SearchCap: The Day In Search, April 27, 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:

• Microsoft Live Search 411 Adds Traffic To Capabilities
  

  How many people are familiar with Microsoft’s Voice Search tool “Live Search 411?” It’s a powerful yet not well-known way to do local search from any phone (1-800-CALL-411 or 1-800-225-5411). Conceptually, it’s exactly like Goog-411 but has more considerably more content and capabilities. Built on the Tellme infrastructure it can provide:

  Local business search Driving directions Weather Sports scores Stock [...]

• Google Maps Pulling In Geotagged Flickr Photos
  

  Our own Barry Schwartz spotted this today on Google Maps: A search for rustybrick includes a link to see Flickr photos displayed on Google Maps:

  Clicking on that link leads to a fairly lengthy list of photos imported into Google Maps via the Flickr API. The photos are all from a Flickr feed that includes photos [...]

• SEOs Say AOL’s Love.com Feels More Like A One-Night Stand
  

  AOL recently soft-launched Love.com, which it advertises as a collection of “topic blogs” that “provide a central view into what the world is loving now.” But it’s really an SEO play. Give the site any subdomain under the sun, and Love.com will make a new site on-the-fly with content scraped from news sites, blogs, YouTube [...]

• Google’s Morse Code For Samuel Morse’s Birthday
  

  Today is the birthday of Samuel Morse, the inventor of Morse code. Today, Google is sending out a message to everyone that it is his birthday. The logo is getting a lot of buzz and people are asking for more information about it. Here is a picture of the logo:

  Supposedly, the logo [...]

• Microsoft Launching Kumo At SMX Advanced?
  

  When’s Microsoft’s new search brand launching? Perhaps at our SMX Advanced search marketing conference on June 2, based on a “countdown clock” someone spotted at the Microsoft campus. The LiveSide Blog reports a visitor noticed a countdown clock at Building 88, where the Live Search team works at Microsoft’s headquarters. The clock says “Countdown to Kumo,” [...]

• SMX Advanced Rate Increases May 2 – Register Now!
  

  The Early Bird Rate for Search Marketing Expo – SMX Advanced expires at the end of the day on Friday, May 1st. Save on your All Access ticket by registering now!

  Advanced features one-of-a-kind sessions for experienced search engine marketers. Look at the agenda. See what to expect – read conference chair Danny Sullivan’s preview. Check out the [...]

• Google’s What’s Popular Gadget: The Next Digg Clone?
  

  Steve Rubel reports that Google has released a new iGoogle Gadget named What’s Popular. The gadget looks like a small little Digg clone to me. Here is a screen capture:

  As you can see, you can mark up or down a story and it shows the number of “pops” next to the story, plus [...]

• AT&T Secretly ‘In Bed’ With BT Firm?
  

  AT&T which has publicly advocated on behalf of relatively stringent rules and opt-in requirements around behavioral targeting (BT) appears to have been working with BT firm Audience Science (formerly Revenue Science). Wendy Davis at MediaPost has written two related stories on the issue. Here’s her summary of the apparent contradiction between AT&T’s public position and [...]

• Who’s Coming & Going In The Search Industry?
  

  Over the weekend, there seemed to be a lot of activity on people coming and going at search companies. I figured I sum up some of those moves in a short post here.

  Former Googler Douglas Bowman, who resigned from Google due to Google being too data centric has taken a job at Twitter, according [...]

• Is The Hype Over Google AdWords Quality Score Justified?
  

  The focus of the paid search world, if you measure it by tweets, blog posts and conference sessions, has turned squarely to Google’s AdWords Quality Score over the past few months. Google first introduced Quality Score years ago, but changes they rolled out in August of 2008 recently increased visibility of the score in the [...]

• Can Microsites Harm Your Primary Site’s Rankings?
  

  Publishing many web sites can be a very challenging process. There are times when organizations have a larger main site and decide to operate one or more smaller sites (aka microsites) as well. Other organizations publish a number of microsites without having a larger site at all. Whether publishing microsites are in violation of the search [...]

• How To Overhype Your Search Engine
  

  After covering search for 13 years, I’m more than a little jaded. I’ve seen any number of search start-ups promise to revolutionize how we search. None of them have in the huge way they’ve promised, other than Google — and it’s a special case. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been watching [...]

