SearchCap: The Day In Search, Jan. 4, 2007

Jan 4, 2007 at 4:55pm ET by Barry Schwartz

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

From Search Engine Land:

Google Removes “Tips” Feature After Recent Blog Controversy
A search on calendar and blog no longer brings up the Google Tips at the top. Danny explained the recent controversy over Google adding tips at the top of the results with his Fury Over Google’s Self Promotion…
Improved Information Retrieval – Looking at Context with Susan Dumais
Desktop and file search can be very different than web search, and the user’s context plays an important role in what is valuable when creating a search algorithm. But understanding context may be helpful…
SideStep To Add Cruise Search, The Vertical Search Opportunity
Rounding out its travel search offerings, SideStep will soon launch cruise search, powered by CruisesOnly, the premier cruise brand of Boston-based NLG. While I was surprised by this announcement as I think…
YouTube Forced To Shut Down In Brazil
Reuters reports that a Brazilian court has ordered YouTube to be shut down due to not preventing a celebrity sex video from being posted time and time again. Daniela Cicarelli and company sued YouTube after being…
Amazon Promotes Askville & LinkedIn Launches Answers Services
Gary Price spotted Amazon promoting Askville more aggressively the other day. For example, a search on travel new york city brings up an Askville promotion all the way at the bottom left of the page, it looks like…
Google Calendar Set To Pass Yahoo Calendar
Hitwise reports that Google Calendar has increased its market share by 333% between June 2006 and December 2006. Google Calendar recently passed by MSN Calendars share and is quickly encroaching on Yahoo…
Google Reader Adds Personalized Trends
The Official Google Reader Blog informed us that Google Reader has added a trends feature to Google Reader users. You can access your Reader trends here, or via the link on the main page that reads “New…
Tagging isn’t Indexing: A Study of Del.icio.us Tagging
Have you ever tagged an image in Flickr, a link in Del.icio.us, a video in YouTube? Have you used tags in these systems to find similar pictures or pages or videos? Is tagging is taking indexing away from professional…
Microsoft’s Live.com Advertises On Google
It is always amusing when one of the big search engines advertisers on one of the other ones. Both Google and Yahoo advertise through each other’s PPC programs. And now it looks like Microsoft has jumped into it…
Site Diagnostics Bug In Google AdSense Control Panel
If you have looked in your site diagnostics tab in your AdSense control panel lately, you will see a bug that displays a robots.txt error, meaning you are disallowing the Google AdSense mediapartners bot…