Below are Search Engine Land’s 10 most popular stories from December 2008:

Top 10 Most Popular Stories: December 2008

1) Santa Tracker 2008: Google & NORAD Team Up Again – My favorite Christmas activity is tracking Santa’s route around the world. Once again, NORAD and Google are making it easy. The NORAD Tracks Santa 2008 site is now up, and a countdown for your iGoogle home page can now be downloaded. Google just blogged the news today. Below, what to expect.

2) 8 Santa Trackers For Christmas Eve 2008, From NORAD Santa To Twitter – It’s Christmas Eve, and that means Santa Claus is out doing his run. But where is Santa right now? Thanks to the internet, there’s a huge number of ways to get Santa sightings. Below, a summary that covers online video sightings, Santa’s phone number (apparently he can talk while driving), email updates, tracking him via your mobile phone and yes, even getting Twitter updates.

3) Tough Love For Microsoft Search – Back in June, I spoke at Microsoft as part of a regular series for those involved with its webmaster tools group and anyone generally interested in search. My talk was called “Tough Love For Microsoft Search,” and I covered various reasons why I felt the company has generally failed to make headway in the space. The core premise is that Microsoft as a company isn’t succeeding at search because it views search as a task it has to do, rather than one it really wants to do. The article below is an adaptation of that presentation. There’s even a movie.

4) Google Search Suggest Get Ads, Links & Answers – Earlier this year, Google Suggest finally made it to the Google home page. The feature suggests queries as you begin typing in the search box. Now Google is testing providing links to web sites, direct answers and even ads that appear within the Google Suggest list.

5) Google Book Search Puts Magazines Online – First Google digitized books, then newspapers, then historic Time-Life photos and now — magazines. Today through Google Book Search, people can search the full-text of millions of articles from more than 10 magazine with hundreds more to come, the company has announced. Eventually, content from the magazines will be available to those doing Google News Archive searches or show up in “regular” Google searches via Universal Search. For now, however, the content lives only within Google Book Search. How do you access the magazines? Ideally, Google wants you to find them in response to a search for anything at Google Book Search. For example, a search for hank aaron catching babe ruth should bring up a listing tagged as “Magazine” that leads to a 1973 Ebony magazine article about Aaron nearing Ruth’s home run record (note, search functionality doesn’t seem to be live yet but should be enabled shortly).

6) Google Testing Enhanced Listings, “Pagelinks” & Auto-Spelling Correction – Google is testing a number of changes to its search results, including a way for select publishers to enhance their page descriptions, a way for searchers to jump to sub-sections of a web page and automatically correcting misspelled queries, to some degree.

7) Do Search Engines Use Bounce Rate As A Ranking Factor? – Your web site’s bounce rate may be a significant factor in your search engine rankings. If the bounce rate on your site is high, you could end up with lower rankings in the search engines. Correspondingly, lower bounce rates may actually offer meaningful ranking boosts. (Don’t know what a bounce rate is? Hang on—definitions below.) Don’t believe that bounce rate is a serious ranking factor? You should.

8) “You Could Go To Google,” Says Yahoo — But Why Not Stay Here? – Yahoo has changed the way they handle a query for a competing search engine. Now, if you search at Yahoo for google, live or ask.com, Yahoo will tell you, “You could go to [Search Engine Name Goes Here]. Or you could stay here and get straight to your answers.”

9) Ask.com Plays The Google AdWords Arbitrage Game – Ah, Ask.com. Since I wrote their obituary in March, not much has got me thinking they’ll make a comeback. Sure, there was the gimmick of kind of bringing back Jeeves himself. But the spate of “hotels.ask.com” ads I see them running on Google makes me think they’re dropping further from being a search engine and more into a search arbitrage play.

10) Yahoo Layoffs Happening Live Online – The Yahoo layoffs are underway, and are happening live online. Blogs, news sites, and social sites like Twitter are filled today with live reports about what’s going on inside Yahoo’s offices. Here’s a rundown of what we’ve found. Silicon Alley Insider is posting updated comments from the now ex-Yahooers, who are describing the scene at various Yahoo offices around the country.

To see all of our most popular stories over time, visit our Most Popular Stories page.

Below are Search Engine Land’s 10 most popular stories from November 2008:

1) Maps Of Fires In Southern California: November 2008 Edition – Fires are burning in Southern California once again. Here’s an update on how to find maps of where the blazes are.

2) Are Our Brains Becoming “Googlized?” – Are our brains being rewired by using the Internet? The evidence tends to be pointing that way. As somebody interested in how the mind works, I read with interest the results of a recent study at UCLA that used the sexiest research tool around today, fMRI scanning. fMRI allows researchers to see which parts of the brain are active when participants are exposed to different stimuli. And for the first time I’m aware of, this was used to track brain activity while people engaged in various online tasks, including searching. First of all, the “official” story of the study. Then I’ll launch off into my own personal speculation, as the study raises some mind altering implications, and I use that term “mind altering” in it’s literal sense.

3) Election Results From The Search Engines & Beyond – Today, the United States is electing a new president, voting on one-third of the seats in the U.S. Senate, and voting on all 435 seats in the House of Representatives. An important election? To say the least! Not to worry, though. The internet, and the major search engines, in particular, will have you covered. Here’s a look at how the search engines are planning to help you get the real-time election results you’re looking for tonight.

4) Google’s New Search-Based Keyword Tool Tells You What Keywords You’re Missing – Google released a new keyword tool tonight, named the Search-Based Keyword Tool. This tool goes beyond what the other Google tools provide and tells you what keywords you are currently missing out on based on search query data from your site’s content.

