SearchCap: The Day In Search, Dec. 7, 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:

• Yahoo Adds "More" DHTML Button On Search Results Page: Yahoo added a "more" button that seems to be a DHTML or CSS contextual drop down menu with more search options to the inner search pages. So if you do a search on gary price at Yahoo Search (he tipped me off to this), you will notice next to the options above the search box is a more link with an arrow down. Clicking on that gives you more search options, here is a picture.
   
• Google Makes Deal with BSkyB On YouTube White Labeled Site: The Wall Street Journal reports that British Sky Broadcasting Group PLC (controlled by News Corp) and Google are in a deal to allow BSkyB to use YouTube technology and Google email technology on a new video-sharing site possibly named "Skycast." Google and BSkyB will share the revenue generated from the new site. The WSJ says that this is the "first time Google’s Gmail, a free Internet-based email service funded by advertising, has been modified for use by another media company’s customers and used under another media company’s brand name." That is true, but Google was always open to monetizing Google Applications and adding additional services to it, such as YouTube.
   
• Top Ten Ways To Contact Google: Reaching the Google web search team is not always an easy thing to do. That is why I came up with one of my few top ten lists, this one is named Best Way To Contact Google? I’ll give you my best way and worst way to contact Google.
   
• Video With Google On Duplicate Content, PageRank, Sitemaps & More: WebProNews has an excellent video of guest interviewer, Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz.org and Google’s Vanessa Fox from the Webmaster Central team. Rand does an excellent job asking Vanessa about duplicate content, PageRank, Sitemaps and even discusses DaveN. This 17 minute video is well worth a listen to.
   
• Google Checkout Snubbing Affiliates?: Threadwatch reports on a WebmasterWorld post by Marcia that Google Checkout currently is not stringing along the variables in the URLs necessary for affiliates to get paid their commissions after a recent upgrade to Google Checkout. It appears that this was not by design, and simply an oversight, which should be fixed sooner than later.
   
• Google AdWords Hosted Business Pages: The Inside AdWords Blog announced a new feature that allows businesses without web sites to build a "hosted business page" for their business on Google’s servers and then use AdWords to send traffic there. The page is basically an informational page that tells people how to contact you and what you do. It is currently only open for new US advertisers, at no cost. More details on how it works at AdWords help. I believe Yahoo also offers a similar service.
   
• Chicago SES Day 3 Session Coverage: The social side of search came out in some of the blog posts about Chicago SES today. Search Pulse 11, broadcast live last night during cocktail hour was filled with major search issues and special on air guests. Loren at Search Engine journal writes of Jim Hedger’s press conference last night, which uncovered a connection between Adsense and terrorist groups. Rand Fishkin interviewed Vanessa Fox of Google for WebProNews.

Search News Headlines From Elsewhere:

• Share your photos in more languages, Official Google Blog
• Podcast: Special Edition, Danny Sullivan’s Keynote, 2006: The Year In Search, Daily SearchCast
• In SEO, What Changes Should You Track, Search Engine Roundtable
• Bitten By The Google Spider, Forbes
• 3 Simple Steps to Maximize Your Traffic from Google Image Search, Caydel Blog
• Google Newspaper Ad Test Update, PPC Discussions
• The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine Now Home to 85 Million Archived Web Pages, ResourceShelf
• Clusty Unveils Dynamic Clustering Search Tool for Iraq Study Group Report, ResourceShelf
• Technorati named 2007 Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum, Profiled in Time Magazine, Sifry’s Alerts
• Pluggd "perfects" audio and video search, raises $1.65M, VentureBeat
• Google Click Fraud Funding Al Qaeda & Hezbollah Terrorist Groups?, Search Engine Journal