SearchCap: The Day In Search, April 22, 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:

• Bing’s Read/Write World: An Ambitious Project To Bridge Maps With Movies, Photos, Local Data & More

  It’s probably not something that you can wrap your head around pretty quickly. It’s also not something you can describe in quick, easily digestible terms. “It” is a new Microsoft Bing effort called Read/Write World that has some pretty lofty goals: things like indexing and connecting all of the world’s “geo-linked media.” And not just […]
• Bing Rewards Now On Bing’s Header Bar

  Bing has added the Bing Rewards program directly to the top header bar of Bing’s search results. Now when you search on Bing, you will see the “Rewards” link and icon on the right of the “sign in” link. Here is a picture: Bing said that integrating this Rewards link into the header will give […]

• Search In Pics: Google’s Front Door, Yahoo Knives & Google Fashion Store

  In this week’s Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have, and more. Google’s Front Door In Madrid: Yahoo Knives?: Google Fashion Retail Store: Google’s Living Wall Logo In […]

• How To Use Automated Rules In Google AdWords

  When I first started down this 6-lane highway called Online Marketing over six years ago, we used an absolutely archaic bid management software whose name escapes me. I want to say it was a Yahoo! (or precursor to Yahoo!) product, and basically it automated our bids so they would go up and down based on […]

• Tips For Managing Ad Fatigue On Facebook

  On the face of it, Facebook marketplace and search advertising are similar. In both platforms, the advertiser places a bids for an ad, competes against other advertisers at the impression level and then pays the platform a CPC for every click. These similarities help search marketers who are increasingly being asked to manage Facebook campaigns. […]

• Five Visionaries Sum Up The Future Of Search: Part II

  Over the past several months, I’ve been trying to crystal ball what the future of search might look like. I’ve had fascinating discussions with several visionaries in the industry, including Stefan Weitz (Microsoft), Shashi Seth (Yahoo), Hampus Jakobsson (RIM) and John Battelle (Federated Media). In my last column, I started to sum up the overarching […]

• Google’s Interactive Earth Day Logo

  Today on Google’s home page is a special interactive Google logo for Earth Day. Earth Day this year falls out on Good Friday and for the special day, Google made a fun, animated and interactive Google logo. Ironically, it seems as if you have Pandas playing (see the Google Panda update), the logo also has […]

• Google News Gets A Bit More Personal

  Google has added a pair of features today that make Google News a little more personal. First, the “News for you” section of Google News now includes stories based on your previous Google News activity. If you click on a lot of articles about a certain topic, this section will begin to show more articles […]

• Belgium Launches Investigation Of Google WiFi Data Collection

  While some countries have already completed their investigations, Belgium is just now launching a probe into Google’s collection of Wifi data over unsecured WiFi networks. According to the Flemish newspaper De Morgen, Belgian data protection officials believe Google is guilty of a “flagrant violation of privacy protection laws.” A Bloomberg report says the Belgian privacy […]

Search News From Around The Web:

Business Issues

• Google Gets Around to Telling the World Who’s on Its Management Team, AllThingsD
• Google’s China market share: declining, Financial Times
• Microsoft Announces Global Leader for Advertising & Online Business: Frank Holland rounds out team of online advertising veterans., microsoft.com
• Woman sneaks into Google, leaves ‘angry’ letter, Mercury News

Local, Maps & Mobile

• Cycle Route Planner, Aerial and Languages, MapQuest Blog
• Google Places Turns 1: What’s Working, What’s Not, Small Business SEM
• Google: Video Offers Unusual Glimpse Inside One Of Its Data Centers, Business Insider

Searching

• More powerful collaboration, Google Custom Search

SEO & SEM

• Your fast pass through security, Official Google Webmaster Central Blog
• 5 Key Reasons SEO Should Be Part Of Your Marketing Toolkit, Search Engine People
• AdWords Campaign Experiments: Details and Pitfalls, Searching Beyond the Paid
• Correlation Data for SEO and Social Media Analysis – Part 1 – Whiteboard Friday, SEOmoz
• Google Brings AllTheWeb Back To Life, Ranking It For Yahoo Search, Search Engine Roundtable
• Google Offers AdWords Tips For Easter On Good Friday, Search Engine Roundtable
• Google Panda Boosts Old-School Linking Schemes – A Case Study, Michael Gray
• Templatized personalization an effective strategy for link building, Vertical Measures
• What Visible Quality Score Isn’t Telling You, PPC Hero
• You Can’t Grow a Blog On Negative Linkbait Alone, outspokenmedia.com

Social Media

• Facebook Celebrates the Like Button’s 1st Birthday By Showing Off Its Footprint, Inside Facebook
• Twitter Promotes Mobile Apps & SMS To Logged-Out Users, RyanSpoon.com
• Cover Your Assets: How To Prepare For Social Community Meltdowns, AIM Clear Blog

Video, Music & Image Search

• Google talks to Spotify to power music service, CNET News

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

• Confessions of a Content Farm Hand – Ex-Mahalo staffer recounts his journey from liberal arts grad to online seo hack to content strategist and the lessons he's learned about creating quality content that can stand the test of time and the wrath of the almighty algorithm update.
• What Visible Quality Score Isn't Telling You – There is a metric named ‘quality score’ that appears for every keyword in your account. In terms of that quality score, the statement above is true.  But there are other ‘quality scores’ that are used inside the AdWords system to determine whether or not your ads are eligible for auctions, which position they appear in, and even how much you pay per click. The above statements are not true for those versions of quality score…
• How Can I Convince People of the Value of SEO? – I have a client who was called by [one of those online Yellow Pages–type companies] that would build him a website for $39 a month, which he wants to look into. The website that he initially hired me for is not built yet. In other words, he is considering "firing" me.
• The new Google Analytics Beta – a detailed review – Get up to speed on some of the new features of Google Analytics with this comprehensive article by Dan Barker.
• The Anatomy of a Perfect Landing Page – I absolutely love design tips and I think this could be really helpful for those of us that need a guide on creating catching and classy landing pages for our websites.
• Social Media for SEO vs. Customer Engagement – The topic of defining social media came up and one area of interest was the difference in outcomes when it comes to incorporating both social media and search engine optimization. The social media tactics and expected outcomes when used for a SEO program are very different than social media intended to improve customer engagement outcomes. I think this is an important distinction because while social media and SEO work great together, the outcomes and business value can be very different.