5) Google SearchWiki Launches, Lets You Build Your Own Search Results Page – Google will announce today (Update: official announcement) the launch of SearchWiki, a major addition to its user interface that allows users to edit search results. When using SearchWiki, you can re-order, remove, or add web pages to the search results for any query. You can also add notes to specific listings. You have to be logged in to a Google account so that the changes you make will be saved and shown the next time you run the same search. “This is a way for search to adapt to a more interactive experience,” says Google Product Manager Cedric Dupont. “We ran a bunch of experiments, and the response was overwhelmingly positive from our users. They asked for this feature.”

6) Eagerly Awaiting Google’s Voice Search For The iPhone – Yesterday, arguably the top tech story of the day was Google’s introduction of voice search for its iPhone app. As of this morning, the updated app still isn’t available in the iTunes store (that’s not Google’s fault). I spoke yesterday afternoon with Google’s Mike Cohen and Gummi Hafsteinsson about the app and how it would work. What they described was something that sounded qualitatively different in terms of accuracy and usability vs. competitive offerings now in the market.

7) Google Hosting Time-Life Photo Archive, 10 Million Unpublished Images Now Live – TimeWarner and Google have announced that starting today Google will make available millions of images from the Life Magazine photo archive. The vast majority (97 percent) of these images have never been seen by the public (they were sitting around in physical envelopes). These are hard-copy photographs that have been or are being scanned by Google and will be hosted by Google. They will show up in Google.com and Google Image search results. All these photos are available in high-resolution (5 and 6 megapixels). The images will be free to use for “personal and research purposes” but will be digitally watermarked to prevent unauthorized or unlicensed commercial uses. There are links to appropriate contacts for those who want to use the images commercially.

8) Google SearchWiki 101: An Illustrated Guide – Google SearchWiki — a new feature that allows you to move and comment on search results — has been out for less than a day, and it’s amazing to see how much confusion (as well as commentary) there is already developing. So below, some clarification on how it works, opportunities search marketers should consider, some privacy issues and ideas for improving it.

9) Where Can I Vote? Google Maps Lists Voting Locations! - According to Google Trends, lots of people are currently trying to figure out where their local polling place is. So it’s time for a good reminder of what we covered earlier. Google Maps has a special area and search shortcut to help you find where you’re registered to vote, voting location hours and more. Searches like where can i vote or polling places make a special “shortcut” box appear at the top of Google’s results.

10) Who’s Got The Flu? Google Flu Trends Reveal State-By-State Activity - Wondering if it’s just you or if others have the flu, too? Google’s announced a new tool that tells you. Google Flu Trends allows you to see flu activity across the United States. How’s Google doing this? Is it now indexing actual human beings, in the way it does web pages? Nah. Turns out that when you’re sick with the flu, you search for that word and other flu-related topics. Google can tell which areas are seeing a spike in flu-related searching, and from that, trends can be plotted.

To see all of our most popular stories over time, visit our Most Popular Stories page.

Below are Search Engine Land’s 10 most popular stories from October 2008:

1) Los Angeles & Southern California Fire Maps: October 2008 Edition – Southern California is ablaze with wildfires once again, including one I can see out my window in the Newport Beach foothills. Trying to keep track of where they are. Here’s a guide to maps of current fires and place you can expect future ones to be posted.

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2) Google’s iPhone Ad Units, G1 Pre-Sells 1.5 Million? – On Friday, AdWeek reported that Google was creating and testing specialized ad units for full HTML mobile browsers, such as Safari on the iPhone. The idea is that the iPhone’s Safari browser (or Android, Skyfire, Opera) would be detected and alternative ads, and landing pages or iPhone optimized sites, would be substituted for conventional mobile (or transcoded) sites.

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3) Fall Fun: Viewing Cornfield Mazes Via Online Maps - One of the unique seasonal activities to do this time of year is to make a trip out to a nearby farm and wander through mazes carved out of corn fields. Designers of these mazes often make them to form interesting pictures or written messages when seen from a bird’s-eye view. I’ve selected a handful to look at here from Google Maps, Yahoo! Maps, and Live Search Maps, so enjoy!

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4) Google Confirms RSS For Web Search Results – Google has confirmed for Search Engine Land that they’ll soon start offering RSS feeds for web search results. When it happens, the RSS feeds will be an extension of Google Alerts, which currently only allow notification by email.

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5) SearchPerks – Microsoft’s New Prizes For Searches Program – Microsoft’s Live Search Cashback program has failed to grow the company’s search traffic significantly (as I expected), so now it’s try again time. Out officially today is SearchPerks, a program designed to be easier to use and more broadly targeted than Cashback.

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6) 7 Search Tools You May Not Know … But Should – Google UK recently shared a list of 52 Things to Do on a variety of Google properties (found via Phil Bradley). It’s a collection of tools and tips about using Google products and services for some everyday functions. If you’re a search power user, you probably know most of them already. But Google’s message seems to be, “Did you know you could do all this stuff on Google?” It got us thinking about non-Google search tools that might have slipped notice altogether, or just fallen off your radar. With that in mind, here’s a list of seven search tools you may not know about … but should. Read on to discover about how to see search suggestions from all major search engines on one page; a “cover flow” interface to see face images from Google Images; a new way to get recommendations about music, movies and more; new tools to search multiple search engines from one place; a tool for finding hot event tickets and as assist for hunting through Flickr’s many photos.

