Search Headlines & Links: Mar. 21, 2007

Want a snapshot of the day’s search marketing news? Here we’ve collected today’s top news stories posted to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with search-related headlines from around the Web:

From the SEW Blog:

• Let “First Principles” Guide Your Strategy
  First principles form a core set of working assumptions, hypotheses, and key beliefs about a single area of interest. Marchex’s Matthew Berk suggests letting all dialogue, all thinking, and all subsequent labor derive from a set of first principles.
• Page Rank Obsession
  If you want to position for yourself for success now, start thinking about your users first, before worrying about the search engines.
• Minus Expenses, Yahoo and Google Ad Revenues Are Similar
  While it is well known Google has higher search market share, recent analysis of profits show Yahoo’s ad revenue is a lot closer than the market share would suggest.
• SEMPO 2007 Officers Named
  The Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization has announced its 2007 officers, and Dana Todd’s not one of them.
• February Share of Search Numbers Are In
  February share-of-searches numbers are in from comScore and Nielsen//NetRatings, with Google widening its lead over Yahoo once again, though the two had different findings for the direction of Yahoo’s share.
• Google Wins in KinderStart Case
  Google has come out on top in a case filed last year by KinderStart.com, in which the kid-friendly search engine and parental advice site accused Google of “downgrading its search-result ranking without reason or warning.”
• Get Some Video Ad Accountability
  The biggest players are still scratching their heads about how to define and quantify accountability, based on what we heard at ClickZ’s Online Video Ad confab on Monday.
• No More Video Island for About.com
  Vertical publishers like About.com have clearly evolved in the last year. They used to think about video as a separate island, but now they want all media integrated within their sites.
• Extreme Vertical: SupplierSearch – a Furniture Search Engine
  SupplierSearch is a furniture industry-specific search engine developed by Furniture Today and Kellysearch, the business-to-business search engine.
• Lycos Rebranding As Jubii in US
  Having lost the rights to its own name in the United States, Lycos Europe is rebranding itself as Jubii for the US market.
• Google Hires SideKick Team To Build GPhone
  Google has apparently hired the team that developed the T-Mobile SideKick device.

Headlines & News from Elsewhere:

• Does your SEO Only Know SEO?, Search Engine Guide
• Help Me Help You, SEO Book
• Live From DDL: Video, Video, Video, Kelsey Group Blog
• Making a Site Link-Friendly, SEOmoz
• Fed Up With Dumb Search Marketing Tactics and Web 2.0, Cre8tive Flow
• Yahoo CEO praises new ad system, says “very happy”, Reuters
• What’s The Best Way To Monetize Video Search?, Search Insider
• SEO for WordPress – The Complete Guide, Jim Westergren
• Mark Pilgrim to Join Google, SEO by the Sea
• Piper Jaffray Expert Says Local Search is set for a Boom, ClickZ
• Google’s Now an Affiliate Marketing Network, ReveNews
• Allth.at Launches Innovative Search Agents App, Read/Write Web
• Women of Internet Marketing Wednesday Part 14, Search Marketing Gurus