SearchCap: The Day In Search, December 6, 2010

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: DecorMyEyes Merchant Vitaly Borker Arrested After NYT Piece On Google Rankings Just over a week ago, the New York Times introduced the world to Vitaly Borker, who boasted of being abusive […]

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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:

  • DecorMyEyes Merchant Vitaly Borker Arrested After NYT Piece On Google Rankings

    Just over a week ago, the New York Times introduced the world to Vitaly Borker, who boasted of being abusive to customers and claimed, inaccurately, that such behavior had a side benefit of producing good rankings in Google. Now another side benefit: Borker’s arrest. From an CNBC article on the arrest: Vitaly Borker, an alleged […]

  • New Android Flagship Nexus S Comes Out Of Hiding

    The Google Nexus S is out today. It was previewed incognito by Google CEO Eric Schmidt at Web 2.0 a few weeks ago. A Samsung Galaxy S-based handset running Android 2.3, it’s the new Android Flagship phone and reputedly best Android device out there — according to early reviews. We’ll get our proverbial mitts on […]

  • Hot At Sphinn: Google’s Response To DecorMyEyes, LinkedIn Case Studies & More

    It may come as no surprise that the news surrounding DecorMyEyes.com and Google’s response to the publicity it got dominated the activity on our sister site, Sphinn, last week. Beginning with the New York Times article, the story spread rapidly across the Internet; several stories reached Sphinn’s home page, and it was also the topic […]

  • Black Friday & Cyber Monday Recap: Search Ads Drove Big Retail Gains

    The dust seems to have finally settled on the long holiday weekend, and according to several reports both formal and informal, that dust is largely colored green. Green, as in money: transactions, average order size, revenue, and other metrics are widely reported as being up this year compared to 2009. Here’s a recap of several […]

  • Going Head-To-Head With Amazon, Google Launches eBooks

    Google has rolled out its long awaited digital ebooks program, the next step in the company’s ambitious but controversial project to scan and make searchable the estimated 130 million books that exist in print versions. “The next logical iteration for us is to open up a bookstore,” said Scott Dougall, product management director for Google […]

  • Australian Police Drop Google WiFi Investigation

    Saying it’s unlikely to get a conviction, the Australian Federal Police has given up its six-month investigation of Google’s collection of personal data over unsecure WiFi networks. In a statement issued Friday, the AFP says that Google’s activities “may have” broken the law, but that pursuing the matter further doesn’t make sense. Evidence exists to […]

  • The Decor My Eyes Fiasco & Local Reviews Tactics

    This past week, marketers the world over watched the “Decor My Eyes fiasco” unfold with horrified fascination. A ruthless online marketer gleefully mistreating customers in order to achieve higher rankings was a story we didn’t want to be true, but Google’s subsequent penalization action verified it was. The fiasco underscored the importance of reviews, particularly […]

  • The First Google ChromeBooks May Appear This Week

    Google is having a press event tomorrow and it’s focused on Chrome. There will likely be discussion of the Chrome browser app store. However much more interesting is the possibility that we’ll see the first Chrome OS netbooks “in the flesh,” so to speak. There has been conflicting information about whether these netbooks would appear […]

  • AOL Scheming To Sell Itself To Yahoo?

    This morning brings another report of AOL M&A machinations involving ways to merge with or be acquired by Yahoo, now that both sites have very similar missions and strategies. They’re in a way like the Ford and Chevy of the internet these days: workmanlike but not very glamorous. Maybe that’s unfair to Ford. Both Yahoo […]

  • Is Google Changing Quality Score Rules Again?

    In the past few months, two significant issues have been messing with AdWords quality scores—or at least with how many of us perceive quality scores. Google has developed several bugs in how it displays quality score. Keywords with low quality scores are acting like keywords with high quality scores. Google Quality Score Display Bugs Google’s […]

  • Last Minute Holiday SEO Tactics

    The holiday season is underway, and unfortunately many of us have waited for the last minute to attend to our SEO for the season. SEO for the holiday season really is best done in August, September or October. But what if you didn’t get to it this year? Is it too late? Not necessarily. There […]

  • Google Christmas Trees & Kwanzaa Flag Joins Chanukah Dreidel

    Last week, I showed how Google had a Chanukah Dreidel replace the basic everything icon on the left hand Google search results. But did you know that Google also has a Christmas Tree icon and Kwanzaa Flag icon? If you search for [christmas] or [kwanzaa] or [hanukkah] you will get a special everything icon. Standard […]

  • Google’s New Social Sitelinks

    Google is now showing social search related results in the Sitelinks section of the search results. The social sitelink includes your friend’s name, profile photo, and it links to your friend’s content on a particular website. For example, if I search for [twitter] on Google, I see Robert Scoble (scobleizer), Steve Rubel (steverubel), Israeli Consulate […]

  • Wikileaks: Chinese Leaders’ Vanity Searches On Google Led To Hacking

    I’m almost positive that one day we’ll see “Wikileaks: The Musical” on Broadway (or perhaps the Opera at The Met). There are equal measures of comedy, tragedy and intrigue in the many thousands of documents dumped and disclosed last week. It’s perfect fodder for dramatic adaptation. And one set of documents that embody all of […]

  • Google, Bing & Searching For The New Wikileaks Website

    Looking for the Wikileaks website? Having lost one domain, and having its second site going down temporarily, it’s a challenge, even for the search engines. Where’s Wikileaks? Yesterday, I wrote about how Google was still listing the old address for Wikileaks — wikileaks.org — in a search for wikileaks: That’s still the case today. Anyone […]

  • Searching The Wikileaks Cablegate Archives With Cablesearch

    Want to explore the “Cablegate” material that Wikileaks released last week for yourself, but have no idea where to start? There’s a new search engine for the material. Cablesearch: A Google For Cablegate Called Cablesearch, it’s a project from the Eccar: The European Center of Computer Assisted Reporting. Gary Price from ResourceShelf tipped us to […]

  • Amazing: Groupon Rejects Google Mega-Offer

    Groupon has apparently rejected the $5 billion-plus takeover bid by Google, electing to remain independent and probably go public later. AllThingsD is independently reporting that Groupon’s revenues are actually closer to $2 billion than the $500 million previously estimated. I was told several months ago by Groupon President Rob Solomon that the company was on […]

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About the author

Barry Schwartz
Staff
Barry Schwartz is a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on Twitter here.

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