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Stories Discussed In The Show

• The Lies Of Top Search Terms Of The Year
  I wanted to make some time and dive deep into the issue of why all those top search terms from the various search engines don't match. Others have thankfully been doing that. The short answer, as I've written before, is that they are all heavily filtered. That's why you don't see popular terms like "sex" and "porn" and navigational queries like "google" showing up. I might try to come back to this in more depth, but here's a summary of the lists and what people are saying about them. Plus, I'll explain that chart above and how it shows...
• Battle For Books: Evil Google Versus The Altruistic Open Content Alliance
  Google Book-Scanning Efforts Spark Debate from the Associated Press is an excellent look how the rivalry between Google's library scanning project and that of the Open Content Alliance -- backed by Yahoo and Microsoft -- is getting more heated. Google pretty much comes off as the evil company trying to lock up books for its own commercial goals. I'll try to restore some balance to that. But then again, perhaps the rhetoric is the only thing that will make Google decide it should figure out a way to better assure people that the scanning will be as open source...
• Google Drops SOAP Search API
  Google has dropped support for the Google SOAP Search API as of December 5, encouraging people to make use of the AJAX Search API in its place....
• Reactions on Discontinuation of Google API, Google Blogoscoped
• Ask.com Tests New Search Interface With Ask X
  The Read Write Web blog first spotted Ask.com testing a new interface they named Ask X. The new interface sports a steel background for the home page with more goodies inside. A search on Ask X for barry schwartz shows a three column pane interface. On the left hand side is the search box, where you can type and as you type you see search suggestions appear below the search box [Note From Danny: Pity this doesn't happen on the home page as well]. In the middle column is a smart answer, followed by two paid listings and then...
• Yahoo Pushing Vertical Search Through More Yahoo Shortcuts
  Yahoo! Shortcuts must be working for searchers and for Yahoo! Starting last week, I noticed Yahoo prompting me a lot more to search for retailer coupons, flights from city to city and movie showtimes - all which trigger a Yahoo Shortcut. While shortcuts have been around for a while, this is the first time I remember Yahoo prompting me over and over use them before I've completed a search....
• DIY Day, Daggle
• Google Pushing New Blogger In Search Results
  Now that Blogger is officially out with a new version, I guess Google's ready to get behind the service in a big way. The screenshot above shows a new promotional "tip" I just got in my web search results. I've never seen anything like that before for Blogger nor that I can recall for any other Google products. Not like this. The tip reads:...
• Holiday 2006 Grudge Match: Google Checkout Versus Paypal
  Google Steps More Boldly Into PayPal’s Territory by the New York Times shows how Google Checkout has really stepped things up this holiday season. The article covers how Google is giving merchants huge incentives to promote Google Checkout on their online stores. One merchant sent out a promotion to customers, telling them they get $10 off all orders of $30 or more if they use Google Checkout. He said his traffic tripled and it cost him nothing, since Google is paying the bill (he gets reimbursed the $10 per order from Google) and Google is also offering zero transaction fees...
• Diller Touting Ask And Centrality Of Local
  Barry Diller keeps talking about Ask as the "glue" of his empire and more specifically about the importance of local. Ask and the new AskCity are thus in the hot seat. ClickZ has a piece today about the forthcoming introduction of financial and real estate data into AskCity....
• Google Search History Used To Send Wireless Hacker To Prison
  News.com reports that a wireless hacker was sentenced to 15 months in prison due to the help of some Google searches. The wireless hacker conducted searches for keyword phrases on "how to broadcast interference over wifi 2.4 GHZ," "interference over wifi 2.4 Ghz," "wireless networks 2.4 interference," and "make device interfere wireless network." The court documents do not disclose how this information was retrieved, i.e. via Google subpoena, looking at his browser history on his PC, or tracking his internet usage during the investigation....
• Google By Far The Leader, If You Look At Site Owner Traffic Stats
  When I posted Enquisite's search engine popularity stats yesterday, I almost went into a riff about how site owner traffic stats are often so different from what the major measuring services report. Google almost always comes out much, much higher when you look at site traffic referral sources (as with Enquisite's stats). I did get into this on yesterday's Daily SearchCast. But Rich Skrenta does a great job on the issue for who prefer to read about the issue. More on his post, along with a long look at stats, the pros and cons of Google being a huge traffic...
• Portrait Of A New Site Getting On Digg
  Search Engine Land made the Digg home page yesterday because of Neil Patel's great article, The New Digg Features Plus, A Submitter's Perspective. I've already covered how as a new site, we're still growing our traffic. Now I've got a chance to show what it means to a new site to get digged. The picture above tells the tale. Once we hit, the first hour brought in nearly 4,000 visits. Then it tapered off. For the entire day, we had 7,134 visits from Digg, 78 percent of our entire traffic. Bear in mind that this is all "cream," IE...
• Up Close With Digg Podcasts (& Vote For The Daily SearchCast!)
  Neil Patel covered the new podcast feature at Digg in yesterday's story, The New Digg Features Plus, A Submitter's Perspective, but I wanted to take a deeper look at how it works plus maybe entice a few votes for my own podcast, The Daily SearchCast, along the way....
• Survey: General Search Fails Professionals
  Convera, an enterprise search company, commissioned an online survey of 1,000 U.S. "professionals" in publishing, advertising, marketing, healthcare, finance and government. The survey sought to determine work-related search behavior and corresponding satisfaction levels. While sponsored research must always be regarded with a critical eye, the results are worth noting:...
• Quintura For Kids Launched
  I discussed Quintura in November - if you recall it's a search engine that provides searchers with a tag cloud, which if they mouse over the tags it will display results. Well, today they launched Quintura for kids as a beta release. It works along the same lines as the adult version, with a search box, tag cloud and mouse over to see results, drawn from Yahoo Kids. It's looking very seasonal at the moment with a backdrop of snow, lights, trees and so on. There are also five icons for various search subjects such as animals, games and music,...
• Google's Discontinued Services, Google Operating System
• YouTube's Solution To Unauthorized Japanese Videos: A Warning Written In Japanese, Techdirt
• Top 16 Reasons People Hate SEOs, Stuntdubl
• Google Dell PC (Screenshot), Google Blogoscoped
• Google Swimming Pool, Google Blogoscoped
• Hey (Username) Your lights are on!, Official Google Enterprise Blog
• Google Holds First Pajama Day (in beta!), InsideGoogle