SearchCap: The Day In Search, June 28, 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:

• Google’s Facebook Competitor, The Google+ Social Network, Finally Arrives

  Google’s long expected second shot at taking on Facebook in the social networking space has arrived in the form of the Google+ Project. It has some interesting twists on the social networking model but is far from a Facebook-killer. That Name The terrible name is a bad start. Google+? Google+! I can’t even question or […]
• Think Germans Are The Most Sensitive To Privacy? Others May Be More So

  Privacy is a much discussed topic and most focus seems to be privacy issues in Europe. But people have different attitudes to privacy throughout the globe with some having an intense fear of compromising their privacy or identify. How does this affect search? And where are the most privacy senstiive nations>

• How Information Is Socially Shared

  The mystery of how and where articles, information, graphics, and more are shared online has been something to plague both marketers and content creators alike. Catering your information towards your target audience and where they share it most is crucial to producing content that spreads like wildfire online. Linkbait tactics would be without effectiveness if […]

• French Company Seeks $421M From Google For “Blacklisting”

  Perhaps sensing “blood in the water,” a French company called 1plusV has sued Google in the Paris Commercial Court for the equivalent of $421 million. (The civil complaint was orginally filed on February 22, 2011.) An operator of vertical search sites, 1plusV is the corporate parent of legal search engine Ejustice.fr, one of three companies […]

• Google Launches “What Do You Love” Search, To Find Google Services

  Google has launched a new service at wdyl.com, which stands for “What Do You Love” from Google, which allows users to search for anything and see what comes back from a variety of Google’s many different search resources. Over the years, Google has continued to add new products, services, portals, and features to their portfolio. […]

• Google’s +1 Button Goes Global

  Google’s +1 button is rolling out internationally. The company has announced that 1 buttons will start showing on a few select Google search engines at first: Google.co.uk Google.de Google.jp Google.fr The +1 button will be “expanding quickly to most other Google search sites” in the near future. Up until now, the +1 button has only […]

• Google Beefs Up Government Requests Report For Latest Info Release

  Google has added key pieces of information to its Government Requests Transparency report. The semi-annual release of data chronicles the search engine’s interactions with government officials around the world, in which those officials request that information be removed from Google’s index, or ask for data about its users. It also tracks user traffic from countries […]

• 5 Considerations For Connecting With Local Searchers

  These days, local business owners are regularly faced with the question of where to advertise to attract new customers. While there’s basic knowledge that consumer media habits are transitioning, many businesses often lack an in-depth understanding of exactly what has changed and how they should be adjusting their marketing strategies to match current trends. This […]

• How To Help Clients Understand Social Link Outcomes

  My previous column, Key Problems With Current Social Link Graph Signals hit a nerve with a few people who felt I was too harsh in my critique of social signals as content quality indicators. See this post from bigmouthmedia for one of the more in-depth responses. It’s not that I don’t feel social signals have merit. […]

Search News From Around The Web:

Applications & Portal Features

• Exclusive: Yahoo launching Hadoop spinoff this week — Cloud Computing News, gigaom.com
• Unsubscribing is easier than ever with Unsubscriber, ymailblog.com
• Google Docs Documents Go Missing For Some, Search Engine Roundtable
• Google Talk now supports XMPP Jingle, juberjabber
• The Data Liberation Front Delivers Google Takeout, Data Liberation

Business Issues

• Facebook Hires George Hotz, a Programming Whiz known as ‘GeoHot’, Wall Street Journal

Local, Maps & Mobile

• Google now activates 500,000 Android devices every day, thenextweb.com
• Review Snippets Gone From Google Blended Results, Mike Blumenthal

Searching

• ChaCha and Wolfram|Alpha Bring Computation to Q&A and SMS, Wolfram|Alpha Blog
• Groupon leaks entire Indian user database, Risky Business

SEO & SEM

• 30 (New) Google Ranking Factors You May Over- or Underestimate, SEOptimise
• AdWords and AdCenter Match Type Differences, PPC Hero
• Adwords Lead Generation, ppcblog.com
• Answers to 4 Excellent SEO Questions, SEOmoz
• BingBot Crawling Too Heavily Again?, Search Engine Roundtable
• Google Says Stop Reading Tin Foil Hat SEO, Search Engine Roundtable
• How to influence search robots in crawling your website, State of Search
• How to Quickly & Easily Change Keywords to Broad Match Modifier Using Google AdWords Editor, webranking.com
• How to Use AdSense Keyword Tool for Article Marketing, Search Engine People
• Optimizing Your Online PR Strategy for Search & Social, Part 3: Background Research, Search Engine Guide
• Paying for Search Rankings – Is Everyone Doing It?, Search Engine Watch
• Top 7 Tricks to Rank in Google Places, Search Engine Journal
• Top SEO Mistakes You Must Avoid (Cheatsheet), Search Engine Journal
• Using SEO Spider Data in Excel, distilled
• Will setting the rel="canonical" attribute of a page to itself cause a loop?, YouTube

Video, Music & Image Search

• Google’s New Search by Image Returns Porn & Has Quick Remove Images, Search Engine Roundtable

Other Items

• Celebrating Pride 2011, Official Google Blog

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

• Personas 101: What Are They and Why Should I Care? – Solid introduction to personas from Linda Bustos: "A persona is not a demographic profile, a market segment or a summation of survey data. Rather, a persona is a combination of data modeled from ethnographic and behavioral user research, as well as narrative."
• 30 Things to Do If You Want Your Company Blog to Fail – Everyone struggles to maintain a great blog, but what if you've decided it's your goal to create a phenomenally awful company blog? Well, here are 30 things you can do to fast-track your trip to the bottom!
• Your Web Metrics: Super Lame or Super Awesome? – Are you reporting crappy web metrics? Avinash explains which ones are lame and provides you with the information you need to report on metrics that truly matter.
• The Benefits Of C Class IP Hosting – As usual, the new age SEO mystics like to say that anything that seems “exploitive” is useless and a waste of money. For this reason a common myth has circulated within the SEO industry that C class hosting is useless. Strangely, the people who say this mostly don’t even know what C class hosting is used for.