SEM News: SearchCap: The Day In Search, April 11, 2008

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

From Search Engine Land:

Google Now Fills Out Forms & Crawls Results
One of the biggest search challenges has long been that the major search engines like Google cannot crawl material that can only be retrieved through the use of forms. Now Google is filling out those form to obtain the information previously hidden, the company has announced....
Yahoo Adds Much More Imagery To Maps
Yahoo has largely opted out of the mapping arms race between Microsoft and Google that has seen both invest millions in their mapping platforms. While it was the early pioneer of dynamic mapping and use of maps as a local search tool, the company decided to focus on more "practical"...
Yahoo's Minimum Bid Change Happening Next Week
As expected Yahoo told me that you can expect some of your minimum bids to change as soon as early next week. So if you are running ad campaigns on Yahoo Search Marketing, and your quality is not up to Yahoo's level, then your minimum bid may spike up. Yahoo...
Microsoft Proposes Comprehensive Framework To Protect Consumer Privacy
Microsoft has added its input to that of a host of other stakeholders in the growing debate over consumer privacy, online ad targeting and potential US (and local) government regulation. (Here's a related WSJ story on search engine effort to block a proposed anti-tracking law in the New York state...
Search In Pictures: Yahoo's Yoshi Fight, Google Mapping Chicago, Yahoo's Purple Ball
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....
Speculating About The Visual Future Of Search Results
Danny has written extensively about the past and potential future of search. And this past year we saw the introduction of "blended" or "universal" search. Among other developments, search results became much more "multi-media" and visual. In particular video became part of organic and, most recently, paid search results. Accordingly,...
How Flash Can Be Search Engine Friendly
For a long time there has been a tug of war between developers and designers who love to use Flash and SEOs who know how bad Flash can be from a search engine crawler perspective. The designer wants the beauty of an all Flash site. The SEO wants to bring...
New Microsoft Live Maps Rolls Out With Boatload Of Upgrades
A new version of Microsoft's Live Search Maps has rolled out (after yesterday's major traffic and routing upgrade). There's an enormous range of feature and functionality upgrades, which are explained in some detail on the Virtual Earth blog. There's also a discussion at CNET. At a crude level, what it...
Microsoft Still Favored To Win Yahoo, Madison Avenue Contemplates The Consolidated Online Ad Future And Congress Gets Involved
Just in case you hadn't gotten enough news and speculation about the various, potential deals surrounding MicroHoo, AOL and News Corp. there are a flurry of articles (as one might expect) today about all this. The most interesting is probably the one in the Wall Street Journal that interviews ad...
The Trouble With All-In-Zero Video Players
Although YouTube hit pop-culture status just a couple years ago, online video has been a staple of corporate and content websites for quite a bit longer. In that time, web designers have tried many approaches to viewing experience, trying to combine compelling content with a user-friendly interface. After many...
In The Trenches, April 11, 2008
In The Trenches is a weekly spotlight of tips, tricks, and news about the tools search engine marketing professionals use to give them a leg up on the competition. Today: News from the search engines, today's in-depth look, "Two Tools That You May Not Have Added To The Toolbox...