SearchCap: The Day In Search, May 8, 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:

• Google To ‘Integrate’ Microblogging?
  

  While Twitter is looking at ways to be more search-ey, Google is apparently thinking about ways to be more microbloggy. Buried in a Reuters article about Google’s shareholders meeting yesterday is this paragraph about the company’s interest in the social web: “Company executives who appeared alongside Schmidt at the media briefing said Google was looking at [...]

• Google Does TV Ads, To Push Chrome Browser In Commercials
  

  It used to be common wisdom that Google never did consumer marketing. That’s changed over the past few years, with Google doing everything from billboards to radio ads to bus “wraps” to push particular Google products. Now it boldly goes into that final frontier, TV ads in the United States. It’s a [...]

• SMN Webcast: Get Your Questions Answered By SEO Experts
  

  This Tuesday, May 12, at 1 PM Eastern Search Marketing Now will present a unique format in the webcast “Ask iProspect: Strategies & Tactics for World-Class SEO.” Senior management from iProspect will be on hand to answer questions from registrants on what it takes with the biggest and the best when it comes to [...]

• Search In Pictures: Google Aptera, A Yahoo Pint & Kids At Google
  

  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. Aptera’s at Google: A Yahoo Pint: Bring Your Kids To Work Day at Google: Yahoo India Pool: Award from SE Asia [...]

• Official: Wolfram Alpha Launches May 18
  

  After briefly going live yesterday, Wolfram Alpha — the much anticipated fact engine — was quickly shutdown. Now the company tells us that May 18 is the official launch data. For more about the service, see my write-up, Impressive: The Wolfram Alpha “Fact Engine”.

• Live Search Mobile Adds Videos & Baseball Scores
  

  The Live Search Blog announced they have added video search results and baseball scores to Live Search Mobile. I decided to take a few screen shots of live.com on my iPhone: Live Search Mobile Video Results:

  Live Search Mobile Baseball Info:

  Why the Mets? Well, I am a Met fan, or at least, I try to [...]

• Designing For The Subconscious Mind
  

  In last month’s column, I brought up the idea that the first impression your web site makes can have a bigger impact than many of the more traditional design considerations we tend to regularly obsess about. My theory is that users’ gut-level reactions when seeing a new site for the first time—and the split-second judgments they [...]

• Gmail Goes Offline Again
  

  Gmail has now been offline for the past twenty minutes or so. Just take a look at Twitter Search to see how many people are upset with the downtime. Here is a screen capture:

  This outage seems to be impacting both web access, pop access and imap access. Hopefully this outage won’t be as long or serious [...]

• The Next Decade: Can Google Stay On Top?
  

  There’s a feeling in the air of change — from one era to another and, more precisely, from one type of media culture to another. The hearings on Capitol Hill yesterday on the “future of journalism” reflect this transition in which traditional media are under intense pressure and fighting for their lives in some cases. [...]

• Wolfram Alpha Now Live (Er, Was Live)
  

  Wolfram Alpha, the much anticipated fact engine, is now live. That means, you can go to wolframalpha.com and test it out for yourself. Keep in mind, Wolfram Alpha is not a Google competitor, it is a beast of its own. Do comment and let us know your thoughts. For more about this new search engine, [...]

Search News From Around The Web:

Applications & Portal Features

• Stardates in Calendar!, Calendar Announcements

Business Issues

• Google Exec Joins EA’s Board of Directors, Wired
• Google’s Strength May Be Part of Microsoft Defense Strategy, New York Times
• Analyst: Google Will Be Worth $200 Billion In A Year, paidContent.org
• Apparently Google’s Lawyers Were Prepped For Google/Apple Antitrust Inquiry, TechDirt
• Are Yahoo Investors Now Tuning Ballmer Out?, paidContent.org
• Chrome Ad in the New York Times, Google Operating System
• Google Acknowledges Antitrust Inquiry, New York Times
• Google Expected To Walk Away From ‘Unfavorable’ AdSense Deals With AOL, MySpace, paidContent.org
• Ugly Chapter in Yahoo!’s History Revisited, ABC News

Local, Maps & Mobile

• CityVoter’s New Strategic Direction, Screenwerk
• Ex-Googlers Try To Create A Better Travel Guide With Nextstop, TechCrunch
• Google Maps: How to Remove Duplicate Records in the Local Business Center, Mike Blumenthal
• New Google Earth 5.0 Update Version 5.0.11733.9347, Google Earth Blog

Paid Search & Contextual

• AdSense Publishers Want To Allow Image Ads But Disallow Flash Ads, Search Engine Roundtable
• Click Forensics Unveils New Platform to Help Ad Networks, Publishers and Advertisers Identify High Conversion Search Traffic, Click Forensics
• Connect Your Google Analytics Goals to Your AdWords Conversion Tracking, Brad Geddes
• New Interface Thursdays: Meet the Networks tab, Inside AdWords
• Quality of The UK Live Search Click, adCenter Blog for Advertisers

Searching

• Microsoft’s new search – Built on open-source, The Register
• 3 Models of Value in the Real Time Web, Read/Write Web
• Authority FTW: Blog Posts in Google Universal Search, Small Business SEM
• Google News Bug Shows Black/Blank Images, Search Engine Roundtable
• I’m An Internet Celebrity Because Google Says So!, Vertical Measures
• Making Decisions With Machines and People: 3 New Cyborg Q&A Services, Read/Write Web
• Predictive Search Query Suggestions, SEO By The Sea
• Search Goes Real-Time With Scoopler. Twitter Dominates Results., TechCrunch
• So Much for A Quiet Launch, Wolfram|Alpha Blog

SEO & SEM

• How much does a domain’s age affect its ranking?, YouTube
• Google, Remove My Social Security Number, Search Engine Roundtable
• How Links in Gmail Might Be Used in Google Algorithm, Search Engine Journal
• Many Effective Online Marketing Strategies Are Old & Obvious, SEO Book
• Matt Cutts Uses His Blog To Mess With Google Search, Search Engine Roundtable
• Pull PR and Newsroom Optimization Tactics, Online Marketing Blog
• Website security as SEO, Econsultancy
• What are the factors that go into determining of PageRank of a Twitter page?, YouTube
• Whiteboard Friday – Expired Content, SEOmoz

Social Media

• Leave a comment, comentário, ou commentaire, Social Web Blog
• Twitter & Tell-A-Friend Viral Hell, andybeard.eu
• Lawn Care Marketing | Market Your Lawn Business Online, outspokenmedia.com

Web Analytics

• How to Use Ecommerce Tracking in Google Analytics, Google Analytics Blog

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