SearchCap: The Day In Search, July 10, 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:

• Ask Announces Search Deal With Photobucket
  Ask announced that Photobucket has put its search box on the site. Photobucket is owned by MySpace parent News Corp., which has a search deal with Google. The Ask deal with Photobucket includes sponsored listings and other ads. Previously web search on Photobucket was provided by Google….
• Online Privacy Hearings See Conflicting Testimony And Recommendations
  Privacy has re-emerged as one of the most pressing and complex issues for everyone online, including search engines, after a sustained period of relative calm. However the rise of behavioral targeting, domestic spying/wiretapping by the Bush administration, attempts by states to regulate privacy and more aggressive moves by Europeans to…
• Google Trends Showing a Swastika (卐)?
  Dave Shaw notified me of a weird character being displayed as a “hot trend” on Google Trends this morning. It appears that Google is displaying a swastika as 卐. This appears to be some sort of chinese character, but the swastika is well known for usage in Nazi Germany, and…
• Click Forensics & Yahoo Team Up To Build Factr
  Click Forensics, Yahoo take on click-fraud cases from News.com reports that in part of the Click Forensics & Yahoo partnership, they have teamed up to build a new software tool to detect click fraud named, Factr. Factr, Fully Automated Click Tracking Reconciliation, automatically queries Yahoo’s search ad platform when Click…
• Yahoo! Lets You “Build Your Own Search Service”
  Yahoo! has just unveiled the next phase in their plan to spur search innovation by providing search-related resources to developers. The Yahoo! Build Your Own Search Service (BOSS) enables developers to access Yahoo! search results, combine them with other sources, rerank them, and define their appearance. Yahoo! says they…
• Me.dium Launches “Real Time” Social Search
  Me.dium has introduced a social search engine that blends results from a “real time” index of what people are currently viewing online with Yahoo’s full-scale web index. The result is something I’ve not seen elsewhere—and despite my long time skepticism regarding social search, this approach actually holds promise for delivering…

Search News From Around The Web:

Applications & Portal Features

• Chat with your Gmail contacts on the iPhone, Official Gmail Blog
• Google News Redesign Experiment, Google Blogoscoped
• Stanford Chooses Yahoo! over Google, gInside
• Yahoo! Finance Ranks as Top Financial News , comScore

Business Issues

• Microsoft Gains With Live.com, But Not Search Share, MediaPost
• Yahoo And Turner In Sports Ads And Content Deal, paidContent.org

Local, Maps & Mobile

• Big Day of Local Search News: Localeze and Praized, Small Business SEM
• New MMA-compliant mobile image ads, Official Google Mobile Blog

Link Building

• Link Building via Word-of-Mouth, Search Engine Watch

Paid Search & Contextual

• Microsoft adCenter Add In For Excel – Keyword Suggestion Tutorial – adCenter Advertiser, adcentercommunity.com
• AdWords system maintenance on July 12th, Inside AdWords
• Google showing AdWords at the bottom of the page, Andrew R H Girdwood
• Google Slaps AdWords Advertisers Again Over Landing Page Quality Factors, Search Engine Roundtable
• Yahoo to offer ad-supported online games, News.com

Searching

• Pixsy Search Technology & Infospace Network, altsearchengines.com
• Praized Media introduces Local Search platform, altsearchengines.com
• hakia Joins Yahoo!’s Search BOSS, Hakia Blog
• Paglo – the search engine for IT., altsearchengines.com

SEM Industry

• Googler, JohnMu, Working On Vacation, Search Engine Roundtable
• Happy 1st Birthday, Sphinn!, Small Business SEM
• SEM Synergy Interview Now Available, Small Business SEM

SEO & SEM

• Adding Value To The Search Community: My Interview With Adam Audette, Search Engine Guide
• Taking Note Of Competitors’ Mistakes & Successes, SEOmoz
• Are Google’s Human Evaluators Coming From cart.corp.google.com?, Search Engine Roundtable
• Do Google Sitelinks Influence Your Search Rankings?, Search Engine Roundtable
• SEO is an Orchestra, Not an Instrument, Search Engine Guide
• Yahoo Patents Anchor Text Relevance in Search Indexing, SEO By The Sea

Social Media

• A Blogger’s Guide to Branding with Social Media, ProBlogger
• Has Facebook Found the Key to Making Money via Search?, Search Engine Watch
• Twitter Back On Track? – Raises API Limit To 100 Requests Per Hour, Read/Write Web

Other Items

• Ballmer: We’ll look at open source, but we won’t touch, News.com

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

• How to increase search rankings via guest blogging
• Rewind to Fundamentals: The 10 Best Ways to Find the Perfect Image for your Blog Post
• How to Say Nothing in 500 Words (A Lesson on Writing)
• Reputation Crises Management: 8 SEO Triage Tips
• New Blog From The Conversion Rate Experts
• How a Search Engine Might Rank Bookmark Sets, Playlists, Directory Pages, and other Collection Items
• New Analytics Tool Open for Public Beta
• Bruce's Guide to Appropriate Use of Flash…
• Adding Value To The Search Community: My Interview With Adam Audette
• What would you call linkbait if you couldn’t call it linkbait?
• What the Marlboro Man can teach you about Branding
• Why the Social Media World NEEDS to Understand SEO
• Google passes second link’s anchor text