SearchCap: The Day In Search, July 22, 2011

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Bing Tests Ads Within Organic Search Results? The RKGBlog blog posted a screen shot of Bing testing search ads directly in the organic results. Honestly, I almost cannot believe it – […]

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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:

  • Bing Tests Ads Within Organic Search Results?

    The RKGBlog blog posted a screen shot of Bing testing search ads directly in the organic results. Honestly, I almost cannot believe it – but more on that later. Here is a cropped picture of the screen shot. Why is this so shocking? Placing search ads inline with organic free listings is somewhat taboo for […]

  • Search In Pics: Nooglers, Google Garage & Marissa Mayer With Martha Stewart

    In this week’s Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have, and more. Marissa Mayer with Martha Stewart: Google Car By Google Sign: Artistic Picture of The GooglePlex: A […]

  • The Alexander Calder Google Mobile Logo

    Google is featuring a special logo for Alexander Calder, an American artist known for inventing mobile sculptures, 113th birthday. Alexander Calder was born on July 22, 1898 in Lawnton, Pennsylvania and died on November 11, 1976 at the age of 78 in Manhattan. The logo is Google’s first doodle made entirely using HTML5 canvas. Google […]

  • Simplifying Tag Tracking: The Universal Tracking Container

    Every web analytics provider requires nearly the same setup process: pixels. A couple lines of JavaScript pasted onto the pages of a website provide data critical to any optimization process, attribution model, or consumer behavior analysis. As part of my role includes integration engineering for an analytics vendor, I spend a substantial amount of time […]

  • Does This Website Usability Fairy Tale Have A Happy Ending?

    Whenever I’m asked what usability is, I get tongue tied. “It’s about humans and computers,” I may say, but they’ll picture robots and talking cars. “I help make web sites that work,” is closer, but vague because technically, if it’s on the Internet, it’s working. Then I’ll hear myself try to make it clearer by […]

  • Uncovering The Best Mobile SEO Resources On The Web

    About two weeks ago, I started a new chapter in my professional life as the VP and “Conductor” of Marketing at BlueTrain Mobile, an award-winning technology start up company in Cambridge, MA. This is an exciting career move for me in so many ways, and will push me to ramp up on my “mobile SEO” […]

  • Google Overhauls Place Pages, Emphasizes Reviews & Kills Citations

    Local searchers and local businesses will see a fairly substantially different Place Page the next time they’re poking around Google Maps/Places. The company announced a new look Thursday and promises more changes to come. The new layout of Place Pages puts a heavy emphasis on reviews. More specifically, it emphasizes reviews from Google users and […]

  • Today On Google+: Business Profiles Terminated, Blueprint For Businesses On Google+ Will Be Made Available To All Shortly

    Below is today’s top news relating to Google+, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. Businesses Removed From Google+ Google Removes Mashable, Sesame Street & Other Prominent Accounts From Google+ is a post by Matt McGee which highlights some of the recently terminated Google+ accounts. Mashable, Ford and even […]

  • Clever Sense: A Mobile Search Engine That’s Like “Pandora For The Real World”

    I suspect someone is going to successfully build Google’s “contextual discovery engine” before Google does. The newest company to make a run at what Marissa Mayer was talking about is Clever Sense with its new app “Alfred” (formerly called Seymour). Intended to be a demonstration of Clever Sense’s underlying data extraction and machine learning technologies, […]

  • MSFT Earnings: $17B In Quarter, $70 Billion For Year

    Microsoft announced fiscal Q4 and full year revenue this afternoon. Growing 8 percent from a year ago Microsoft reported $17.37 billion in topline revenue and $6.17 billion in operating income. Revenues for Online Services, which houses Bing and online advertising, grew 17 percent for the quarter and 15 percent for the full year. However the […]

Search News From Around The Web:

Applications & Portal Features

Business Issues

Local, Maps & Mobile

SEO & SEM

Social Media

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

  • How Google+ Could Cost Online Retailers Millions – One second is how long Google’s +1 plug-in drags down page-load time, and that’s not “just” a second when research shows that ten percent of site traffic is lost for every extra second a site takes to load.
  • How Twitter’s Technical Infrastructure Issues Are Impacting Google Search Results – Vanessa Fox explains how Twitter has managed to kill its rankings with an overcomplicated site structure that consists mainly of crawlability issues.
  • 24 Top Paid Search Metrics Explained – Good post detailing important pay per click data points and what they mean.
  • Does Domain Parking Work Anymore? – With the arrival of Google Panda, my recent experiences purchasing a few premium domains, and a total shift in the way people use the internet, I begin to wonder about the current and future state of domain parking.
  • Changes in Google Places and Reviews – What Does it Mean for the SMB? – Google is clearly reducing their reliance on third party reviews and increasing the prominence of their own reviews. That is obvious and it makes sense from their self interested point of view now that they are garnering adequate volumes of reviews on their own.
  • Google Adds URL Parameter Options to Google Webmaster Tools – Roundup by Vanessa Fox: In 2009, Google launched the parameter handling feature of Google webmaster tools, which enabled site owners to specify the parameters on their site that were optional vs. required.  A year later, they improved this feature by providing an option for a default value. Google says that they’ve seen a positive impact from the usage of those tools thus far.” Now, they’ve improved the feature again, by enabling site owners to specify how a parameter changes the content of the page.

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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