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

From Search Engine Land:

• Googlebot Identifies Smartphone Content With New User-Agent
  

  Google has announced that its mobile crawler now has a user-agent that’s specific to smartphones. The company has already had a user-agent that targets feature phones. The new Smartphone Googlebot-Mobile user agent is: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8B117 Safari/6531.22.7 (compatible; Googlebot-Mobile/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html) [...]

• Google Authorship Rich Snippets – Is Google Promoting Authors Or Google+?
  

  More and more, Google has been showing pictures of article authors next to search results. But what began ostensibly as simple adoption of industry standard Web markup seems to have become an exercise in promoting the Google+ social network. In June 2011 Google began to pilot a way for content authors to associate a photo [...]

• Search Engine Land’s SMX West Super Early Bird Rates Expire Saturday – Register Now & Save!
  

  Looking for the best deals in your holiday shopping? How about an offer that saves you money now… and boosts your 2012 revenues? Time is running out! SMX West Super Early Bird rates – the lowest offered – expire end of day Saturday, December 17th. Register now for an All Access pass. Here’s what you [...]

• Google Adds Author Stats To Webmaster Tools
  

  Google has introduced a new report in Google Webmaster Tools named “Author Stats.” Author Stats shows you how often your content is showing up on the Google search results page. This will show up under Google Webmaster Tools in the “labs” section in Webmaster Tools. It shows the impressions and clicks of the stories found [...]

• Google Zeitgeist 2011: Rebecca Black, Lego Alien & Steve Jobs
  

  Google released the Google Zeitgeist 2011 today. Google made several lists this year and even broke them down by country. You can play with the interactive lists at googlezeitgeist.com. Those in the picture above are included in the “fastest rising searches” category, including Rebecca Black, Google+, Ryan Dunn, Casey Anthony, Battlefield 3, iPhone 5, Adele, [...]

• Google’s Holiday Gift To Webmasters: No Panda Updates Till Next Year
  

  Yesterday, I made an assumption that Google would put all Panda updates on hold until after the holiday season. Google tweeted yesterday afternoon that there would be “no major Panda updates until the new year.” The last Panda update we had was labeled a “minor” update on November 18th and since then, it has been [...]

Recent Headlines From Marketing Land, Our Sister Site Dedicated To Internet Marketing:

• Microsoft Launches So.cl – A Social Experience For Students
• Assessing The Opportunity In Mobile Marketing
• Facebook Timeline Officially Released To The Public
• UK On Cookie Compliance: Website Owners “Must Try Harder”
• Review: Real Life With The Galaxy Nexus Android 4.0 Smartphone

Search News From Around The Web:

Business Issues

• Google sued by former Formula One head Mosley over sex party searches, thestar.com
• Google employee creates the ultimate LAN party house, lives la vita local, Engadget
• Google Granted Patent For Driverless Car “Landing Strip”, TechCrunch

Link Building

• 6 Ways to Recover from Bad Links, SEOmoz
• GoDaddy’s spammy link building techniques, yoast.com

Local, Maps & Mobile

• Factual Restaurants, Factual Blog
• Galaxy Nexus now available in the U.S., Official Google Mobile Blog
• Gibraltar images in Google’s street view, www.panorama.gi
• Google Offers Up a Step by Step Guide to Deal with “We do currently do not support this location”, Mike Blumenthal
• Imagery Update: Week of December 12th, Google LatLong

Paid Search & Contextual

• Introducing the Google Affiliate Network API, Google Affiliate Network
• adCenter’s Kind of Broken, www.ppcassociates.com
• New languages and categories in general category blocking feature, Inside AdSense

Searching

• Shopping Goes Geek with Wolfram|Alpha, Wolfram|Alpha Blog
• Yahoo! Search Trends: Holidays 2011, Yahoo Search Blog

SEO & SEM

• 3 Tips & Tools To Help You Become a Better SEO Project Manager, SEOptimise
• 5 Questions You Need To Answer About Your PPC Account Using MCF, PPC Hero
• Google Adds "More By" Link For Authorship Attribute, Search Engine Roundtable
• 5 Signs Your SEO Stinks — And Ways To Fix Them, Search Engine People
• How Search Engines Distinguish Between Regional Sensitive Queries and Global Queries (And How You Can Compete), Search Engine People
• How to Fix Crawl Errors in Google Webmaster Tools, SEOmoz
• Increase Your SEO: 5 Steps for Optimizing Your Blog’s Images, www.searchenginepeople.com
• Reflections On 2011 and the Year Ahead, Microsoft Advertising Blog

Social Media

• Timeline: Now Available Worldwide, Facebook Blog

Video, Music & Image Search

• comScore Releases November 2011 U.S. Online Video Rankings, comScore

Related Topics: SearchCap

About The Author: Matt McGee is Search Engine Land's Executive News Editor, responsible for overseeing our daily news coverage. His news career includes time spent in TV, radio, and print journalism. His web career continues to include a small number of SEO and social media consulting clients, as well as regular speaking engagements at marketing events around the U.S. He blogs at Small Business Search Marketing and can be found on Twitter at @MattMcGee and/or on Google Plus. See more articles by Matt McGee

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