SearchCap: The Day In Search, September 14, 2011

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

From Search Engine Land:

• Bing Gets More Personal With Adaptive Search

  Bing has announced at SMX East today a new personalization feature named adaptive search. It seems a lot like Google’s previous query feature but supposedly, it goes well beyond just the previous query. Bing said the “more you search, the more Bing can learn” and thus adapts the search results for YOU based on your […]
• Google+ Sharing On Maps A Template For Other Products

  Before Google+ launched several months ago Eric Schmidt repeatedly told people that Google’s social strategy would involve adding a “social layer” to other Google products. When G+ appeared as a full-blown Facebook competitor and destination many people forgot about the “social layer” strategy. But with the addition of +snippets to Google Maps and related sharing on Google+ we […]

• Google Testing New Celebrity Endorsement Advertising Program

  Google users may soon see celebrity endorsements included as annotations under paid search results as part of new advertising program that the company has just started testing. Google’s Christian Oestlien revealed the test this afternoon as part of a session on Google+ and the Google +1 button at our SMX East Conference in New York […]

• Facebook Adds “Subscribe” Button, Other News Feed Options

  On the heels of its announcement about Smart Lists, Facebook is giving users more options for sharing and managing their content, including letting individuals share public content with people who “subscribe” to their feeds rather than “friend” them. The most important change is probably the introduction of a “Subscribe” button to each user’s profile. (This […]

• 5 Simple Steps To Stop Wasting Budget With Poor Retargeting

  Is this really another article about retargeting? Absolutely, but with very good reason – whilst marketers think retargeting (or remarketing) is an obvious and established practice, many are still failing to get it anywhere near right, and are actually harming their campaigns by doing it badly. A few months ago in this column, we explored […]

• Time Management Tips For In-House Search Engine Marketing

  If there’s one complaint that is universal for in-house search marketing managers, it’s that there just isn’t enough time or resources to get everything done. And usually, this complaint is valid; rare is the case of over staffing for search marketing. Often, one person may handle SEO as well as paid search and hey, for […]

• For First Time, Twitter Will Show Promoted Tweets From Accounts You Don’t Follow

  Look out, Twitter users: More advertising is coming to your Twitter stream, even from accounts that you don’t already follow. Twitter announced Tuesday that its Promoted Tweets program is expanding to “a small number of users,” and a Twitter help page explains where those ads might appear: At the top of relevant search results pages […]

• Report: AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo To Team For Display Ads

  In an apparent response to Google’s rising prominence in the display advertising market, the rest of the major players — Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL — are reportedly teaming up to sell ads on one another’s sites. The report in the Wall Street Journal’s All Things D says the pact was explained to a group of […]

• Oh Good Grep! Web Grepper: A New Web Intelligence Feature From Blekko

  Blekko, the search engine that launched last year and is known for its spam reduction efforts, is introducing a new feature today that will help make previously difficult, if not impossible to find (for free), web data accessible to more searchers, marketers, media, and others. Say hello to Web Grepper. More about the name in […]

• SMX East Keynote: A Conversation With Eli Pariser

  Good morning! Welcome to day two of our SMX East Conference in New York City. We’re beginning today with a keynote conversation with Eli Pariser, author of The Filter Bubble, a book in which Pariser argues that search personalization leads to users being unaware of viewpoints and opinions that are different than their own. We […]

• Google: PageRank Drops Most Likely Because You Sell Links

  In a new Matt Cutts video, the Google engineer answers why webmasters are likely to see a toolbar PageRank drop for their site. He mentions three reasons: (1) You simply lose a link from a third party page that had a lot of high PageRank. (2) You have weird canonicalization issues with your site and […]

• Google Will Offer Wi-Fi Opt-Out Tool To Improve User Privacy & Appease European Regulators

  With the smoke still smoldering from Google’s long-running battle over the collection of personal information via unsecured WiFi networks, the company says it’s working on a service that will allow WiFi router owners to opt-out from being included in Google’s location services. In a blog post yesterday, Google says the opt-out will be available to […]

• Walmart Buys OneRiot For WalmartLabs

  Walmart is at it again with what seems an unusual purchase for the retailer. The company has just purchased social advertising company OneRiot, it’s been announced. It will become part of WalmartLabs. From the OneRiot blog post: We’re delighted to announce that OneRiot has been acquired by Walmart. The OneRiot team will now be joining […]

• Google Search Share Plateaus, BingHoo Gains, AOL Drops

  The comScore search market share numbers for August are out. What they show is Google seeming to hit a kind of plateau. Over the past year it seems to be bumping up against a market share ceiling of around 65-66 percent. By contrast Yahoo and Bing gained slightly and now have a combined 31 percent of […]

Search News From Around The Web:

Applications & Portal Features

• Google launches group deals aggregator in China, IDG

Business Issues

• How the Google Motorola Deal Went Down, New York Times
• Facebook IPO delayed until late 2012, FT.com
• Google hires Bush spokesman to reach out to GOP campaigns, The Hill’s Hillicon Valley
• Yahoo for Sale: Possible Bidders Circling — Including Marc Andreessen — as Board Pressure Mounts, AllThingsD

Local, Maps & Mobile

• Does a Groupon Deal Impact Yelp Ratings?, Search Engine Journal
• Google Places: Now Permanently Closed with 2 clicks – Its Getting Worse NOT Better, Mike Blumenthal

Link Building

• Link Attraction: How Does Your Site Score?, Vertical Measures

Searching

• If Yahoo! Searches Predicted the Emmy Winners, Dexter, Tina Fey & Glee Would Take Home Top Honors, Yahoo Search Blog

SEO & SEM

• Google AdWords API Developer Token Rejected, Search Engine Roundtable
• Keyword Research: Reevaluation of Keyword Search Estimates, komarketingassociates.com
• Mobile SEO: 3 Tips to Make Your Desktop Content Mobile-Friendly, Search Marketing Standard
• Segmenting by Device: Why All Your Accounts Should Be Running Mobile Campaigns, PPC Hero

Social Media

• Facebook testing summary notification e-mails, ZDNet
• Facebook Stats for Retailers: How Do You Compare?, Rimm Kaufman
• How To Reach Bloggers, Ninja Style, SEOmoz
• Test Shows How Your Facebook Page Posts Were Shared, All Facebook

Video, Music & Image Search

• Edit your videos with YouTube, YouTube Blog

Web Analytics

• Twitter Unveils Analytics in Private Beta, AllThingsD

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

• Discussion: What Do You Look For When Deciding Whether to Follow/Like Someone? – It's a decision you probably make every day: Should I like/follow this person/company on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ or wherever. In our "Discussion of the Week," we want to know what you look for or look at when you're deciding to follow/like someone or not? What are the signs or signals that will instantly tell you NOT to follow someone … or that you should follow them? The floor is open!
• Understanding Your Backlink Profile – Michael Gray writes… As SEO’s and internet marketers, understanding and knowing the value of backlinks is one of the key aspects of our job. However, many articles I read and people that I talk to, really don’t understand it’s not just the links that matter.
  It’s a variety of factors that make up your back link profile and how much of that “agrees” with other parts that is important. Here are some of those factors:
• Introducing Twitter Web Analytics – Twitter Web Analytics will be rolled out this week to a small pilot group of partners, and will be made available to all website owners within the next few weeks.
• 5 Filters Everybody Should Use In Their AdWords Account – Good post providing some very detailed instructions for setting up some Google AdWords Filters that are a little more complex.
• How Do I Get Google's Bulleted Snippets? – The first (and only) overview that I've seen on this important new Google feature.