2006, Search Engine Land
• Google Chief Executive Sells Shares, AP
• You Are So Wrong About Google, The Motley Fool
• Top 10 Search Terms in 10 Categories, November 2006, ClickZ
• Yahoo! Christmas Update? I Doubt It, Search Engine Roundtable
• How Does Google Crawl Pages & Index Them?, Search Engine Roundtable
• Yahoo to launch ‘Big Thinker Series’ in India from January, New Kerala
• Microsoft’s adCenter Promotional Codes Not So Promotional?, Search Engine Roundtable
• Webaroo Secures $7.5 Million Second Round Funding, PaidContent.org
• 62 posts on how to squeeze the juice from digg, Cornwall SEO
• Stupid Things We Say – Part 2, Greg Boser
• How to become a top 100 Digg user, Pronet Advertising
• Consumers Submit To Yahoo Local, WebProNews
• Megite’s Alternative Way to Rank Popular Videos, TechCrunch
• More on Yahoo-AOL Combination Possibility: Financial Models, Savings Etc, PaidContent.org
• Possibility Of A Yahoo-AOL Merger in 2007; Google-AOL Change of Control Clause, PaidContent.org
• Jobless in Seattle?, GigaOM
• Make Google Services Opera-Friendly, Google Operating System
• Google not pointing to “best in their class
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