SearchCap: The Day In Search, April 6, 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: Master Of Closing The Loop?
  I gave SEO Book’s Aaron Wall a big mention for his piece on trust earlier this week, but he’s got another post out now that deserves as much attention: Google as the Invisible Hand of the Online Economy. In it, he covers things such as how by being everywhere, Google…
• Google Exec On Board Of Company That Might Pollute Google Results
  Bottom Slurping for Google Juice from Kate Kaye ClickZ is a fairly jaw-dropping story of Associated Content, a site cofounded by Google vice president of advertising sales Tim Armstrong, that might very well be generating the type of AdSense-powered crud that pollutes Google and other search engines as I…
• AFP & Google Settle Over Google News Copyright Case
  The most significant copyright case against Google News, that filed by Agence France-Presse back in March 2005, has now ended. Google has signed a licensing agreement with AFP that settles the suit. News from the AFP here. The statement from both companies has the usual spin that this is about…
• A "New Deal" For Online News & Search Engines?
  Investment pundits have been scratching their heads this week over billionaire investor Sam Zell’s $8.2-billion purchase of Tribune Corp., publisher of the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times, and owner of other old-media properties. Newspapers have been bleeding cash and losing both money and eyeballs to online news, job and…
• Shareholders To Vote On Google Censorship In China
  Google Faces Pressure Over Censorship from WebProNews reports that Google’s shareholders will have the right to vote at the upcoming annual meeting on the issue of censorship in China and other "abusive regimes." Marketwatch and BetaNews both also have earlier coverage….
• Google China Releases Labs Product Very Similar To Sohu.com’s Sogou
  Google evades question about software similarities from InfoWorld reports that Google is under scrutiny on their release of a Pinyin Input Method Editor (IME). The IME is a Google China labs product that enables "users to enter Chinese characters by typing their Pinyin equivalents on a standard QWERTY keyboard." The…
• No Win Against Google For Party That Opted-Out Of Click Fraud Settlement
  Google AdWords Contract Upheld (Again)–Feldman v. Google from Eric Goldman reports that Google has won a case against the one of the 556 plaintiffs that opted out of the Google click fraud settlement." Here are some key points I want to pull out from this:…
• Teaching Google To See Images
  "Image search" is really something of a misnomer, because current generation search engines rely primarily on text to "understand" all types of content, including images. When you search for images on Google, Flickr or most other search engines, they aren’t examining the pixels that make up images. Instead, search engines…
• Google AdWords Goes Yellow & Changes On Click Event
  The Google AdWords Blog just announced that they have made two changes on how the top sponsored listings in the Google search results are handled. (1) A color change from a blue background to a yellow background was pushed through today after much testing. (2) Now you have to click…
• Del.icio.us Improves Firefox Bookmarks Extension
  The del.icio.us blog announced an upgrade to their Firefox extension that enables the easy bookmarking of pages. The changes include: Searching and browsing your bookmarks can be done directly in your Firefox browser You can edit your bookmarks within Firefox You can define which tags to display in the Firefox…
• Search In Pictures: New Column From Search Engine Land
  Last week, Barry Schwartz tried a new idea of showing what was happening in the world of search based on pictures he found on the web. You liked it enough that we’ve decided to make it a formal column called Search In Pictures, which will run on Fridays here…
• Search In Pictures: Food, Sharks, Monkeys & God
  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….

Search News Headlines From Elsewhere

Applications & Portal Features

• Google Talk widget gets better, Webware
• Baidu Planning Email Service?, Pacific Epoch

Business Issues

• STARTUPS: Google’s victims, Valleywag
• McClatchy’s Deal With Yahoo Opens Doors, theledger.com
• Yahoo ‘Faced’ in Social Network Indecision?, Internet News
• Ask.com Markets on Google to Lure Visitors to its Own Search Engine, Search Engine Roundtable
• Technorati breaking away, leaving Google behind in the dust, Compete Blog
• Technorati CEO Search Confirmed, TechCrunch
• ADVERTISING: How to beat Google, Valleywag
• UBS Analysis of Comscore Search Numbers for Feb, Searchblog

Local & Mobile

• Google Allows Bulk Uploads for Local Business Listings, Small Business SEM
• Where 2.0: Early Registration Ending Tuesday, O’Reilly Radar
• New Interactive Print Page for Maps!, Yahoo Local & Maps Blog

Paid Search & Contextual

• Domainers Owning Google?, Threadwatch
• Google AdSense Tests Western Union Quick Cash Payment Option, Search Engine Roundtable
• New Microsoft adCenter Welcome Guide, adCenter Blog

SEM Industry

• Exerting Influence & Moving Markets, SEO Book
• In-Housekeeping 101: Where to Put Your SEO Department, Search Engine Watch
• In-house Spotlight: Shopping.com’s Former SEO, Search Engine Journal

SEO & SEM

• Don’t Forget About Branding, Link Building Blog

• What exactly qualifies as a quality link?, Jennifer Slegg

• The Worst Search Engine Spam I Have Ever Seen, James Li

• Do you really need meta tags? You bet, Jennifer Slegg

Social Media

• Technorati Patent Filing on Blog Spam, SEO By The Sea
• Go Go (Reader) Gadget, Google Reader Blog

Video, Audio & Image Search

• Startup aspires to be ‘Google’ of audio, video, Associated Press
• Yahoo Podcasting and Media Tagging Patent Applications, SEO By The Sea

Other Stuff

• Turkey’s Lawmakers Move to Block Sites, Associated Press
• For Cable TV, No Interest in Selling Ads the eBay Way, New York Times
• CrazyEgg – Measuring Web Site Usability, Read/WriteWeb
• Naka-Yahoo! ka ba?* (*Are you on Yahoo!), Yahoo! Search Blog
• RUMORMONGER: Two Google bridegrooms?, Valleywag