SearchCap: The Day In Search, January 8, 2010

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

The Convergence Of Web Search & Site Search

The company I work for, SLI Systems, specializes in site search—searching products or content within a single website. That’s all we do. For example, try searching Search Engine Land using the SLI-powered search box at the top of the page (but wait until you finish reading this article first!). As a result of our focus, [...]
Google Mulling Several Ways To Integrate Ads On Maps

A number of articles appeared that speculate about or discuss ads on Google Maps (PC and mobile) now and in the future. Google Maps is one of Google’s most successful and valuable properties — arguably even more so in mobile — and the company is going to be both careful and thoughtful about how it [...]
Testing In 2010: Tips & Ideas To Get You Started

If you asked some of the best online marketers in the business what one piece of advice they can give you to help make your site better, stronger or more profitable, I bet most would say “test your pages, test your techniques, and test your theories.” The one constant in search engine marketing is change. [...]
A Year Later, Yahoo’s CEO Gives Herself A B-Minus

Next week will be Yahoo’s new CEO, Carol Bartz, one-year anniversary at Yahoo. It has been a long year for Yahoo, between the Microsoft deal and closing down or selling many of their products – Bartz has been at the center of most of the praise and debate. In a Bloomberg piece, Bartz [...]
Yahoo To Keep BOSS In Microsoft Deal, May Charge In Future

A post by Ashim Chhabra from the Yahoo Boss team in the Tech Group adds some details to how Yahoo BOSS will survive under the Yahoo-Microsoft deal. It appears that Yahoo is allowed to continue operating BOSS under the Microsoft deal. Some of the results will be powered by Yahoo, while the search results in [...]
Ecommerce Usability Showdown: Affiliate VS. Merchants

According to Google, affiliates provide such a road-rage-awful experience that they deserved to be kicked out of AdWords en masse. My experience shopping for a new laptop for my dad during Boxing Week more than proved that status as an affiliate site hardly determines usability, and that merchants sin liberally against the commandments of user [...]
5 Web Analytics New Year Resolutions

It’s that time of year again. Well-meaning people all over the world are proclaiming that they will quit smoking, drink less, eat fewer bacon sandwiches and of course, make more of an effort to analyze the performance of their websites. I am afraid I can’t help anyone with the first three having repeatedly failed with [...]
Google’s Near Me Now: A Yelp Killer?

Just a couple weeks after failing to consummate a rumored deal to buy Yelp, Google has launched a mobile search tool that could take away the mobile market share of Yelp and similar sites/apps like Urbanspoon, MapQuest, and some of the yellow pages apps. It’s called “Near Me Now,” and Google previewed it last month — [...]
Bing Admits MSNbot Is Slow

Via Search Engine Roundtable comes news of refreshing candor from a Bing employee about the performance of Bing’s crawler, which is still referred to as MSNbot. The admission happened yesterday in the Bing Webmaster Center forums, when Brett Yount, a program manager for Bing, replied to a question about why Bing has only indexed one [...]