SearchCap: The Day In Search, December 3, 2007

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

From Search Engine Land:

• Microsoft Launches adCenter Accreditation: adExcellence
  Microsoft has announced the launch of adExcellence, their accreditation program to qualify companies and individuals as certified adCenter experts. Microsoft promised to launch this program in 2007 and they have with a month to spare. To enroll in Microsoft adExcellence, visit http://www.adexcellence.com/….
• Google Previews Expanded Docs Roadmap In Michigan
  YourSearchAdvisor and TechCrunch report on a meeting sponsored by the Ann Arbor Chamber of Commerce last week for local businesses about forthcoming developments and enhancements for Google Apps and Docs. The speaker was Scott Johnston, former VP of Product Development at JotSpot, which was acquired by Google in late 2006….
• Saddam Hussein, Britney Spears, Harry Potter & Recycling In Yahoo 2007 Top Trends
  What does Saddam Hussein, Britney Spears, Harry Potter and recycling all have to do with each other? They all made the Top Trends in Yahoo Search in 2007 list. The top news story search in 2007 was Saddam Hussein, the top environmental search was recycling, the top troubled stars search…
• Microsoft Does Sitelinks On Live Search
  The SEOCO blog reports that a search at Live.com now may return extra links under the first results. This is known as Sitelinks over at Google. For example, a search on dmoz at Live Search returns this:…
• Susan Decker, Yahoo’s President, Gets Raise
  Salary jumps for Decker with Yahoo promotion from News.com reports Yahoo’s President, Susan Decker, will be getting a pretty nice raise. As Yahoo’s CFO, she made $500,000, as Yahoo’s president, she will be making $815,000. In addition to the $315,000 raise, Decker will also be eligible for a bonus of…
• ZenithOptimedia: Online Ad Spend To Overtake Radio, Magazines In Two Years
  With the exception of online, the ad industry is in a slump. Growth is in the low single digits and will only gain next year because of the US presidential election, European football and Olympics. Accordingly, ZenithOptimedia has released an advertising forecast that reflects projected growth of a modest 4.1…
• Google Considers “Anonymizing” StreetView In US
  Google’s StreetView program has been shadowed by privacy concerns arising from the capture of license-plate numbers, people’s faces and other potentially embarrassing images. To address these issues, Google set up a system where users could request images be removed. However arguably the embarrassment or damage has already been done by…
• Google Answers More Questions On Paid Links
  Information about buying and selling links that pass PageRank from the Google Webmaster Central blog answers more questions about the recent paid link regulations Google has set forth for their index. The main reason Google is going after paid links is because of “inaccuracies” in results and “inequities” in ranking…
• The Facebook Privacy Fallout Continues
  For those just joining us, Facebook was overly aggressive with its Beacon tracking program, one of several new ad programs launched in early November. Beacon required users to opt-out or have their activity and transactions on Facebook partner sites broadcast to their networks back on Facebook. Discovering this, many people…
• Coining A New Day: Local Tuesday
  It seems that every year, this time of year (right after Thanksgiving in the U.S.), economic analysts, members of the media and pundits pore over the latest economic data to gauge how ‘Black Friday’ turned out, as it is the traditional starting point for the holiday shopping season. After…
• Search Illustrated: Search Engine Sitemaps
  Looking for a way to direct the search crawlers to each and every page on your website? Google, Yahoo, and MSN have all agreed to support one method of submitting a site’s pages: through an XML map placed on the root of a website. This week’s infographic shows how…
• Search Month: November 2007 Search News, In Review
  Search Month is a monthly newsletter that recaps stories covered on Search Engine Land over the past month. It’s also available by feed here. Below, news about Search Engine Land itself, then our 10 most popular stories from November 2007, then a major story for various search topics along with…
• Tracking Santa: NORAD & Google Team Up For Christmas
  Every year, I enjoy helping my kids track the approach of Santa Claus through the NORAD site, as I’ve written about before. This year, Google’s getting in on the action. You’ll be able to track Santa in Google Earth on Christmas Eve with the help of special file. You…
• Search Engine Land Celebrates Its First Birthday!
  Happy Birthday to us! Today, Search Engine Land officially turns one year old. Below, I wanted to share some thanks to all those who’ve helped make it such a successful year, and I’m going to save the in-depth "what have we achieved" statistics for sharing for January, when the entire…

Search News From Around The Web:

Applications & Portal Features

• Google on Desktop Search and Personal Information Management, SEO By The Sea
• New Feature in Gmail: Info Box When You Mouse Over any Name, Digital Inspiration
• At Wikipedia, Illustrators May Be Paid, New York Times

Business Issues

• Barry Diller’s Grand Acquisitor, Fast Company
• Latest Yahoo Org Changes: Scott Moore Adds Entertainment, Broady Out; LMC Splitting Up, paidContent.org
• Yahoo Betrays Free Speech, New York Times
• Google-DoubleClick Deal To Pass FTC’s Review This Week?, paidContent.org
• Six Apart Sells LiveJournal To Russia’s SUP, TechCrunch
• Surf and search: Life’s a beach @ Google, Los Angeles Times

Conferences

• A Guide for Liveblogging a Search Conference, BruceClay.com
• Good Morning From SES Chicago 2007, AIM Clear Blog
• My PubCon 2007 schedule, Matt Cutts
• Pubcon and Missing Casinos, SEO By The Sea
• SEMpdx Exclusive Interview: Seth Godin & His Meatball Sundaes, SEM Portland
• SES Chicago, and Webmaster World Las Vegas, Live Search Webmaster Center Blog
• SES Wit and Wisdom: The Don of Marketing, Search Engine Watch Blog
• Welcome to SES Chicago 2007!, WebProNews
• Why Pubcon Rocks, Online Marketing Blog

