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 […]

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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:


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Danny Sullivan
Contributor
Danny Sullivan was a journalist and analyst who covered the digital and search marketing space from 1996 through 2017. He was also a cofounder of Third Door Media, which publishes Search Engine Land and MarTech, and produces the SMX: Search Marketing Expo and MarTech events. He retired from journalism and Third Door Media in June 2017. You can learn more about him on his personal site & blog He can also be found on Facebook and Twitter.

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