SearchCap: The Day In Search, August 19, 2011

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

• Facebook’s ‘Like’ Button Declared Illegal In Germany

  Citing violations to the countries strict privacy laws, the Independent Center for Privacy Protection (ULD) called for all Facebook ‘like’ plugins to be removed in the German state of Schlewsing-Holstein. The ULD stated that the Facebook ‘like’ plugin infringes on the Telemedia Act and the Federal Data Protection Act as Facebook transfers data back to the […]
• Bing’s Facebook Fans Do 68% More Searches Than Average Bing Users

  Bing’s Facebook fans really “like” searching. And they like searching on Bing, it appears. According to a recent comScore white paper, Bing’s Facebook fans do 68% more searches (on Bing) than the average Bing user. And it extends out a bit further, too: The friends of those fans do 27% more searches than regular Bing […]

• Confirmed: Google Testing Frames For Search Options & Search Results

  Google has confirmed a new user interface test on the search results page where the left side search filters are in a scrollable frame, and the middle of the search results are in their own scrollable frame. Technically, they are not frames, but rather some form of AJAX or HTML5 like interface. I am honestly […]

• Search In Pics: Google Wave Pool, Google Bowling & Lego Angry Birds

  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. Google Wave Pool With Sergey Brin: Google +1 T-Shirt: Matt Cutts Marathon Shirt: Google Socks: Google […]

• Is Your Blog An Asset Or A Liability?

  I analyze websites every day, as well as a lot of Facebook pages, and a ton of blogs attached to websites and Facebook pages. I realized something this week. There are a lot of junktastical blogs out there, and I now wonder why people have even added this feature to their site. Here’s the truth….you […]

• Adwords Conversion Funnels & Attribution Models: Can They Work Together?

  First click. Last click. Linear. Reverse decay. Linear reverse decay…everyone accepts that attribution is a necessary consideration in analytics, but no one seems to be able to crack the code. There are countless ways to attribute revenue, yet the major analytics systems stick with the traditional last entry. The reality is that we, they, you, […]

• Belgium Says Google Broke Privacy Law, Offers Cash Settlement

  Google is considering a settlement offer from federal prosecutors in Belgium who say the company broke national privacy laws when it collected personal data from unsecured WiFi networks via its Street View vehicles. According to Bloomberg, prosecutors have offered Google a €150,000 penalty (currently about $215,000 USD) for the gaffe that Google has repeatedly said […]

Search News From Around The Web:

Business Issues

• Google now expanding into Bothell, too, seattlepi.com
• Google plans 840-person expansion near Seattle, techflash.com
• Why the Motorola Mobility Deal is like the Google Book Search Settlement, StevenLevy.com

Local, Maps & Mobile

• Augmented Reality Maps and Directions Coming to iPhone, Read/Write Web
• 7-pack vs Blended Local Results – Split Testing?, The Super Rad Whitespark Blog

SEM Industry

• Google Panda Bilingual, Scrolling Google Interfaces, Better Images & Yahoo In Bing Webmaster Tools, Search Engine Roundtable

SEO & SEM

• A Website Audit: The Beginnings of an SEO Campaign, Canadian SEO
• Adwords Reps – A Love-Hate Relationship, Searching Beyond the Paid
• Google AdWords Keyword Exception Leading To Infinite Loop, Search Engine Roundtable
• Statistics: Don’t Make These Mistakes – Whiteboard Friday, SEOmoz
• The top 10 SEO myths, .net magazine

Social Media

• “Reclaim Blogging”: Why I’m giving up Twitter and Facebook., gapingvoid
• Bootstrap from Twitter, Twitter Developers
• Facebook Begins Rolling Out ‘The Ticker’ To More Users, All Facebook
• Help, I’ve fallen into a pit of steaming Google+ (what that means for tech blogging), Scobleizer
• How Google+ is like Twitter — but not in a good way, GigaOM
• Most Who Read Tweets Also Write Them, eMarketer
• The Evolving Use of Social Media for Political Campaigns, Social Media Today

Web Analytics

• Two Simple Website Metrics for Small Businesses to Monitor, Small Business SEM

Recent Hot Items From Sphinn, Our Social News Sharing Site:

• How Google+ is like Twitter — but not in a good way – From Mathew Ingram at GigaOm: "..the more I thought about the new social network and the things it doesn’t do very well, the more similar it seemed to the issues that have also been dogging Twitter for some time. Like Twitter, the web giant has to figure out how to solve some pretty challenging problems — including the “noisy stream” issue, the problems of search and discovery, and, of course, how to keep people from going away and never coming back."
• The Ultimate Guide To “LinkedIn Today” & How To Optimize Your Presence On It – Great, and deep, post from Greg Finn on LinkedIn Today, a LinkedIn feature that was launched back in March and has grown in use with little publicity… until now.
• 10 risky default settings in social media that you need to check – Nice list of default social media settings that could prove to be problematic.
• Most useful new features in Google Analytics v5 – The new version of analytics (v5) became available to all users from April 2011. Other than its new look, it has many new features for helping provide better analysis and SEO reports. The analytics team is still working to give us more surprises over the next few months. I will be covering the most useful features that were missing in the old version of analytics.
• Website Metrics: Your Business Site is in Good Condition – What Now? – You’ve taken your website through the evaluation process…you’ll eventually have to dig in to the metrics and make sure things are happening like they’re “supposed” to.