Search Headlines & Links: July 7, 2006

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…

• 
  Conference Coverage: SES Latino 2006
  The first ever Search Engine Strategies Latino will be taking place this
  Monday and Tuesday in Miami, Florida. Danny will be moderating some sessions
  and I will be covering the Landscape & Tactics tracks at the Search Engine
  Roundtable. Nacho Hernandez from iHispanic is hosting the event. You can view
  the conference schedule by clicking here. Want to discuss? Join our Search
  Engine Watch Forums thread….
• Google
  Health Scrapbook: Google’s Health Portal
  Via PaidContent and VC Ratings, Google is working on a health portal named the
  Google Health Scrapbook. From what I understand there will be a "directory"
  for patients, doctors, vendors and pharmaceutical each. Google "users will be
  able to log in with their own account information and do things such as add a
  new medical provider, check their medical records or pay their bills." Google
  has been rumored to be working on a health portal for a while. With the hire
  of Adam Bosworth, Google’s Architect, Google Health we expected more. But when
  Google released Google Co-Op, those rumors were…
• Google
  Checkout Could Increase Costs For The Shopping Comparison Engines
  Google Checkout adoption will translate to higher costs for the shopping
  comparison engines. Some of the costs will be passed onto merchants, and I?m
  not sure they?ll stand for it. The shopping comparison engines are some of the
  biggest purchasers of pay per click (PPC) listings on Google Adwords and
  Yahoo! Search Marketing (YSM). Companies like Shopping.com, Shopzilla, and
  NexTag are also some of the savviest search marketers in the biz, looking at
  revenue derived from each and every click. Whether you call it arbitrage or
  not, many of the shopping comparison engines purchase keywords to drive
  traffic to their…
• W3C
  Selling PageRank Or Thanking Supporters?
  Nathan Weinberg linked to a post by Emad Fanous who notes that the W3C is
  selling PageRank 9 and PR7 links. You can buy a link on this page also and
  earn yourself a PR9 link from the w3.org site. How much is it? $1,000 per year
  and if you do that, you will also get yourself a free PR7 link on this page.
  How about that for a good deal? 🙂 I’ll stop being sarcastic now… Things to
  note: (1) The links do not carry the nofollow attribute (2) It seems like
  anyone can buy the links. See the…
• Google’s
  Q&A Database Different From Web Search Database
  This morning I posted at SER that Google was displaying results for a
  particular site in the Q&A section of the Google SERPs but at the same time
  does not have any pages of that site listed in the Google web search index….
• Search
  Forums Roundup: July 7, 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
  Checkout: Exaggerated Claims? – Spam is an Arms Race – So Confused About 302
  Redirects – Are Outbound Links Rewarded? – A Guide to Keyword Analysis, and
  more….
• AOL
  Podcast Search Beta Live
  TVEyes’ podcast search engine Podscope.com has been launched as a service on
  AOL Search in Beta. You can access the AOL Podcast Beta Search after accepting
  the license agreement, you will then be directed to http://podcast.search.aol.com/.
  A search will provide a method to listen to podcast excerpts with a link to
  hear the whole podcast. You can submit your podcast to AOL here. You can also
  learn more about AOL Podcast Search beta here….
• 
  Business.com Adds NoFollow To Many Links
  Threadwatch reports that Business.com has added the nofollow attribute, a
  method of telling search engines not to count particular links as a "vote," to
  many of its outbound links. Aaron Wall discusses how the use of the nofollow
  in this sense "muddies their credibility," by saying, we have links on our web
  site that we posted but we don’t trust them. It turns out that only those that
  pay business.com for a directory listing gets a link without the nofollow
  added to it. Everyone else who is accepted into the directory, is tagged as
  untrusted….
• Lawsuits
  Over The Google Party Jet; Arguments Over Bed Sizes On Board
  New details out now about the Google Jet we’ve written about before, the used
  767 that Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have purchased. Turns
  out, there are lawsuits filed over the retrofit of the plane, and with them,
  news of hammocks hanging from the ceiling and an apparent fight between the
  cofounders over bed sizes that Google CEO Eric Schmidt had to referee….
• Dr.
  Stephen Hawking Turns To Yahoo Answers For How Humans Will Survive
  Wow. Dr. Stephen Hawking, yes, the real Stephen Hawking, has turned to Yahoo
  Answers for help. How can the human race survive the next hundred years?, he
  asks, in a question that Yahoo reassures us is really from the famous
  physicist and not a joke. And stay tuned, because Yahoo’s planning to get U2’s
  Bono to post later today. How’s it going for Hawking? There were 15,867
  answers when I looked. That means his next question should be, "How can I
  review all these answers?" The answer is to sit back and let the Yahoo Answers
  community itself do it….
• 
  Smarter.com Updates Site
  Smarter.com made 4 major changes to its website. The company introduced a new
  design, new ranking methodology, clustering beta, and limited crawling. While
  Smarter is one of the little guys in the shopping comparison engine industry (Shopping.com
  and Shopzilla being the leaders according to comScore data), these are bold
  moves which show how serious the company is about becoming a major player….
• Search
  Engine Optimization in an Hour a Day
  If you’re just getting started with search marketing, it can be tough to know
  where to start or which sources of information to trust. Things change
  quickly, and what worked yesterday doesn’t always work today. Fortunately,
  there are some fundamental approaches and techniques that always seem to work,
  and a new book does a great job of laying a foundation for search engine
  success. Even better, the book avoids jargon and stays away from the countless
  hotly debated "tactics" that often cause more harm than good. I’ve got a
  review of this new book in today’s SearchDay article, A Beginner’s…
• Google
  In Another Dictionary: Merriam-Webster
  The LA Times reports that the term ‘Google’ has been added to the
  Merriam-Webster, the dictionary I grew up on. The other day we reported that
  Google was added to the Oxford English Dictionary, the most authoritative
  dictionary of the English language….

Other Things We Read, Didn’t Blog But You Might Want To Read…

• Verizon Files with SEC
  to Set YP Free, ClickZ
• 
  Maybe I’ll xerox that google search for my rolodex — and wait for the
  lawyers’ letters to come, USA Today (AKA, why Google isn’t worried that it
  might become a generic term through dictionary definitions)
• Copernic
  Offers Branded Desktop Search, Marketing Pilgrim
• 
  Google to Israeli SEM firms: come on, we?re friends (sell AdWords),
  Multilingual Search Blog
• Yahoo To
  Keep Showing Bids, Search Engine Watch Forums
• 
  Covering Your Tracks Is Tricky Online, Wall Street Journal
• EBay’s
  PayPal president departs, San Jose Mercury News
• 
  With Google wolves at the door, eBay announces exec will leave, Associated
  Press
• For
  eBay, Google Checkout doesn’t register, News.com (first official eBay
  comment on not allowing Google Checkout that I’ve seen)
• 
  Is Listing Supporters The Same As Selling PageRank?,
  InsideGoogle
• 
  Microsoft appoints new UK chief, Computing
• 
  Make Buttons Quickly With Web-Based Tool, ResearchBuzz
• Google
  Wildcard Search Game, Google Blogoscoped
• 
  Wikia, the political 2.0, Searchblog
• 
  Digg versus New York Times Reality Check, Hitwise
• 
  Verizon Nears Spinoff of Directories, Wall Street Journal
• 
  Measuring the Web, Ongoing (step back a decade and revisit how big the web
  was then)
• More
  No-Follow Fallout, V7N
• Google
  Code Jam Europe 2006 (Video), Google Blogoscoped
• 
  Yahoo building a Google FS clone?, Geeking With Greg
• 
  Baseline on "How Google Works", Geeking With Greg