SearchCap: The Day In Search, January 30, 2009

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

From Search Engine Land:

• How Search Marketing Made Me a Fantasy Football Champion
  Okay, so it’s not curing polio or splitting the atom, but winning my fantasy football league this year was a fairly rewarding experience. Week after week, I racked up the points and left my circle of friends in the dust. My secret? Search marketing training.
• Losing Hope With Yahoo, After Watching The Paid Search Division Stumble
  Come and get us, Microsoft. That might as well be what Yahoo’s search ad division — Yahoo Search Marketing — is doing with its action of changing advertiser accounts without asking first. Part of Yahoo’s long-standing problem has been that it generates less advertising revenue per ad than Google. The Panama upgrade that came out two years ago was supposed to fix that — and didn’t. Then the partnership with Google was supposed to fix things — and never happened. Moreover, that deal just highlighted problems with Yahoo’s broad matching system. …
• Are You An SEO Hybrid?
  During search engine optimization (SEO) consultations, have you heard any of the following statements: “I didn’t hire you for website usability. I hired you for SEO.” These statements, and the sentiments associated with them, come in many variations, such as: “I didn’t hire you to redesign my site. I hired you to get my site #1 on Google.” …
• Live Search “Auto Suggest” Add-On For Firefox Released
  Microsoft’s Live Search still isn’t built into Firefox, but you can add it to your Firefox search box manually. Now, a new add-on from Live Search does this complete with the ability for the search box to auto-suggest terms you might be searching for. For more, see the Live Search blog.
• Martin Schaedel (Lazerzubb) Killed In Plane Crash
  I can recall when I first met Martin Schaedel, known widely by his online handle lazerzubb, I think it was at a search conference in Sweden or Germany years ago. He was the youngest person I’d ever seen show up at one (he was maybe 15 at the time), and he was eager to make his mark. And so he did among many in the search and internet marketing community that watched him grow up. Sadly, Martin was apparently killed in a small plane crash in Santa Monica yesterday. Over the …

Search News From Around The Web:

Applications & Portal Features

• GDrive, beu blog
• Google Reader Recommendation Lists Stops Updating, Search Engine Roundtable
• Google Web Accelerator Discontinued, Google Operating System
• What we did on our winter break, Official Google Reader Blog

Business Issues

• 11 Business Plans For Twitter, www.alleyinsider.com
• Amazon.com Announces Fourth Quarter Sales up 18% to $6.70 Billion; 2008 Free Cash Flow Grows 16% to $1.36 Billion, Yahoo! Finance
• China advertisers balking at long-term deals, Reuters
• Google delays stock option exchange program, News.com

Local, Maps & Mobile

• MapQuest Local for iPhone, MapQuest Blog
• The Colorblind Want To Use Google Maps Traffic Data, Search Engine Roundtable
• TimeMap: Helping you add the 4th dimension to your maps, Google Geo Developers Blog

Paid Search & Contextual

• A new year, a new traffic model for Ad Planner, Inside AdWords
• Google AdWords XML Reports Missing Decimals, Search Engine Roundtable
• Google Confirms New Display URL Policy: One Domain Per Ad Group, Search Engine Roundtable
• Rewards for Search: Yahoo Canada Teams Up With Air Miles, Traffick

Searching

• The State of Blog Search, 2009, Read/Write Web
• Unlike Bush’s ‘Google Bomb,’ Google Quickly Defuses Obama’s, Fox News
• When Google’s "Did You Mean" Pushes Away Better Results, Google Blogoscoped

SEM Industry

• A Request For Google’s Webmaster Tools – Fight spamlink hacking head-on, Performancing.com
• SMX West Discounts, Training & Liveblog Schedule, BruceClay.com

SEO & SEM

• eRetailers Using SEM: Promote to Keep Yourself Afloat, www.search-mojo.com
• What’s a Yahoo Advertiser to Do?, Search Engine Watch
• When it comes to SEO, Don’t let your Branding Department Choose Your Keywords, Search Marketing Sage

Social Media

• Warning: Dependence on Facebook, Twitter Could Be Hazardous to Your Business, PBS
• Facebook Connect and Apple’s iPhoto ’09, Facebook Developers News
• The 20 Words and Phrases That Will Get You the Most ReTweets, danzarrella.com
• The Twitter Experiment – Pogue’s Posts Blog, New York Times
• TwitClicks – Analytics for Twitter, danperry.com
• Twittering away standards or tweeting the future of journalism?, Reuters

Video, Music & Image Search

• Annotations Made Easier, YouTube Blog

Web Analytics

• Advanced Google Analytics – Zero Visits and Search Page Referrer, SEOmoz

Recent Hot Items From Sphinn, Our Social News Sharing Site:

• SEO Career Path
• A Look At Article Directories and Their Influence in Organic Rankings
• Is your graphic design helping or hurting your business?
• Making Money With Facebook
• How to Search for People Across Many Social Networks
• Top 5 mistakes made by PPC newcomers
• Dev Server Indexed = SEO Death
• Cool FireFox Plugins to Enhance Google Analytics