SearchCap: The Day In Search, June 17, 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:

• Ask.com Expands AnswerFarm Q&A Database
  

  Continuing its move from being a traditional search engine to an “answer engine,” Ask today has announced that its “AnswerFarm” database has tripled in size, from 100 million Q&A pairs to 300 million. Ask says they’ve also improved the quality of the Q&A database content: “Our semantic search technology advancements in clustering, rephrasing, and answer relevance enable [...]

• Bing: comScore sees Gains; Compete Sees Same Old, Same Old
  

  More early stats are coming in on how searchers are reacting to the Bing launch. comScore shows Microsoft’s Bing search engine continuing to make gains, but Compete shows things remain largely the same. From comScore, the latest stats show that “searcher penetration” has climbed from 13.7% in the week before it launched, to [...]

• Choosing A PPC Campaign Management Application: SMN Webcast Thursday
  

  Tomorrow, Thursday June 18 at 1 PM Eastern, Search Marketing Now hosts a webcast “Choosing a PPC Campaign Management Application: 20 Questions You’ll Need to Ask.” Speaker David Rodnitzky has come up with 20 key questions to help you determine what you need and how to evaluate your options and make an informed decision about [...]

• PPC Segmentation: 4 Tips To Better Target Customers
  

  Any marketer will tell you that the more you know about your audience, the better you can speak to it. That’s why research is so essential in paid search — it can help you choose the right keywords, match them up to the best copy, and ultimately, help you better speak to your audience. But [...]

• China, Censorship & Google Redux
  

  In the wake of the 20th anniversary of the Chinese Government’s crackdown on democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square, the issue of Google’s (self) censorship of search results in China has come around again. CNET has a lengthy and critical article on the subject: Google was going to help democratize data in China. Instead, about three years [...]

Search News From Around The Web:

Applications & Portal Features

• New fields for Gmail contacts and better importing too, Official Gmail Blog
• Check Out The New Yahoo! Toolbar, Yahoo Search Blog
• iGoogle goes au naturel, Official Google Blog

Business Issues

• Bing Returns To China With A New Name – "Biying", Digital East Asia
• For Yahoo Newspaper Consortium Members, Targeting Is Now The Draw, Not Job Ads\, paidContent.org
• Maybe Google Isn’t Losing Big Bucks on YouTube After All, BusinessWeek
• News Bosses Tell MPs: Free Us To Fight Google, paidcontent.co.uk

Local, Maps & Mobile

• Stuck in Traffic?, AOL Search Blog
• MLB.com Streams Live Baseball Games to the iPhone, New York Times

Link Building

• Linkscape Index Update: Now with More Visualization, SEOmoz
• What types of directories are seen as sources of paid links?, YouTube

Paid Search & Contextual

• Bing Shopping & PPC Ads, Rimm Kaufman
• Find Competitor’s Top Performing Keywords, PPC Hero
• Font size matters, Inside AdSense
• uniQlicks spamming AdSense publishers with fake AdSense termination emails, JenSense
• Upstream and Downstream Clicks: It’s All About the Google (and a little bit about Yahoo), www.traffick.com

Searching

• Something to Chew On, Wolfram|Alpha Blog
• Ask.com Announces Database of 300 Million High-Quality Question-and-Answer, Ask.com
• Igor Stravinsky Birthday, 2009, Google Logos Collection
• Is Ask.com Out of the Search Engine Race?, Marketing Pilgrim

SEM Industry

• SEO is my Role Playing Game, The SEO Scoop

SEO & SEM

• Are Your Analytics Causing You to Lose 30% of Your Sales?, GrokDotCom
• Best practices for Product Search, Official Google Webmaster Central Blog
• Google News Releases Much Needed Publisher FAQ, Search Engine Roundtable
• Google Page level penalty for comment spam – rankings and traffic drop, SEO Gadget
• Product Search for Webmasters, YouTube

Social Media

• Digg API changes could mean profit for developers, News.com
• Up, Up, and Away, Twitter Blog
• Phase 4 Of Facebook’s Systematic Attack On Twitter: The Everyone Button, TechCrunch

Video, Music & Image Search

• YouTube Adds the Wonder Wheel, Google Operating System

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

• Google Says: Yes, You Can Still Sculpt PageRank. No You Can't Do It With Nofollow
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• New AdWords Trademark Policy: Who Wins?
• Watch Out: Google Penalty for Comment Spam on Your Blog
• PageRank Sculpting Is Dead! Long Live PageRank Sculpting!
• I'm pissed. Dear Google, please go vaporize yourself!
• InfluenceRank: Google's Social Media PageRank
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