SearchCap: The Day In Search, October 1, 2010

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 Pulls Dead Body Images From Street View Brazil

  Google has removed Street View images in Brazil that showed dead bodies on local streets. One image showed a partly-covered body lying on the side of Avenida Presidente Vargas in Rio de Janeiro, and the other showed a covered body near police cars in the city of Belo Horizonte. The images were first published by […]

• September 2010: Search Engine Land’s Most Popular Stories

  Below are Search Engine Land’s 10 most popular stories from September 2010: 1) What’s Up With The Google Balls Logo On The Google Homepage Today? – Visiting the Google homepage today may make you go “wow.” It has one of the most wild and explosive special Google logos I have ever seen. […]

• Official: Bing xRank Is Dead

  Bing xRank is no more. A Bing spokesperson has confirmed that the search service was recently shut down. The xRank URL, https://www.bing.com/xrank, currently redirects to the Bing home page. Launched in 2007, xRank was essentially Bing’s version of Google Trends, but with a number of additional features. The help page (which is still on Live.com) calls […]

• Is Apple Really “Threatening” Google In Mobile Advertising?

  Earlier this week a Bloomberg/BusinessWeek article appeared under the headline: Apple Threatens Search Giants’ Mobile Ad Shares. It gained a tremendous amount of secondary pickup and discussion for the proposition that Apple had tied Google in mobile advertising revenue. The article relied on IDC estimates to argue “Apple may be gaining share in the U.S. mobile […]

• Blue Arrows Hit Google Instant

  Did you notice the blue arrow that’s showing next to the first result in Google’s listings? It’s part of the new keyboard navigation system that rolled out for Google Instant this week. A reader contacted us about the arrow that he started seeing, and that caused me to see them for the first time myself. Maybe […]

• Web Analytics, The Wonder Cure For Funnel Crappiness

  Your site sucks at creating customers. Think not? If you won’t listen to me, maybe you’ll listen to Seth Godin. In a September 15 post, What Shape is Your Funnel?, (go ahead, open it in a new window and feast on this mental treat) Seth explains a critical, but often ignored concept in marketing of all […]

• Search As Conversation: Surf Canyon’s Mark Cramer

  In my last Just Behave post, I talked to Mark Cramer about his search plug-in, Surf Canyon. The plug in dynamically reorders your results based on the results you click on, taking the click as a signal of intent. This time, I’d like to present the part of the interview where Mark and I explored the […]

• Yahoo CEO Bartz Announces Exec. Departures, Speculation About Bartz’s & Yahoo’s Future Begins

  Yahoo has seen a long list of talented people leave the company during the organizational turmoil of the past few years. However it appeared the company was stabilizing and potentially even back on track toward growth and forward momentum. However AllThingsD earlier reported and today confirmed (before official confirmation from CEO Carol Bartz) that three top […]

Search News From Around The Web:

Applications & Portal Features

• Logitech unveiling Google TV product on Oct. 6, news.cnet.com

Business Issues

• Aiming at Android, Microsoft sues Motorola, news.cnet.com
• Google Maintains Hiring, Seeks Additional Advertisers in China, BusinessWeek
• Microsoft Files Patent Infringement Action Against Motorola: Statement from Horacio Gutierrez, corporate vice president and deputy general counsel of Intellectual Property and Licensing., www.microsoft.com
• Russia’s Quintura Sells Its Visual Search Patents, paidContent.org
• Stop It. Google Won’t But Twitter., John Battelle’s Searchblog
• The Ugliest Girl At The Dance: How Yahoo Destroyed Yelp’s Google Acquisition, TechCrunch
• Yahoo Media Boss Jimmy Pitaro Quitting For "Huge And Amazing Job" At Disney – Sources, www.businessinsider.com
• Yahoo: Digital Punching Bag of the Week, blog.traffick.com

Link Building

• Link Building in competitive verticals – are you scaling enough, www.holisticsearch.co.uk