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7) Sneak Peek: Stunning New Google Satellite Imagery – New satellite images that will eventually show up in Google Earth and Google Maps are now arriving from the Google-sponsored GeoEye-1 satellite that launched a month ago. GeoEye has just released the stunning image below as a preview of what’s to come:

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8) Is Yahoo’s Buzz A Buzz-Kill? - When Yahoo Buzz launched back in February of 2008, it was thought by many to be the next big player in the social news community space. This was largely due to the fact that if your content got the most “buzz” it had a chance to be featured on Yahoo.com, which can send millions of visitors to your site over a short period of time. Of course it didn’t take long for people to find themselves at Yahoo’s first major Buzz-kill.

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9) StumbleUpon Without The Toolbar – The past few weeks have been busy for the people over at StumbleUpon and its users alike. Just a few weeks ago, StumbleUpon lifted the 200 friend max from its user base and added a subscribe feature. On Wednesday my favorite social community announced that there were yet more changes to their discovery/recommendation engine. This new user experience is being called “beyond the toolbar”. Not only do you not need to download a toolbar, but you actually don’t even need to be registered with StumbleUpon to stumble anymore. This is really a “new user” experience. Let’s check it out.

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10) Crucial Firefox Plugins For SEM Professionals; Put Google To Work To Meet CPA Goals – Today’s news briefs: Google AdWords Editor update, Yahoo Search Marketing content upgrades, and upcoming features for Microsoft’s adCenter. An in-depth guide to some great Firefox plug-ins for search engine marketing professionals, followed up by the free tool of the week: Google’s Conversion Optimizer.

To see all of our most popular stories over time, visit our Most Popular Stories page.

Below are Search Engine Land’s 10 most popular stories from September 2008:

1) Searching With Google Chrome & Omnibox - Now that Google Chrome is live, I spent some time looking at the search features within it, especially to see — as I did recently with Internet Explorer 8 — whether Google was going to try to stack the deck in its own favor. Like Microsoft, Google’s playing it straight. As for search features, I’m mixed on whether I like the new “Omnibox” feature that combines a browser’s address bar and search box into one single area.

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2) On Android Eve, Co-Founder Andy Rubin Predicts The Future Of Mobile – Tomorrow is widely anticipated to be the day when T-Mobile announces availability of the first Android phone. The phone is reportedly an HTC “Dream,” which will apparently sell for $199 with a two year contract. Many believe the handset will resemble a Sidekick. It’s fitting in a way that a Sidekick-like device should be the first Android phone. Android co-founder Andy Rubin was the one-time CEO of Danger, which made the Sidekick for T-Mobile. On the eve of the announcement, it’s also fitting that Rubin, now director of mobile platforms at Google, broadly weighs in on the future of mobile.

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3) VideoSurf: New, Genuinely Radical Video Search – I’m generally not given to hyperbole or breathless enthusiasm when writing about a new search service. Quite the opposite, in fact—over the decade I’ve covered search I’ve seen so many so-called “radically new” approaches that are simply updates or spins on existing technologies that I’ve grown a bit jaded. But not after seeing a demo of VideoSurf. I’ll echo the headline for this post: VideoSurf is one of the most innovative, radically different approaches to video search (or any kind of search for that matter) that I’ve ever seen. Even better: It delivers highly relevant search results—something most video search services fall sadly short on for many types of searches. What’s different about VideoSurf, and why am I so excited by it? Read on.

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4) 10 Key Features That Differentiate Google’s Chrome From Firefox & IE – Google’s has released its own open-source browser, Chrome, in direct competition to Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer. Yesterday, Danny described his test-drive of Chrome in Searching With Google Chrome & Omnibox and Greg speculated on its future in How Bright Is The Outlook For Chrome?. Both compared Google’s new browser to the incumbents, Firefox and Internet Explorer. But Chrome is actually very different from those two browsers, and significantly different from nearly everything else on the market. Here are the 10 major features that truly differentiate Google Chrome from the competition.

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5) The Google Hive Mind – As Google turns 10 years old, that important birthday sees the company more powerful than ever before. With its competitors in disarray, the Big G seems likely to grow even further. The secret to its success? For me, it’s what I’ve been calling the “Google Hive Mind.” Rather than follow a rigid top-down master plan, the company’s direction and success has been shaped by decisions often taken independently of how they’ll benefit the company as a whole. But collectively, those decisions DO form a master plan, a hive mind that dictates what the company will do. The hive mind has been hugely successful in growing Google’s business through a symbiotic relationship with its customers. But that’s also a weakness: Google may seem too threatening to those same customers, as it grows. As it expands and expands, some of those outside the hive begin wondering if it needs to be constrained. Part of this is due to the fact that individually, I think Googlers themselves don’t understand how the hive mind appears to outsiders. Thus at 10, stronger than ever, Google also faces its biggest challenge: whether an outside force in the form of government intervention will be brought in to halt the hive.

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6) Google Says, Don’t Rewrite Dynamic URLs To Static URLs – Almost two years ago, Google updated their guidelines to say that they can now properly handle crawling dynamic URLs. But last night, Google posted a blog entry now telling webmasters not to use rewrite rules for dynamic URLs, at least in most cases. Google say, in bold, “avoid reformatting a dynamic URL to make it look static.” But Google also admitted that “static URLs might have a slight advantage in terms of clickthrough rates.” However, Google said “dynamic URLs should be favored over hiding parameters to make them look static.”

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7) Information Architecture Is Crucial To Good SEO – You have probably heard the phrase “information architecture” but may not have given it much thought. That’s a mistake! In today’s article I am going to talk about why SEOs should care about the concept. The Information Architecture Institute defines “information architecture as the art and science of organizing and labeling websites, intranets, online communities and software to support usability.” For most people, it is pretty intuitive to say that designing a web site that is easy for end users to navigate so they can find what they want will be good for business. What may be less intuitive is how this affects SEO.

