SearchCap: The Day In Search, February 25, 2014

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

From Search Engine Land:

• McDonald’s & Cadillac’s Sochi Olympics TV Ads Spark Nearly 500K Online Searches
  Television advertising analytics firm iSpot.tv evaluated a number of key metrics for this year’s Olympic advertisers and found ads from McDonald’s and Cadillac resulted in the highest number of online searches within minutes of each brands’ spots being aired. Of the more than 250 brands that ran television ads during this year’s Sochi Olympic broadcasts, […]
• When The Best Move Is To Kill The Site
  The contents of the following column are based on real circumstances. Certain elements have been changed to respect the privacy of each site. Imagine there are two websites. Here are their basic profiles: Site One is an e-commerce company and website launched in 2013 that sells nutritional supplements, based in Atlanta, Georgia. They sell to […]
• Quixey Offering Deeper Search Results Inside Mobile Apps
  Quixey, which describes itself as a search engine for apps rather than an alternative app store, has announced deeper “functional search” within apps. Previously, Quixey allowed app discovery by keyword or category, delivering users to the “front door” of relevant apps. Now, Quixey will surface information that “lives inside of apps.” Quixey offers web-based app search […]
• The Secret To Staying Relevant With Authorship
  At PubCon last year, Google’s Matt Cutts discussed big changes to the search results, many of which we’ve seen played out over the past several months. In his talk, he mentioned upcoming improvements to authorship results. A couple months later in December, Google confirmed it had started tightening the belt when it came to authorship results […]
• Bing Improves Tax Related Search Results Before April 15th
  Microsoft Bing has added new features to the Bing search results when you search for tax related queries. This is being done because Bing and other search engines see a huge increase in the number of tax related queries between January and April, i.e. before your taxes are due on April 15th. Bing now shows […]
• The Marquee HTML Google Easter Egg
  We got another easter egg for you within Google. Yesterday, we wrote about the blink HTML easter egg, where the search results blinked on and off. Now, there is another one for searching for [marquee html] at Google. When you do that, the results count will scroll from right to left on the page. How […]
• Ray Kurzweil’s Job At Google: Beat IBM’s Watson At Natural Language Search
  If Ray Kurzweil is right, computers will be smarter than humans 15 years from now. It’s called “technological singularity” and a big part of his job at Google is making sure that vision becomes reality. Kurzweil, an inventor and futurist that became Google’s Director of Engineering in late 2012, recently told the Guardian that his […]
• Live @ SMX West: Measuring The Mobile Lead
  According to research from Morgan Stanley, 2014 will be the year that mobile usage surpasses desktop usage of the internet. Another recent study from InMobi found that outside the US and UK, mobile media time spent now exceeds TV. So clearly, obviously, mobile is the place to be for advertisers and marketers. Or is it? […]

Recent Headlines From MarTech, Our Sister Site Dedicated To Internet Marketing:

• News Feed Adds More Page Detail: Facebook To Show More Stories About Liked Topics
• Twitter Launches Promoted Accounts In Search Results
• Chevrolet Biggest Spender At Sochi Olympics, But P&G Wins The Digital Game
• The Hazards Of Love: Keeping Mindful Within Long-Term Engagement
• Why Marketers Are Now In The Entertainment Business
• LinkedIn Becomes Only American Social Network In China With Launch Of Simplified Chinese Beta
• Samsung Galaxy S5 Offers Upgrades But May Not Excite
• As LG, HTC Prep Smartwatches, Samsung Ditches Android On Its New “Gear” Devices

Search News From Around The Web:

Industry

• SEC Probes Google Disclosures, Wall Street Journal

Link Building

• It’s Still a Link Building Business, State of Digital
• Raw Download Made Easy, Majestic SEO Blog
• The Future of PageRank: 13 Experts on the Dwindling Value of the Link, WordStream

Local & Maps

• Mysterious Egyptian spiral seen on Google Maps, Fox News
• New Hotel Finder Mobile Experiment, Travel Search Blog

Search Marketing

• Why SEO & PPC Teams Should Work Together & Not Against Each Other, performancein.com

SEM / Paid Search

• Getting The Most Value From Your PPC Agency, SwellPath
• Serving Up 3 Key AdWords Strategies for Local Businesses, RKG Blog
• AdWords Audience Targeting Tips, koozai.com
• Google AdWords Search Funnels Attribution Modeling: Think Hard Before You Act, Search Engine Watch
• Join the UK Bing Ads Starter Webinar on the 18th of March, Bing Ads Blog
• Negative Keywords: Stop (Only) Excluding, Start Directing!, PPC Hero

Searching

• How I Quit Google, TIME.com
• Knowledge-based programming: Wolfram releases first demo of new language, 30 years in the making, VentureBeat

SEO

• A New SEO Approach to Content Strategy, SEO Copywriting
• German link network crack down hurts huge Fashion Brand HugoBoss.com, linkresearchtools.com
• How NOT to Structure Your URLs for Local Rankings, LocalVisibilitySystem.com
• How to Create an SEO Roadmap, Shimon Sandler
• Moving Your Penalized Site To A New Domain Won’t Necessarily Remove Your Google Penalty, Search Engine Roundtable
• The outdated way Google sees images, SEOish