SearchCap: The Day In Search, April 20, 2007

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 Search History Expands, Becomes Web History
  Google’s Search History feature, which was switched on as a default option for many Google searchers in February, has now been renamed Web History to reflect how it has expanded to track what Google users do as they surf the web. It’s a huge move for Google and raises anew…
• Complaint Over Google-DoubleClick Acqusition Expected To Be Filed At FTC Today
  Google draws privacy complaint to FTC from News.com reports three organizations are going to file a joint complaint today with the Federal Trade Commission over Google’s proposed acquisition of DoubleClick. The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), along with the Center for Digital Democracy (CDD) and the U.S. Public Interest Research…
• Battelle Chats With Microsoft’s General Counsel On Google/DoubleClick Antitrust Allegations
  News Analysis: Microsoft General Counsel on DoubleClick and Antitrust from John Battelle documents some of his conversation with Microsoft’s general counsel Brad Smith today….
• Does "GoogleClick" Spell The End For Bid Managers?
  This week’s announcement of Google’s new AdWords Preferred Cost Bidding may have been a whimper compared to the bang of its DoubleClick acquisition news. But the two events may be related in a way that could spell trouble ahead for the paid search bid management companies like Atlas, Omniture, KeyWordMax,…
• Google’s Q1 2007 Profit & Revenue Rises Over 60%
  Google announced first quarter earnings for 2007 showed revenues of $3.66 billion, an increase of 63% compared to the first quarter of 2006 — and an increase in profits of 69%. You can see the financial tables for the first quarter of 2007, plus the earnings call is archived, and…
• Google Acquires Marratech’s Video Conferencing Software
  Google announced that they have acquired Marratech’s video conferencing software (not the company, just its software)….
• Time For Google To Give Up The Fight Against Paid Links?
  The Paid Links Economy from Philipp Lenssen at Google Blogoscoped is a nice, thoughtful follow-up to last week’s paid links debate that erupted after Google’s Matt Cutts featured a new way to report paid links. There’s plenty of the history of link buying and assorted comments, though Philipp’s article doesn’t…
• New SEO Tools: Robots.txt Builder, Term Targeting & Crawl Test
  Three new SEO tools came out this week that are worth a look. Dave Naylor released a robots.txt builder tool, while SEOmoz released term targeting and crawl test tools. Some more about the tools, below:…
• SES NY: Click Fraud Remains A Contentious Issue
  Yesterday, Click Forenics released its quarterly Click Fraud Index showing a purported increase in click fraud from 14.2 percent in Q4 ‘06 to 14.8 percent in Q1. By contrast, Google argues that "click fraud" constitutes less than 0.02 percent of all clicks. Chris Sherman earlier summarized the Click Forensics findings….
• StumbleUpon Releases StumbleThru For Domains
  StumbleUpon, a search service that displays recommended sites for users based on interest profiles, has released StumbleThru, a service that searches for content from some of the most popular sites on the web, including Flickr, MySpace, Wikipedia, YouTube, BBC, CNN, and Physorg. This makes it easy to discover new content…
• Yahoo’s Upgrades And Migrates Events Site Upcoming
  Events are an important but historically neglected area of local search, previously the almost exclusive province of newspapers and printed weeklies. Now there are a range of startups and more established sites providing local events information. They include Socializr, Attendio, Eventful, Zvents, Citysearch, AOL Cityguide, Heyletsgo, Jambase, the various ticket…
• Google To Integrate News With Web Search Results
  Soon, Google will quietly begin changing the way it blends news results and standard web search results, co-mingling links to news sources and web pages if your search terms are relevant to current news events. The new format will replace OneBox news links that have normally appeared at the top…
• Search In Pictures: Easter; Search Fun, Google Power, Art & Signs
  In this week’s Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have and more….
• The Case Of The Missing White House Cached Page On Google
  In my story about Google’s new content removal tools, I highlighted the fact that anyone can potentially wipe out the cached copy of a page, even if they aren’t the page’s author. To illustrate this, I was going to use as an example how the official George W. Bush page’s…
• Google Declares Stephen Colbert As Greatest Living American
  It’s official. Stephen Colbert is the Greatest Living American, or at least now ranks tops for that phrase at Google. It’s all come from the latest Google bombing campaign sparked off in part by Stephen himself. The backstory on this, plus the "I thought Google bombing didn’t work anymore"…

Search News Headlines From Elsewhere

Applications & Portal Features

• Does Anyone Really Click on Sponsored Links in Gmail?, Grokdotcom
• Gmail Spam Filtering Back To Normal, Jeremy Zawodny

Business Issues

• Google’s Intentions for Apps and Future Acquisitions, StepForth

Local, Maps & Mobile

• Toilet on Google Maps? Horseshoe? Colts Fan?, InsideGoogle
• Big Money in Little Screens, New York Times
• Mobile Search Site Creation and Optimization: Part 1 of 2, Search Engine Guide
• Mobile phones represent next frontier for search, Reuters

Paid Search & Contextual

• If it ain’t broke…, Inside AdSense Blog
• LinkedIn Not Labeling Google AdSense Ads, Search Engine Roundtable
• Should Google Refuse To Sell Ads That Profit From Tragedies?, InsideGoogle
• Google Gets Mixed Bag in Latest Ruling in American Blinds Case, Eric Goldman
• ADiFY banks $19m to challenge Google Adsense?, E-Consultancy
• New Google AdWords Dashboard Looks Like Yahoo Panama, Search Engine Journal

SEM Industry

• SES New York 2007: Now in Comic Form!, SEOmoz
• ESCA and Chef Dave Pasternack, SEO Wife
• Estuvimos presentes en Madrid, Google Webmaster Central Blog
• Searchnomics - another search engine marketing conference series, Pandia
• SES Toronto’s Coming! June 12-13, 2007, Traffick
• Finding The Women in Tech and Women in Search, Cre8PC
• Who’s Your Favorite SEO’s Celebrity Look-a-Like?, Search Engine Guide
• The Internet Marketers Manifesto, SEO Scoop
• Why Selling SEO Services is Typically a Bad Business Model, SEO Book.com

• You Can’t Afford Michael Jordan, But You Can Get a Strong SEO Leader, Search Engine Watch

SEO & SEM

• Custom 404 Pages Aid Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Guide
• Google’s Historical Data Ranking Factors Revisited, Plus Advertising Rankings, SEO By The Sea
• SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – Everybody Wants to Rule The SERPs, SEOmoz
• Google’s Web History Patent Applications, SEO By The Sea
• Copywriting Makeover: Value vs. Vision – Part 2 of 2, Search Engine Guide

Social Media

• Digg API, Flash Application Toolkit, and Contest Announced!, Digg
• Petition Against Alexa’s Statsaholic Lawsuit, Mashable
• Will You Be My Friend?, Askville Blog
• Wikipedia founder mulls revenue options, Reuters

Video, Audio & Image Search

• Is YouTube Selling Text Links to Politicians, Threadwatch
• YouTube to collect user data, News.com

Other Stuff

• AOL founder launches health care Web site, News.com
• Google, Wikipedia Sued By Politician Confused About How The Internet Works, Techdirt
• Google Clarification, Gray Hat News