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8) Google News Error Aids In United Airlines Stock Drop – The Google News Blog explains an error that occurred yesterday, which hurt the stock price of United Airlines. Google News picked up a story on the Florida Sun-Sentinel website about United filing for bankruptcy. It was an old story, but it did not contain the original date. Instead, Google found September 7, 2008 listed on the page somewhere. Due to that, Google indexed the article and listed it in Google News. It was not listed as a headline story on the home page of Google News. Nevertheless, United Airlines stock fell over 11% yesterday.

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9) Waiting For Google Chrome To Launch – Obviously the big story of yesterday and today in the technology world is the impending launch of Google’s open-source browser Chrome. It will likely be available for download here later today. (TechCrunch and Google Blogoscoped have a few screenshots.) There are dozens and dozens of stories on Techmeme.

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10) Google Chrome – Google’s Finally Launching Its Own Browser – So much for a quiet Labor Day off. Google Blogoscoped has news of Google Chrome, a new browser that Google plans to release. More coverage can also be found on Techmeme. No — it’s not just a rumor. Google tells me that it is indeed a real browser it plans to release. Expect more news to come when we’re back at things on a normal schedule tomorrow.

To see all of our most popular stories over time, visit our Most Popular Stories page.

Below are Search Engine Land’s 10 most popular stories from August 2008:

1) Google’s Email, Gmail, Having Major Issues – It is not uncommon for Gmail (Google Email) users to complain about outages and issues with sending and receiving email. But right now, there are hundreds of Gmail users complaining that Gmail is down or simply not sending or receiving emails. A current search at Twitter on Gmail will return hundreds of messages with Gmail complaints. I am personally receiving a "Temporary Error (502)" and was receiving other weird errors when trying the Gmail interface. Some are reporting that Gmail is working fine through POP and IMAP protocols, but just not via the web interface.

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2) 6 Common Website Mistakes That Are Costing You Money – As I’m reviewing company websites to prepare for our August SEO Training Class, I’m struck by how often I see the same website mistakes. Since we’ve been offering the SEO classes over the past 7 months, we’ve reviewed over 40 websites. In each class of 6 online marketers, there’s never a dearth of problems to point out to them. I’m not talking about minor glitches here, but stuff that prevents the website from reaching its full potential with the search engines. In other words, as long as these problems exist, they’re not going to be able to gain all the targeted search engine traffic that they could be. To put it into terms that anyone can relate to–the company is basically losing money every day they don’t fix their website. Here are 6 common website mistakes that could be costing you money.

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3) Olympics Logos From Google, Yahoo & Ask.com – Today is the day that the 2008 Summer Olympics kick off in Beijing. Here are the logos from Google, Yahoo and Ask.com for the special day:

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4) Search & Internet Explorer 8 – After finally getting the new Internet Explorer 8 beta installed (demands to upgrade Windows, verify Windows, sigh), I spent some time playing with the new search functionality and checking to see if Microsoft was going to try to stack the deck in its favor with the new browser. So far, it remains pretty even handed. Indeed, so far, Microsoft seems kind of lame given that there are some cool search features you’re hard pressed to locate. Let’s take a tour.

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5) Google Adds Olympics One Box Results – I was chatting with Danny about the Yahoo Olympics Shortcut on the Daily SearchCast and Danny noticed that a search for beach volleyball olympics on Google returns a Google OneBox result.

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6) Google Insights For Search Launches – Google has launched Google Insights for Search, a tool that helps advertisers and marketers understand searcher behavior. The tool offers a comprehensive set of statistics based on search volume and patters. You can compare seasonal trends, geographic distributions, and category-specific searches, and you can group all these variables together to get extremely specific. In addition, Google allows you see "rising searches" overall or in a specific filter that you have set up. Overall, this seems to be a huge extension to Google Trends, Google Ad Planner, and the tools available within AdWords to advertisers. I will share some examples with you below, in order to help you understand the powerful set of features Google Insights for Search can offer you.

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7) Looking For The Paris Hilton Campaign Video — How’d The Search Engines Do? – As much as I’ve enjoyed comedians poking fun at John McCain’s ad that uses Paris Hilton to mock Barack Obama, even better is a new fake ad where Paris Hilton herself takes on McCain. People are clearly turning to the web to find it – Google Trends shows plenty of people seeking it in a variety of ways. A quick look at that below, how easily (or not) the video can be found on search engines, and the video itself.

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8) 3,000+ Hours Of Olympic Video: Can Search Engine Users Find It? – During the 2008 Beijing Olympics, NBCOlympics.com is streaming 2,200 hours of exclusive live Olympic video, as well as over 3,000 hours of replays. This content is housed exclusively on the NBC site. Users can search NBCOlympics.com to watch their favorite highlights or catch something they may have missed. But can hungry Olympic video fans find their way to this mass of popular NBC content? Like the number of gold medals Michael Phelps will win, this remains to be seen.

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9) Google.com Finally Gets Google Suggest Feature – After being in testing for literally years, Google Suggest is finally coming to Google.com. This is the feature where as you start to type in the search box, related searches automatically appear below where you are typing.

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10) Googler Asks, "Marry Me" Via Google Maps – The Google Earth Blog reports that Googler Michael Weiss-Malik has proposed to his girlfriend, Leslie, via Google Maps. They documented everything on their new web site, MarryMeLeslie.com, but here is a picture of the proposal using an embeddable Google Map: View Larger Map

To see all of our most popular stories over time, visit our Most Popular Stories page.

