SearchCap: The Day In Search, April 21, 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:

• AT&T: 43 Percent Of Local-Mobile Searchers “Walk Through The Door”

  There are a number of studies (e.g., Pew, Forrester) in the market that question how interested or engaged users are with “location based services.” Those studies tend to narrowly focus on Foursquare, Gowalla and mobile check-ins. They tend to miss the larger point about the importance of location on mobile devices. A new study from […]
• Google Loses Patent Case Over Linux Servers

  The FOSS Patents blog reported that Google lost an important patent case on their Linux server kernels they have been using throughout the company. Bedrock Computer Technologies was awarded $5 million for Google infringing on their patent (U.S. Patent No. 5,893,120) named “Methods and apparatus for information storage and retrieval using a hashing technique with […]

• Google Offers Taking Signups In New York City, Bay Area & Portland

  Google Offers, the company’s not-so-secret coupon program, is taking signups in three areas: New York City, San Francisco/Oakland and Portland, Oregon. Users can subscribe to get discounts via email in any or all of those available cities. After signing up, Google’s confirmation promises “regular emails” — which sounds like not necessarily “daily” — with discounts […]

• All Google Analytics Users Now Get New Version

  Google has released the latest version of Analytics to all users, introducing a completely redesigned interface, multiple customizable dashboards, event goals, more powerful custom reports, and a search term cloud visualization. When users log into Google Analytics, they can access version 5 by clicking on “New Version” at the top right of the page. (Toggling […]

• 5 Simple Tips To Diversify Your Organic Traffic Acquisition

  With all the talk about diversifying your revenue and traffic channels, most people often miss that organic traffic itself can be diversified. Traffic from search engines takes on many flavors and paths. A deeper dive into understanding the life cycle of a shopper query will lead you to some interesting avenues. Here are a few […]

• Google Auto-Completions Now With Partial Queries

  Google announced they have improved the Google Instant auto-completions feature to work better on longer tail queries. Google explained that many searches done at Google were never done before, so offering up predictions on a long tail query can be complex. But if you look at only part of the query, the chances of that […]

• Blekko Adds Facebook Comments To Search Results (But Why?)

  If you’ve been hoping that someone’s search engine would turn into a social network, today is your lucky day. Sure, Google and Bing have been making search results more social, and Bing shows Facebook “likes” in its search results, and Google has its +1 button experiment … but that’s nothing compared to what Blekko is […]

• An Easy-To Follow Method For Ad Optimization & Testing

  Most of us in the PPC world know that testing ads is a great idea – almost necessary optimization work. There are plenty of articles around the web expounding the benefits: increase QS, lower costs, boost conversion rate … all good stuff. In this article, let’s tackle the basic block and tackling necessary to get […]

Search News From Around The Web:

Applications & Portal Features

• Exclusive: Chrome notebooks confirmed to be released June/July, Neowin.net

Business Issues

• Google, Microsoft, LinkedIn, AmEx And Others Offer Over $400M In Value To Startup America, TechCrunch
• Oracle versus Google patent trial likely by November, Reuters
• Amazon, Google and Twitter Top EFF’s Privacy Scorecard, www.zdnet.com
• Jon Leibowitz: Google should step up on privacy, politico.com
• Google And Facebook Ramp Up Lobbying Spend In Q1 2011, TechCrunch
• Larry Page – The 2011 TIME 100, TIME
• Onward, to the Plex., Caroline McCarthy

Local, Maps & Mobile

• Google, DOE building definitive electric-car map, CNET News
• An incredible global, blog.foursquare.com

Link Building

• Google Webmaster Tools Links Tool Bug, Search Engine Roundtable

Searching

• Google Definitions Command Not Working?, Search Engine Roundtable

SEO & SEM

• 3 Strategies for Organizing Your Match Types, certifiedknowledge.org
• Web Manager’s Guide To SEO Strategy, SEO Book
• What happened to Google Shopping Sellers on March 16th?, CPC Strategy
• Foolproof Keyword Research, Search Engine People
• How is Google Public DNS data used?, YouTube
• Post-Panda, Your Original Content is Being Outranked by Scrapers & Partners, SEOmoz
• Sites Retool for Google Effect, Wall Street Journal
• Social Media for SEO vs. Customer Engagement, Online Marketing Blog
• Top 10 Ways to REALLY Piss Off Google, Search Engine People

Video, Music & Image Search

• Clever trick to make YouTube videos fill up the browser, SearchReSearch
• Bing Images Now Linking Directly To Image & Not Page, Search Engine Roundtable
• Exclusive: Apple to beat Google on cloud music: sources, Reuters

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

• What’s New About Landing Page Policy? Google Responds – Andrew Goodman asks Google for some clarification on their new way of communicating violations of its Adwords landing page policies.
• Post-Panda, Your Original Content is Being Outranked by Scrapers & Partners – A weird thing has happened as a result of panda. Something you might have expected Google's Search Quality testers to catch before rolling the update out. Due to the domain-wide nature of the signal, high-quality, original content produced by the websites who were negatively impacted are now being ranked below the exact same content, republished by partners to whom they syndicate. Even more egregious, they are also being outranked by scrapers who effectively steal and republish the same content without permission or credit.
• Avoiding Unscoped Work from Unreasonable Clients – Have you ever had a dispute with a client? Most freelancers and contractors will answer this question with a resounding "no" because we tend to think of disputes as something which results in court proceedings….