Search Headlines & Links: May 26, 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…

• Daily
  SearchCast, May 26, 2006: Dell’s Doing Google, Dude; Google Does 50% Of US
  Searches; Don’t Be Evil? Don’t Make Ballmer Laugh & More!
  Today’s search podcast covers Google and Dell sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g.
  Well, Dell agreeing that for an undisclosed sum, putting Google software on
  its new computers is a good thing, dude. Meanwhile, Google does half the US’s
  searches and is sending a new spider after your landing pages, to see if
  you’re running a quality ad campaign. YouTube grows and grows in video search,
  plus Ballmer laughs and laughs over Don’t Be Evil (ok, just one laugh) and
  more! Warning, this episode contains occasional off-the-cuff singing, which
  might be harmful to your ears. Sorry, it was a holiday…
• 
  Homestore Rebrands As Move.com
  Earlier this month, Homestore and much of its network of sites have rebranded
  under the banner of a new URL, Move.com. The new site is being positioned as a
  real-estate vertical “search engine” for all things related to buying, renting
  and relocation. Homestore has had a number of past legal problems, which the
  company has apparently now put behind itself. The rebranding should help with
  that as well….
• Search
  Forums Roundup: May 26, 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: Yahoo! and
  eBay Partner – Google Sends Out Class Action Settlement Info – Larry Page Sets
  Out His Vision – Opting Out Of Open Directory Listings At MSN – Say Bye-bye to
  Rankings and Hello to SEO Success! and more….
• Ballmer
  On Google And Don’t Be Evil: Laugh & No Comment
  When I asked Barry Diller earlier this year if Ask needed some type of “Don’t
  Be Evil” like Google, his answer got the audience roaring with laughter. “Be
  Evil,” he said, then qualifying that businesses needed to be realistic. Now
  Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer gets to swing at the same question in an interview
  with the San Francisco Chronicle. He basically dodges the question by saying
  Google doesn’t seem to follow it….
• AOL
  Video Gets Google Video Promotion
  Way back when Google and AOL cut their partnership deal, AOL was to get
  promotion on Google Video. What, big flashing neon AOL banners? Actually,
  Google said it would be low-key. And that’s pretty much what’s been delivered.
  Gary Price noted earlier this week that a small AOL Video link had been added
  to the reverse bar of the Featured section of Google Video. Look over there on
  the right-hand side. You can’t — well, you can — miss it….
• Google
  Seeks Employees Through Wired Ad
  Google Ad in Wired from Google Blogoscoped covers Google doing print ads. No,
  not to drum up new users, though it has done some of that before. This time
  it’s to attract employees to work for the company. If you didn’t skip three
  grades and failed to learn Lisp by age 10 like Niniane, there’s no need to
  apply. Darn, and there’s me wasting all that time on Basic at age, um, 13?
  Well, I can still make my name fill the screen of a TRS-80….
• 
  NetRatings Data: The Local Angle
  Danny posted here about April Nielsen//NetRatings data reflecting that Google
  had crossed the 50% threshold in search market share. I want to point to
  another part of the release, which jumped out at me: the Internet driving
  people to local retailers (“big boxes” in this case)….
• NetRatings:
  Google Tops 50 Percent Mark In US Web Searches
  New stats (PDF) out from NetRatings show Google now handles half the web
  searches in the United States:…
• Google
  AdsBot Now Coming To Assess Your Landing Pages, Will Impact Your AdRank
  Google’s rolling out a new system where ad landing pages will be automatically
  spidered by a new AdsBot. The content of landing pages will help determine the
  quality of an ad campaign. That quality score, along with the amount you are
  willing to pay, is then used to determine an ad’s AdRank, the position where an
  ad will appear in the results. A high quality score means you can rank higher
  even if you pay less than others. And not participating in the new spidering
  system can hurt your AdRank….
• Google
  Dropping Conservative Sites?
  Is Google Dropping Conservative Sites They Disagree With? from Jennifer Laycock
  at Search Engine Guide is an interesting article regarding the possibility that
  Google is dropping sites from their index due to their political content.
  Jennifer has done some excellent digging around into some of the allegations
  surrounding the issue. However, the interesting, larger point is the extent to
  which Google (or indeed any other search engine) has a responsibility to be
  impartial in the information they provide, for financial reasons if no other….
• New Search
  Patents: May 25, 2006 – Yahoo Units and Microsoft Redundancy Filters
  New patents from this week from Yahoo on indexing by concepts and on uses of
  scripts on different computers to share data between them. Microsoft looks at
  reranking search results based upon redundancy, annotations on web pages, and
  showing web ads based upon a person’s television viewing habits. IBM comes up
  with smarter bookmarks, and Amazon shows smarter search results when a first
  query doesn’t quite work….

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

• 
  Geek out: We’ll miss you, Orlowski, Valleywag (say it ain’t so, O)
• 
  Microsoft To Push ‘Windows Live’ Phones, Webcams, PC Magazine
• Lord of
  Yahoo!’s Short Tail, SEOmoz
• Yahoo says
  no to Amnesty International on China, News.com
• 
  Google releases Picasa for Linux, NewsForge
• 
  Hacking With Google: On The Increase, V7N
• Use Farecast To
  Find Flight Deals (or just fly Southwest), TechCrunch
• Google Q &
  A: What questions do you want to ask Google?, ZDNet
• 
  Google’s Click Settlement: Should You Opt In or Out?, ClickZ
• Do
  You Want Traffic or Business?, ClickZ
• 
  Picture this: Picasa for Linux, Official Google Blog