Obama Admits “(Not Provided)” Drove Decision To Use PRISM Program

WASHINGTON – Following revelations that the U.S. government’s PRISM program has been secretly collecting information on foreigners overseas from the nation’s largest Internet companies like Google, Facebook and, most recently, Apple, in search of national security threats, President Obama admitted that Google’s policy of hiding keywords in Google Analytics was the deciding factor in moving […]

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Search In Pics: Miley Ray Cyrus At Twitter, Google Giant Koosh Ball & NYC Glass Fitting Area

In this week’s Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the Web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have, and more. Ingress Birthday Cake: Source: Google+ Miley Ray Cyrus At Twitter: Source:…

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Google Testing “In-Depth Articles” Search Results, A New Rich Snippet?

Dr. Peter Meyers, the Marketing Scientist at Moz, formerly SEOmoz, tipped us off to a new Google search interface test. It appears Google is testing showing “in-depth articles” in the search results for local queries. In the screen shot below, Pete triggered these results by searching…

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State AGs: Google Still Allows & Profits From Illegal Drug Ads

The National Association of Attorneys General (NAAG) is accusing Google of continuing to give consumers access to illegal and counterfeit goods — including drugs — in its search results, and letting sites that deal in such goods to advertise with Google. NAAG has asked Google co-founder…

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What Is a Link Scheme? Ask an SEO, Get a Wrong Answer

Everyone knows that Google expressly forbids the use of link schemes that are designed to influence their search results. Technically, they have no objection to any link scheme of any type that does not influence their search results (although, on the gripping hand, they do stress that whatever you do on your Websites should be done for visitors, not for search engines). SEO bloggers love to write serious-toned warnings against the use of link schemes. I have probably written a few myself, somewhere in the past. It’s an easy blog post to write and helps take up the slack on a slow blogging day. Technically, if you’re publishing a lot of content on a large Website (like a news site or a community resource blog) your editorial calendar should include occasional rewrites of important topics (or you should revisit them as incidental digressions in important articles) — but I digress. We innately, at some intuitive level, understand as a community that we should all be handing out anti-Link Scheme warnings like candy. People will mostly ignore them or interpret them in ways so as not to identify their own practices as constituting link schemes. Everyone “Building” Links Is Using One […]

Google Claims Searches & Paid Clicks Can Predict Box Office Success With 92% Accuracy

A newly released white paper from Google claims the search engine can predict a movie’s opening weekend performance within 92 percent accuracy based on search query and paid click volume. After evaluating search and paid click data for 99 top box office films in 2012, Google correlated the…

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SearchCap: The Day In Search, June 6, 2013

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the Web. From Search Engine Land: Bing Pushes To Build Marketshare Through “Bing It On” For Faster Airport Wifi I got a surprise recently on my trip through Orange County’s John Wayne Airport….

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