Local, Maps & Mobile

• Android graduates to 2.0 with Tips, blog.foursquare.com
• Car Home for Android Gets Personal, googlemobile.blogspot.com
• Did you feel the TweetHeat this summer?, www.bing.com
• How To: Add Geotagging to Blog Posts for Local Search Engine Marketing, Online Marketing Blog
• Survey: 42% of Groupon SMBs Would Not Repeat, www.screenwerk.com
• Yahoo Local Filled with Locksmith Spam, Mike Blumenthal

Paid Search & Contextual

• It’s Called an Ad Group and Not a Keyword Group for a Reason, www.bgtheory.com
• Reaching for the top spot? "Estimated Top Impressions" now available in the Bid Simulator, Inside AdWords
• Testing What the Competition is Missing in Your PPC Ads, Search Engine Guide

Searching

• Google Instant in Chrome Is Awesome, Even More Useful than on Google.com, lifehacker.com
• How to Change Your Default Search Engine in FireFox, Google Chrome and Internet Explorer, Search Engine Journal
• What Can Search Predict?, Yahoo Search Blog

SEM Industry

• How To Rock Your SMX East Presentation, Outspoken Media

SEO & SEM

• 36 Reputation Monitoring Feeds You Can’t Afford to Ignore, AIM Clear Blog
• 56% Of SEOs To Change Strategy For Google Instant, Search Engine Roundtable
• Five Ways To Use Your Social Profiles For SEO – Whiteboard Friday, SEOmoz
• Revive Your Site: Optimizing The Title Tag of Dead Pages, Search Engine People
• The Impact of NOODP on Titles in SERPS, seogadget.co.uk

Social Media

• Is it too late for a Digg comeback?, VentureBeat
• Kevin Rose Speaks Frankly About The New Digg Rollout, TechCrunch
• Need a Reservation? That Could Depend On How Big You Are on Twitter (Really), Ad Age
• Quora adds ability to insert images, no longer just a Q&A Site, thenextweb.com
• The Value of a Liker, www.facebook.com

Video, Music & Image Search

• Google: "Currency" of Online Video Advertising Will Shift to "Cost Per View" as YouTube Readies "TrueViews", www.beet.tv
• Visual Search App Quintura Kids Is Released for Ovi Store (Nokia), blog.quintura.com

Web Analytics

• Analytics 101: 6 Mistakes You Can’t Afford to Make, BruceClay.com

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

• Christine Churchill shares Keyword Research and PPC Best Practices – In this interview, Christine Churchill of Keyrelevance shares some of keyword research best practices on how to use different keyword tools to compile your keyword list. Also, some great tips on structuring PPC account for increasing you quality score.
• How You Can Build Your Own Mini Demand Media – This article by Joel Ohman outlines how you can build your own "mini Demand Media system" and become "more efficient when publishing high quality content".
• Rumor? Facebook and Skype Readying Deep Integration Partnership – Kara Swisher  from AllThingsDigital reports: According to sources close to the situation, Facebook and Skype are poised to announce a significant and wide-ranging partnership that will include integration of SMS, voice chat and Facebook Connect.
  The move by the pair–which have tested small contact importer integrations before–is a natural one for the social networking giant, which is aiming to be the central communications and messaging platform for its users, across a range of media.
• 36 Reputation Monitoring Feeds You Can’t Afford to Ignore – Google alerts have been the reputation monitoring rage for years now….However, Google alerts alone are far from a complete picture of what’s going on out there. This post offers a guerrilla list of RSS feeds, perfect for reputation monitoring, can be used to mine alerts from major sites including YouTube, Google, Facebook & Twitter.
• Google URI Shortener Opened To The Public; Comparing To Bit.ly & Twitter – Everything you need/want to know about Goo.gl. Whether you like URI shorteners or not, they're reality. Now that Google chimes in, watch out for movements.