SearchCap: The Day In Search, April 3, 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:

• Will Utah’s New Trademark Bill Stop Competitive Keyword Buys?
  Wow. Via Techdirt, news from the EFF that the Utah legislature has passed a Trademark Protection Act law preventing people from buying ads linked to terms that are also trademarks of others. The Trademark Blog notes the law probably violates the US Constitution. Certainly it will be hard to enforce….
• Preliminary Scorecard: How Effective Is Yahoo’s Panama Upgrade?
  The world of search marketing is divided into two types of people, it seems: Those who have never actually used Yahoo’s new Panama sponsored search upgrade and never will; and those who are in knee deep working on their accounts, and want to find out how other fellow marketers…
• Live Search Maps Adds New Features And Firefox 3D Support
  Microsoft added a range of new features to Live Search Maps, including Firefox support for Virtual Earth 3D. Some of the new capabilities are live right now and some are going live later today. Below is a list of the new tools and features and their descriptions from the distributed…
• Ranking The SEO Ranking Factors
  Back in 2005, SEOmoz tried to assemble a list of all the possible search engine ranking factors out there and get various experts to rate them. I say tried to because while they had a list, and ratings, no one knows all the factors or exactly how each individual search…
• Ask Ramps Up The Mystery Ads
  First in the UK, Ask rolled out a guerilla marketing campaign aimed at sparking an "information revolution" to choose Ask over Google. Now a different yet still mysterious campaign is underway in the US by Ask. Valleywag reports about billboards on Highway 101 between San Francisco and San Jose saying…
• Snakes On A Google
  We noted the great Google python rampage in headlines yesterday, but the story continues. Since it’s a slow news day, so why not. On April 1, the python pet of a Google employee in New York got loose. No joke. The python was found yesterday, and no one was harmed….
• MSN Gets The Message: Don’t Prefill The Search Box
  I’m still waiting for the promised official response from Microsoft about the entire prefilling of the search box thing that happened at MSN UK, as we wrote about last week. But via Threadwatch, MSN UK apparently has a blog about the – yes — MSN UK home page. There, MSN…
• The Four Returns Of Social Media Marketing
  There are essentially four different types of return that you can expect from a successful social media marketing campaign: links, mindshare/branding, sales and consumer interaction. Below, a look at each type of return and how you can tap into it, depending on your goals….
• The Impending Social Search Inflection Point
  Search has changed. Online consumer information retrieval has reached another inflexion point – a shift from pure algorithmic search to social search. Searchers have become increasingly sophisticated, and basic algorithmic web results are getting diluted out of most mainstream search experiences such as Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL and Ask. Search…
• Google TV Ads: Google Brings Auction Model To TV Advertising
  Rumored and written about for several weeks, Google is in fact launching a beta trial of TV ads with cable company Astound and satellite TV provider Echostar, which owns Dish Network. Astound operates in selected cities in Northern California. But Dish Network is national. Interestingly, Dish Network is highly interactive,…
• Search Month: March 2007 Search News, In Review
  Search Month is a monthly newsletter that recaps stories covered on Search Engine Land over the past month. It’s also available by feed here. Below, news about Search Engine Land itself, then our 10 most popular stories written last month, then a major story for various search marketing topics along…

Search News Headlines From Elsewhere

Applications & Portal Features

• Introducing Google Apps referrals, Inside AdSense
• Google Gadget ecosystem statistics for March, Niall Kennedy

Business Issues

• FAST Acquires Convera’s Retrievalware Technology, Search Engine Watch Blog
• THE CHART: Downtime, Valleywag
• PriceGrabber Lands AOL Shopping Deal, ComparisonEngines.com

Paid Search & Contextual

• When is MFA a Good Thing?, Threadwatch

SEO & SEM

• Cats and Mice: The Shifting Sea of Search Results, SEO Book
• How SEO Can Save A Business, SEOmoz
• Time and Money: Small Businesses Have Little of Each, Search Engine Watch
• Does "Freshness" Mean More in Google?, Search Engine Roundtable
• Should You Outsource Link Development in SEO?, Search Engine Roundtable
• A Plea to Stop Treating SEO as an Afterthought, Search Engine Watch
• Have you gone overboard with your keyword density?, Jennifer Slegg

Social Media

• The State of Technorati, April 2007, David Sifry
• Technorati’s Mating Dance, TechCrunch
• Mirror mirror on the wall, which blog search is best of them all?, Robert Scoble
• Picli is Digg For Photos…Yawn, Mashable
• Next Service To Try Gaming Digg: Subvert and Profit, TechCrunch
• Time to Join StumbleUpon, Pronet Advertising

Video & Image Search

• Book Search and library digital files — what’s the scoop?, Google Librarian Central Blog
• fisssh!, a meta search engine, is launched, Search Engine Watch Blog

Other Stuff

• Taxes, SES and Starlets: April Smart Answers, Ask Blog
• Turkish Users Demand Special Google Logo, Google Blogoscoped
• Google Search History Art Project, Google Blogoscoped
• This year’s Anita Borg Scholarship winners, Official Google Blog
• Big And Little Screens Dominate This Week’s Google Weekly Zeitgeist, Google Zeitgeist
• Podcast: Google Starts TV Ads; Social For Next Gen Search? MSN Keeps Hands Off The Search Box; SnakePlex & More!, Daily SearchCast