SearchCap: The Day In Search, October 31, 2008
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 2001 Search: Party’s OverTonight is your last chance to search through a 2001 version of Google’s index. On Thursday, Google added this warning to the search page: “Google 2001 will […]
Barry Schwartz on October 31, 2008 at 3:22 pm | Reading time: 6 minutes
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 2001 Search: Party’s Over
Tonight is your last chance to search through a 2001 version of Google’s index. On Thursday, Google added this warning to the search page: “Google 2001 will no longer be available after tomorrow.” The 2001 search was put online as part of Google’s recent 10th birthday celebration, and was never planned to be a permanent feature. - Search In Pictures: Yahoo’s Astronaut, Android Sleeps & Google’s Factory Farm
- Google, Yahoo Prepare To Abandon Paid Search Deal?
Despite public pronouncements of confidence by Google and Yahoo about the future of their paid search deal, which was partly set up to fend off Microsoft and hostile Yahoo shareholders who wanted a Microsoft takeover, the emerging consensus is that it’s not going to happen. The Wall Street Journal this morning reports that the parties are not coming to terms and the US Justice Department wants concessions that the search engines don’t like. - Google Now Allowing Ads For Beer
Taylor Pratt discovered a very quiet change made to Google AdWords policy for handling alcohol ads. Now, Google is allowing search ads for beer, wine and champagne to show up on Google.com. Google’s policy says they allow these ads, “since we consider beer, wine, and champagne to be products intended for the sale and consumption by adults, ads promoting these products will be given a Non-FamilySafe status.” Why did Google make this change? Why did Google first have a ban on beer, wine and champagne ads and now remove that restriction? Why now? - Google Updates AdWords Quality Score To Be “Fairer”
The Google AdWords Blog announced that two new changes to the quality score is coming in the next few days. The first change is to make the quality score calculation score an ad’s CTR based on the ad’s position. The second change is to help enable certain ads to be promoted to the top position. - Spooky Search Engines On Halloween
Google, Yahoo, Live, Ask, DogPile and many more are celebrating Halloween with special spooky logos or themes. Below you will find the logos and themes I spotted throughout the search industry. Google seems to have totally ‘geeked out’ the fear in Halloween by adding spooky thoughts to their robots.txt file: User-agent: zombies Disallow: /brains - The Secret Influence of Search Behavior
Did you know that Rachel Ray grounds up toasted pumpkin seeds, adds some herbs and uses the mixture to coat chicken? Me neither. One day, after my daughter mentioned this to me, I started thinking about how people’s eating habits are changing everywhere. More fast food restaurants serve healthier, lower fat meals. Today’s families use different herbs to prepare food than their parents’ generation. In my house, you may find your salad has apple, pineapple or oranges in it. A few years ago, I would never have had the idea to do that to a salad. Nor would there have been printed recipes from Rachel Ray’s web site piled on the kitchen counter. What’s happening? The Internet. How? By making more information available online, our habits are changing. We’re teaching one another new tricks and evolving together. We’re sharing more stories by way of social networking. We’re learning new ways for doing the same old things. We’re willing to be talked into most anything, especially if we read it on the web, in an email from a friend or click a search engine result that looks credible. - Finding The Sweet Spot
Many of our customers are companies who sell online marketing services to small businesses. When they come to us for sales leads, they usually know exactly what they want – what profile of businesses they‘re looking for and from which sites they’d like us to get the leads. Nevertheless, we do have customers who come to us asking we point them in the right direction – they want to know what the top categories of SMBs advertising online are, or in other words where the sweet spot is. While there are many lists and reports out there, such as this YPA’s Top 10 IYP Headings, we wanted to provide our customers with real-time information on leading revenue-generating categories of SMBs who advertise online. - Google Using OCR To Index Scanned Documents
It used to be that, if you hoped Google would index a PDF file, you had to create a PDF that was text-based, not image-based; Googlebot couldn’t recognize the content of scanned or image-based documents. According to an announcement today, that’s no longer the case. Google says it’s now using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology to read any scanned documents that it finds in PDF format:
Search News From Around The Web:
Applications & Portal Features
- Privacy Lapse at Google JotSpot, Ben Edelman
- Google’s JotSpot exposes user data, News.com
- More powerful APIs now available for managing Google Apps, Official Google Enterprise Blog
- OMG! Gmail Adds SMS Chat, Webmonkey
Business Issues
- Google Will Delay Oklahoma Data Center, Data Center Knowledge
- Facebook May Be Growing Too Fast. And Hitting The Capital Markets Again., TechCrunch
- Study: Google runs more than 10 million Web sites, News.com
Local, Maps & Mobile
Link Building
- Get In Touch With Your Inner Link Self, The Link Spiel
- Link Building Strategies For Affiliates, BlogStorm
Paid Search & Contextual
- Google TV Ads Invoiced Costs Now Finalized in 4 Days, Google Traditional Media Blog
- Where Do You Set AdWords Match Types?, Search Engine Guide
- Is the Google AdSense Team Worrying About the Economic Downturn?, Search Engine Roundtable
- Microsoft adCenter Drops Sunday Support Hours, Search Engine Roundtable
- Porn and Gambling: Canaries in the SEM Coal Mine?, Search Engine Watch
Searching
- Looking back in time for context, Google News Blog
- Experimental Monkeys Now Available, Yahoo! Search Blog
- Google Blog Search Now Reads Links on Web Pages, Digital Inspiration
- Search Google Profiles, Google Blogoscoped
SEM Industry
- O’Reilly Found Conference, O’Reilly
- Google Opens New Interactive Help Forums One at a Time, Search Engine Roundtable
- Google, The Unbiased Company, Has CEO Backing Obama, Search Engine Roundtable
- Happy Halloween from We Build Pages!, We Build Pages
- Is SEO Blogging Worth It?, SEO Refugee
- LinkedIn Removed My Profile Photo!, Barry Schwartz
SEO & SEM
- The Problem With URLs, Coding Horror
- Analogies in Blog Titles are Like Dirty Underwear, Wolf Howl
- Google Personalized Search and Ranking Study, Reliable SEO
- Technical SEO Issues Are Hard and We Need Good Solutions, Vanessa Fox
- What is Google Query Expansion? Cases and Examples, Search Engine Journal
Video, Music & Image Search
- Update: Picasa 3 out of beta, freeware junkie
- Yahoo! Video Streams Surge 56% in September to Claim Second Spot to YouTube which has broken 5 Billion Monthly Videos Serve, Nielsen Online, Beet.TV
Recent Hot Items From Sphinn, Our Social News Sharing Site:
- Tools of the SEO Trade
- European Politics 2.0: Romanian PM hits Twitter, Facebook
- Microsoft’s business record in Google Maps Hijacked!
- The Manly Man's SEO Conference Guide
- New Search Engine Land Column Launches
- 50+ Must Read Web Design for ROI, Usability and SEO Articles
- Google Local Business Hijacking: Microsoft Acquires Yahoo, Becomes Escort Service
- Light Behind The Changes At We Build Pages
- I’m a Codependent, Social Media Baby
Related stories
New on Search Engine Land