October 2008: Search Engine Land’s Most Popular Stories

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 […]

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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.


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Danny Sullivan
Contributor
Danny Sullivan was a journalist and analyst who covered the digital and search marketing space from 1996 through 2017. He was also a cofounder of Third Door Media, which publishes Search Engine Land and MarTech, and produces the SMX: Search Marketing Expo and MarTech events. He retired from journalism and Third Door Media in June 2017. You can learn more about him on his personal site & blog He can also be found on Facebook and Twitter.

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