SearchCap: The Day In Search, February 4, 2009

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: SEO Careers In A RecessionFirst off, I would like to start by reminding everyone to participate in the SEMPO.org 2009 in-house salary survey. Running for the second year, this benchmark survey […]

on February 4, 2009 at 5:05 pm | Reading time: 10 minutes
Chat with SearchBot

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

From Search Engine Land:

  • SEO Careers In A Recession
    First off, I would like to start by reminding everyone to participate in the SEMPO.org 2009 in-house salary survey. Running for the second year, this benchmark survey provides direct industry feedback, from in-house professionals like you, on the realities of compensation in this profession. Agency side folks, don’t worry, will be launching the second annual survey for you shortly. Click to take the In-House Salary survey Opportunity in a recession Buy low, sell high. That’s the mantra of every great investor. Finding a career on the internet, and especially in search marketing, is no different. Now is an excellent time to …
  • Want More B2B Conversions? Reduce Your Visitor’s Anxiety.
    For the past couple of months, I’ve been writing about ways to improve the conversion rates of your search traffic. Borrowing shamelessly once again from my friends at MarketingExperiments.com, I finish up this conversion series focusing today on anxiety (not yours, your visitor’s), and some things we can do as search marketers to help relieve it. In successfully relieving the anxiety of the visitor, we stack the deck in our favor, resulting in higher conversions and greater returns on our search marketing investments. Quite simply, anxiety is any concern in the visitor’s mind that is stimulated by any …
  • Google’s Influence In The Oval Office
    Google’s Clout Grows as Tech Initiatives Take Shape from the Wall Street Journal outlines Google’s CEO recent technology meeting with Obama and the new US government. If you missed the news, last week, a group of executives met with President Obama to discuss technology’s role in the US stimulus plan. One of those executives was Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, who sat right next to Obama at the meeting. We are all aware that Google was very politically and financially supportive of Obama during the elections. In fact, the Wall Street Journal reports that Google was the …
  • Yahoo Starting To Roll Out “Search Pad” Feature
    Formerly known as “Research Assistant” Yahoo is starting to introduce (to selected users) what it’s now calling “Search Pad,” an application that automatically collects sites and content as users conduct online research. By contrast, Google has shuttered (for new users) its similar but less developed Notebook service. Yahoo describes Search Pad in the following way: Search Pad is a note taking application built into Yahoo! Search that automatically assists you in saving websites you visit and taking notes as you search. Search Pad helps you collect, edit, organize, save, print, and email your notes for immediate or future …
  • Virtual Earth’s First 2009 Imagery Update
    The Virtual Earth Blog announced their first 2009 imagery update, including about 100TB of new images. The major updates are including the new Digital Globe satellite imagery they recently licensed and Bird’s Eye photos of Paris, France. There are literally tons of updates to the imagery, from satellite, to birds eye to orthos. For the full list of where the new imagery can be spotted in Live Search Maps and Vritual Earth, see the blog post.
  • Internet Explorer 8 Search Now Showing Instant Answers From Live Search
    The Live Search blog announced that Internet Explorer 8 is now showing instant answers from Live Search in the search box. This feature is on by default and will show instant answers for searches related to financial information, weather conditions, movie show times, calculations, equations, conversions, and definitions. Here is a screen capture:
  • FriendFeed Improves Search Features
    FriendFeed, which launched in 2007, has grown tremendously recently. A recent blog post announces that they have improved their search features. The new features include: Search for words only in entry titles or in comments [intitle:superbowl] – entries that mention “Superbowl” in the title Search for only entries that were liked or commented on by specific friends [like:bret football] – entries about football that Bret has liked Search for entries with a minimum number of likes or comments [comments:5 friendfeed] – entries that mention FriendFeed with at least 5 comments Exclude terms from your search [jobs -steve] – entries …
  • Google Android Phone Finds Its Voice (Search That Is)
