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Search Headlines & Links: October 6, 2006

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Below, a recap of stories posted today to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with other items we've spotted but not blogged separately:

From The SEW Blog...

  • Google Calls Operational Pause On Products & Yes, New Rollouts Were Hurting Search
    Google Puts Lid on New Products from the Los Angeles Times is great news from Google -- Sergey Brin leading an attitude change of "features, not products" to get Googlers to improve what they already have rather than push out new stuff. From the story:...
  • Google News - Porn Edition?
    Barry Schwartz emailed me to take a look at the entertainment section at Google News a little while ago. No, Google's not gone into porn -- but yes, that's Jessica Simpson nude that accidentally got up on the page. You can see there was story about the movie "Employee of the Month," and the thumbnail picture came from this article about the movie. For family-friendly viewing, I've inserted a tactful black box. Here's the uncensored view of what Google News had....
  • New Search Patent Applications: October 6, 2006 - Google Takes Over the Patent Office
    There were some interesting new patent applications this week from Yahoo, Microsoft, and IBM, but nothing on the scale of the outpouring of intellectual property published and assigned to Google - I uncovered 15 new patent applications from the Mountain View search giant. I'll address patent applications from those others in a later post. This post looks at Google's filings. Some of the topics covered include: Natural language questions and answers from a search engine, Query rankings and mid-page refinements, A detailed personalization system, Advertising and email contacts amongst members of a social network, Bringing together advertisers and advertising agents,...
  • Yahoo Messenger Worm Targets Google AdSense Click Fraud
    The Register reports that a new malware worm has been discovered that targets Yahoo Messenger, sends those users to pages with Google AdSense ads and clicks on them. The Google ads are specifically high priced keywords such as mesothelioma, which is a cancer caused from exposure to asbestos. More details on this worm at the Spyware Guide....
  • Google Acquisition Of YouTube Rumor
    Speculation about a potential acquisition of YouTube by Google is heating up. The Wall Street Journal reports and here's more coverage and buzz. Previously it was reported that Yahoo was in similar talks to buy the site. The rumor first appeared this morning on TechCrunch....
  • Google Print Helping Book Sales
    Despite a skeptical publishing community some publishers are seeing increased sales from Google's book scanning project. Reuters quotes several publishers as seeing increased sales. And here are the top 10 books on Google Book Search....
  • MySpace: Not Just For The Under 30 Crowd
    As a kind of twist on that old 60's mantra, social networking's slogan might have been: not for anyone over 30 -- or so we thought. As is being widely covered, comScore reported and MySpace apparently confirmed that the average age of its users is going up. More than 50% of its users in August were over 35. This represents a kind of mainstreaming of social networking in one way of looking at it. MySpace, as you remember, has a deal with Google in which the latter will pay a guaranteed $900 million over a three-year period to be the...
  • Hitwise: 'Social Local Search' Growing Fast
    Hitwise's LeeAnn Prescott, who presented at SES Local, has posted some of the data she showed at the conference. In this particular example, what she compared was traffic to traditional yellow pages sites vs. directory sites that incorporated user-generated content: "[G]rowth over the past year to the yellow pages custom category has been relatively flat, while the market share of visits to the custom category containing Yahoo! Local, Yelp, Judy's Book and Insider Pages has grown by 44% when comparing August 2005 to August 2006. While standard yellow pages sites are receiving significantly more traffic in terms of volume, these...
  • Honda's New 'Crave' Campaign Missing Search?
    Honda has redesigned its bestselling CRV sport utility vehicle. There's a snazzy flash-based site featuring the new car and a user-generated/social media component there too. People can post their "craves." But this otherwise sophisticated campaign, which includes outdoor and other traditional media, is apparently missing search....
  • Free Local Search White Paper From TeleMapics
    Consulting firm TeleMapics is offering a free local search white paper, which you can get here. Called "Local Search: Time for a Tune-Up?," the document is 62 pages and provides a fairly detailed overview of the state of local search. For those already working with local search, there's nothing here you probably won't already know. But it's a good primer for those who aren't very familiar with the area -- and it's free....
  • Search Forums Roundup: Oct. 6, 2006
    Today's SearchDay, Search Engine Forums Spotlight, features our weekly links to this week's hot topics from search engine forums across the web: Google Gadgets Now For Your Website - Is SEO a Game of Outsmarting Search Engines? - Relevant Domain Names - Business Week Article On Click Fraud, and more....

Headlines & News From Elsewhere

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