SearchCap: The Day In Search, February 6, 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:

• Google Offers A Peek Into Its Internal Eye-Tracking Studies
  There’s an interesting post today on the Official Google Blog that gives a glimpse inside the company’s usability and eye-tracking studies — tests that help Google determine what their search results pages should look like. The image above, for example, shows how users interact with a standard results page with 10 links. The deeper colors up top, Google says, show that most people found what they were looking for in the first two results on the page. No surprise there, but in May, 2007, when Google introduced Universal Search to its interface, marketers began …
• Privacy Critics Don’t Give Google Enough ‘Latitude’
  Since it launched a couple days ago there have been several predictable responses from persistent Google critics who regard the new location-aware Latitude service on Google Maps as a threat to privacy. The phrases “tracking,” “stalking” and “Big Brother” popped up in a range of articles in mainstream news outlets. Those stories were quickly written without thoughtful investigation of the actual privacy controls Google has established. And this morning in MediaPost the following appeared: Privacy International says the [Latitude privacy] system has a design flaw: Other people can get their hands on users’ phones, and then change the settings. For …
• Another Survey (Incorrectly) Predicts Google Could Lose Search Crown
  In a “what’s wrong with this picture?” moment, AdWeek reports that Forrester Research has concluded that Google, for lack of user loyalty, is vulnerable to being dethroned and that another “Google Killer” may be lurking just around the corner. First the caveats and then the criticism of these findings and their implications. All of my comments that follow are based upon the AdWeek summary of the findings and conclusions of the Forrester survey (n=4,800 US users). Here’s the most important bit of that summary: [Forrester] found that brand loyalty to search engines is quite low. That coupled with the lowest of …
• Search In Pictures: Google Doodle Wall, Ask.com On Labonte’s Helmet & A Google Boat?
• The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective Advertising
  Despite the economic meltdown of the past several months, search still seems to be cruising along with barely a hiccup. To be honest, it’s a little surreal. For those of us in the industry, it seems like we’re in a protective bubble while the world falls down around us. To be sure, the impact has been felt, even in our search world. But all things are relative, and relative to every other marketing channel, search seems invincible. The question is: Why? What is it about search that makes it weather economic storms so well? Based on what I’ve seen, the only clients …

Search News From Around The Web:

Applications & Portal Features

• New in Labs: Multiple Inboxes, Official Gmail Blog

Business Issues

• Baidu’s
  China Lead Over Google Shrinks After Web Search Outcry, Bloomberg
• Colonial Williamsburg Partners with Google, ResourceShelf
• Google’s ‘Chief Internet Evangelist’ sees bigger, faster Web, Mercury News
• How to Save Your Newspaper, TIME
• Is The Worst Behind Us? Online Ad Revenues Pick Up In The Fourth Quarter., TechCrunch

Link Building

• Building Links With Content? Get Your Point Across!, Search Engine Journal

Local, Maps & Mobile

• Court Orders County to Release Geographic Mapping Data, Electronic Frontier Foundation
• Mapping Foreclosures = $marter Home $earches, Virtual Earth, An Evangelist’s Blog
• Top 10 Moments Caught on Google Maps Street View, Urlesque
• Where Do Mobile Ads Work Best? On the iPhone!, Read/Write Web

Paid Search & Contextual

• Downloadable Ads and Keywords for U.S. Real Estate Advertisers, adCenter Blog for Advertisers
• Google AdSense Testing New Ad Format With Larger Search Box, Search Engine Roundtable
• Google Quality Score Is Overhyped, PPC Hero
• Is The Economy Taking A Toll on AdSense Publisher Earnings?, Search Engine Roundtable
• Six ways to experiment with AdSense and grow your earnings, Inside AdSense

Searching

• Google’s Search Box Stops Working for Some Firefox Users, Search Engine Roundtable
• MaddoffSearch.com, ResourceShelf
• Techrigy Hits 1 Billion Conversations–Think Google Alerts On Steroids, TechCrunchIt

SEM Industry

• Should you hire a search engine marketing company based on the lowest bid?, Jennifer Slegg
• How To Buy SEO/Search Marketing Services, SEO Book
• SEO At the Enterprise Level–A Major Flop, TechCrunchIt
• Video Recap of Weekly Search Buzz :: February 6, 2009, Search Engine Roundtable

SEO & SEM

• How do you find keywords in a specialized industry?, Search Engine Guide
• Google News Crawl Issues a Bug with Google, Search Engine Roundtable
• Three Israeli Baby Googles, Seeking Alpha
• Wasting Pagerank on Noindex Pages, Chris Hooley
• Whiteboard Friday – Positioning Your Blog, SEOmoz

Social Media

• Next Steps in Openness, Facebook Developers News
• How Village Voice Media Uses Digg to Game Their Traffic Numbers, The Deets
• Maryland General Assembly Bans Facebook, Legum’s New Line
• Should more charities be making use of Twitter?, Econsultancy
• Stop that Social Media Marketing Confusion! 24 No Frills SMM Tips, SEOptimise

Video, Music & Image Search

• 100,000,000 geotagged photos (plus), Code: Flickr Developer Blog

Web Analytics

• New SEO reports for Google Analytics, Yoast

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

• IM Spring Break for Free – Meme Contest
• 8 More SEO Topics that Have Rand Fishkin Stumped
• 40 Twitter for Business Tools & Resources
• How search engines detect paid links
• How to Track YouTube Videos
• Using Multiple Keyword Filters in Google Analytics
• Social Media Interview with Reg Saddler (Zaibatsu)