SearchCap: The Day In Search, November 10, 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:

• SEM Lessons From The Fall Of The Berlin Wall
  

  Twenty years ago the fall of the Berlin Wall didn’t just change politics in Europe—it changed Europeans behavior. To this day we work and search differently because of fall of the wall, and there are valuable lessons for search marketers in examining in examining this historic event.

• Google Flu Shot Locator Shows Where To Get Vaccines Near You!
  

  Looking for where to get a seasonal flu shot or that hard-to-find vaccine against H1N1 swine flu? Google has a new flu shot locator that can help. When the locator loads, you many need to manually enter your location. Do so using the “Change Location” option:

  After doing your search, a red needle icon shows where to [...]

• PPC Advertising and Geo-Targeting: SMN Webcast Thursday
  

  On Thursday at 1 PM EST, join Dan Soha of Five Mill Inc as he explains the ins and outs of geo-targeting, on the SMN Webcast: “PPC Advertising and Geo-Targeting.” Thanks to Marin Software for sponsoring this webcast. PPC advertisers use geographical targeting to create more focused and targeted advertising campaigns. By limiting the geographic target, [...]

• Google, Bing & Yahoo Bribe Users With Free WiFi
  

  Who expected the search wars to open a new front involving WiFi? Google, Bing & Yahoo have each just announced free WiFi promotions of various sorts. Google, which previously said it would provide free WiFi on all Virgin America flights through early next year, is now going to provide it at 47 US airports through the [...]

• 11 Effective, Efficient Ways To Use Limited Time To Build Links
  

  I visit most of the SEO forums at least once a week to keep up with what’s going on in the link building community. This past week was fairly quiet, but over on the HighRankings Forum, a thread on time management vs. link building efforts caught my eye. A webmaster wanted to know the best [...]

• Hawaii Joins The Google Street View Union; Microsoft Updates Look Of Bing Maps, Adds Features
  

  Google has now added Hawaii to Street View, making it the 50th and final US state to be included in the Maps image database. You can also get these images in Google Maps for Mobile. Google launched Street View a little more than two years ago, in May 2007. Since that time there has been considerable [...]

• Google Provides Sesame Street Logos In High-Res On 40th Anniversary
  

  Today marks the official 40th anniversary for Sesame Street and Google is providing some of the logos they showed on Google.com for high resolution download over here. In addition, Google said they are a supporter of the non-profit Sesame Workshop. Google has been showing logos for the past several days, leading up to the 40th [...]

• Google AdWords Adds New Alerts & Place Pages Performance Reports
  

  Google AdWords announced two updates including new alerts and place pages in performance reports, let me explain both in more detail. The new alerts are designed to help you stay on top of your campaigns. In addition to the billing alerts, they added alerts for new keyword and budget ideas in the Opportunities tab. [...]

• How To Quickly Customize Your Facebook Page To Attract More Fans
  

  Facebook Fan Pages are gaining popularity due to their high adoption rates among Facebook’s 300+ million users. Currently more than 10 million users become fans of Pages each day. However, the basic fan page layout is quite cookie cutter, so adding some simple modifications can really make a Fan Page standout and land those valuable [...]

• Google To Deliver New “Caffeine” Search After The Holidays
  

  Google’s got a present for searchers and site owners. The long anticipated new Google Caffeine search index will go live soon, just after the holidays. The Google Caffeine Sandbox, where people have been invited since the summer to test Google’s next generation search infrastructure, has been closed, replaced with this “it’s coming” message: We appreciate all the [...]

• Please Take Search Engine Land’s Audience Survey
  

  We’ve got a special request of our Search Engine Land visitors and SearchCap newsletter readers. Take our 2-minute audience survey! Please? If helping us keep the lights on isn’t enough of an incentive, we’ll toss in a chance to win a ticket to Search Marketing Expo – SMX West in Santa Clara, March 2-4. SMX [...]

• Why An Exclusive Wall Street Journal Deal Wouldn’t Help Bing
  

  With Rupert Murdoch talking about blocking Google, Jason Calacanis suggests that Murdoch should cut an exclusive deal with Bing. If that doesn’t kill Google, it might at least win Bing a 10% search share or more within 6 months, he argues. I suggest Jason needs a reality check. Here’s one for him. From his post today, [...]

Search News From Around The Web:

Applications & Portal Features

• Show Week Numbers in Google Calendar, Google Operating System

Business Issues

• Is Google Gearing Up To Buy A Second Mobile Ad Network?, moconews.net
• We’re Hiring Engineers!, YouTube Blog
• Yahoo Joins The Free-WiFi Marketing Bandwagon, paidContent.org
• AOL Begins Layoffs; 100 To Be Let Go Today, paidContent.org
• Google’s gift: Free wireless Internet in 47 airports, CNN Money
• Yahoo CEO pledges to boost profit margins, The Associated Press
• Yahoo Loses Yet Another Senior Executive, TechCrunch

Local, Maps & Mobile

• "Kindle for PC" Now Available, Amazon.com
• Google Maps LBC Local Listing Ads: Additional Details & Interface Review, Mike Blumenthal
• New handbook for Google, Droid users, Seattle Times Newspaper
• Real-Time Search Makes Move Into Mobile, MediaPost

Link Building

• Link Building Has Changed, SEOmoz

Paid Search & Contextual

• EFT available in Greece, Inside AdSense
• Pricing Adjustments Working, Say Experts, Yahoo! Search Marketing Blog

Searching

• Study reveals issues with search ads — trust and usefulness, Chiefmartec.com

SEO & SEM

• Announcing Our First Product Search Marketplace Partners: Etsy, eCrater, and eBid, Google Merchant Blog
• Advanced Mininet Building, Blue Hat SEO
• Does Google Handle Canonical Issues Fully?, Search Engine Roundtable
• Google AdWords Bug For Geo-Targeting Impacting Few, Search Engine Roundtable
• Q&A Is it OK if a keyword appears twice in an account?, Brad Geddes
• SBS Mailbag: Is it too late for holiday SEO?, Small Business SEM
• Snippets and Titles, YouTube

Social Media

• Coming Soon: LinkedIn for BlackBerry, The LinkedIn Blog
• Hundreds of Facebook Groups Hacked, loose wire blog
• LinkedIn works with Twitter, and vice versa, The LinkedIn Blog
• Twitter user ‘Shit My Dad Says’ gets CBS deal, THR
• Vidly Brings HD Video To Twitter, TechCrunch

Video, Music & Image Search

• New YouTube API Version Available for Testing, YouTube Blog