SearchCap: The Day In Search, June 16, 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:

• Report: How The Internet Has Changed Music Consumption
  

  Music file sharing services have always been a mutant species of search, offering different tools and methods for finding and listening to tunes. Napster was one of the first and most infamous, and its widespread adoption caused the recording industry to panic, suing both the company and thousands of its users. That hasn’t stopped the [...]

• Microsoft Taking Click Fraud Battle To Court
  

  The New York Times reports that Microsoft is taking the click fraud battle to court: Microsoft filed the civil complaint on Monday in United States District Court in Seattle against Eric Lam, Gordon Lam and Melanie Suen, of Vancouver, British Columbia, along with several corporation names they were believed to have used, and several unnamed parties. [...]

• Clean Tweets: New Add-On Zaps Twitter Spam
  

  If you use Twitter regularly, you probably know spam is a growing problem — particularly with Twitter’s search engine and the way it surfaces trending topics. Danny Sullivan described how spammers are targeting hot keywords in his Twitter’s Real Time Spam Problem article 10 days ago. Since Twitter hasn’t addressed the problem yet, the folks behind [...]

• PageRank Sculpting Is Dead! Long Live PageRank Sculpting!
  

  Earlier this month, Google’s Matt Cutts sent a shockwave through the advanced SEO community by saying that site owners could no longer perform “PageRank sculpting” using the nofollow tag in the way they’d previously thought. Now Matt’s posted more explanation about the change. But rather than stop PageRank sculpting, I expect [...]

• Taptu Offers Search Engine For iPhone; 40 Percent Of iPhone Users Online More With Mobile
  

  Mobile search engine Taptu has just launched a free iPhone app (”alternative search machine”). It’s the first iPhone-specific search engine but Taptu has been doing mobile search for some time. According to the company the engine crawls the web and indexes “iPhone friendly pages” that are optimized for the device. The index is much smaller [...]

• Understanding Federated Link Building: A Primer With Examples
  

  You’ve probably heard the term “Federated Search“. It’s the term used to describe the process of simultaneously searching multiple search engines or online databases from a single search box. Federated search is unfortunately an awkward term. It sounds like something from the Civil War. Federated search is closely related to meta-search. If you’ve ever [...]

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Search News From Around The Web:

Applications & Portal Features

• Automatic transliteration for Custom Search, googlecustomsearch.blogspot.com
• How to Invalidate Wikipedia Articles, Michael Gray

Business Issues

• 10 Reasons To Bet On A Yahoo Turnaround (YHOO), Business Insider
• Google’s censorship struggles continue in China, News.com
• MySpace Lays Off Almost 30%, gesterling.wordpress.com

Link Building

• Link Building Contest Comes To a Close, Vertical Measures

Local, Maps & Mobile

• Google Maps: Spammers find a way, Mike Blumenthal
• Links of Local Interest, Volume 8, www.davidmihm.com
• What not to do when you visit Mountain View, Mike Blumenthal
• Yahoo Extends the New Yahoo! Mobile Experience by Launching in Nine Additional Countries, www.businesswire.com

Paid Search & Contextual

• Getting started with AdWords workbook, Inside AdWords
• How to Use Google Wonder Wheel and Related Search Tools for Keyword Research, PPC Hero
• Kenshoo Makes PPC Complexities Easier to Manage, Search Engine Journal

Searching

• 3 Tools to Combine Bing and Twitter Search Results, Search Engine Journal

SEM Industry

• Jane and Robot Search Developer Summit, SEOmoz

SEO & SEM

• Audio of Matt Cutts’s Nofollow Comments in Today’s SEO Newsletter, BruceClay.com
• Do dates in URLs determine freshness?, YouTube
• 5 Ways to Increase Your Blogs’ Search Traffic, Search Engine People
• Expert SEO Testing: Usually Worthless, SEO Book
• Finding the Google Mobile Keyword Tool, Natural Search Blog
• Google Says: Yes, You Can Still Sculpt PageRank. No You Can’t Do It With Nofollow, SEOmoz
• Optimize Your Search Engine Listing for Improved CTR, SEM Clubhouse
• PageRank Sculpting, BlogStorm
• SBS Mailbag: How Should I Target Related Keywords?, Small Business SEM
• The Good The Bad and The Ugly Of SEO, SEO.com
• What impact does "page bloat" have on Google rankings?, YouTube Blog

Social Media

• Facebook Surge – The Gen X/Gen Y Tradeoff, Hitwise
• Do’s and don’ts, Yahoo Answers Blog
• First instance of a major advertising campaign using Facebook Vanity URLs, The Next Web
• InfluenceRank: Google’s Social Media PageRank, Search Engine People

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

• Blog Comments And Google
• Matt Cutts on the PageRank Sculpting/NoFollow Issue
• What is Internet Liberalisation and Why Should you Care?
• Nofollow Change: Why Life Just Got Tougher for Niche Sites
• How to Change Your Domain While Keeping Your Search Engine Ranking
• Yahoo! Announces Common Tag: Like The Meta Keywords