SearchCap: The Day In Search, January 12, 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:

• Extreme Email Experiment: How Much Is Too Much?

  With some simple analytics in place, you can pretty easily establish the ideal frequency of your B2B email campaigns. Based on the results from this experiment, we confirmed that we should be sending email more frequently. You will probably come to a similar conclusion.

• Wolfram Alpha Redesigns For 2011

  Next time you visit Wolfram Alpha, you’ll be greeted by a shiny, new, colorful home page — that’s just one of a few design tweaks the site has announced on its blog. There are also some interesting tweaks to the results pages. One is the addition of linked data inside the search results, which you […]

• Google Tweaks New AdSense Interface

  Google has announced of series of changes to the new AdSense interface. There are a handful of changes in Google’s blog post: The default metrics on the Home and Performances reports have been changed back to page-level metrics. The ad block/allow selector now shows the product name. Ad unit impressions and queries have been renamed […]

• Google Places Gets Its Own iPhone App

  There’s a Maps app on your iPhone, a Google Mobile app that includes access to Google Maps, and now there’s a third option for Google-based local search and discovery: a dedicated Google Places app. It’s just announced today and is already available in the iPhone’s app store. The app seems to focus more on the […]

• Session-Based Clicks Under Fire in WSJ Report

  Advertisers interviewed by the Wall Street Journal are complaining about Google’s practice of delivering ads within a user’s search session, but beside results unrelated to an advertiser’s purchased keywords. Google says it’s been returning AdWords in this way for years, in an effort to target users in the process of narrowing down their search for […]

• Google vs. Bing: The Fallacy Of The Superior Search Engine

  I can still remember when my when I first switched over to Google on the recommendation of my brother’s girlfriend. She’s literally a rocket scientist and carries a lot of intellectual weight with me; her endorsement was fairly simple – “it returns great results”. To understand what “great results” means, transport yourself back 10+ years […]

• B2B Website Usability Should Influence Organic Ranking

  As a member of the Search Marketing community, I am always eager to see what great announcements those search engine powerhouses have in store for us. This year, my hope is that the search engines will realize that usability should be a primary ranking factor over some current metrics that are so often manipulated such […]

• Search & The Slow Season: Your Brand’s Big Opportunity

  Now that the holidays are over, many search marketers want to put their feet up and enjoy the down time. But does search ever have a lull? Not really – it is always on. However, the slow season offers search marketers a great branding and growth opportunity. The Opportunity For Brand Marketers Whether your slow […]

• How Will Google Be Impacted By Verizon’s iPhone?

  In the event you were “off planet” yesterday you still might not know that Verizon is getting its own version of the iPhone on February 10. There are some differences between the Verizon and AT&T versions of the iPhone beyond their underlying technology (CDMA vs. GSM). Among them Verizon is offering an unlimited data plan […]

• UK Regulator To Crack Down On Paid Celeb Tweets

  Will celebrity “influencers” like Kim Kardashian or Chelsea Handler soon have to disclose when they’re being paid to promote a product or service on Twitter? This past weekend The Guardian reported that the UK Office of Fair Trading (OFT) “has begun a crackdown on Twitter users and bloggers using their online presence to endorse products […]

• Search Week: January 10, 2011

  Search Week is an exclusive weekly newsletter for Search Engine Land premium members that recaps stories covered on Search Engine Land over the past week. Below are top stories organized by topic that happened over the past week. Each topic (or Search Engine Land column) is also a link, where you can click through and […]

• Search Week: January 3, 2011

  SearchWeek: January 3, 2011 Search Week is an exclusive weekly newsletter for Search Engine Land premium members that recaps stories covered on Search Engine Land over the past week. Below are top stories organized by topic that happened over the past week. Each topic (or Search Engine Land column) is also a link, where you […]

• Google Pushes Hotpot Activity To Maps’ Home Page

  Here’s a sign of how intent Google is on increasing adoption of Hotpot, its local recommendations engine: Hotpot activity from your friends has been added to the Google Maps home page. If you’re logged in to your Google account, you’ll see recent activity from your Hotpot friends in the left-side window. (Aside: Clearly, my Hotpot […]

• New AdWords Tool Introduced For Better Understanding Of Mobile Searchers

  With mobile searches growing by leaps and bounds, Google has introduced an option on its keyword tool that lets marketers find keyword suggestions for mobile devices. The company says mobile searches on Google climbed 130% year-over-year in the third quarter of 2010, and search queries have grown more than five times over the past two […]

Search News From Around The Web:

