SearchCap: The Day In Search, March 4, 2011

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

From Search Engine Land:

• Google Hotpot Places A Bet On Las Vegas

  Google’s on-the-streets promotional blitz for its Hotpot ratings and recommendations service has landed a new home: Las Vegas. The company has just announced a local marketing campaign in “sin city” that’s aimed at upping usage of Google Places and Hotpot. As part of the launch, Google is giving away 10,000 free Las Vegas Monorail tickets […]
• Bing Travel & Kayak Announce Partnership

  In a post on the Bing blog made earlier today, Bing Travel and Kayak have joined forces, as the two travel search engines announced a formal partnership to provide searchers with more comprehensive results. In the next few weeks (no specific timeline has been shared yet), Kayak will begin serving flight search results to Bing […]

• CBS Buys Clicker Video Search Guide; Lanzone Becomes CBS Interactive Prez

  CBS has wisely acquired internet TV guide Clicker, sometimes incorrectly called a video search engine. Clicker CEO Jim Lanzone has been named President of CBS Interactive. He’ll bring tremendous energy and intelligence (and a sense of humor) to the role. The acquisition price wasn’t disclosed. Clicker raised roughly $19 million from investors. CBS also owns […]

• Google’s Farmer Update Plants User Behavior Seeds

  Over the last 10 days, the world of Internet search has swarmed around any source for news on Google’s “Farmer” algorithm change that affected nearly 12% of USA search results. Any company generating its revenue by producing low quality content rushed to wrestle up new rank and ad revenue data and discuss the damage. As […]

• 10 Quick & Dirty SEO Success Metrics

  When your job is to drive organic search engine traffic to a website (SEO Director/Manager/Ninja), you will inevitably need to prove your worth. There’s nothing like cold-hard-facts to paint a picture of success (or expose “The Man Behind The Curtain”). In an ideal world, all digital marketing efforts are managed under one bucket, and the […]

• PPC Data On “Farmer” Shows Traffic Quality Improvement

  Some have speculated that Google made the “Farmer” update to help its advertisers, and its own bottom line, but data from large search marketing agencies shows revenue wasn’t the search engine’s primary signal. Yet, data from Efficient Frontier and the Rimm Kaufmann Group indicate that revenue-per-click is showing a modest improvement, all the same. Both […]

• Google, Microsoft Cooperate To Invalidate Broad Online Mapping Patent

  It’s reasonable to say that the world of technology patents is screwed up and headed for some major reform. One area in which this is very apparent is location/mapping/geo. There are a number of seemingly conflicting or contradictory local and local-mobile patents that have been issued over the past several years. Some of these patents […]

• Blekko Offers New Linkroll Widget & More Publisher Tools

  Blekko has expanded its publisher/marketer outreach with two new tools and a dedicated Blekkogear page for those and other publisher offerings. One of the new tools is the Live Link Roll (shown at right as a screenshot), which is a widget that displays a site’s most recent inbound links “as they happen in realtime,” Blekko […]

• Google Shows Your Latest Tweet As Search Snippet … In 10 Seconds

  As Tim Cohn noticed, Google has changed how it shows Twitter profiles in search results. With the new display, Google is showing the user’s latest tweet as the snippet. As you can see from my example above, it’s even keeping links from the tweet active in the snippet. And if you’re curious to know how […]

• Google Test: Auto-Completing Search Queries

  Via Google Operating System comes the screenshot above, which shows a new test Google is running that involves auto-completing search queries. It’s similar to Google Suggest but, as Google Operating System notes, this auto-completion is happening on long-tail terms where Google Suggest has stopped giving suggestions. I was unable to replicate the test using the […]

• Video: Inside Google’s Self-Driving Cars

  At the TED 2011 conference this week, Google has been giving extremely rare demos of its self-driving cars. TED attendees have even been allowed to travel inside them, on a closed course. Below, some video of the action. Google’s Robot Cars Google’s Sebastian Thrun, the software engineer who heads the project, gave a short talk […]

• Google Speaks More About The Farmer Update, AKA Panda Update

  In an interview with Wired magazine’s Steven Levy (who’s keynoting at our SMX West conference next week), Googlers Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts speak more about the recent Farmer algorithm update. One of the interesting things they say is that last year’s launch of the “Caffeine” indexing infrastructure played a role in upping the visibility […]

Search News From Around The Web:

Applications & Portal Features

• Add Multiple Google Profile Photos, Google Operating System
• Chrome OS Get A Big Update — Two Words: Trackpad Fixes, TechCrunch

Business Issues

• AOL Buys Outside.In, Less Than $10 Million, Business Insider
• Google’s Blogger banned in Turkey over soccer broadcast piracy, thenextweb.com
• How Apple and Google Became the Two Most Admired Companies in the World, TIME.com

Local, Maps & Mobile

• Yelp Business Accounts Become Multi-Lingual, Yelp Official Blog
• Foursquare upgrades venue statistics, aboutfoursquare.com

Paid Search & Contextual

• Adwords ‘Enhanced CPC’ Split Test Results, ppcblog.com

Searching

• Bing Testing Navigation Usability with Alternate SERP Format, www.webranking.com
• Minimum Wage Data Comes to Wolfram|Alpha, Wolfram|Alpha Blog

SEM Industry

• A New Era at BlueGlass, www.blueglass.com
• Video: Google Farmer/Panda Update, Whitelists, SEO California Hosting & Yahoo’s Sweet 16, Search Engine Roundtable
• Why the Search Marketing Industry Must Adapt or Perish, Mashable

SEO & SEM

• @ pC2011: Publishers Learn To Live With Google’s Black Box, paidContent.org
• Bing’s Duane Forrester on Webmaster Tools, Metrics, and Sitemap Quality Thresholds, SEOmoz
• Deconstructing Google, SEOmoz
• Does Google Look At State Or City Level Hosting Location?, Search Engine Roundtable
• Keyword Density – Finally Useful for SEOs and Penguins, SEOptimise

Social Media

• 20 Examples of Great Facebook Pages, blog.hubspot.com
• 4 Ways To Make The Best Twitter Connections, Search Engine People

Web Analytics

• Client Side Authorization in the API, Google Analytics Blog

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

• Link Building 101 – WordPress SEO guru Yoast breaks down the basics of link building in light of the recent JC Penny slap with "Link Building 101"
• How Many Words In ALT Text For Google, Yahoo & Bing? – "How many words will Google, Yahoo and Bing count as part of ALT Text on a page? Someone asked me this on the other day and I wondered if a little simple test might offer an answer. This sort of post is usually a decent way of picking up natural forum links wether it’s right or wrong…."