Below are Search Engine Land’s 10 most popular stories from July 2008:

1) Cuil Launches – Can This Search Start-Up Really Best Google? – Can any start-up search engine "be the next Google?" Many have wondered this, and today’s launch of Cuil (pronounced "cool") may provide the best test case since Google itself overtook more established search engines. Cuil provides what appears to be a comprehensive index of the web, offers a unique display presentation, and emerges at a time when people might be ready to embrace a quality "underdog" service. The big questions now are how does the relevancy hold up and can word-of-mouth really still build significant share? [Note: The Cuil site was supposed to be live for searches at of 9:01pm Pacific time on July 27, but so far I'm still seeing only a holding page. I'd expect this to change fairly soon].

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2) The Day After: Looking At How Well Knol Pages Rank On Google – We’ve been assured that just because content sits on Google’s Knol site, it won’t gain any ranking authority from being part of the Knol domain. OK, so a day after Knol has launched, how’s that holding up? I found 1/3 of the pages listed on the Knol home page that I tested ranked in the top results. I came away feeling that being on Knol does indeed give pages an advantage they might not get if they’d been hosted on some other brand new web site.

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3) Cuil Fast Test - Relevancy Isn’t A Google Killer – Now that Cuil is live, I wanted to do a few fast queries to get a sense of how it seems to stack up against Google. With the huge caveat that nine queries are far from letting anyone conclude anything, I still didn’t come away with a sense that Cuil has Google-beating relevancy. Instead, it has some flaws though is better than many start-up search engines appear out of the box. Queries I tried:

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4) Google’s Knol Launches: Like Wikipedia, With Moderation – After six months of testing, Google has formally rolled out Knol, a service designed to let people create pages of knowledge on any topic they choose. While Google says Knol is not designed to compete with Wikipedia — and there are good arguments to back this up — I still think the easiest way to describe the service is Wikipedia with moderation. Below, more about this, the service in general, and some of the issues it may raise for Google.

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5) Google Maps Walking Directions Now Live – Earlier this month, I reported that Google Maps was testing walking directions on a small subset of users. This morning, I noticed that Google Maps now is offering walking directions for all Google Maps users. For example, conduct a search for 200 Madison Ave to 200 Lexington Ave and you will see the option to take "Walking" directions as opposed to driving directions. Here is a picture:

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6) Google Trends Showing A Swastika (卐)? – Dave Shaw notified me of a weird character being displayed as a "hot trend" on Google Trends this morning. It appears that Google is displaying a swastika as 卐. This appears to be some sort of Chinese character, but the swastika is well known for its usage in Nazi Germany and has been a very controversial symbol since. Here is a picture of Google Trends at the time I write this:

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7) Search Volume Comes To Google Keyword Tool & Live Search Updates – I reported at the Search Engine Roundtable that Google has added search volume numbers to the external keyword tool. The volume numbers are approximations, and I would guess are from the same sources Google obtains data for Google Ad Planner and Google Trends for Websites. Here is a screen capture of a keyword research search on [seo]:

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8) Google Ranking (Partly) Explained – Google has historically been criticized for being a black box. But for the past couple of years the company has been trying to be more transparent in key areas (Matt Cutts in particular has been very helpful here). As the latest in a series of such posts, Amit Singhal, who runs the Google "ranking" team in search quality, discusses the "philosophies" behind Google ranking.

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9) Yahoo! Lets You "Build Your Own Search Service" – Yahoo! has just unveiled the next phase in their plan to spur search innovation by providing search-related resources to developers. The Yahoo! Build Your Own Search Service (BOSS) enables developers to access Yahoo! search results, combine them with other sources, rerank them, and define their appearance. Yahoo! says they are making BOSS available in an attempt to spur innovation in the search space and disrupt the market. They point out that unlike with other web companies, a search startup has many obstacles: from cost (it takes a lot of machines to process all the web’s data) to expertise (some of the world’s smartest PhDs work at the major search engines) to historical data (which search companies can only get a hold of by that old-fashioned method of waiting). Below, more on what Yahoo! is making available through BOSS and how likely it is that the launch will really create the next Google.

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10) SEO For Semantic Search Engines – A new generation of search engines is starting to become publicly available, so it’s time to start thinking about how it will affect SEO efforts. The new search engines I’m talking about are the semantic search engines, meaning they are search engines that can be queried using natural language (not keywords like when using Google). Behind the scenes, these search engines try to understand the meaning behind the text web pages and so when you query them, they map what your query means and find answers based on the meaning they’ve extracted. It’s all very neat, and there are many examples: Powerset (which Microsoft recently acquired), Hakia, [true knowledge], Cognition, and a few others.

To see all of our most popular stories over time, visit our Most Popular Stories page.

Below are Search Engine Land’s 10 most popular stories from June 2008:

1) June 2008 California Fire Maps - Wildfires, again, in my home state of California. People are looking for maps of where they are at, so here are some resources.

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2) Yahoo The Failure: Myth Versus Reality – As SS Yahoo appears to be sinking, let me be the contrarian about her future. I admit, I find it as hard to believe as anyone that Yahoo has much life left in it after all the executive departures this week, plus the latest news of Delicious founder Joshua Schacter going. But since Yahoo’s leadership has done a piss-poor job making people believe there’s hope, I’ll step up and give it a swing. Buck Up Little Yahoos! First of all, WTF? Seriously, what the hell is going on? How did Yahoo become such a loser company in anyone’s mind other than the idiotic investors who usually don’t seem to know what they’ve bought? Let’s have a little reality check about that big fat failure Yahoo supposedly is.

