SearchCap: The Day In Search, February 4, 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: Why Google’s Wrong In Its Accusations

  Along with everything else going on for Bing’s Harry Shum on Tuesday — a panel about search spam, dealing with Google’s accusations that Bing “copies” Google’s results — Shum dealt with perhaps his most important worry. Reassuring his son that Bing wasn’t “cheating” as a search engine. “The worst part for me is that after […]
• User Considerations For Web Design And Online Marketing

  The most difficult group entity we design for, engage with and market to is commonly referred to as “users”. Some of you know members of this group as people. A few use the term without thinking it through. The term “users” has an official formal name in some industries, which to be honest, only serves […]

• Search In Pics: Google Sweden License Plate, Yahoo Beach Sandals & Google Privacy Cup

  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 Sweden License Plate (see story here): Yahoo Sandals: Eric Schmidt At DLD11: Google Leaky Privacy […]

• Reputation Crisis: Where To Turn?

  Here’s a rough paraphrase of a classic business cliche: “In business, at the end of the day, your reputation is all you’ve got.” Let’s say that after years of working hard to build a solid reputation, one day, a result surfaces in Google for a search for “your name” and one of the top results […]

• Yelp: 35 Percent Of Searches Mobile Now

  Yelp released some new mobile data yesterday based on usage and activity in December. The company said that its mobile apps generated calls to local businesses “every other second.” Here are some of the other data: 3.2 million unique visitors used a Yelp mobile app Every other second a consumer generated directions to a local […]

• Top AdWords Get Longer, Leaner Look

  Many noticed it last month, but Google has made it official: many AdWords placements at the top of the page will be getting extended headlines. For ads in which each line seems to be a complete sentence, ending in the proper punctuation, Google will move the first description line to the headline, separating the two […]

• Google Webmaster Tools Search Queries Report Now Less Accurate

  The Google Webmaster Blog announced a “slight change” to how the search queries reports are displayed. Google will be rounding the impressions and clicks to one or two significant digits instead of with two or three significant digits. What does that mean? Basically the reports are less accurate because they are more rounded. For example, […]

Search News From Around The Web:

Business Issues

• Google Gets 75,000 Job Applications in One Week, Topping Record Set in ’07, Bloomberg
• The great Google v. Bing slap fight explained piece by piece, thenextweb.com
• Facebook holding Feb. 8 event to discuss new H.Q., news.cnet.com
• Yahoo! Hires Hotmail Vet to Manage Mail, Flickr, More, blog.louisgray.com
• Yahoo’s Search Future Found In ‘Web Of Objects’, MediaPost

Link Building

• How Link Building Resembles Real Life, Vertical Measures
• Make Your Own Back Links Buy Owning The Sites, Search Engine Roundtable

Local, Maps & Mobile

• Competitors Make Up 28% of Page One Smartphone Brand Search Results, www.brysonmeunier.com
• Google Places Hotel Booking Feature To Be Available to All …. Someday, Mike Blumenthal
• iPad App Store gets search filters, 9 to 5 Mac
• Take a trip to the Super Bowl with Google Earth, Google LatLong

Paid Search & Contextual

• Update Your Information to Receive Optimization Advice and Special Offers from Our Communications Team, adCenter Blog
• Google Asks: Why Have’t You Switched To New AdSense Interface?, Search Engine Roundtable
• January CPCs: Seasonally down but up YoY, blog.efrontier.com
• Using Paid Search Keywords Correctly to Build Your Online Business, Search Engine Guide
• Western Union now in the Palestinian Territories, Inside AdSense

Searching

• Google Instant Scores 98% Adoption Rate, 2% Opt-Out, Fast Company
• How Much Does Bing Borrow From Google?, New York Times
• New Physical Properties Data for Alloys, Wolfram|Alpha Blog
• One million books scanned and returned to CIC university libraries, Inside Google Books
• Weekly Yahoo! Search Trends – February 4, 2011, ycorpblog.com

SEM Industry

• Bing.com/siteowner being shut down on April 4th, 2011, www.bing.com
• SearchFest 2011 Mini-Interview: Todd Friesen, www.sempdx.org
• Video: Google Scraper Filter, Bing Cheating Google & Girlfriend Picture Spam Revenge, Search Engine Roundtable

SEO & SEM

• International SEO: Where to Host and How to Target – Whiteboard Friday, SEOmoz
• IP Addresses in Google Webmaster Tools Reports, Search Engine Roundtable
• Social Media – Why an SEO background is better than PR!, SEOptimise

Social Media

• 5 Tips on Better Facebook Marketing for B2B Companies, Online Marketing Blog
• Learning From Kenneth Cole’s Social Media Mistake, blog.hubspot.com
• Rainbird: The Way Twitter Counts Tweets In Realtime (Which Will Be Open Sourced), TechCrunch

Video, Music & Image Search

• Facebook Video Count Has Been Plummeting For Five Months, paidContent.org
• Geotagging photos with Panoramio and Google Latitude, Google LatLong
• Piccsy: Stunning Image Bookmarking and Discovery [Invites], thenextweb.com

Web Analytics

• Google Analytics XSS Vulnerability, Spare Clock Cycles

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

• A Natural Link Profile and Nofollow as a Ranking Factor or Signal – What is the significance of nofollow for link building and SEO? Should you care about the nofollow attribute at all or do only low level link builders waste their time dealing with it? Maybe you have to think of your link profile first and foremost?
• Domaining – Practical uses for domain strategies – How are you using domains to your benefit? Don't let that stockpile of domains just sit there, make them work for you! Practical tips on how to use domain strategies.
• How To Implement a Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) Process – Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is a popular phrase – just look at the number people mention it on twitter in the last 24 hours (although some are for Croatia). But what exactly does it mean? Is it another buzz phrase that will take 5 years to evolve into anything? (CRM anyone?) Or is it a real phenomenon that will become a key online tool?…
• Blekko, Can I Please Have My Spam Back? – At the end of the day, I have no respect for a search engine that censors my results based notions of quality, rather than relevancy.  It ceases to be comprehensive, it smacks of elitist righteousness and – most of all – decisions about the validity of content are being made on my behalf by people I don’t know.
• The Evolution of the Social Media Manager: Social Monetization Manager? – Honestly, I'm not sure what to make of this. However, the idea definitely got me to thinking and the fact that a giant media conglumorate is already going this route makes it worth sharing and discussing. From the article: "The next evolution of the social media manager position may very well focus on a puzzle piece that is largely missing in the social media strategy of news companies: monetization."