SearchCap: The Day In Search, Dec. 20, 2006

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

From Search Engine Land:

• Battle For Books: Evil Google Versus The Altruistic Open Content Alliance
  Google Book-Scanning Efforts Spark Debate from the Associated Press is an excellent look how the rivalry between Google’s library scanning project and that of the Open Content Alliance — backed by Yahoo and Microsoft — is getting more heated. Google pretty much comes off as the evil company trying to lock up books for its own commercial goals. I’ll try to restore some balance to that. But then again, perhaps the rhetoric is the only thing that will make Google decide it should figure out a way to better assure people that the scanning will be as open source…
• Google Pushing New Blogger In Search Results
  Now that Blogger is officially out with a new version, I guess Google’s ready to get behind the service in a big way. The screenshot above shows a new promotional "tip" I just got in my web search results. I’ve never seen anything like that before for Blogger nor that I can recall for any other Google products. Not like this. The tip reads:…
• The Lies Of Top Search Terms Of The Year
  I wanted to make some time and dive deep into the issue of why all those top search terms from the various search engines don’t match. Others have thankfully been doing that. The short answer, as I’ve written before, is that they are all heavily filtered. That’s why you don’t see popular terms like "sex" and "porn" and navigational queries like "google" showing up. I might try to come back to this in more depth, but here’s a summary of the lists and what people are saying about them. Plus, I’ll explain that chart above and how it shows…
• Diller Touting Ask And Centrality Of Local
  Barry Diller keeps talking about Ask as the "glue" of his empire and more specifically about the importance of local. Ask and the new AskCity are thus in the hot seat. ClickZ has a piece today about the forthcoming introduction of financial and real estate data into AskCity….
• Google Search History Used To Send Wireless Hacker To Prison
  News.com reports that a wireless hacker was sentenced to 15 months in prison due to the help of some Google searches. The wireless hacker conducted searches for keyword phrases on "how to broadcast interference over wifi 2.4 GHZ," "interference over wifi 2.4 Ghz," "wireless networks 2.4 interference," and "make device interfere wireless network." The court documents do not disclose how this information was retrieved, i.e. via Google subpoena, looking at his browser history on his PC, or tracking his internet usage during the investigation….
• Holiday 2006 Grudge Match: Google Checkout Versus Paypal
  Google Steps More Boldly Into PayPal’s Territory by the New York Times shows how Google Checkout has really stepped things up this holiday season. The article covers how Google is giving merchants huge incentives to promote Google Checkout on their online stores. One merchant sent out a promotion to customers, telling them they get $10 off all orders of $30 or more if they use Google Checkout. He said his traffic tripled and it cost him nothing, since Google is paying the bill (he gets reimbursed the $10 per order from Google) and Google is also offering zero transaction fees…
• Portrait Of A New Site Getting On Digg
  Search Engine Land made the Digg home page yesterday because of Neil Patel’s great article, The New Digg Features Plus, A Submitter’s Perspective. I’ve already covered how as a new site, we’re still growing our traffic. Now I’ve got a chance to show what it means to a new site to get digged. The picture above tells the tale. Once we hit, the first hour brought in nearly 4,000 visits. Then it tapered off. For the entire day, we had 7,134 visits from Digg, 78 percent of our entire traffic. Bear in mind that this is all "cream," IE…
• Google By Far The Leader, If You Look At Site Owner Traffic Stats
  When I posted Enquisite’s search engine popularity stats yesterday, I almost went into a riff about how site owner traffic stats are often so different from what the major measuring services report. Google almost always comes out much, much higher when you look at site traffic referral sources (as with Enquisite’s stats). I did get into this on yesterday’s Daily SearchCast. But Rich Skrenta does a great job on the issue for who prefer to read about the issue. More on his post, along with a long look at stats, the pros and cons of Google being a huge traffic…

Search News Headlines From Elsewhere:

• Beyond the SOAP Search API, Official Google Code Blog
• Reactions on Discontinuation of Google API, Google Blogoscoped
• Podcast: Are Those Really Top Search Terms Of 2006; Book Battles; Ask’s Cool Ask X Design & More, Daily SearchCast
• Google Base Store Connector Updates, Official Google Base Blog
• Housing Information Lives on the Web, ClickZ Stats
• SEM Nightmare – Yahoo Thinks I’m a Typo, IncrediBILL
• Pixsy Goes the Widget Way, ClickZ
• Jake Baillie to Leave TrueLocal, Online Marketing Blog
• 9 Cost-Effective PPC Branding Strategies, Marketing Pilgrim
• Google Data Joins PHP Zend Framework, DevX News
• Podcast: Google Link Building, Duplicate Content, CSS Tricks, Images Near AdSense, Yahoo! Directory Tag, Here Comes Panama, & More, Search Engine Roundtable
• Avoiding Google’s Duplicate Filter When Syndicating Your Blog, Marketing Pilgrim
• When Will Google Begin Devaluing Social Links; Such As Digg.com, Yahoo! Answers & del.icio.us?, Search Engine Roundtable
• Life without a SearchEngine, Dave Naylor
• Yahoo Japan launches WLAN service, TeleGeography Research
• Google Makes 3 of Top 10 Media Acquisitions in 2006: AdAge, Google Watch
• Free Content Clicks from adCenter, PPC Discussions
• Google Partnerships & Enhanced Logo Branding, Search Engine Journal
• Industry Moves: Yahoo VP Joins NYTimes.co as VP, Marketing, PaidContent.org
• Google Says It Wins With Video Ads, WebProNews
• Indiana tweaking Internet search engine [ChaCha], Chronicle-Tribune
• Yahoo Upgrades Personals – Does This Stuff Work?, TechCrunch
• Site Architecture and SEO, ClickZ
• What Can Advertisers Do at Answers.com?, iMedia Connection
• Zoho Goes Wiki, TechCrunch
• YouTube’s Solution To Unauthorized Japanese Videos: A Warning Written In Japanese, Techdirt
• Google Holds First Pajama Day (in beta!), InsideGoogle
• A Keynote Conversation with Danny Sullivan and Jason Calacanis, SearchDay
• del.icio.us API for URL top tags, bookmark count, Niall Kennedy
• People search engine Spock raises $7M, to launch next year, VentureBeat
• Hey (Username) Your lights are on!, Official Google Enterprise Blog
• Top 16 Reasons People Hate SEOs, Stuntdubl
• Dave Naylor’s New MySpace Site, TickMe, Daggle
• The New Version of Blogger, Official Blogger Blog
• Questions in SEO that I Can’t Answer, SEOmoz
• Voices.com Offering Talent For Google Audio Ads, InsideGoogle
• Google’s Discontinued Services, Google Operating System
• Chris Sherman on How to Find the Right Search Marketing Partner, 10e20 Blog
• PodZinger Expands with European Partnership, PodZinger Blog
• Highlight: Hanukkah, Official Google Video Blog
• PubCon Las Vegas 2006 – The Movie, mediadonis
• When Did Matt Cutts Lose His Conference Virginity?, Daggle
• Google Dell PC (Screenshot), Google Blogoscoped
• Google Swimming Pool, Google Blogoscoped
• Google Gingerbread Man, Daggle