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3) Google Trends Comes To Web Sites: Trends For Web Sites – Google has launched a major addition to Google Trends named Trends for Web Sites. Trends for Web Sites extends Google Trends by enabling you to search for web site addresses, as opposed to just searching for trends by keyword. R.J. Pittman, Google’s Director of Product Management, told me that by entering a domain name into Google Trends, Google will return traffic, search, and geographic visitation data for that site. Trends for Web Sites will show sites related to the domain name you entered. It will also show searches that are correlated to the domain name, and if you are logged into Google, it will show the estimated traffic for that site. In addition, you can enter in up to five domain names and Google will plot line graphs for all the domains you entered in.

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4) George Carlin’s Death Spikes Searches For His Seven Words You Can Never Say On TV – I was saddened to hear one of my favorite comedians, George Carlin, passed away Sunday. Clearly he touched many people. A quick look at Google Trends shows searches related to him have spiked up as well as for his famous “seven words you can’t say on TV.” Among the things people are seeking.

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5) Mr. Google, Tear Down This Google Trends Wall! – About two seconds after Google Trends For Websites came out, people started noticing that one company’s websites oddly had no data available — Google’s own. Google will tell you all about the traffic to competitors like Yahoo and Microsoft but gives away nothing about itself. The same is true for the newly-released Google Ad Planner tool. It’s not right, despite Google’s weak excuse of not wanting to provide “financial guidance” about itself via the tool. Google either needs to post its own information pronto or allow any company to opt out.

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6) Google Logo Meets Hooters – People are always interested in the Google logo, especially as they often change it. But anyone searching now for google logo might get a surprise, as noted by Ari. Out of all the relevant images Google could have shown in the top three, Google picked this one as the second most relevant image result for a search on [google logo].

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7) Hey Firefox – Let Us Pick Our Own Search Engine! – So Firefox 3 has a new release candidate making news, suggesting that the browser is nearly done. May I suggest that the browser is nowhere near being done until the Mozilla Foundation drops its favoritism to Google and allow users to pick their own default search engine? And that Microsoft ought to be among those choices?

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8) Google Ad Planner Launches, Offers Site Demographic Profiles – Google has launched Google Ad Planner as an invite-only beta. It’s designed to allow advertisers to identify sites with demographics they’re interested in — even sites that aren’t part of Google’s advertising network.

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9) No, Advanced SEO Does Not Mean Spamming – Coming back from our SMX Advanced conference last week, I found myself doing some soul searching. How was it that some people could wonder if advanced SEO means spamming search engines? And have I been contributing to this confusion? For the record — no, advanced SEO doesn’t mean you have to spam. Not in my book. But as SEO has matured, I find myself wondering if the importance of good site architecture — search engine friendly design — has become lost as an advanced technique itself. And has the battle for links caused us to segment too much into different halves of an SEO “house?” Is SEO splitting apart?

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10) Facebook Group Using Google Maps To Go “Dipping” At Strangers’ Pools – Facebook ‘dipping’ craze irks pool owners from the Telegraph reports that teenagers on Facebook are using Google Maps to locate pools in their neighborhoods and then hold pool parties as uninvited guests. The new phenomenon is called “dipping” and has caused concern in the Bournemouth, UK area. These “dippers” have been inviting others via Facebook to join the parties. The teenagers are instructed to “wear fancy dress costumes” and bring a bicycle as a way to make an escape for when the cops come. These dipping events seem to run between midnight and 3am and only have 16 confirmed participants.

To see all of our most popular stories over time, visit our Most Popular Stories page.

Below are Search Engine Land’s 10 most popular stories from May 2008:

1) Playing With Live Search Cashback – Microsoft launched Live Search Cashback, and this takes you through the experience of using Cashback as a searcher. It has been a rainy week here in New York, and I figured I would start my search and shopping experience looking to buy an umbrella using Cashback.

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2) Microsoft’s Worldwide Telescope Application Blasts Onto The Desktop – Microsoft has launched (an appropriate metaphor this time) its Worldwide Telescope desktop application. You must download the software, but then you’re treated to a beautiful array of images and "guided tours" of the cosmos (see screenshots below). Intended for science education, "Worldwide Telescope stitches together terabytes of high-resolution images of celestial bodies, and displays them in a way that relates to their actual position in the sky."

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3) Powerset Launches "Understanding Engine" For Wikipedia Content – After nearly two years in the making — and plenty of hype — Powerset has finally rolled out a "natural language" search engine. It’s not a Google killer. It’s barely a business model right now. But at least it’s something the world can finally play with, and under the hood, there’s lots of potential. By the time you read this, the Powerset site should have changed into a tool that allows you search against material within Wikipedia. Why bother using Powerset rather than using Wikipedia’s own search tool or even Google set to look only within Wikipedia pages? The Powerset pitch is that you’ll get better results because Powerset’s technology has read and understood what every word within Wikipedia actually means.

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4) Google Logo: First Laser Logo – Google has a special logo up on the home page today, a laser logo. The logo links to a search results for first laser, which shows image results at the top, followed by search results from University of Chicago, Wikipedia and then Propeller.com. Why does Google have a laser logo up today? Theodore Maiman, 48 years ago – demonstrated the first laser on May 16, 1960.

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5) Twitter Beats (Wow, By 3 Minutes) The USGS With China Earthquake News – Hey, I like Twitter, but this entire thing Robert Scoble started about how Twitter had news of the Chinese earthquake before the US Geological Survey seemed absurd. Did it really? As it turns out, probably so — by about three minutes. Reading some of the accounts, you’d get the impression Twitter seemed to alert the USGS to the news. See also:

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6) Hey Microsoft: Bribing Searchers Is Fine; Frustrating Them Is Not! – I’ve got no problem if Microsoft wants to "bribe" searchers to use its search engine. Even Google has done the same. But the Live Search Cashback program rolled out today seems a pretty inept way to do it, far more likely to disappoint and frustrate than woo searchers.

