SearchCap: The Day In Search, May 2, 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: Twitter Sees Highest “Sustained” Activity Ever In Wake Of Osama Bin Laden News Twitter has released new numbers showing last night’s announcement that Osama bin Laden was dead generated the most […]

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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:

  • Twitter Sees Highest “Sustained” Activity Ever In Wake Of Osama Bin Laden News

    Twitter has released new numbers showing last night’s announcement that Osama bin Laden was dead generated the most activity on the service that it has ever seen, in terms of “sustained rate of tweets.” From 10:45 PM Eastern time on May 1 through 12:30 AM on May 2, there were on average 3,440 tweets per […]

  • 14 Differences Between Mobile Search & Desktop Search Results

    When you write a monthly column on how mobile impacts search and social, it can be easy to forget that most businesses still aren’t thinking about mobile as something that impacts them today, and aren’t really planning for a future in which most of our online activity will take place on mobile devices. For the […]

  • Averages Lie: A Guide To Understanding Increments & Bid Simulator

    Suppose you run a banana stand. You buy pallets of bananas and sell them for $1.00/banana to poor saps in the airport. You normally buy bananas from Farmer Jones for $0.30 each. You have an additional $0.60/banana in expenses for delivery costs, storage, staffing, airport booth rental, etc, leaving you with $0.10 profit on each […]

  • Hot At Sphinn: Explaining Your SEO/SEM Career, Affiliate Marketing Scams & More

    If you’ve ever had friends or relatives whose eyes glazed over as you try to explain your life as an SEO/SEM consultant, you wouldn’t have been alone last week on Sphinn. In a more lighthearted “Discussion of the Week” than some previous topics, we asked: How do you explain being an SEO/PPC/Social Media marketer to […]

  • Speculating On The Next Shift In Google Search Algorithms

    On February 23, 2011, the day that Google’s Panda update was released, a significant shift in search algorithms and SEO in general happened. For the first time, user experience and content quality became ranking factors in SEO for Google. Google clearly liked the impact of that change, since they followed more recently with an update, […]

  • SMX Advanced Seattle Sold Out Again! Expo Pass, Workshop & SMX East Options

    For the fifth year in a row, our SMX Advanced Seattle search marketing conference has sold out. The tickets went faster than ever, six weeks before the show, which runs June 7 and 8. Missed getting a pass? There are some alternatives to consider: Waiting List: Inevitably, a few people who’ve bought tickets aren’t able […]

  • Does Google Have A Class System For Googlers?

    Former Googler, Andrew Norman Wilson posted a very interesting video on his blog about a group of Google employees who were portrayed as a “lower class” of Googlers. These Googlers were primarily responsible for the Google Book project where they manually scanned books all day. Andrew Wilson documented how these Googlers worked, starting their day […]

  • Legal Woes Mount For Google: “Locationgate,” Skyhook Suit And FTC-Search Probe

    Following the revelation last week that the iPhone stored user location data a consumer class action was filed. This kind of disclosure/revelation-class action cycle is now familiar. And because Google also collects location data it is now also the subject of a similar class action (Brown et al v. Google) seeking $50 million in damages. […]

  • Google & The Death Of Osama Bin Laden

    I remember distinctly how Google reacted during the 9/11 attacks. Miserably, having to resort to using its ad space and special links on its home page to keep people informed, because its results were so out of date. How things have changed, in so many ways. Google On 9/11 Recall Google back on September 11. […]

  • Google’s World’s Fair Logo For 160th Anniversary

    Today on the Google home page is a special logo for the 160th anniversary of the World’s Fair. The World’s Fair was the idea of Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s husband and took place in The Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, London, United Kingdom in 1851. This Google logo is interactive, a growing change in how […]

  • Google Releases Alabama Tornado Destruction Images & Maps Of Tornadoes

    Google has posted before-and-after images of the terrible devastation left behind by the tornadoes that hit the South and parts of the East Coast of the United States earlier this week, with close-up views particularly of Tuscaloosa, Alabama. The easiest way to see the images is through a Picasa album that the company has posted. […]

  • Another Company Outed for Paid Links: Sequoia-Backed Milanoo

    A story on TechCrunch today notes that a Sequoia-backed shopping site called Milanoo appears to be spamming Google with hoards of paid links that are helping them rank for things like [cheap dresses] and [evening gown]. They got news of the situation by way of a site called Digital Due Diligence that checked Milanoo’s backlink profile […]

Search News From Around The Web:

Applications & Portal Features

Business Issues

Local, Maps & Mobile

Link Building

Searching

SEM Industry

SEO & SEM

Social Media

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

  • How Google Creates Black Hats – Aaron Wall on Google breeding webmasters that don't care much about their guidelines: "Google is betting that anonymous strangers will behave more kindly than Google has, but when an animal is backed into a corner it often acts in unpredictable (and even uncontrollable) ways."
  • Can We Please Stop Pretending That Microsoft's Bing Is Doing Well? – As even a quick glimpse under the hood reveals, Bing not doing well. It's doing horribly.
    Worse, Bing is burning attention and money that Microsoft could instead focus on a much more important battleground, one that–unlike search–could eventually destroy Microsoft's core business.
  • Using Social Awareness Streams To Learn What People Care About – If you’re only interested in keyword research for page rank purposes, you’re missing out on what people really care about. Since Google and Bing have learned how to determine what people like the most, it make sense to look for new ways to get that information for your web site.
  • Avoiding Affiliate Marketing Scams – Rae Hoffman shares lots of advice about making sure you don't fall victim to some of the occasionally outrageous claims of affiliate systems/products that promise great wealth, huge checks and little or no work
  • A Hint of What Google's Social Network Might Look Like? – Good summary by of a new Google patent on Social Messaging User Interface by Bill Slawski.
  • Increasing SEO Complexity Lowers Result Diversity – If you think about what Google's Panda update did, it largely changed the cost-benefit analysis of many online publishing business models. Some will be frozen with fear, others will desperately throw money at folks who may or may not have solutions, while others who gained will buy additional marketshare for pennies on the Dollar.
  • Bing Maps’ “Game Changer”: Hi-Res Aerial Imagery Coming To Entire US and Western Europe – Hot on the heels of last week’s Read/Write World effort, Bing Maps has announced another ambitious project that will improve its imagery collection.
    It’s called the Global Ortho Project and the goal is to provide consistent, high resolution (30 cms) imagery across every square inch of the United States and Western Europe by June, 2012.

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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