    Google is rolling out voice search on the Android platform via the new software update happening this week. That’s also supposed to add a virtual keyboard apparently. The G1 has only a physical keyboard. CNET points out that the central difference between the iPhone version of voice search and Android’s is the inability to simply hold the phone up to your head and speak (on the iPhone version). On the Android version you’ll need to initiate voice search by pressing a button. Google trained voice search using the learning from Goog411 (US and Canada only) so it doesn’t recognize British …
  • Does Auto-Matching Cause Unintentional Trademark Abuse?
    Auto-matching is a feature provided by both Google and Yahoo which allows the search provider to autonomously select new keywords for you and to create new ad copy for you, without the advertiser’s advance permission. The new keywords are selected from various places including your ad copy text, your display URLs, your landing page and/or common typos and related terms. Your ads will appear as sponsored listings when these new keyword terms are searched by a consumer. In other words, Google and Yahoo, by way of the auto-matching feature, can show your ads on keywords that you did …
  • Google Latitude Turns Maps (For Mobile) Into Social Tool
    Google Latitude is now live, a new service from Google that allows you to send your location to Google Maps and share it with friends via many mobile phones (not the iPhone yet, but that’s coming). Some might call the just-launched Google Latitude (part of a new version of Google Maps for Mobile) “son of Dodgeball,” although it’s more elegant and user friendly. Google bought early mobile social networking service Dodgeball in 2005 and shuttered it in 2008. It also acquired the “Twitter-like” Jaiku in October of 2007. Google never really developed the Jaiku service and …
  • Google Latitude: Share Your Location On Google Maps
    Google Latitude is now live, a new service from Google that allows you to send your location to Google Maps and share it with friends via many mobile phones (not the iPhone yet, but that’s coming). Greg Sterling will have our own review of the service posted later today. For now, you can explore it directly yourself now (or here via your moble phone). You can also use the service from your computer, though the instructions from Google on how to locate the iGoogle Latitude gadget don’t currently seem to bring it up. Instead, use this link, …
  • Book Your Meet & Eat Table For SMX West!
    We spend a lot of time coming up with networking activities for Search Engine Land’s Search Marketing Expo conferences, and our SMX West event happening next week from Feb. 10-12 in Santa Clara, California, is no exception. One of these are our Meet & Eat tables. Registration is now open for those, plus there are a number of other networking events, parties as well as 50 sessions packed with search marketing knowledge. Each day at lunch, we have several tables assigned to different topics. A table leader will help get discussion going, and then …
  • Google AJAX Search Results = Death To Search Term Tracking?
    Buzz has been growing over the past 4-5 days about what appears to be a new Google search results test that, if widely implemented, might spell doom for SEO rank checking software and some other tools. Many are concerned that it could kill web analytics software, too, but that may not be the case. Google appears to be testing AJAX-based search results on a limited basis. Users who are able to access the test see different URLs for Google searches. Rather than the standard www.google.com/search?q=keyword, URLs in the AJAX test use a hash mark, like this: www.google.com/#q=keyword. Michael VanDeMar wrote about …

Search News From Around The Web:

Applications & Portal Features

Business Issues

Local, Maps & Mobile

Link Building

Paid Search & Contextual

Searching

SEM Industry

SEO & SEM

Social Media

Video, Music & Image Search

Web Analytics

Other Items

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

Add Search Engine Land to your Google News feed.    Google News

Related stories

New on Search Engine Land

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.

Related topics

Google AnalyticsGoogle ChromeLink buildingLinkedInSEO

Get the must-read newsletter for search marketers.

Topics

Our events

About

Follow us

© 2024 Third Door Media, Inc. All rights reserved.

Third Door Media, Inc. is a publisher and marketing solutions provider incorporated in Delaware, USA, with an address 88 Schoolhouse Road, PO Box 3103, Edgartown, MA 02539. Third Door Media operates business-to-business media properties and produces events. It is the publisher of Search Engine Land the leading Search Engine Optimization digital publication.