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7) The Big List Of Major B2B Search Engines – Most search marketers focus on Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. But B2B search marketers also have a growing number of vertical search options. Clicks and leads from these vertical search sites may not yield the same traffic as general search engines, but the percentage of qualified traffic and conversions can increase dramatically with leads from these specialized and vertical business-oriented engines. Here’s a roundup of the most important search sites and resources B2B search marketers should be targeting. See also:

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8) Eight Keyword Research Mistakes That Are Costing You Money – One of the reasons search marketing is so effective is that it delivers information on products and services to people who are actively seeking them out. People enter search terms into a search engine and the engine provides sites and ads that are relevant to the terms. The process of identifying keywords is wrought with pitfalls which can reduce the effectiveness of online campaigns. Here are eight common mistakes companies make in selecting keywords for their campaigns.

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9) Yahoo Glue Pages Launches In India – Yahoo has launched Glue Pages Beta in Yahoo India. Glue Pages are specialized pages that contain an enhanced visual search result page for select search queries. The search results that trigger the special "Glue Pages" run across searches in health, sports, entertainment, travel, technology, and finance categories. The Glue Pages combine classic search results on the left hand column with more visual information related to your query in the middle and right section of the page. The results contain images, videos, articles, and more. For example, a search on diabetes returns standard search results on the left, in the middle we have WebMD results, followed by HowStuffWorks.com results, then results from Yahoo Groups, Yahoo Answers, Yahoo News, and even Google Blog Search. See also:

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10) Supercharge Your URLs For Maximum SEO Impact – When optimizing URLs for high rankings, little attention is given to optimizing the URL for maximum clickthrough. Yet the URL undeniably affects searcher clickthrough rates in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). You could conclude from this that the long URL distracts the searcher from viewing the listing’s title and description. Not a great outcome.

To see all of our most popular stories over time, visit our Most Popular Stories page.

Below are Search Engine Land’s 10 most popular stories from April 2008:

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Top 10 Most Popular Stories: April 2008
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1) Twitter Wrote This Column For Me – By now you have probably seen a bunch of talk about Twitter. And after all of this talk you might be still thinking: OK, so what the heck is Twitter really and why should I care? How is it going to help my business at the end of the day? Rather than writing this column myself, I decided to let Twitter (or more specifically, my extended Twitter network) write it for me. This is me on Twitter (feel free to add me). So let’s get started… The best way to demonstrate the usefulness or power of something is to show real examples. I started this experiment at approximately 5:20 PM EST on Monday afternoon. Within 1 hour, I had over 80 different replies that answered all of my questions and more. Within 1 hour I had reached out to people from all over the world and they had reached back. It all started with this simple question: "How would you describe twitter in 140 characters or less?"

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2) Google Now Fills Out Forms & Crawls Results – One of the biggest search challenges has long been that the major search engines like Google cannot crawl material that can only be retrieved through the use of forms. Now Google is filling out those form to obtain the information previously hidden, the company has announced.

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3) Hitwise: Google Hits New High; Microsoft & Yahoo New Lows – Last week, Hitwise released the latest statistics for search engine share in the United States for March 2008, showing Google at an all-time high while Microsoft and Yahoo hit all-time lows.

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4) Why Mixx Hasn’t Gotten The Following It Deserves – Yet – Mixx, a social media submission site, is a newcomer on the scene, so it understandably will take a while for it to catch up with older sites like Digg, Propeller, Reddit, and StumbleUpon. That said, this article looks at the current state of Mixx and the potential future of its small but devoted community. This might come as a surprise, but Mixx serves approximately 500,000 unique visitors per month and is breaking their engagement record every month, even though the site is barely 6 months out of its private beta. One of the reasons for this is that so much of the activity takes place in the form of conversations (in the private groups as well as user-forums) that isn’t reflected in the metrics.

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5) A Small Business Marketing Success Story: John Tuggle, Guitar Teacher – A small business can have millions of dollars in revenue and dozens of employees … or it can be a one-man-band, turning passion into a living. This month’s small business marketing success story is about the latter. Meet John W. Tuggle, a guitarist living in Athens, Georgia. John has been playing guitar for 17 years, and giving private lessons for 14 years. Like many music instructors, John put his knowledge into a "how to" book and built a web site to sell it. That was about two years ago. After 18 months of struggles (he thinks he sold five books), John was ready to give up teaching; he was going to play gigs and be a studio engineer.

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6) Google Gets Whois Answers In Search Results – Looks like Google’s gained a new direct answer service, whois information for domains. Enter a query like whois searchengineland.com, and you’ll be told when the domain was registered and expires, along with a link to more information from the Domain Tools site. Here’s a screenshot:

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7) Link Development Tool Shortcuts For Firefox – A few weeks back I did a post on my blog about creating Firefox quick search bookmarks. I was surprised at how well received it was, though I think people were most pleased with the fact that I had created a download of a very small selection of the large list of SEO related Firefox quick searches that I use.

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8) "Previous Query" Refinement Coming To Hit Google Results – Yesterday (technically still today my time), I did a keynote interview with Google vice president of search products & user experience Marissa Mayer during our SMX Sydney show. We covered a wide range of topics, including how "Previous Query" refinement will soon come to natural listings on Google, plus how Australia is to get StreetView mapping, Google testing how well Yahoo monetizes, how Orkut might have to be replaced in the US, and other topics.

