SearchCap: The Day In Search, February 20, 2008

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

From Search Engine Land:

• Gates On Yahoo Acquisition: It’s The Engineers We Want
  CNET reports on Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates’ speech at Stanford University yesterday in which he said that it wasn’t the advertisers, the brand or the traffic so much as the engineers that Microsoft wanted in the Yahoo acquisition. Of course others in the company, including perhaps CEO Steve Ballmer, would…
• SES London Day Two Recap
  Day two of SES London is now complete. Here is the coverage of the conference that I found through my daily travels of the world wide search web….
• Lee Odden Interviews Google’s Adam Lasnik
  Lee Odden posted a ten-minute interview with Google’s Adam Lasnik. Adam is well-known for being one of the many Googlers who work on Webmaster communication. In this interview, Lee asked Adam questions on: Google compliant Flash and JavaScript capabilities Duplicate content issues and if there are penalties Using the nofollow…
• Yahoo Search Index Now Supported By Open-Source Hadoop Architecture
  As the Yahoo Search Blog explains, open-source Apache Hadoop is now at the center of Yahoo’s search index: We are now using Hadoop to process the Webmap — the application which produces the index from the billions of pages crawled by Yahoo! Search … Our implementation of a Hadoop-based Webmap…
• Microsoft & Google Sued Over Paid Search Patent Infringement
  Google And Microsoft Sued For Patent Infringement from MediaPost reports Google and Microsoft were sued for patent infringement over their paid search platforms. A Ohio based company named Paid Search Engine Tools of Liberty Township said Google’s AdWords and Microsoft’s adCenter products infringe on their patent “Paid search engine bid…
• Van Natta To Leave Facebook, Yahoo Offers Enhanced Severance To Retain Employees
  AllThingsD first reported yesterday that Facebook CRO (formerly COO) Owen Van Natta is leaving the social network to pursue his desire to be a CEO. You could take all this at face value or read something more into Van Natta’s departure depending on how skeptical/cynical you are. All the public…
• Eight B2B Landing Page Conversion Tips
  Driving prospects to your website is only half the battle. What can B2B marketers do to entice visitors to take desired online actions… and improve conversion rates? Here are eight easy-to-implement tips designed to improve landing page relevance, persuade action, build credibility, and maximize response rate….
• Official: Google To Enforce AdWords URL Policy Starts April 1st
  Google has an official post that they will be strictly enforcing the AdWords URL policy. Yes, we covered this last week but I wanted to make sure everyone is notified about this change in policy enforcement at AdWords. In short, the policy requires your ad’s display URL match its destination…

Search News From Around The Web:

Applications & Portal Features

• Gears 0.2 Released!, Google Gears API Blog
• So Much Data, and So Many Ways to Guard It, New York Times

Business Issues

• AOL ex-CEO looks beyond Google, Microsoft & Yahoo, Reuters
• Google generated $2.53 billion in advertising sales from U.K. in 2007, MarketWatch
• Google.org India = Google’s Master Plan, Marketing Pilgrim
• Why Microsoft Thinks Big Is Better, AdWeek

Local, Maps & Mobile

• Creating a User-Contributed Map: Look, Ma - No server side scripts!, Google Maps API Blog
• GenieTown Launches To Tackle Local Services, TechCrunch
• Go by miles or kilometers, Google LatLong
• Google Maps Offers Refine by User Rating & Neighborhood Option, Mike Blumenthal
• Predict Tonight’s Lunar Eclipse with Google Earth, Google Earth Blog
• Superdelegate layer in Google Earth, Official Google Blog

Link Building

• Do You Link Dope or Incestuously Link?, The Link Spiel
• Can A ODP (dmoz.org) Removal Hurt Your Search Engine Rankings?, Search Engine Roundtable
• Link Attraction Factors: Getting Dugg and Going Viral, Read/Write Web

Microhoo

• Microsoft exec confident Yahoo deal will work, News.com
• Yahoo Plays It Safe, For Now, New York Times

Paid Search & Contextual

• Feedburner - Kickin It Old School, TechCrunch
• In for a penny, in for a pound key, Inside AdSense
• 63% of AdSense Publishers Say Earnings Down in 2008, Search Engine Roundtable
• Google AdWords Still Using Past Searches To Display Target Ads, Search Engine Roundtable
• Google Will Hide Ads If You Don’t Like Them, Well Kind Of, Search Engine Roundtable
• Register for upcoming adCenter Beta and Pilot Programs, adCenter Blog

Searching

• From the Mailbag: Report scanning errors in a cinch, Inside Google Book Search

SEM Industry

• Internet Marketers are the Canaries in the Web Advertising Coalmine, SEO Book
• Scheduling Tools, Networking Lunches Added for SMX West, Search Marketing Expo Blog
• Search Engine Journal Opens Search Marketing Job Board, Search Engine Journal
• SEO is like fashion, Brisbane SEO Blog
• Spring 2008 Search Marketing Standard Inspires and Educates, Cre8PC
• The Camera Adds 10 Pounds or A Girl’s Guide to getting ready for conference season, Sugarrae

SEO & SEM

• SEO Headlines, BruceClay.com
• 50 Questions to Evaluate the Quality of Your Website, Search Engine Journal
• Around the Horn With the Big Three Engines, ClickZ
• How to Track the Evolution of Search Engine Algorithms , SEOmoz
• Keyword Research for Bloggers: A Comprehensive Guide, Copyblogger
• Landing Page Optimization for SEM: Design and Execute, Search Engine Watch
• Scaling SEO Services, All Things SEM
• Search Online, Buy Offline Has a Long Way To Go, Small Business SEM
• What is the SEO Impact of Changing a Site Often?, Search Engine Roundtable

Social Media

• Are You Using Social Media to Improve Your Customer Service?, Search Engine Guide
• Digg Gets More Mainstream; But Are Their News Sources Too Narrow Now?, Read/Write Web
• Japan online networking king Mixi to take on China, Reuters
• Piggybacking on Facebook, New York Times

Video, Music & Image Search

• MySpace working on music service: reports, Reuters
• New details on MySpace’s music play, News.com
• Prevent Images From Being Indexed With NoImageIndex, Google Blogoscoped
• YouTube brings life, weirdness to Spain election, Reuters

Web Analytics

• 9 Things to Think About When Buying a Web Analytic Solution, Serengeti Communications

Recent Hot Items From Sphinn, Our Social News Sharing Site:

• Shove SEO Fame up Your ***holes, Inc
• Importance of Monitoring Social Media
• 50 Questions to Evaluate the Quality of Your Website
• Do You Link Dope or Incestuously Link?
• The Most Useful StumbleUpon Feature You May Not Have Known
• John Andrews: An Atypical Interview
• PDFs and Search Engines
• SEO, Social Marketing & Scientology
• 10 Traffic-Stealing Weeds That Suck the Life Out of Your Google Garden and How to Yank Them
• How to make search engine crawling of dynamic contents less expensive
• Charity Awards for Search Education (Cases)
• Just How Much Traffic Can You Get From Social Media Websites?
• Eleven Steps to Creating a Killer 404 Error Page
• A non-famous SEO’s take on the “Famous SEO’s” discussion.
• What Social Media Was Like in the 1990’s