SearchCap: The Day In Search, September 12, 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:

• Q&A With Google’s Insights For Search Senior Product Manager
  In The Trenches is a weekly spotlight of tips, tricks, and news about the tools search engine marketing professionals use to give them a leg up on the competition. Today: News from the search engines, today’s in-depth look, “Q&A With Google’s Insights for Search Senior Product Manager” and this…
• Live Search Adds Fourth Search Ad Before Organic Results
  The adCenter blog announced that they have added a fourth ad to the top ad location in the Live Search results. This brings the number of search ads displayed on the page from 8 to 9, and pushes the organic search results down by one ad position. Here is a…
• Yahoo: How Open When You Compete With Others?
  Yahoo had a press day yesterday designed in part to pump up the media about the company’s prospects and progress post the Microsoft-fiasco. As someone who’s been positive about Yahoo, I oddly found the day leaving me less reassured, not more. In the end, ironically it might have been…
• Search In Pictures: Google To The Moon, Yahoo’s Server Toss & GPS Bike
  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 Adds Location To Mobile Web Search
  Last November, Google introduced its My Location feature in Google Maps for Mobile. It uses cell tower IDs to triangulate the location of the phone and then identifies that location on the Google Maps interface. With a bit less precision, it essentially does the same thing that GPS does: eliminate…
• Human Hardware: Foraging with Search
  In the last column, I looked at how Pirolli and Card theorized that we humans adapted our ancestral foraging strategies to retrieve information in a hypertext environment. The theory was first proposed in 1994, in a pre-Google era (although search engines were beginning to make their presence felt). If…
• Early Interview With Google’s Page & Brin
  This week, we’ve seen a lot of coverage of Google’s 10th anniversary, yet most writers have spent little time covering Google’s really early days, when the company was just a scrappy startup with a handful of employees. Here’s a great interview with Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin from…

Search News From Around The Web:

Applications & Portal Features

• Yahoo revamps sites to add third-party content, San Francisco Chronicle

Business Issues

• Debunking Google’s log anonymization propaganda, News.com
• Liveblogging From Yahoo’s "Open House": Sexy Email and Barbara Mandrell!, AllThingsD
• Yahoo Defends Google Deal, BusinessWeek
• Yahoo Exec: ‘People Don’t Want to Search’, InternetNews
• Google buys Korean blogging software platform TNC, one of first purchases in Asia, VentureBeat
• We’ve been Googled!, Web 2.0 Asia

Local, Maps & Mobile

• Hurricane layer updates for Ike, Google LatLong
• Tip of the week: Smooth riding, Google LatLong
• Google mobile chief says can’t afford a dud, Reuters

Paid Search & Contextual

• AdWords Account Security, Stepforth
• Microsoft adCenter Desktop Beta Feature Requests, Search Engine Roundtable
• Ad perfect, Official Google Blog
• Conversion Rates Have You Down? Our 5 Day Landing Page Series is the Cure, PPC Hero

Searching

• Google Germany Drops Adult Video Sites Like RedTube.com, Search Engine Roundtable
• Interview of Quintura Search CEO Yakov Sadchikov, SEO Book
• Announcing the BOSS Mashable Challenge, Yahoo Search Blog
• Security expert: Google anonymization not anonymous enough, Ars Technica

SEM Industry

• Ognian Mladenov: Search Blogger of the Day, The SEO Scoop

SEO & SEM

• Black Hole SEO, SEO Book
• New Stealth Crawler from Yahoo!, eKstreme.com
• Demystifying the "duplicate content penalty", Official Google Webmaster Central Blog
• Google Is Testing New Webmaster Tools Verification Process, Search Engine Roundtable
• SEO Reporting: Going Beyond Rankings, Search Engine Watch
• Tynt’s CEO Derek Ball Responds to SEO Community Concerns, Eric Lander
• Whiteboard Friday - Best Page First?, SEOmoz

Video, Music & Image Search

• Google Tightens Standards for YouTube Videos in Response to Lieberman’s Pressure, ResourceShelf
• Why YouTube Videos Will Never Be Downloadable (Legally, Anyway), Wired

Web Analytics

• Google Analytics 101 (Part 4), Inside AdWords

Other Items

• The Missing Doodles, Google Operating System
• Google Chrome comic book raises $454, Inquisitr

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

• Using Free Applications Within Your Link Building Strategy
• The Origins of Man…or 8 Awesome Search Bloggers
• How To Linkbait E-commerce Stores: 15 Tips For Success!
• SEO Mofo vs. World's Dumbest Spammer
• Milk Those Links For Rankings & Clickthrough!
• Tynt’s CEO Derek Ball Responds to SEO Community
• Evaluating Google's Response To Mapspam Reports
• Interview with Shana Albert
• David Mihm’s Local Search Presentation at SEMpdx Hot Seat (Liveblogging)
• The Collection of SEO and Web Accessibility Tools