SearchCap: The Day In Search, October 9, 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:

• Dissecting The AP & Murdoch Speeches Against Those Internet News Thieves
  

  Associated Press president Tom Curley and News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch both made speeches yesterday in China that are being widely reported as an attack on Google. Having read through the actual speeches, I was surprised they weren’t as bad as I thought they’d be. Below, I’ve highlighted key portions along with [...]

• Brin Defends Book Search Settlement; Google & Plaintiffs Get One Month To Revise It
  

  The clock is ticking: Google and the parties involved in the Book Search lawsuit settlement have one month from today — until November 9 — to revise the settlement and satisfy the recent objections from the US Justice Department and others. That may seem like an ambitious timeframe given the amount of objections the settlement has [...]

• Want Better Web Design? Watch Real Users
  

  I’ve been in web development since 1995. For me, and many of you, it’s easy to forget that people don’t have the computer equipment to use the web sites and Internet applications we build. I’ve always found it interesting that TV show web sites are Flash based and loaded with images and video. [...]

• Search In Pictures: Google Chrome Cake, Yahoo Shwag & Google Lies Barn
  

  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. Google Chrome Cake: Yahoo Shwag, Might Be Worth Money One Day ;-) : Google Juice: Google Lies Barn?:

• Google Unlocks 700 Million Posts In Search Bug Fix
  

  Wired reports Google has fixed a year old bug where 700 million posts within a Usenet group were unsearchable via Google Groups. Google fixed this bug after Wired called them out for the blunder. Google sent Wired a response that read: It turns out there was a bug, a specific bug, that affected search within a [...]

• Kayak.com Releases Travel Search Data & Travel Index Tool
  

  Somewhat quietly, last week Kayak posted a new feature that opens up access to their search data using Kayak Trends. A key feature of Kayak Trend data is the KAYAK Travel Index™, an a statistical model that provides a measure of travel demand from analysis of searches on KAYAK sites, and aligns that with average [...]

• Yahoo Search Ads Now Filtered By Site Option
  

  The Yahoo Search Marketing Blog announced the search ads displayed on Yahoo Search are now filtered based on the filtered sites you select on the left bar. For example, here is a search for a product in Yahoo Search:

  Notice all those ads? Well, when I filter the results to Amazon only, Yahoo only shows an [...]

• Golden Twitter Nuggets & Takeaways From SMX East
  

  I took a lot of notes at SMX Toronto earlier this year and posted them in this column as Golden Nuggets From SMX Search Analytics. Looking back at them now, the evidence undeniably reinforces my memory of how much I learned, and I’m glad to say that three days at SMX East this week was [...]

• How important Is Click Through Rate In Google’s Quality Score Formula?
  

  A question often posed by marketers is, “What is the relative importance of different factors Google uses to determine quality score (QS)?”. Some of the factors mentioned on the AdWords blog are: Click through rate of the keyword and the matched ad Account history Landing page quality Keyword/Ad Group relevance The question for an advertiser then [...]

Applications & Portal Features

• Picasa Web Albums integration, site feeds, and page templates in Google Sites, Official Google Docs Blog
• New features for drawings in Google Docs, Official Google Docs Blog

Business Issues

• Verizon-iPhone deal less likely after Google move, IDC says, ComputerWorld
• Exclusive! Yahoo provided Iran with names of 200,000 users, ZDNet
• Google Claims to be the Lone Defender of Orphans: Not lone, not defender, Open Content Alliance (OCA)

Local, Maps & Mobile

• A bonus batch of Street View imagery, Google LatLong
• MapQuest Navigator on iPhone: Intuitive, simple, voice-guided navigation at a great low price, MapQuest Blog
• Exploring Local, Google Maps – The Brand
• The Year (Almost) Of Mobile Search, MediaPost

Link Building

• The Key to Paid Linking Revealed, The Search Agents

Paid Search & Contextual

• The Evolution Of Click Fraud: Massive Chinese Operation DormRing1 Uncovered, TechCrunch

Searching

• Computing Stock Data in Real Time, Wolfram|Alpha Blog
• Retiring Google Base’s Separate Search Page, Google Merchant Blog
• Google’s "Quick View" PDF Also Does OCR Conversion For Many Languages, Search Engine Roundtable
• Impressive! New Online Database: Van Gogh’s Letters, ResourceShelf
• New Online: Library of Academic and Other Lectures from NPR and PBS, ResourceShelf
• Twitter Search Refines Trend Searches To Give You More Real-Time Results, TechCrunch

SEM Industry

• Video Recap of Weekly Search Buzz :: October 9, 2009, Search Engine Roundtable
• Whiteboard Friday – Interview with Google’s Maile Ohye, SEOmoz

SEO & SEM

• SEO for e-Commerce Sites: Dealing with Out-of-Stock Product Pages, Daily SEO Tip
• Bing SEO Strategies, SEO Book
• Google Fixes Webmaster Tools Verification Issue With Google Sites, Search Engine Roundtable
• Google Turns Off Parameter Handling For Some Sites?, Search Engine Roundtable
• How to be a better SEO, Bruceclay.com.au
• HTML Sitemap vs. XML Sitemap: Google Says HTML Comes First, Search Engine Roundtable
• Trailing Slashes: Root Domain Same Page But File Names Can Be Different Pages, Search Engine Roundtable

Social Media

• Coming Soon: Twitter in More Languages, Twitter Blog
• Facebook’s mounting customer service crisis, CNET News
• 30 Twitter Tools for Business, SEOptimise
• Facebook Visits Increased 194 Percent in Past Year, Hitwise
• Healthcare Marketing: Making the Case for Social Media, Online Marketing Blog
• Testing Digg-fed "Content Ads", Digg the Blog

Video, Music & Image Search

• Spammers Newest Tactic: YouTube Video Spam, Read/Write Web
• Y,000,000,000uTube, YouTube Blog
• YouTube’s New Logo Shouts From The Rooftops: ‘1 Billion Views Per Day!’, TechCrunch