SearchCap: The Day In Search, Dec. 28, 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:

• Google Ranks Second In Merriam-Webster’s Word Of 2006 List
  Gary Price reports Google, the verb, was the second most popular word in Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year survey that just came out. Merriam-Webster published the top ten words over here. The top word is "truthiness" by Stephen Colbert….
• Google Blog Search Passes Technorati In Visits
  Hitwise reports that Google Blog Search has passed Technorati in visits this week. Hitwise explains that when Google added a link from Google News to Google Blog Search in October, the traffic for Google Blog Search spiked by 168%. Hitwise reports that currently about 60% of Google Blog Search traffic comes from Google News referrals….
• Patent Filing for Google Mobile Search Provides Indexing Clues
  Mobile search has its own rules, and if you want your pages indexed for people searching with handhelds, it may help to take a look at some of the patent applications that have come out lately from Microsoft and Google on the topic. Microsoft provided some details about what they are looking for in a patent filing from September, Mobile friendly internet searches. They note there that they will only index some pages for their mobile search. And Google……
• How Google Sitelinks May Work, From Patent Application
  Back in September, Vanessa Fox at the Official Google Blog shared with us a little information about sitelinks, the groups of links to internal pages that sometimes appear under the top result on a search results page. She also pointed to a page on Google’s Webmaster Help Center that provides some more details. A patent filing with a pretty generic name, Systems and methods for providing search results came out last week on these extra internal links. It held a couple of surprises……
• Yahoo To Open New Research Center In Bangalore
  The Business Standard reports that Yahoo is to open a new research center in Bangalore, India. The research center is to focus on hiring "mentors and partners" for the existing research and development center in Bangalore, that currently employees 700 individuals. The head of Yahoo Research, Prabhakar Raghavan, said; "We have initiated the process of setting up our lab in Bangalore and have started hiring scientists for this unit. There is no time-frame when this centre will start its operations as it depends on the caliber of people we hire and when the centre will be acquire a critical mass…
• New Mobile Flight Status Tracker By FlightStats
  Gary Price reports that FlightStats has added a mobile flight tracking site at http://mobile.flightstats.com/. So for all you holiday season travelers, bookmark this address on your mobile device (I did), to check flight status, departures and arrivals, flight arrivals, airline & airport information, security wait times and more….
• Question & Answer Search Engines Ranked
  Via Slashdot, What’s the Best Q&A Site? from MIT Technology Review tests several question and answer search engine services. They reviewed and ranked AnswerBag, Askville, Live QnA, Wondir, Yahoo Answers and Yedda. So how did they rank? Out of a total 12 points, Yahoo Answers scored 11 points, coming out tops….
• Top 101 Search Stories Of 2006
  Chris Winfield over at 10e20 has compiled a list of the top 101 stories in the search industry for the past year. He orders the stories in descending priority order, and most of the stories link to external sources. Here are the top five: (5) Google & Yahoo & Microsoft supporting the Sitemaps.org protocol (4) The Big Daddy Google Infrastructure change (3) Social search and media optimization and how it can be leveraged for SEOs (2) Danny Sullivan leaving Search Engine Watch for this fine blog (1) Google Buys YouTube for $1.65 Billion…
• Search Bloggers On Their Most Popular Posts & Stats For 2006
  Search bloggers around the globe are celebrating the holiday season by giving the gift of competitive intelligence. From sharing their most popular posts to giving up all of their precious web statistics – a community of search bloggers are sharing more than they ever have….

Search News Headlines From Elsewhere:

• Google Chief Executive Sells Shares, AP
• You Are So Wrong About Google, The Motley Fool
• Top 10 Search Terms in 10 Categories, November 2006, ClickZ
• Yahoo! Christmas Update? I Doubt It, Search Engine Roundtable
• How Does Google Crawl Pages & Index Them?, Search Engine Roundtable
• Yahoo to launch ‘Big Thinker Series’ in India from January, New Kerala
• Microsoft’s adCenter Promotional Codes Not So Promotional?, Search Engine Roundtable
• Webaroo Secures $7.5 Million Second Round Funding, PaidContent.org
• 62 posts on how to squeeze the juice from digg, Cornwall SEO
• Stupid Things We Say – Part 2, Greg Boser
• How to become a top 100 Digg user, Pronet Advertising
• Consumers Submit To Yahoo Local, WebProNews
• Megite’s Alternative Way to Rank Popular Videos, TechCrunch
• More on Yahoo-AOL Combination Possibility: Financial Models, Savings Etc, PaidContent.org
• Possibility Of A Yahoo-AOL Merger in 2007; Google-AOL Change of Control Clause, PaidContent.org
• Jobless in Seattle?, GigaOM
• Make Google Services Opera-Friendly, Google Operating System
• Google not pointing to “best in their class