The long tail session is hitting all of the blended areas of serach, which is in itself Long Tail. Aaron Shear is speaking now about Shopping Search and hitting the longtail search terms in a shopping search engine campaign. Aaron feels that the main "head" search terms, or the money terms, result in a lot of traffic bouncing off the site : meaning they can drive a lot of semi-targeted traffic but not the best in conversions, dependent upon the terms.

Long tail search goes far beyond normal organic SEO and deep into local search. Mary Bowling is speaking at SES San Jose about the long tail of local search. All relevant search to brick and mortar businesses is local search. 30% to 40% of searches have local intent and search engines have to interperate this intent. What is the long term of local search? Even if your main search terms is "denver plumber",

Being a search marketer and avid link builder, yesterday I ran across a blog which was perfect for contributing a quality post to on behalf of client, so I looked around the blog to find their contact information to build a relationship with the blogger. Building a trusted relationship with a blogger; exchanging emails, discussing the world of blogging, giving a little SEO advice and asking to contribute a post,

There must have been a rather large shortage of tech & search news yesterday as it seems a GMail hiccup by Google shut the service down or a little while, and the end result was global coverage of the event . This goes to show how many small to large businesses actually use a webmail application like Google GMail and are totally dependent on a third party free service to handle their secure and urgent company mailings.

Blinkx , the video search engine and video search technology firm, is moving to acquire search advertising and contextual ad firm Miva, which has been hit hard on the stock market. Miva closed at $.78 a share yesterday, and according to Allen Stern at CenterNetworks , Blinkx is offering $1.20 a share in cash for Miva. Miva , which also owns SearchFeed, is well known in the search community as being a rebranded version of FindWhat,

Google has launched a free music downloading service in China which lets users download licensed songs, which will be supplied by music companies in exchange for advertising revenue. How much cooler can you get than Google and free music downloads? Enter NBA star and Chinese National Yao Ming, who cofounded the site Top100.cn , where the downloads will originate from.

Yahoo launched their Olympics Shortcuts yesterday )which we covered here on the blog this morning( but if you're ready to get your Olympics fix across multiple search engines, Google is also serving Olympics news and scores in their Google OneBox. Just search for terms with the word Olympics in them, and a sport. For example, beach volleyball olympics and taekwondo olympics.

Yahoo has rolled out a series of their famous Yahoo Shortcuts specific for the 2008 Summer Olympic Games being held in China. The Opening ceremonies for the Olympics will be on August 8th and Yahoo Search will then be serving real time results in their Olympic shortcuts. For example, a search for 'Olympics medal count' will bring this result )the bottom image is a proof( : If users want their results to be only for one country,

Yesterday morning we covered some changes in the Yahoo Search Index and its rankings of sites, with some sites dropping and some shooting up in search rankings. Yahoo has confirmed that the index update is indeed taking place and is expanding through the week: We'll be rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the next few days. As you know, throughout this process you may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index,

A collegue and Search Engine Journal reader emailed me over the weekend, to let me know that the Yahoo Paid Inclusion ) Yahoo Search Submit ( feed for his business, and that of his competitors have been experiencing problems, and dropped from the rankings. Apparently, there is a major shifting going on of Yahoo rankings, which has been documented by members of Digital Point Forums : Yes! I have also noticed Yahoo update results, few of my websites jumped to 1st page!

The Google Webmaster Central Blog posted a YouTube Video of the day in the life of the Google Webmaster Support team. It's a really cool account of the daily routine of the different members of the Google Webmaster Central team. Just when I thought the video couldn't get any cooler, Matt Cutts whips out his iPhone and shows the viewers how he was reading a Search Engine Journal post by Eric Lander on NoFollow and PageRank sculpting . Very cool indeed!

Yahoo is launching the new version of Delicious.com )del.icio.us( today and with or without the dots, the company seems to be moving on with its social bookmarking platform, even without Joshua Schachter )the original founder of del.icio.us who left Yahoo in the Spring( behind the wheel. Delicious was supposed to rebrand about a year ago , but they have finally "dropped the dots" and are now rebranded as Delicious.com instead of del.icio.us. Under Yahoo's wing,

Google and Yahoo spent a combined $1.36 Million last quarter in lobbying according to the Associated Press, with Yahoo spending $630,000 and Google topping off at $730,000.

Google has been given the go ahead to begin their StreetView project in the UK, which will capture images from Google cars with cameras perched on the top, and publish those images on Google Maps. Privacy concerns surround Google StreetView because of photos published of vehicles, license plates, private property and individuals online.

Google has acquired Omnisio , a social video mashup service which lets its users splice and edit online videos found on YouTube, Google Video and Blip.TV, adding balloons and annotations to the videos while also mixing segments together in a remix type setting. Omnisio, a Y Combinator company,

Comparing quotes from financial services is a big market in the UK, as sites which deliver quotes from unsecured loan, car insurance and even pet insurance providers battle for top rankings in both paid search and organic search on Google UK. For an example, search on Google UK for secured loans . A couple of months back, Google.co.uk stepped in and started serving its own quote comparisons, above the normal Google AdWords results,

Google's Matt Cutts issued the announcement that Google [Toolbar] PageRank was going through an update over the weekend, and it seems that the rollout of the update began Friday night or yesterday, with the PageRank of some sites rising in value and others dropping. Sure, Toolbar PageRank is not a valid indicator of everything that goes on behind the scenes at Google, and penalties associated with PageRank ' or the changing of PageRank,

Google's Matt Cutts issued the announcement that Google [Toolbar] PageRank was going through an update over the weekend, and it seems that the rollout of the update began Friday night or yesterday, with the PageRank of some sites rising in value and others dropping. Sure, Toolbar PageRank is not a valid indicator of everything that goes on behind the scenes at Google, and penalties associated with PageRank ' or the changing of PageRank,

Yesterday, Google's Matt Cutts announced on his blog that a new Google Toolbar PageRank update is on the way , and thatas part of the PageRank update, Google will be expiring some of the older [PageRank] penalities on websites. Good news for sites which were hit with a PageRank penalty last year?

Combatting complaints sites in Google results has become an ongoing issue for many companies, as consumer complaints from years ago can appear on the front page of Google results when a brand name is searched upon. Sites like RipOffReport, Pissedconsumer.com and Complaints.com are also no slouches when it comes to SEO and public relations, which pair organized and optimized site structure with organic linking via press coverage; into a deadly combination.