Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

• SearchBiz: Corn Farmers Oppose GoogleHoo; Online Ad Spending In Trouble?; McCain Campaign Upset With YouTube Takedowns

  Roll Call this week lays out the current state of the Google-Yahoo advertising deal, and says Microsoft is exercising “its considerable political clout” in Washington, DC, against Google. The article portrays Microsoft as aggressively using its in-house and outside lobbyists to rally public and private support against the deal. And, get this, one of the [...]

• New Video: Easy Tips For Better Searching

  Last year, Common Craft produced a great, short video explaining RSS “in plain English.” The company is back now with another wonderful one, Web Search Strategies in Plain English. It’s less than three minutes long and does a great job explaining how to use some of the most simple “power” commands at [...]

• Google Book Search Lawsuit To Be Settled? Plus, University Partners Launch HathiTrust Archive

  Via Resource Shelf, we learn of a report in Library Journal that says Google is close to settling a three-year-old lawsuit with publishers surrounding Google Book Search. Meanwhile, some of Google’s university partners have banded together to launch their own book search service, Hathi Trust. [...]

• Searching For Small Businesses, Coming Up Frustrated

  Having written about search for years, it’s often easy for me to mistakenly assume that everyone gets it. Search is where the customers are. Surely every business owner, large or small, understands by now the importance of appearing before these customers in search. Surely. But as I’ve looked for local businesses [...]

• Search Engine Land & The Thought Leadership Series

  Earlier this year, Search Engine Land participated in its first conversational marketing campaign through our ad partner, Federated Media. We’re now doing another one, and this is a short post to ensure readers know that while we’re taking part in a new “conversation,” our writers are not being told what to say as part [...]

• Study: Huge Potential SEM Spend Untapped

  A new JupiterResearch, Marin Software-sponsored study has found some surprising things about large-search marketers and their SEM spending: more than 90 percent would spend as much as 22 percent more — if they had better tools and technology to manage complex campaigns. That potentially represents hundreds of millions — even billions — of dollars that [...]

• Study: Google & Web Search Make You Smarter

  Proving what many of us in the search industry have long suspected, a report today on CNN says searching the web makes you smarter. Dr. Gary Small, a professor at UCLA, studied the brain activity of two groups of elder adults — one with “Web savvy” and one without. The study used MRI technology to measure [...]

Search News From Around The Web:

Business Issues

• Google and Yahoo: A Tale of Two Online Ad Markets, New York Times
• Google Query Growth Strong In September, But Spending Trends Ominous, www.alleyinsider.com
• The Startup is Cloudera, the Business is Hadoop MapReduce , Amr Awadallah Blog
• Ex-Google, Yahoo, Facebook employees snub recession, launch Hadoop startup, VentureBeat
• Google Book Search Goes to the Frankfurt Book Fair, Google Content Central Blog:
• Microsoft and Yahoo: Ballmer’s "failure" now a "dodged bullet", All about Microsoft
• Microsoft Big Brains: Gary Flake, All about Microsoft
• Experian Cancels Pricegrabber.com Sale Efforts; Blames Failure On Credit Crunch, paidContent.org
• Google demanding Intel’s hottest chips?, The Register

Local, Maps & Mobile

• Google Maps: Short term fix and long term problems in LBC, Understanding Google Maps & Yahoo Local Search
• Regular Google Street View Live for France, Google Blogoscoped
• Mobile Search Set for New Growth Spurt, Ad Age

Paid Search & Contextual

• 2 Ways You Could Be Killing Your Quality Score Without Knowing It, PPC Hero
• Google dodges economic crisis and opens fully to Third Party Ads, 77Lab
• Quality scores and ad auctions, Official Google Blog
• Google Profiting From Typo Squatting, Report Charges, Wired

Searching

• MAMA , Opera Developer Community
• Searching for a Halloween Costume? , AOL Hot Searches
• How Many Times Have You Searched Google?, Google Operating System
• The Elusive Job Search, MediaPost
• Yahoo! Search Taste Test, Jeremy Zawodny
• Ready to vote?, Live Search Blog

SEM Industry

• 30 Internet Marketing Blogs You Must Know to Succeed Online, SEOptimise
• How do you attribute revenue across a team of ads?, Search Marketing Now
• Lisa Barone joins We Build Pages!, Jim Boykin
• Where’s The ROI?, Search Engine Watch
• SEO in the global recession: preempting 2009′s keyword strategies, David Naylor

SEO & SEM

• 6 Things We Heard Again from the Search Engineers at SMX East, Marketing Pilgrim
• PageRank Sculpting: Parsing the Value and Potential Benefits of Sculpting PR with Nofollow, SEOmoz
• SEO Basics: Unlocking Content for Search Engines, Online Marketing Blog
• Google and personalized search at SMX, Geeking with Greg
• Wall Street Journal (and me!) on Holiday Marketing, Small Business SEM
• A Little Piece of the Google Algorithm – Revealed, SEOmoz

Social Media

• Twitter accidentally reveals search integration? , CNET News

Video, Music & Image Search

• Google Blasts Ruling on Images in Search Results, InternetNews.com
• Another Google content play, Hollywood Reporter

Other Item

• Daily SearchCast: October 2, 2008, Daily SearchCast

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

• The 5 Different Forms of Social Media News Momentum
• 7 Criteria of an Effective SEO Page Title
• 5 SUPERDUMB Mistakes with AdWords Keywords
• 20 Mixx Resources To Help You Off Your Digg High
• Fix Your 404s the Easy Way: Free Direct Text Links Advice from Matt Cutts
• Link Building for E-Commerce Site : It’s Not All About Paid Links
• Dealing With Grief Online – Social Communities Offer Ways to Cope & Remember
• Marriott, Hertz & Avis Hijacked in Google Maps – Affiliate Mapspam Continues
• 10 Symptoms of Highly Viral WordPress Themes
• Travel PPC: 10 Ways to Improve Your Google AdWords Campaign

Related Topics: SearchCap

About The Author: Matt McGee is Search Engine Land's Executive News Editor, responsible for overseeing our daily news coverage. His news career includes time spent in TV, radio, and print journalism. His web career continues to include a small number of SEO and social media consulting clients, as well as regular speaking engagements at marketing events around the U.S. He blogs at Small Business Search Marketing and can be found on Twitter at @MattMcGee and/or on Google Plus. See more articles by Matt McGee

Connect with the author via: Email | Twitter | Google+ | LinkedIn