• Yahoo Now Showing Two Indented Results
  

  A search for swine flu at Yahoo returns two indented results under the main results. As far as I know, Yahoo has only shown a single indented results under the main result. I am not sure if this is some type of bug or if Yahoo has decided to show more results from [...]

Search News From Around The Web:

Applications & Portal Features

• Google fixes severe Chrome security hole, News.com
• AOL Launches Online “News Magazine” PoliticsDaily, TechCrunch

Business Issues

• For Yahoo, Four Reasons Not To Sell Search To Microsoft, MediaPost
• FTC says Internet firms near last chance, Reuters
• Online Video Ad Growth Seen Slower Due To Downturn, SmartMoney
• Online Video Ad Spend Still On Track To Generate $1 Billion By 2011, paidContent.org
• Steinbeck Heirs Seek To Slow Google Books Settlement, New York Times Blogs

Local, Maps & Mobile

• NOAA Brings Great Lakes to Google Ocean, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
• Google Earth Helps Solve A Plane Crash Mystery, TechCrunch
• Maps of the Swine Flu Outbreak – Updated, Google Maps Mania
• Google Maps Bug Causes Reviews To Go Missing, Search Engine Roundtable
• Google Maps Data Quality: Where do we stand after the Locksmith Onslaught?, Mike Blumenthal

Link Building

• 10 linkbait strategies to build links and drive traffic, Econsultancy
• Pick the Right Market & be Linkworthy, or Fail, SEO Book

Paid Search & Contextual

• Case study – Impact of online advertising on in-store sales, AdWords Agency Blog
• Tips to Make Your Brand Work For You, adCenter Blog for Advertisers
• Google Banning AdSense Publishers For Not Updating Privacy Policies?, Search Engine Roundtable
• New "Google for Advertisers" site has launched, AdWords Agency Blog

Searching

• Wolfram Alpha Getting A Public Preview On Tuesday, TechCrunch
• Live Search cashback “exponentially growing”: 5M pageviews and 10k purchases every day, LiveSide
• Wolfram|Alpha: Our First Impressions, Read/Write Web
• Navigating the Web Better on Ask, Ask.com Blog

SEM Industry

• Video Recap of Weekly Search Buzz :: April 24, 2009, Search Engine Roundtable
• ANZAC Day in Australia and New Zealand, Google Logos Collection
• Will SEO still exist in five years?, YouTube
• You Don’t Have To Sell Out To Blog In This Industry, Search Engine Roundtable

SEO & SEM

• How Google Treats Punctuation, Search Engine Journal
• How Search History Influences Google AdWords, SEOptimise
• How to be good in the world of SEO, Econsultancy
• Low Hanging Fruit and PPC Keyword Opportunities, Search Engine Journal
• Switching things around, Dullest.com
• What happened to GoCompare? – Their Banning, Penalty & Re-inclusion into Google, Site Visibility
• World’s Best Headlines: BBC News, Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox

Social Media

• A Sign Of Things To Come: Naked Pizza Erects Twitter Billboard, TechCrunch
• FBI Arrests Oklahoma Teabagger For Twitter Threats, Wired
• The Twitter Book, by Tim O’Reilly and Sarah Milstein, Boing Boing
• Twitter Clients Are a UI Design Playground, Daring Fireball
• Why there will be many Twitters, Scripting News
• 8 Ways To Make Your Twitter Time More Productive, Shimon Sandler
• FBI accuses Twitter user of massacre threats, News.com
• Here Comes Twitter Spam And How To Fight It, TechCrunch
• 23 Social Media Marketing Tips from Dell, Comcast, HP, Wells Fargo, Best Buy, General Mills, Ford, UPS, Home Depot, Cirque du Soleil, Online Marketing Blog
• Corporate Blogs and ‘Tweets’ Must Keep SEC in Mind, Wall Street Journal
• Preliminary Results From A Survey of More Than 130,000 Wikipedia Readers and Contributors Available, ResourceShelf
• What Is Facebook Opening Up To Developers On Monday?, Allfacebook.com

Video, Music & Image Search

• Google Image Labeler Plagued With Pornography?, Search Engine Roundtable

Other Items

• Google’s Larry Page to be a father, Mercury News
• Google Celebrates Samuel Morse’s Birthday, Google Logos Collection
• Google Logo Not Broken, It’s Morse Code, Search Engine Roundtable

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