SearchCap: The Day In Search, July 25, 2012

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 Antitrust “Settlement” Take Two: Not Quite Yet

  On the basis of statements and representations made in a Financial Times report, I wrote a post yesterday entitled “Google Strikes Antitrust Deal With EU, Avoids Legal Battle.” But it’s clear 24 hours later that it was premature to make such sweeping statements and declare the case “settled” in Europe. A Reuters article today makes […]
• Facebook: No Sense “To Even Begin To Think About Doing Web Search” Now

  Facebook is working on improving its search engine, but a company executive says it doesn’t make sense “to even begin to think about doing web search” right now. Lars Rasmussen, Director of Engineering at Facebook, made the comments in an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald. He told the paper that he’s “working on something […]

• Google “Reveals Index Secrets”: Charts Indexing of Your Site Over Time

  Yesterday, Google webmaster tools launched Index Status (available under Health) that charts the number of indexed pages for your site over the last year. Total Indexed Count Google says that this count is accurate (unlike the site: search operator) and is post-canonicalization. In other words, if your site includes a lot of duplicate URLs (due […]

• Common Crawl Makes New Web Data Available, Launches Coding Contest

  Looking to do research based on data gathered from across the web? That’s one of the purposes of Common Crawl, and the group has just released new data, as well as a contest to encourage use of that data The 2012 data, which contains 3.8 billion web documents, shows stats such as 63% of top […]

• Use Open Graph To Get Video Thumbnails Into Your Search Results

  Joel Harvey is, among other things, the Video Scientist at Conversion Sciences. Over the past four years, he has developed video strategies for a large number of online retailers. We’ve found that video is great for drawing and converting qualified search traffic, so I asked Joel to tell us his tricks for getting video ranked […]

• How To Extend & Improve Your Retargeting Efforts

  Invariably, when people get a taste of a good thing, they want more of it. This is definitely the case with online advertisers and their use of first party data in site retargeting. Site retargeting has been one of the hottest sectors in the online advertising space over the last couple of years, as advertisers […]

• Report: Tablets Offer Lower CPC, Higher Conversions Than Desktop PCs

  One of the key findings of the Q2 2012 Global Digital Advertising Update from Adobe (Efficient Frontier) is that search marketers can get more value from mobile campaigns than they now can on the PC. According to the report cost-per-click (CPC) prices are lower for both tablets and smartphones than comparable PC search campaigns and […]

• Twitter Inching Closer To Giving You All Your Tweets, But Search Has A Long Way To Go

  Twitter is working on a project that will give users access to an archive of all of their own tweets. Twitter CEO Dick Costolo told the New York Times this week that the company is building a tool that would let Twitter users download their own tweets. He didn’t provide a timeframe for such a […]

• Confirmed: Google’s Expandable Knowledge Graph Test

  Alex Chitu reports Google is testing a new feature for the Google Knowledge Graph. The new feature is a way to show an expanded version of the knowledge graph in the top of the search results. Currently, when you search in Google and the knowledge graph comes up, it shows you up to five related […]

• Google Pushing Out Panda Update 3.9 Tonight

  Google says it will roll out the latest update to its Panda algorithm later tonight. The company posted the news a few minutes ago on Twitter, saying this update will affect about one percent of search results. New data refresh of Panda starts rolling out tonight. ~1% of search results change enough to notice. More […]

• Microsoft Begins Rolling Out AdCenter Update

  Microsoft’s AdCenter has just released some new features, including the ability to measure tablet traffic via Microsoft Advertising Intelligence, the ability to have more ads per ad group, and increased site exclusions for syndicated ads. The company has been working diligently in recent months to match Google AdWords’ features and make it easier for advertisers […]

Recent Headlines From MarTech, Our Sister Site Dedicated To Internet Marketing:

• Pinterest Is Throwing A Summer Party To Build Community
• Tips For An Effective Twitter Chat
• Smartphone Adoption Gaining Momentum, Most First-Timers Go For Android
• Are You Leaving Potential Email Subscribers On The Table?
• Foursquare Introduces Promoted Updates For Mobile: “Search Ads For The Real World”
• Twitter’s NBC Olympics Partnership: A Sign Of Things To Come

Search News From Around The Web:

Applications & Portal Features

• Yahoo to Return Indonesian Check-In Service Koprol to its Founders, thenextweb.com

Business Issues

• Google seeks campaign money by touting Net as prime info source, CNET Mobile
• Facebook Open Graph Leader Leaves: Director Of Product Management Carl Sjogreen Plots Next Adventure, TechCrunch
• Facebook Opens First International Engineering Office In London, TechCrunch

Local, Maps & Mobile

• Samsung kills local search on international Galaxy S3 in ‘stability’ update, Android Central

Link Building

• linking as a search ranking factor, blog.majesticseo.com

Searching

• Google Power Searchers Get Their Certificates, Search Engine Roundtable

SEM Industry

• MozCon: Fishkin on future of SEO, The Seattle Times

SEO & SEM

• Google’s Penguin Update: The Basics, Karl Ribas
• Outranking Google, SEOmoz
• Search Ranking Tools: Be Prepared For Bing’s API To Go Paid, Search Engine Roundtable
• The Other Side of PPC: Dealing with Clients, Search Engine Watch

Social Media

• BuzzFeed’s strategy, Chris Dixon
• Gartner Says Worldwide Social Media Revenue Forecast to Reach $16.9 Billion in 2012, gartner.com
• Twitter, Hollywood Working on In-Stream Video Series, AdWeek

Web Analytics

• Tracking Adjusted Bounce Rate In Google Analytics, Google Analytics Blog