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9) Tools For Engaging In Social Media – We all know Social Media Marketing can be pretty time consuming. There are numerous social media communities, each requiring you to sign up, make a profile, and participate, in order to have any success with them. So it is only natural that you would like to have some helpful tools to short cut the process wherever possible. Below we will go through each of the major social communities that I use and outline some of the best tools to help you manage and maintain your accounts.

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10) How Flash Can Be Search Engine Friendly – For a long time there has been a tug of war between developers and designers who love to use Flash and SEOs who know how bad Flash can be from a search engine crawler perspective. The designer wants the beauty of an all Flash site. The SEO wants to bring the site traffic. It’s a tough situation, but there are ways to implement Flash and still provide something for the crawlers to chew on.

To see all of our most popular stories over time, visit our Most Popular Stories page.

Below are Search Engine Land’s 10 most popular stories from March 2008:

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Top 10 Most Popular Stories: March 2008
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1) Open Letter To Google: Do The Right Thing, Divest Yourself Of Performics – At long last, Google owns DoubleClick. In doing so, the company has done something else that many people would have never believed possible. Become an SEO. That’s right – Google’s in the SEO business now, selling services through DoubleClick’s Performics to people who want to rank well on — um — Google. Conflict of interest? You bet.

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2) White Spaces: Google’s Second Bite At The Wireless Apple – Now that the 700MHz auction is over and Verizon and AT&T are the winners of the largest spectrum blocks, Google is placing renewed emphasis on its shared bid for a piece of unlicensed TV "white spaces." We’ve written about the so-called "white space coalition" previously.

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3) The Google Quality Raters Handbook – Brian Ussery has discovered a revised copy of the Google Quality Raters Guidelines, which he archived on his own site. The documents are used by Google Quality Raters to aid them in classifying queries, measuring relevancy, and rating the search results. To do so, the Quality Rater must understand how Google works and this document has a bunch of that. Let me pull out some of those details in easy to read bullet points.

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4) Nine Essential Tactics For Reputation Management In Social Media – On Monday I had the distinct pleasure of speaking to a crowd of about 250 local search marketers at SEMpdx Searchfest in Portland. The audience reaction to my session, entitled "The Dark Side of Reputation Management," highlighting a stark reality out there in the corporate trenches. While nearly every hand in the room enthusiastically shot straight up when asked if they "believed their company should be leveraging social channels," fewer than 10 were actually engaged in social media marketing—let alone proactive reputation management.

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5) Yahoo Takes A "Shine" To Women 25 To 54 – Perhaps the perfection of Yahoo’s vertical strategy is its new blog-inspired site Shine. It’s a broad mix of content from publisher partners such as Hearst Communications, Rodale, and Condé Nast. It also aggregates and links to third party content and is encouraging users to blog on the site. Unlike Yahoo content-specific sites like Food, Shine is a kind of meta-vertical and focuses on a key Internet audience: women aged 25 to 54.

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6) Using Wikipedia To Reveal Web Traffic Data – Before investing time and effort in search rankings, and even before setting client expectations, it makes sense to gather whatever intelligence you can about the keywords you’d like to rank for. SEOs and webmasters have few reliable sources of information about the relationship between rankings and traffic. But Wikipedia’s traffic stats can help, offering some surprisingly detailed data. Have you been searching for Jesus? On Google, Wikipedia ranks first for that search. How much is that first place ranking worth? According to Wikipedia’s public traffic stats, about 14k page views on a typical day, and 19.3k on Christmas. The redirect Jesus Christ, which points to the same page, gets about 25% as much traffic, and Christ adds another 10%.

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7) Is Microhoo A Done Deal? – Lately, a merger between Yahoo! and Microsoft is looking more and more probable. Not only have reports been flying around that Yahoo! and Microsoft are in negotiations, but Yahoo!’s SEC filing last week (Tuesday March 18 2008) has added significantly more fuel to the merger fire.

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8) How To Improve Site Conversion, Minimize Google Ad Cost, And Reduce Your Carbon Footprint - With Google’s recent announcement about page load time influencing Quality Score, now is a good time to discuss site speed. Speed matters. People rate snappy, responsive sites as more usable, even when the user interface itself doesn’t change. If your architecture or design aren’t that great, your users will give your site more chances before abandoning if the site responds quickly. Google knows that speed supports usability. I’d suggest much of the credit for Google’s rise to industry dominance goes to their ongoing obsession on making search results blazingly fast. So, how does site speed relate to PPC?

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9) 10 Tips For A More Effective Paid Search Campaign – Chances are, if you’re reading this you’re either running a cost-per-click (CPC) advertising campaign or are considering it. You probably know that CPC advertising involves selecting a set of keywords and writing an ad to appear when someone searches for that keyword in the major search engines. And you’re aware that CPC advertising requires you to set a cost that you are prepared to pay for a click. And you are probably familiar with the benefits of CPC advertising; namely, generating leads, driving sales, and creating brand awareness. But what you may not know yet are these ten tips that can increase the effectiveness of your CPC campaign, while also helping to keep your search engine marketing budget on track. These tips focus on Google AdWords, but many apply to CPC programs across the board.

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10) A Small Business Marketing Success Story: Pink Cake Box – Ready for something different? Typically in this space each month, I write a "How To" or "Why To" article with ideas and tips for helping small businesses succeed online. I’d like to go in a different direction: profiles of small businesses that are succeeding online. I’m a big believer that learning from the successful examples of others is often the best way to grow a small business, and hopefully you’ll agree. Today, I’ll introduce you to a small business that’s baking up a storm via its web site, a blog, public relations, and social media.

To see all of our most popular stories over time, visit our Most Popular Stories page.