SearchCap: The Day In Search, August 14, 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:

• AOL Launches Improved Mobile Search
  AOL has improved its mobile search capability, especially for Windows Mobile devices. Earlier I had incorrectly reported that there had been a full relaunch of its mobile portal. Only the search functionality has been improved and relaunched. There are now two types of search experiences: a Windows Mobile experience and…
• Report: More Time Spent With Content, Mild Increase In Search
  According to the Nielsen-measured, Online Publishers Assn (OPA) sponsored Internet Activity Index, Internet users are spending more time with content sites, less time with “communications” and marginally more time with search. According to OPA president Pam Horan’s prepared statement, “The index indicates that, over the last four years, the primary…
• Live Search Is On A “Positive Trajectory” Says Microsoft
  Microsoft says its Web search on “positive trajectory” from Reuters reports Kevin Johnson, president of Microsoft’s platforms and services group, saying Live Search is on a “positive trajectory.” He said in an interview: Over the next 12 months, we’ve got a very aggressive engineering plan with multiple releases of search…
• Ask.com’s New Simple U.S. Commercial
  Gary Price discusses a brand new Ask.com commercial being broadcasted in the U.S. This commercial is very simplistic, with virtually no words to the whole commercial. It just shows feature after feature. Here it is:…
• Search Illustrated: Black Hat Cloaking Explained
  Have you ever clicked on a promising search result, only to find that the web page you land on has nothing to do with what you expected, or even worse, is a page of porn or other spam? If so, you may have been the unwitting victim of black-hat…
• Embed Google Maps Feature Coming Soon
  Google’s embeddable map feature out next week from The Sydney Morning Herald reports that Google Maps will be adding a YouTube like embed maps feature, as early as next week. Carl Sjogreen, Google Australia’s senior product manager, announced this feature in Sydney today. The feature will be rolled out worldwide…
• Google, Microsoft Moving Forward With Health Ventures
  The International Herald Tribune reports (story also in the NY Times) on new developments at both Google and Microsoft concerning their health product strategies. The long-rumored Google Health is apparently almost here. (See screenshots at Google Blogoscoped.) Health care-related advertising and marketing is a multi-billion dollar industry in the U.S….
• Google Webmaster Tools Adds Malware Review Form
  The Google Webmaster Central Blog announced a new feature to submit a request to Google to review pages that were labeled as being malware. We reported in the past that Google Search Results Now May Display Malware Warnings. In addition, Google has been sending malware notifications via email to Webmasters….
• Google Website Optimizer, Pensive Riffs: A Meeting of the Minds
  Part one of this article is here. “Big money goes around the world” – Rush When we left off, I had shared the results of a first test for the home page of a small business ecommerce site. My colleagues and I went through a systematic process to work…
• Ask Jumps, Google Slips and Yahoo Leads American Customer Satisfaction Index for Search
  For the first time, Yahoo has beaten Google in the annual University of Michigan American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI). The survey measures U.S. consumer satisfaction across a broad range of business and product categories including “e-business,” which covers search. The survey asks a statistically representative sample of consumers to rate…
• How To Win Friends And Influence People In Social News Networks
  Still wondering why you submit an article on Digg or Reddit and it goes nowhere? The key, as with most things in life, is who you know. But as with links, clients or affiliates: you want quality over quantity. You want people who are active and have strong profiles….

Search News From Around The Web:

Applications & Portal Features

• Hotmail will soon bring you more of your requests, better performance, Hotmail Blog
• Pipes Adds Entity Detection, Pipes Blog
• Hyperpolyglotic Gmail, Official Gmail Blog
• Yahoo! Launches New Applicant Tracking System , David Dalka

Business Issues

• Yahoo! To Open Illinois Office To Tap Engineering Talent, Campus Technology
• An Inside Look At Google’s AdWords HQ, InformationWeek

Paid Search & Contextual

• Google Adds Granular Access To AdWords, Search Engine Roundtable
• Google AdWords To Drop Copy/Move Keyword, Search Engine Roundtable
• Microsoft adCenter Faces Four Days of Outage?, Marketing Pilgrim
• Google AdWords Now Accepts UK Direct Debit Payments, SEOptimise
• AdSense CPMs by Referral Source for a Day, Jeremy Zawodny

Searching

• Who Does Blended Search Better?, BruceClay.com
• Health-Related Smart Answers Debut on Ask.com, ResourceShelf

SEM Industry

• Contribute Feedback for the MSN/Live Search Team (And Be Heard), SEOmoz

SEO & SEM

• Wordtracker marries Google Trends, The SEO Scoop
• How to Select a Search Engine Optimization Firm, Search Engine Watch
• Understanding the Search Landscape, Search Engine Watch
• 8 Tips for Avoiding an SEO Fraudster, Marketing Pilgrim
• What Do You Do if Your UK Site Ranks Lower Locally than Worldwide?, Search Engine Roundtable

Social Media

• Yappd Launches, Calls Itself "Twitter With Pictures", Techcrunch
• 34 More Ways to Build Your Own Social Network, Techcrunch
• Tracking Wikipedia’s Not-So-Neutral Editors, Chronicle.com

Video, Music & Image Search

• YouTube wants to depose Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart, News.com
• Japanese content community targets YouTube, FierceIPTV
• YouTube Videos & Google Maps Integration, Search Engine Roundtable

Web Analytics

• Alexa Says YouTube Is Now Bigger Than Google. Alexa Is Useless, Techcrunch
• Hitwise Launches New Widget Featuring Internet Usage Trends, BusinessWire

Other Items

• Is Google Really More Than Just A Search Engine?, InformationWeek
• Content 101, Yahoo Publisher Network Blog

Hot Items From Sphinn, Our Social News Sharing Site:

• Things That Bug Me Regarding Those Who Sell Links
• Yahoo to Google, “You don’t have the balls”
• Sphinn Meetup @ SES San Jose 2007
• The MSN/Live Search Team Wants to Hear from You
• How To Win Friends & Influence People In Social News Networks
• How to be a Master in the dark art of Social Marketing
• SEO & Search Engine Market the Planet one link at a time
• Google Partners with gBox to Compete with iTunes
• The last word on reciprocal linking?
• Interview: Mike Grehan, World Traveler & Global SEO
• 6 Spanking New WordPress Plugins You Haven’t Seen
• Cartoon: Why SEO Is Like Sex and Air
• Who Does Blended Search Better?
• Inside the Mind of a Google Search Engineer