Local, Maps & Mobile

• Ask.com’s Interactive and Dynamic Maps Come to Ask UK, ResourceShelf
• Google versus the telecoms, News.com
• Who’s going to win the spectrum auction? Consumers., Google Public Policy Blog
• Superpages Formalizes TurnHere Deal, Screenwerk

Paid Search & Contextual

• Is AdBrite About to Lose One Third of Its Ads?, TechCrunch
• What’s new with mobile ads, Inside AdWords
• Paid Search To Take Off In Canada , WebProNews
• Baidu to Launch New Brand Advertising Product, CNN Money
• How Google, Yahoo Content Ad Matching Really Works, Search Engine Watch
• Microsoft Boosts Tools for adCenter, Live Search, eWeek

Searching

• Modifications to the Voting System, Askville Blog
• For the 2008 Race, Google Is a Crucial Constituency, New York Times
• Britney, Boxing Day, and Biology: December Smart Answers, Ask.com Blog
• Feature: How to Track Down Anyone Online, lifehacker.com
• Quintura becomes Alternative Search Engine of the Year, Pandia
• The Alternative Search Engine of the Year, 2007!, Alt Search Engines

SEM Industry

• BONUS: Whiteboard Friday – "Say It Ain’t Sullivan" Part II: Search 3.0, SEOmoz
• Search Engine Land Quote Featured On Ask.com Banner Ad, SEOdisco
• SEL vs. SEW: And The Winner Is?, Small Business SEM
• Hello Stranger, The Men of SEO
• Mike Yanke Blogs SES Chicago for TopRank Online Marketing Blog, Online Marketing Blog
• Search Engine Roundtable 4th Birthday Celebration!, Search Engine Roundtable
• November ‘07: Best Search/Marketing Posts, Small Business SEM
• SEMPO Brings Search Engines Together for Education, Search Engine Watch Blog

SEO & SEM

• Bulldog Reporter Advanced PR Technology in Practice, Online Marketing Blog
• Google to change the Robots Exclusion Protocol again, sebastians-pamphlets.com
• How Many Keywords Should You Have?, All Things SEM
• SEO In-house Spotlight: Baron Ginnetti with Pronto.com, Search Engine Journal
• Admission of Guilt Will No Longer Be Required For Google Reconsideration Request, The SEO Scoop
• MSN Search Fights Duplicate Content, WebProNews
• Recap of last week, Matt Cutts
• Google Image Search Update: Filter a Bit Too Sensitive?, Search Engine Roundtable
• Google Index Count Dropping? Is Your Google Index Count Less?, Search Engine Roundtable
• How to Use Search Engines & Web Data to Conduct Competitive Brand Analysis, SEOmoz
• Microsoft Adds More Tools for Search Marketers, Search Engine Watch
• Yahoo Search December 2007 Update, Search Engine Roundtable

Social Media

• Facebook: What Would Google Do?, New York Times
• Is Facebook Bleeding Out StumbleUpon?, AIM Clear Blog
• Digg Filter, a Recommendation Engine for Digg – Interview with Founder, Read/Write Web
• Adroll: The Social Ad Network (Beta Invites), TechCrunch

Video, Music & Image Search

• Google Images Removes "Remove This Frame" Option?, Search Engine Roundtable
• YouTube restores account of Egypt anti-torture blogger, Reuters

Web Analytics

• A Tool to Help You Analyze Your FeedBurner Feed Statistics, ProBlogger

Other Items

• In Hindsight: ‘Exceptionally alert’ to Google’s big ambitions, Mercury News
• Miva Launches ALOT, But Doesn’t Shift a Lot of Priorities, ClickZ
• What Blogging Platform Do You Use? [POLL RESULTS], ProBlogger
• Small Merchants Gain Large Presence on Web, New York Times
• UBS Media Week: Newspapers: Yahoo Consortium Working; Google Print Seems To Be, As Well, paidContent.org
• Who clicks on ads? And what might this mean?, Zephoria.org

Last 20 Hot Items From Sphinn, Our Social News Sharing Site:

• SEO 2.0: On-page Social Media Optimization
• Did Matt Cutts Just Say It Is Illogical To Think Google Would Penalize Sites Just For Buying Links?
• User voting on search results could kill Google
• Google finally ends the hypocrisy and stops text link adverts on Adwords
• 6 Easy Ways To Increase Your Comment Count
• Social Networks Study Released: MySpace & Facebook Are Different After All
• Diggs per minute…a Digg Virgin’s online diary
• Syndk8: Grabbing expired domains the uber smart way (with edu backlinks)
• Curing The Fears Of Being An Amateur Blogger
• Networking with MyBlogLog “Recent Readers” Widget
• Woo, look at all the changes round these parts…
• Lucia’s Linky Love: A DoFollow Plugin to Foil Human Comment Spammers!
• 6 Things You Don’t Know (but think you know) about SEO
• The Myth of the Long Tail and the True Value of Blogging
• Link Buying Crimes vs Sponsored Scientific Research (and the Future of Information Quality Online)
• November ‘07: Best Search/Marketing Posts
• Buying/selling links that pass PageRank – Thread by Google
• Y.A. top 10 list of SEO “DOs & DON’Ts”…
• A Very Beginner’s Guide to the Sphinn Network : Tips and Tricks
• How to Ruin an Excellent Piece of Linkbait, and Why Someone Should be Fired
• Supporting Your Most Valued Communities Without WIIFM
• 19 Best Online Marketing Quotes for the Past Two Weeks
• Google Thinks Spammers Might Be Giving Up
• Official Information about buying and selling links that pass PageRank
• Search Engine Roundtable 4th Birthday Celebration!