SearchCap: The Day In Search, September 9, 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:

• Foursquare: More Than Fun & Games, A Potent Local Search Tool

  About a year ago, I was feeling Foursquare fatigue. Why on earth was I checking in? The badges were harder to get, and I wasn’t going to ever “win” in some places. But now I win all the time, through tips and specials that have been added. Welcome to the new Foursquare. It’s not like […]
• Cost Per Like Campaigns On Facebook: The CTR, Conversion Rate, Reach Tradeoff

  Managers of Facebook Fan acquisition campaigns are often faced with a dilemma when creating campaigns. They often ask whether or not they should they go for a broad audience and greater reach or should they go narrow and target audiences that might have a very small reach but a high affinity for a product. Marketers […]

• The Language Problem: Jaguars & The Turing Test

  “I love Jaguars!” When I ask you to understand that sentence, I’m requiring you to take on a pretty significant undertaking, although you do it hundreds of times each day without really thinking about it. The problem comes with the ambiguity of words. “I” is pretty straightforward. I’m referring to me. Not much ambiguity there. […]

• Search In Pics: Wil.i.am On Google +, Google Pillow On Yahoo Chair & Google Bake Off

  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. Wil.i.am On Google +: Google Subway Ad For Chrome in France: The Yahoo Bus Stop Derby: […]

• One Year Later, Bing-Powered Search Takes 4% Market Share From Google – Hitwise

  It’s been a year since Bing began powering the natural search results on Yahoo and the combination has gained a little more than 4% market share in the U.S. since then. Google has dropped more than six percentage points in the same time period. All of that is according to the latest Experian Hitwise report, […]

Search News From Around The Web:

Applications & Portal Features

• Gmail account security in Iran, Google Online Security Blog
• Google Launches New iGoogle Design, Destroying Custom Themes, Search Engine Roundtable

Business Issues

• Jerry Yang Is Trying To Buy Yahoo, Business Insider
• AOL Said to Discuss Deal With Yahoo Advisers, Bloomberg
• Google Paid $125 Million for Zagat, Wall Street Journal
• Twitter Selects Edelman As Its First PR Agency, holmesreport.com

Local, Maps & Mobile

• Google Places Opens Up Questions Section For Businesses, Search Engine Roundtable
• Who’s Manning the Store: Securing Your Google Places Page, BruceClay.com

Paid Search & Contextual

• Display creative checklist: building direct response ads, Inside AdWords

Searching

• It’s kickoff time for U.S. football searches, Official Google Blog

SEM Industry

• Video: Yahoo Drops Bartz, Subdomain Change Doesn’t Impact Google Rankings & Bing Values Social Over Links, Search Engine Roundtable
• What really are the top SEO blogs?, Go Local

SEO & SEM

• 7 Blog Commenting Guidelines, Search Engine People
• Are Google Quality Raters Lazy & Not Thorough?, Search Engine Roundtable
• Beyond Exact Match Anchor Text To Next Generation Link Signals – Whiteboard Friday, SEOmoz
• Google’s Panda – A Case Study – Jonny Stewart ( @jonaths ) #brightonseo, Site Visibility
• Seven (Non-SEO) Tips to Having a Successful SEO Campaign, Search Engine Guide
• Will Google Author Accounts Become the Next Spam Tactic, Michael Gray

Social Media

• Facebook Begins Auto-Grouping Friends Into Smart Lists, TechCrunch
• Your favorite Twitter client’s search results are about to get easier to read, thenextweb.com

Video, Music & Image Search

• Google Launches A Slick Music Beta App For iOS — Web, Not Native, TechCrunch
• Getting 3D Content on YouTube, YouTube Blog

Web Analytics

• Site Speed gets an upgrade. Hello Performance tab, Google Analytics Blog

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

• A Beginner’s Guide to Successful Conversion – An incredibly deep introductory guide.
• Social Networks and the New Challenge for Ranking in Search – When the Google + social network opened up in Beta, there were a myriad of SEO's and webmasters wondering how the "+1" button found within search would effect search results.  Would a hugely popular article that had a lot of social influence (or lots of "pluses") make a difference in how it ranks?
• 3 Approaches To Scaling Conversion Optimization – A really solid read relating to A/B and multivariate testing and conversion optimization in general. I"m especially interested in the third approach, which is what I consider the bleeding edge of automated/AI driven conversion optimization.
• How Bing Uses CTR in Ranking, and more with Duane Forrester – Duane talks about the Bing Search Algorithm in a manner that we would hope that someday, Matt Cutts would talk about the Google Search Algorithm :.)
• How to Increase Traffic with Social A/B Testing – How long has it been since you considered the placement of your social buttons? Do you know if longer or shorter tweets convert better? What phrases in your profile attract the most followers? When is the best time to share to reach the most people?
• Why “Second Chance” Tweets Matter: After 3 Hours, Few Care About Socially Shared Links – There have been various studies suggesting that if someone doesn’t see a tweet or a Facebook post within a few hours, they’ll never see it at all. Now link shortening service Bit.ly is out with another. After three hours, Bit.ly has found, links have sent about all the traffic they’re going to send. So start thinking about doing “second chance” tweets, as I call them.
  The Half-Life Of A Link
  In particular, Bit.ly has measured what it calls the “half-life” of a socially-shared link. By half-life, it means the point in which a link has received half the clicks it will ever get. From the company’s blog post: