SearchCap: The Day In Search, November 11, 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: Who’s Got The Flu? Google Flu Trends Reveal State-By-State ActivityWondering if it’s just you or if others have the flu, too? Google’s announced a new tool that tells you. Google Flu […]

on November 11, 2008 at 5:42 pm | Reading time: 7 minutes
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Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

  • Who’s Got The Flu? Google Flu Trends Reveal State-By-State Activity
    Wondering if it’s just you or if others have the flu, too? Google’s announced a new tool that tells you. Google Flu Trends allows you to see flu activity across the United States. How’s Google doing this? Is it now indexing actual human beings, in the way it does web pages? Nah. Turns out that when you’re sick with the flu, you search for that word and other flu-related topics. Google can tell which areas are seeing a spike in flu-related searching, and from that, trends can be plotted.
  • Search Illustrated: Getting Ranked – The Long Tail Keyword Equation
    Once an SEO gets to a certain level of expertise, he or she can typically select a list of key phrases and map out exactly what steps are necessary to get those phrases ranked. This week’s infographic demonstrates what that equation for ranking success may look like for a long-tail phrase:
  • Argentina Forcing Google & Yahoo To Censor Search Results
    In response to court orders, Yahoo and Google are censoring search results in Argentina about a variety of celebrities, including public officials, models, actors, and sports stars. According to an in depth article on OpenNet Initiative, this has been going on since 2006 and more than 100 people have succeeded in getting Google and Yahoo to filter search results in Argentina.
  • Google Ad Planner Adds Features, Opens To Everyone
    Almost five months after its debut as an invite-only beta, Google Ad Planner is now available to all Google account holders and has a few new features, too, according to Google’s announcement Monday. Ad Planner is a tool that lets advertisers identify web sites that might be good places to advertise — even web sites that aren’t in Google’s advertiser network (i.e., AdSense). You can pick any web site and Ad Planner will return detailed demographics of its users, such as gender, age, education, household income, and more; it also reports what keywords are typically searched on the site, and other sites that its users tend to visit. The new features announced this week include:
  • Google Reader Now Translating Your Subscriptions
    The Google Reader Blog announced that they now are offering translation of your subscriptions. Google Reader now gives you the ability to subscribe to blogs and sites that do not publish content in your native language. You can select the “Translate into my language” option in the feed settings and Google Reader will automatically translate the content into your language. It will also remember this setting and continue to show you the translated version of that subscription, going forward.
  • DeepDyve Explores The Invisible Web
    As web search engines have improved over the years, there’s been less attention paid to an “inconvenient truth” about the indexes of our favorite information finding tools—namely, that search engines still miss the lion’s share of information available on the web. This so-called “deep web” remains largely impenetrable to search engines for a variety of reasons, and for many types of queries that’s just fine. But if you’re a serious searcher, looking for the best information possible, you can’t afford to overlook this vast “hidden” store of information. And that’s a challenge, because search tools that probe the deep web are for the most part either obscure or fee-based. That’s changing, thanks to a company formerly known as Infovell and now called DeepDyve. The eponymous DeepDyve.com rolls out today with an innovative approach to finding invisible web content that, despite limited coverage at the outset, impressed me with both what it finds and the tools it offers to make the searching experience even richer.
  • Maximizing ROI On Your SEO Investment
    More and more businesses are realizing the importance their web site plays in their overall marketing strategy. They are also realizing the impact of organic search rankings on branding and sales for their business. And this is creating demand for SEO talent to help them improve their position in web search. Normally, this is a good thing for the business (and, of course, the SEO). A talented and hard working SEO can bring good gains to a business. For example, if a web site is already producing $500,000 in sales before the SEO gets involved, and their efforts result in those sales increasing to $1,000,000, then there is plenty of room for paying the SEO something for their work. Unfortunately, it does not always happen quite so simply. It can happen that the business results don’t follow the SEO work, even if the SEO is very competent, and diligently does a good job.
  • How To Fix Google Map Spam
    Search Engine Land has run several recent articles and problems about problems with spam and Google Maps.I figured one more opinion couldn’t hurt, right? I deal with thousands of local listings a month and many of the problems mentioned in the earlier articles. Here are my thoughts on improving the overall experience for local busines owners and searchers:

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Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.

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About the author

Matt McGee
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Matt McGee joined Third Door Media as a writer/reporter/editor in September 2008. He served as Editor-In-Chief from January 2013 until his departure in July 2017. He can be found on Twitter at @MattMcGee.

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