SearchCap: The Day In Search, March 1, 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:

• Yelp: Google Told Us “Our Way Or The Highway”

  If you wanted to see Yelp reviews for a particular restaurant you could either go to Yelp.com or you could go to Google’s Place Page for that same location — and that’s what Yelp is worried about. For the past year or so Yelp and Google have been a little like the two Koreas, not […]
• DuckDuckGo Adds Yelp, The Free Dictionary To Search Results

  DuckDuckGo has added two new content providers to its “zero-click” search results: local business listings from Yelp and definitions from The Free Dictionary. Zero-click results are similar to the “one box” or “quick answers” that other search engines offer. Do a search for a specific local business, and DuckDuckGo may show its basic business info […]

• Search Month: February 2011 Search News, In Review

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

• Bing Shopping Incorporates Natural Language Search

  If you search for “cashmere sweaters under $100″ on Bing or Bing Shopping, the search engine now understands what you mean, returning results for products in the category under the price point specified. Microsoft announced the ability to recognize price constraints today, describing the innovation as “a small step in our journey to make search […]

• SearchWeek: February 28, 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 […]

• Google St. David’s Day Logo, Morocco’s Ibn Battuta Logo & Martisor In Romania

  There are a few logos on Google’s localized versions that have special logos for the day. Google UK has a special logo for St David’s Day in Wales, Google Morocco has a special logo for Ibn Battuta and Google Romania has a special logo for Martisor. Google UK St David’s Day Logo: Saint David’s Day […]

• How To Optimize For Facebook’s New ‘Like’ Functionality

  News was broken this weekend about new Facebook “like” functionality that will replace the traditional Facebook share buttons. The change beefed up the visibility of people’s “likes” by adding thumbnails, and meta data form Facebook’s Open Graph Protocol: This means that getting a page on your website “liked” will now be featured in the stream […]

• A Link Building Blueprint: Utility Linking

  Almost every SEO I know spent the better part of last week discussing recent changes Google made to its ranking algorithm. This update hit some webmasters hard while others went unscathed, and results still seem to be settling out. Nothing I’m working on was impacted (knock wood) probably because I tend to use a wide […]

• Where To Look For Cultural Differences In Europe

  It has been said many times before: optimizing for search and / or Social Media in Europe is more than simply translating a few pages from your US website. Not just because translating will get you in trouble with language differences all across Europe, but also because culture plays a major role in how successful […]

• Hello Chomp, Goodbye Android Market

  Given the massive number of apps now on both the iPhone and Android some people (especially tech bloggers) complain regularly about the “problem of app discovery.” In fact we don’t know if regular users are similarly vexed. But let’s assume they are. On Android in particular “app discovery” has been less than optimal. Now iPhone […]

• Google Adds More Trike Views To Google Maps Street Views

  Google announced they have added trike-view imagery to the Google Street Views. In 2009, Google introduced Google Bikes to pedal around the world capturing pictures of streets where cars could not venture. It has been over a year now and Google has added many of these “trike views” to the Google Maps Street View database. […]

• On Twitter, Oscar Comes Up Short Against Super Bowl

  Sunday night’s Academy Awards came close to matching the Super Bowl’s overall activity level on Twitter. But, like the Pittsburgh Steelers or The Social Network, it came up just a bit short in the end. Twitter says its users sent a total of 36.4 million tweets in a five-hour span Sunday beginning with the Oscars […]

• Google: Mobile Growth Occurring Faster Than Expected

  Google CEO Eric Schmidt says consumers’ adoption of the company’s mobile services has happened more quickly than executives expected. Schmidt, who is set to step down as CEO in April, spoke at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting in Palm Springs. “It’s happening, and it’s happening faster,” he said. “We look at the charts internally, and […]

Search News From Around The Web:

Applications & Portal Features

• Gmail back soon for everyone, Official Gmail Blog
• Optical Character Recognition (OCR) in 34 languages, Google Docs Blog
• Facebook to Surpass Yahoo! in Display Ad Revenues This Year, eMarketer
• Google Apps and Gmail outage outrage: Problem NOT resolved, blogs.computerworld.com
• Google’s New In-App Payments Product Set For Launch In May 2011, TechCrunch
• Now available with Google Apps: User Managed Storage, Official Google Enterprise Blog

Business Issues

• Google and Yahoo! Still Take More Overall Online Ad Dollars, eMarketer
• Google Investing in Latin America as Region’s Sales Jump 80%, BusinessWeek
• Microsoft Man To Publishers: Google Punches Holes In Your Paywall, But Bing Won’t, paidContent.org
• zynamics acquired by Google, blog.zynamics.com

Link Building

• 4 Link Building Tools of the Future, Daily SEO Tip
• From LinkExperts to Conductor & Now iAcquire, Alan Rothstein
• What Happens When You Build 10,000 Dodgy Links to a New Domain in 24 Hours?, SEOptimise

Local, Maps & Mobile

• Google Searches for Success in Local Ads, Ad Age

Paid Search & Contextual

• Automating The Ad Test Visualization Tool, Certified Knowledge
• Earn additional revenue from AdSense for search, Inside AdSense

Searching

• StatCounter: Bing Just Beat Yahoo Worldwide, Read/Write Web
• The Bing Challenge: 31 Days of Google Free Search. Can It Be Done?, webranking.com

SEM Industry

• Click Forensics Acquires Adometry; Adopts New Company Name, Business Wire
• Google Bans Top Contributor From Forums, Community Fights To Get Him Back, Search Engine Roundtable
• Honeycomb statue finally at Google campus, Android Central

SEO & SEM

• 12 More SEO Idiots (or Experts) to Avoid, SEO.com
• Are you practicing advanced SEO in 2011?, Econsultancy
• Google AdWords Mass Suspending More Accounts?, Search Engine Roundtable
• Google’s Farmer Algorithm Update, agent-seo.com
• International sites, domains and SEO, Vertical Leap Blog
• Small Business SEO Services, SEO Book

Social Media

• How we found the rudest cities in the world – Analytics @ foursquare, Foursquare Engineering Blog
• Facebook Acquires Group Messaging Service Beluga In A Talent AND Technology Deal, TechCrunch
• Facebook Rolls Out Overhauled Comments System (Try Them Now On TechCrunch), TechCrunch

Web Analytics

• Mobile Analytics: Tracking Click-to-Call Mobile Ad Campaigns, googlemobileads.blogspot.com
• Raven SEO Tools Review: Social Media, Michael Gray

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

• How Econsultancy measures Twitter via Google Analytics – An interesting read about how one site tracks its Twitter marketing & outreach via web analytics. Should provide some ideas for other companies looking to do the same.
• How to Pimp Your Google Places Page for Better Rankings – Dawn Wentzell delivers a good guest post on the basics of how to get your Google Places page on the map.  Even the not so exicitng stuff (but stuff that matters).