Applications & Portal Features

• A new look for Google Translate for Android, googlemobile.blogspot.com
• An Open Letter from the President of the United States of Google, blogs.msdn.com
• Google News Submissions Should Expect "Significant Delays", Search Engine Roundtable
• Google’s Conversation Translation Looks Like a Gimmick, Read/Write Web
• Themes, and Calendar, and Updates! Oh, my!, www.ymailblog.com

Business Issues

• Search Engines Sued for Accepting Keyword Advertising on "Cheese of the Month Club" Trademark–Pathak v. ICG, Eric Goldman

Local, Maps & Mobile

• First ‘Facebook Phone’ Outed: INQ Cloud Touch With Android?, pocketnow.com
• Google Android More Vulnerable Than IPhone, Antivirus Maker Says, BusinessWeek
• Google Customer Service: Up Against the Algo, Mike Blumenthal
• Loci 2010 – David Mihm, Mike Blumenthal

Other Items

• Haiti, one year after the earthquake, Official Google Blog

Paid Search & Contextual

• Advertisers Sick of Google AdWords Quality Score, Search Engine Roundtable
• How to: Conduct Foreign Language PPC Campaigns, Search Engine Journal

Searching

• Google Transit Search Gets Smarter, Read/Write Web
• Ask.com: Getting Personal, Ask.com Blog
• Curation is the New Search is the New Curation, paul.kedrosky.com
• Enhanced auto results put you in the driver’s seat, www.bing.com
• Over 77 Percent of Lifehacker Readers Say Google’s Search Results are Less Useful Lately, lifehacker.com

SEM Industry

• Proudly Announcing #SMX aimClear® Facebook Marketing Intensive, AIM Clear Blog
• UK SEO market worth £436m in 2010 – new report, econsultancy.com

SEO & SEM

• 25 Important Search Engine Optimization Mistakes to Fix Right Now, Bill Hartzer
• Art of War – SEO Style; Tactical Dispositions; Part I, www.huomah.com
• Editorial SEO Tactics for the Newsroom, www.adamsherk.com
• How Programming Can Help Your SEO, dailyseotip.com
• Is Blog Commenting Useless for SEO, www.cornwallseo.com
• Stop Making the 6 Biggest SEO Mistakes, Search Engine Watch
• The Buyer Intent Behind Your Keyphrases, www.marketingwords.com
• The SEO Wish List – Part 5 Your Server, www.vertical-leap.co.uk
• The Social Media Marketer’s SEO Checklist, SEOmoz
• Ultimate Guide to using Quora for SEO Ranking on Google, www.cornwallseo.com
• Updated index released, blog.majesticseo.com

Social Media

• Twitter endorsements face OFT clampdown, The Guardian
• Picking Twitter Tools for Your Business, BruceClay.com
• Twitter’s Self-Limiting Usefulness, www.technologyreview.com

Web Analytics

• Regular Expressions – Don’t Use Google Analytics Without Them, www.blueglass.com

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

• DOTW: Your 'Desert Island' SEO/PPC Tool? – You've probably debated your "desert island album" with friends — the one album you'd take with you if you had to live the rest of your life on a desert island. Well, what about SEO, PPC and other online marketing tools? In this week's "Discussion of the Week," tell us the one tool/site/service you couldn't live without. And please — in the name of not turning this into a spamfest, just tell us the name, don't drop URLs. (We'll be proactive about editing comments if need be.)
• For Large-Scale SEO, Why Compromise Can Often Mean Failure – Why it's frequently essential to "stick to your guns" and be forceful when attempting to get your Enterprise-level SEO recommendations implemented.
• Curation is the New Search is the New Curation – Another great piece by Paul Kedrosky about the current state of Google's search results, or perhaps more about the state of search in general. "The re-rise of curation," he says, "is partly about crowd curation — not one people, but lots of people, whether consciously (lists, etc.) or unconsciously (tweets, etc) — and partly about hand curation…" (And the comments are good, too, at least as of the time I'm publishing this.)
• How Toyota Perfected Promoted Tweets – Here's an interesting look at Toyota's current "Prius Goes Plural" campaign that begins with Twitter and leads the curious through YouTube and eventually to Toyota's web site. Definitely one of the more involved and creative uses of Twitter advertising, but is it too much to ask users to follow the whole path?
• How to use the link operator in Google Real Time Results – Rishi Lakhani explains why the link operator in RTS is a valuable research tool. He explains how to get the monthly data for an URI mentioned in tweets, as well as bigger timelines based on date, time, and location.